we do not have to love. we choose to love. - bell hooks
love is the work for which all other work is but preparation. - rainer maria rilke
At the heart and root of b*free is love. b*free has been reimagining rooted beliefs, stories and praxis around wellbeing, care and healing with leaders and teams since 2013. We’re deeply curious about what it means to be well and do well together for ourselves, each other, the planetary, and future generations.
We ask: How do we define wellbeing? Who is included and excluded in our definitions of wellbeing? What old stories about wellbeing are dying? What can we learn about ourselves, each other and the planet from them? What patterns invite us to trade the wellbeing of some for the wellbeing of all? What patterns enable us to exchange wellbeing for other outcomes that don’t serve? How can we disrupt those patterns? What new patterns can we co-create? What new stories for individual, collective, planetary and more-than-human wellbeing are beginning to be voiced and asking us to listen? What ways of engaging with nature, spirituality, imagination and creativity will enliven our deeper sense of authentic connection and wholeness?
A.R.T. of WELLBEING CREATORSHIP
To live these questions and develop our capacity to do well and be well together, in 2025 we bring to life the A.R.T. of Wellbeing Creatorship. A.R.T. stands for Awareness, Responsibility and Trust. Wellbeing Creatorship is a journey and process of individual and collective reflection, inquiry, skill-building, and development across the “Inner A.R.T.s”. The aim of this journey is to co-create new understanding, stories and practices about co-creating wellbeing in our lives.
We are patterned in our hearts and souls, heads and hands, ears and feet. Like songs on repeat, we consciously and unconsciously re-create the stories, practices, behaviors, structures and systems around and within us. They are embodied in our individual thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations. They shape how we think, speak, learn, act, relate, adapt and create individually and in relationship with each other. The patterns we re-create are visible and palpable at all scales, in the self, the collective, and the planetary.
Wellbeing, from b*free’s perspective, is a lifelong journey, not a static outcome, nor the absence of pain, discomfort, grief or loss. Integral to a whole life, these challenges that are part of our wholeness carry intelligence to foster our adaptation and growth. Wellbeing is more than health; it is holistic, touching all parts of our lives from our physical wellbeing to our social, mental, financial, environmental wellbeing and more. It is relational meaning it can’t happen solely individually. It arises through our relationships, with ourselves, each other and the planet. It encompasses collective and individual healing. It’s shaped by our choices & by what is beyond our choosing.
Creatorship is an ongoing journey to Wake A.R.T., Grow A.R.T. and Embody A.R.T. Equipped with the incredible gifts we have for Awareness, Responsibility and Trust, Waking A.R.T. is about engaging with how we perceive and contextualize our individual wellbeing in a relation our sense of meaning, purpose and wonder. It’s about engaging with the more existential questions of who we are, individually and together and what wellbeing actually means to us. Growing A.R.T. is about maturing our psychological, somatic and emotional capacities to enact and take responsibility, aka build our capacity to respond, for our wellbeing. Embodying A.R.T. is about enacting our wakefulness and maturity in action. This means perceiving, storytelling and behaving in new ways.
What we discover in the process is both that there is energy we have committed to patterns that don’t serve us and our planet AND that with greater A.R.T. in how we show up within and between us, we can liberate that energy to co-imagine and co-create new patterns of wellbeing.
Self A.R.T. liberates Awareness, Responsibility, and Trust in ourselves.
Relational A.R.T. is Self-A.R.T. in practice in our relationships.
Communication through Listening
Collaboration through Presence
Generative Conflict and Peacemaking
Collective Sense-Making and Decisionmaking in Uncertainty
HOW WE SERVE
Our work enlivens the A.R.T. of wellbeing creatorship in the people we work with. Our client-partners are cross-industry leaders and teams in nonprofits, social enterprise incubators, paradigm-shifting philanthropies and global purpose-driven companies including B-corps. We serve by:
facilitating transformative learning journeys to reimagine beliefs, worldviews, narratives and practice around wellbeing, care and healing
1:1 and group coaching, workshops, & retreat facilitation rooting in wellbeing, care, healing
facilitating generative conflict, restoration and peacemaking
designing rituals, structures and practices of wellbeing and care in organizations
APPROACH
ARTISTIC AND SCIENTIFIC
Our approach both includes knowledge and practice from research, science, rationality and lived experience and transcends them through creative practices and the healing arts. We integrate:
Music, play, poetry, movement arts
Embodiment and psychosomatics
Neuroscience, complexity science, adult development psychology
Ancient and modern psychospiritual wisdom
Adaptive leadership and leadership development, restorative justice, and conflict mediation.
PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE
We are guided by 2 key principles:
1. Embody what we espouse: We aspire to embody and practice what we say we value in each aspect of how we relate to ourselves, each other, our client-partners and our co-creations. In ourselves, and in our values–driven client-partners, we see and feel the gap between believing, saying and doing. This is a key learning edge, challenge and opportunity for all.
2. Respond to demand: Always aimed at wellbeing, who and how we serve has evolved in response to demand.
2013 -2017 → immersive learning experiences, coaching and community for creatives, freelancers and people leaving the workforce
2015-2024 → Healing Leadership* coaching, facilitation and advising in, generative conflict and restorative peacemaking, people/culture transformation for nonprofits (Workplace as HealingSpace*), philanthropies and values-driven companies and B-corps.
2025 ~ → The A.R.T. of Wellbeing Creatorship is the body of work that all of our services, described above in “Our Work,” now ground in.
*Healing leadership is our framework for healing and wellbeing-centered leadership development to reimagine Workplaces as HealingSpaces.
PRACTICE THE FUTURE RIGHT NOW
Every moment is an opportunity to enact the creation of a world we seek to inhabit. We can choose, commit to and practice the future now.
TRUST
We trust in the wholeness, wellbeing and creative potential that each person we work with embodies. We trust the wisdom of structure and emergence, both. We structure our work to create the integrity of a human spine, that is interconnected all the way through and carries us. We are simultaneously flexible, welcoming the intelligence* that weaves around and through us by listening, learning and responding, emergently.
*Collective Change Lab identifies 4 Intelligences: Earth, Ancestral, Love, Spirit
The We In US
Who are we? Learn more about our incredible transdisciplinary team of co-creators here.