The Front Yard Tree

The Front Yard Tree

oulful mentoring, learning, and community

Welcome!

"There's nothing more serious than having fun" -Don Cherry

Learning

The Front Yard Tree is devoted to life long learning as a natural human institution and a deep longing of the soul.

We teach and support the deepening of our embodiment and learn the ways of the imagination, itself a vast topic worthy of lifetimes of study.

We offer creatively fashioned “quests” that combine conceptual and experiential learning with course work, guided meditations, livestream classes and more intended to grow your imagination and build confidence and peacefulness in the body over time.

All of this is put together on a learning community called The Front Yard Tree.

Mentoring

My mentoring work grows out of deep and long standing work with my own mentors, my own adventures, and twenty years of working as a traditional psychotherapist.

It integrates customized guided learning and personal sessions in which we collaborate to create a personal quest.

Mentees have access to a personalized learning space on The Front Yard Tree, where the customized materials (coursework, readings, videos, etc) and interactions between the two will reside.

Community

All learning is community learning, in that the depth of learning that takes place is always related to the quality of the experience of learning. Therefore we take a slow approach to building connection and community as the very topics we are addressing have this as one of their central concerns. It’s asking the question “how are we coming together”.

The Front Yard Tree as a online community space is devoted to the idea of gradual and self-regulated participation that can have a wide range of ways of participating from very short practices to weeks or months long workshops or training. This is the range of offerings we hope to play inside of!

The Big Quest

This project The Front Yard Tree is an experiment. It is a an underlying hope and intention that the way this “information” is present online is actually part of what is being “taught”. We live in very strange times and technology has risen to the point where we are drowning. Lost.

Yet, there are possibilities in the very nature of the internet and how we have begun to connect with each other through all kinds of different affinities but in our own homes. Covid began to show us that we could use this “less than perfect” online medium in deeply creative and empowering ways the fuel connection in new ways.

Web based education and classes have the power to help us be more where we’re at, in our bodies, homes, neighborhoods, and the natural elements found around us. Indeed, it’s possibly the most important thing we could be thinking about!

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The Infinite Bag of Tricks

I have this idea, that everyone has a magical infinite “bag of tricks” inside of them, waiting to be explored for all of the wonderfully imaginative ways the a person can make a life of beauty and possibility, even when it gets hard. And it gets real hard.

The tricks come from anywhere we can access something more imaginitve and whatever too-small definition of life we might be suffering from.

The Infinite Bag of Tricks is me riffing on some of things in my bag.