InstituteBegin a conversation
One person. One place. One threshold.
AVAILABLE
A private immersion
in what comes next.
Jeju Island, South KoreaOctober–November 2026
At the threshold
Something in your life
is changing.
Perhaps you chose it.
Perhaps it chose you.
Perhaps nothing obvious has happened at all.
Your life still works. You are still good at what you do. From the outside, there may be no particular reason to change anything.
And yet, something no longer quite fits.
The experience
Four or seven days.
Just you and dr. akasha.
What is trying
to reach you?
AVAILABLE is a private, one-to-one immersion for people at this kind of threshold.
For years, I hosted an experience called Next Direction. People came asking: Who am I now? What matters to me now? What is my purpose? What comes next?
I still love those questions.
But my work on human maturity has led me somewhere slightly different. I have become less interested in helping people quickly determine what comes next, and more interested in what allows us to meet what is already here.
Sometimes the next thing we need is not another answer. Sometimes we need to become reachable again.
For four or seven days, we walk. Eat. Wander. Talk. Sit in silence. Meet people. Spend time outside. Follow what catches your attention. Let a different place interrupt familiar patterns.
There will be coaching. There will also be stretches when I deliberately don't coach you. A conversation with a stranger may do more than I can. So might getting lost. Or the ocean. Or irritation. Or boredom.
The world becomes part of the inquiry.
And we pay attention.
Who comes?
A life that works.
A life that may no longer fit.
AVAILABLE is for someone who has built enough of a life that changing it has consequences.
You may be a leader, founder, coach, artist, physician, academic, entrepreneur or senior professional. You may be approaching the second half of life.
A career may be ending. A relationship may be changing. Your children may need you differently. You may have succeeded at something that no longer seems sufficient. Or perhaps the identity that carried you here simply cannot carry you where you are going.
You don't need to be in crisis.
“My life still works.
I'm just no longer certain it fits.”
AVAILABLE is probably not for you if what you mainly want is a vacation, wellness retreat, sightseeing experience or someone to tell you what to do next.
I won't know your next direction. That's rather the point.
I will bring questions, developmental practice, attention, companionship and everything I have learned from years of sitting beside people at thresholds.
You bring your life.
What happens
This is an encounter
with your life.
I won't give you a packed itinerary. The experience is intentionally spacious and partly emergent.
Before we meet, you'll complete the Availability Snapshot and we'll begin exploring where you tend to remain reachable and where you tend to close.
Once we're together, the place joins us.
We might walk for hours and talk.
We might walk for hours and not talk.
There may be meditation, developmental inquiry, poetry, movement, ritual, solitude, cultural encounters, meals with other people, time beside water, and practices drawn from the Availability work.
Some things will be planned. Others will happen because we took the wrong road.
The work is to notice what happens when you become available enough for life to participate too.
Three questions travel with us
What is trying
to reach me?
What have you been unable, unwilling or simply too busy to receive? A truth. A loss. A desire. Someone else's perspective. Your own exhaustion. An opportunity. Beauty. The knowledge that something is finished.
Where have I
become unavailable?
We all close. We defend, explain, withdraw, perform, accommodate, become certain, leave our bodies, or retreat into familiar versions of ourselves. Closing isn't failure. The interesting question is what happens next.
How am I being asked
to participate now?
Not: What should my five-year plan be? Something nearer. Given what you can now see, how do you want to meet your work, relationships, body, creativity, community and the life around you? And what might become possible if you did?
The inquiry beneath it
Open. See. Return.
My current research at the Human Maturity Institute explores a capacity I call Availability: our capacity to let reality reach us, affect us and inform how we participate.
During AVAILABLE, these aren't concepts to master. They become things we notice in real time.
Open
Can something reach me, particularly when I did not go looking for it?
See
Can I notice what is happening in me while it is happening?
Return
When I inevitably close, can I find my way back?
At breakfast. On a trail. In a disagreement.
When plans change. When beauty catches you unexpectedly.
Technology & being human
Room for
not knowing.
I use AI. I find it useful.
I am also becoming interested in what happens to us when fewer and fewer questions require us to remain with not knowing.
A machine can help us think. It can suggest where to eat, summarize what we are feeling, rehearse a difficult conversation and offer an answer before uncertainty has had much time to work on us.
The question I am interested in is:
What capacities do I want technology to support, and what capacities am I unwilling to outsource?
During AVAILABLE, there will be periods when we deliberately put away AI, search, recommendations, feeds and navigation. An experiment in what happens when you have to ask someone. When you sit with the question until tomorrow. When nobody is optimizing your attention. When you become bored.
And what becomes possible when you return to technology deliberately rather than automatically?
In a world increasingly capable of giving us answers, I suspect our capacity to be reached by life may become more important, not less.
Situated. Moving. Alive.
AVAILABLE moves with me.
