Retreats
Get Waaaay out of Your Own Way
👻
Get Waaaay out of Your Own Way 👻
While living alone in my extended family’s “Apocalypse Mansion” in the White Mountains during the heart of the COVID pandemic, I dreamed of hosting transformative gatherings in the space. Less than a year later, I hosted my first contemplative songwriting retreat; I’ve hosted nearly a dozen retreats since then.
Whether or not we’re conscious of it, everyone in our society has had innumerable amounts of “creativity denying experiences”. On retreat, participants get to explore their best, most expanded selves. In these protected spaces, we are privileged to witness others both in their vulnerability and the profundity of their gifts. The realness invites us to rewrite our expectations on life and other people. It’s very special and sacred work.
Immersive learning spaces allow for unfolding and connection that can’t happen anywhere else. Part of the medicine comes from being around other people who are shedding old layers of themselves; part of it comes from being around people with many of their basic needs met, seeking higher purposes, meaning, and practices.
As a facilitator, I get so much joy from fostering growth, freedom, and community. I’ve seen so many powerful transformations in my relatively short time hosting in this way. People that feel called tend to reap extreme benefits from these events. Whether it is someone who really genuinely appreciates your music — you can see it in your eyes — someone struggling with the same things that you are — or just a healthy group of present and nurturing people to share in your daily successes of making art!
Lessons that Can’t be learned alone.
Learning happens when we do the thing. With others.
In protected spaces
Expert Facilitation
My diverse qualifications lead to the invocation and co-creation of magical inner & inter-personal realms. With more than a decade of instructing and performing improvised music and comedy, I excel at tuning into who is in the room and how they meet a space.
The more we play, the higher up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs we progress. Unseen possibilities emerge when foundational needs are met: a sense of safety, good food, play, and of goodwill from others. By attuning to the mysterious and sacred purposes for gathering, and bringing sincerity and precision, I foster the emergence of a wide, loving, and intense creative field.
Above all, my job is to see the artist within everyone present and create the conditions for others to see and hold them too. Carefully chosen activities and pedagogy, teamed with loving and wise language, invites the de-armoring necessary to be authentic in close proximity to others. Seeing each other — and allowing ourselves to be seen — means we don’t need to waste energy hiding. More room for God.
From my youth as a theatre kid, to collaborative music-making and community building in classical music as undergraduate, to performing and teaching hundreds of students & professionals at ImprovBoston, I’ve always wanted to go deep into a scene and find out what’s in there. As an artist, the skills that allow me to ‘chameleon’ across disciplines and empower me to see what is essential about art-making in group settings. As a facilitator, the work is always to bring people back to working on the work itself.
Creative spaces have nourished me for most of my life
— the more immersive the better.
The Earth provides for all of our human needs — should we know how to seek it. Practice going beyond the habitual ways of our culture — of our colonial forbearers. Immersed in wild settings, attention based practices can bring us to deeper relationship .
Get out of the hustle. Let the wild show you something about your inner nature. Allow unlearning and letting to simply to happen.
Most of my retreats are held in Rumney, NH; the physical environment’s voice speaks loudly. As city-dwellers and phone-users, intentional unplugging resets our systems. Artists learn by studying art: ‘The Wild’ is the finest work of the Artist known as the universe itself. Many great artists have been nature mystics: going into spaces where people are not invites us to go to places in ourselves we have not allowed ourselves to inhabit