Between us and a direct experience of reality and the present moment, lie our stories.

At the root of our Story lies our Mind and Body. Through learning and practice, we can unleash our untapped agency across the Mind Body Story process to create greater individual and collective wellbeing.

how we work

Mind Body Story

The A.R.T. of Creating Wellbeing

Among humanity’s most powerful tools for constructing, filtering and interpreting reality, stories shape and are shaped by how we relate to ourselves, each other and the world. Our stories and overarching narratives mediate our sense of reality moment to moment and over time. 

Our bodies play a powerful role in how we story our sense of reality. Extremely sensitive, on average our senses pick up ~1 billion bits of data per second from within, between and around us, giving rise to a state in our nervous systems. We experience sensations which kick off our sense-making. The story begins from the bottom–up or body-up.

Our conscious minds think at just 10 bits per second; tiny compared to all we’re sensing! To reduce the potential overload of all the raw data, our minds filter, edit, delete, distort and generalize. Data our conscious minds can’t process is stored in our unconscious memory, nervous systems and bodies. Our conscious minds continue to weave the story our bodies began, with a more partial filtered view of “reality” from the top-down.

Together, we can…

learn, practice and unleash our untapped agency within each part of the Mind Body Story process.

We can train awareness of our minds and bodies so we can make conscious skillful choices, instead of unconscious, habitual ones that don’t serve us or our relationships. 

We can practice how we listen, connect to and regulate our bodies and energy so we can feel better and be better.

We can notice to what and whom we’ve relinquished our agency and traded our foundation of wellbeing, unintentionally or intentionally for unsustainable gain or comfort disguised as wellbeing. 

We can widen our hearts and minds, befriend, not avoid, our own and each other’s vulnerability, loss, heartbreak and uncertainty; difficulties that carry adaptive wisdom and wells of energy that mature us, connect us, help us touch our wholeness and deepen our sense of wellbeing. 

We can recapture the energy held captive by a Story in our personal and collective lives that is ripe for full-scale disruption.

We can liberate, create and practice new ways of being, new patterns, habits and rituals to be well together at the root, through A.R.T.

it’s an A.R.T. to relate to ourselves and each other with…

Awareness

Awareness of habitual and unconscious Mind Body Story patterns and of how our wellbeing shapes and is shaped by our patterned ways of being and doing.

Responsibility

Responsibility or the ability to respond choicefully, focusing our awareness and energy within our locus of control. With greater responsibility, we can disrupt unhelpful patterns and grow our relationships and creative power.

Trust

Trust in our awareness and capacity to respond with agency grows with practice. We learn and adapt more freely & grow comfort with discomfort. This emboldens us to step forward and enact new patterns and possibilities.

  • b*free is phenomenal. They facilitated a gathering for 130 people in our network. The theme was “Authentic Connection Fuels Wellbeing.” We received feedback for weeks about how transformative the experience was; people had meaningful personal and professional breakthroughs in a conversation or two. One participant said, “The facilitation was quietly masterful, setting a tone of openness and trust that stayed throughout the gathering...when people are invited to show up fully, the space becomes not only more human, but also more capable of holding real, rigorous, and courageous dialogue…without losing trust or momentum.” b*free truly knows how to hold people, whether in a packed room or an emotional 1:1.

    —Aria Florant | CEO | Liberation Ventures

  • Since 2018, Nita Baum and b*free have been a vital and grounding presence in the evolution of The Laundromat Project. Through heart-centered and deeply intuitive coaching, they cultivate trust, reflection, and alignment, supporting our team to lead with clarity, confidence, and purpose. b*free’s work is both spiritually resonant and strategically impactful, affirming their powerful belief that the workplace can, in fact, be a healing space.

    —Ayesha Williams | E.D. | The Laundromat Project

  • Nita Baum is a masterful guide, healer, spacemaker and leader who helps others move with purpose. My life changed when I met Nita. Her coaching shaped my leadership in profound and lasting ways. Her presence, care, and challenge in equal measure create the necessary environment to process complexity. Her work helped our team build greater self-awareness, resilience, and clarity in how we lead.

    —Kerri Hoffman | CEO | PRX

  • I asked b*free to work with my member association during Covid. The group was fragmented and dispirited after a year plus of living and working remotely. b*free brought their “Wells of Being” approach to the group. We embraced their framework, wise counsel and spirit during our twice monthly sessions for the remainder of the pandemic. It is accurate to say, three years on, b*free’s spirit and compassion lives on in our community. We are grateful.

    —Rick Torseth | Board Chair | Oxford University Said Business School & HEC Paris Joint Leadership

Learning Journey

Informed by science & cross-cultural wisdom, our experiential learning journey supports individuals and teams to unleash untapped agency across your Mind Body Story. We gather and learn in community to accelerate and deepen development and practice and invite aliveness, wonder and healing. Reflection and group dialogue grow participants’ awareness and competency to work with wellbeing patterns, disrupt extractive habits, strengthen generative ones and create new wellbeing narratives. 

Participants learn the Mind Body Story process fundamentals, gaining shared language, concepts, frameworks and practices for: awareness and agency under stress, psychological safety, navigating conflict, growing team trust and relationships, working with adaptive emotions, adapting in complexity and uncertainty, energy curation, somatic & mindfulness practices.

Sessions are well-suited to leadership teams and/or staff. We offer the journey within individual organizations and to cohorts of leaders & teams across organizations. Sessions can be curated for length/ format to best fit client needs. To learn more, please contact us!

Coaching

We coach leaders and staff to liberate your agency and energy for wellbeing. We aim to grow the versatility of your skills, tools and capacity to create healthy relationships, grow team trust, navigate conflict and adapt in uncertainty and complexity. We support and challenge you to grow and develop 1) Awareness- of strengths and unconscious patterns in your Mind Body Story 2) Responsibility- the ability to respond with greater agency and choicefulness in challenge 3) Trust- greater awareness and responsibility grow trust in self and others.

Facilitation

Our soulful approach to facilitation for gatherings and retreats deepens connection, healing and wellbeing in groups of varied sizes. We attune to your needs, support you and your team to clarify and align on your purpose for gathering and envision the experience you seek to create for participants. We design sessions from the ground up and/or curate from our learning and development content to best align to your needs. Our approach draws from design thinking, group facilitation and the embodied arts to create engaging meaningful, memorable experiences.

Keynote

Keynotes integrate storytelling and interaction to inspire, inform and connect leaving participants a little more well with a greater sense of possibility. Topics include and are not limited to

  • The Connection Between Narrative, Mind, Body and Story: We see the story, but not the state of mind and body that created it.

  • Wellbeing As the Foreground, Not An Afterthought: Making wellbeing a foregrounded conversation, not an afterthought, in life, leadership, team and org culture

  • Leading from Wellbeing: Root how you lead, adapt & navigate complexity, change & uncertainty in wellbeing.

  • Curating Energy for Wellbeing: Learn and explore what regenerates, sustains and extracts your wellbeing energy.