I live much of my life out in the world. AVAILABLE happens wherever I am living. Each place changes the experience. The landscape matters. The weather matters. The culture and the people we encounter matter.
Here, now · South Korea
Jeju Island
Sea. Stone. Wind. Walking.
October–November 2026
Where AVAILABLE begins
Let unfamiliarity
do some of the work.
There is something about this island that lends itself to the work.
Volcanic coastline. Forest. Olle trails. Small villages. Mountains disappearing into cloud. Haenyeo returning from the sea. Cafés full of people making things. Long stretches where the ocean keeps appearing beside you.
We will walk.
We will eat Korean food.
We will spend time beside the sea and in the island's quieter places.
We will let unfamiliarity do some of the work.
And we will notice what happens when you don't quite know where you are.
One private immersion available before November 15, 2026.
4 days · US$7,500
7 days · US$12,500
Caribbean · December 2026
Grenada
Return. Roots. Water. Life.
Somewhere that has
participated in my becoming.
Grenada is different.
I was born in Jamaica, but Grenada became home for me for several years. I know this place not simply as somewhere beautiful, but as somewhere that has participated in my own becoming.
Here, the experience might take us into rainforest and river, villages and markets, beaches and long conversations over food.
Years ago, one person I hosted wanted to visit a cemetery. He eventually buried some beliefs there that he was ready to leave behind.
I couldn't have designed that moment.
That is part of what I learned from these experiences.
Guidance is everywhere when we become available enough to notice it.
Oregon · December 2026–January 2027
Portland &
the Pacific Northwest
Forest. Rain. Coast. Winter.
Something that does not
yet need to be named.
Winter offers a different kind of invitation.
Things become quieter.
The Pacific Northwest gives us forest, ocean, rain, creative culture, long drives and landscapes that do not ask us to hurry.
This version of AVAILABLE will lean into that season.
Less expansion.
More listening.
More fire, forest, weather and silence.
A good place, perhaps, for something that does not yet need to be named.
One private immersion available December 12, 2026–January 17, 2027.
4 days · US$7,500
7 days · US$12,500
What is included
Designed around
one person.
- Before
Preparation, the Availability Snapshot and a private debrief.
- Together
Four or seven days of one-to-one accompaniment and facilitation, developmental inquiry and practices, and locally designed experiences.
- After
Two integration conversations after you return home.
Your travel to the location is separate.
Accommodation, meals, local transportation and any special experiences will be designed with you and priced separately. I don't want to prescribe luxury where simplicity might serve the experience better, or simplicity where comfort would allow you to be more present.
We'll decide together.
Your companion
dr. akasha
Developmental coach.
Facilitator. Poet.
Still becoming.
I have spent much of my adult life trying to understand how human beings grow.
Some of that inquiry became academic. I earned a PhD in Human Development and have spent years working as a developmental coach, facilitator and educator with leaders and organizations around the world.
Some of it became spiritual.
I meditate. I have lived for periods in monasteries. I walked 500 miles across Spain on the Camino de Santiago. I have studied with teachers and traditions that understand development in ways academia sometimes doesn't know what to do with.
Some of it became poetry.
And quite a lot of it became ordinary life.
Relationships. Divorce. Fatherhood. Love. Work. Failure. Starting again. Getting things wrong. Trying to return.
Today, much of my work lives at the Human Maturity Institute, where I am developing a theory and practice of Availability around a deceptively simple question:
What enables us to participate more fully in life?
AVAILABLE is perhaps the most intimate expression of that inquiry.
For a few days, there is no cohort.
No audience.
No curriculum to get through.
Just two people, a place, your life, and whatever happens when we pay close enough attention.
More about dr. akashaThe investment
Different depths of time.
Four days or seven? There isn't a better version.
Four days
US$7,500
When there is already a recognizable threshold or question. Long enough to leave your usual rhythms, enter another environment, notice what begins to happen and work with what emerges.
Seven days
US$12,500
Time for the first answers to run out. Time for boredom. Time for plans to change. Time for the person who arrived to become a little less certain about why they came.
If what is changing involves not simply a decision but the person you understand yourself to be, I would choose seven.
Fees are for the private immersion. Travel, accommodation, meals, local transport and special experiences are separate. Seven days is available in Jeju and Oregon.
This work asks something of me too. I want to arrive available for the person who comes.
So I keep the number small.
Very small.
An invitation
Perhaps something
is already reaching you.
You don't need to know whether AVAILABLE is right for you before we speak. You don't even need a particularly good answer to Why now?
Curiosity is enough for a first conversation.
We can spend 30 minutes exploring what is happening in your life, why this experience caught your attention and whether spending four or seven days together makes sense.
There is no application funnel and no pressure to proceed. Sometimes the conversation itself may be enough.
One private immersion in Jeju before November 15, 2026.
We don't pause to escape our lives.
We pause long enough to become reachable again.