"Awaken your senses and wield time with joy."
"Awaken your senses and wield time with joy."
Musician · Artist · Field Philosopher
Your body is doing thousands of extraordinary things right now that you've never been taught to notice. I was the last person who wanted to be in mine. Learning to notice is what got me back in my body... turns out that's where the magic is.
I was twenty-eight and close to releasing an EP. Life kept moving. The music didn't stop, but it kept happening in the margins.
That's probably why you've seen me walking around with a ukulele. I wasn't willing to wait until I got home, or back to the hotel, or until life finally got quiet enough to have music with me.
Recently I found those old recordings again. I could hear how much my voice has grown, but I could also hear something else: the sound was already there.
So now I'm finding out what happens when the music stops getting the leftover hours… and you can help, by joining my inner world!
Help buy me the time to make, and come inside while the work is still becoming.
Songs in progress. Old recordings. New recordings. Writing. Voice notes. Experiments. The occasional live conversation when I feel like gathering everybody together. Whatever I'm making before it gets polished into something else.
One room. Five sizes of generosity.
Choose whatever fits. The amount changes. The access doesn't.
Sometimes people ask me to play. Sometimes they ask me to speak. Sometimes they bring me a project, a hard life problem, an idea they can't quite get their hands around, or something they want another brain beside them for.
Music. Speaking. Private work. Something we haven't named yet.
Tell me what you're thinking about and I'll take a look.
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You'll see TheTongue.com throughout this video. That was the name of my coaching practice when these conversations were recorded.
I took this name in 1999, on my way out of homelessness, as a thought experiment. It went a little something like this:
Wherever I was standing, however much pain or joy I was experiencing, was a product of what Ryan Yesterday did. His decisions, my reality.
And I would be Ryan Tomorrow soon enough, standing in whatever I decided today. Which left one question worth asking. What am I willing to do? What would I do differently, think differently, say differently, starting today, so that tomorrow got a different vantage point?
That turned into experiments. Curiosities. Playing with reality hard enough to move it. Most were bad. Enough worked that I am here.
I wake as an artist and go to sleep as an artist. Everything else is a room that art walks into.
What I study underneath all of it is experiential capacity: the ability to sense, interpret, and participate in more of what life is actually offering, in real time, through a body that runs on physics you can learn.
The connection between all of it is play. Everything I do, every tool I've built, every room I've opened runs on the same discovery: playful constraint is the mechanism by which bodies heal, nervous systems reorganize, and people come back to themselves.
These days it shows up in music, performance, private work, research, and the strange worlds I keep building.
"On a scale of 1 to 10 my pain went from like an 8.5 to a 2. What you teach is amazing!"
I don't need every part of my life to become one brand. These are a few of the worlds I care enough about to keep building.
"I did not believe you. I came to you for stress. But it's been 8 weeks since your office and I just realized I haven't had a drink in 6 weeks. I forgot that I quit drinking after being an alcoholic for 20 years. I still don't know what you did."
Most of what passes for help is someone handing you their answers. A protocol. A program. A plan. You follow the steps, white-knuckle your way through, and when it stops working, you assume something's wrong with you.
Your body already has its own answers. The problem isn't a missing solution. The problem is interference. Too much noise. Too many layers between you and the signal your own system has been sending since before you could talk. None of that is your fault. But it is in your power.
What I do is reduce the noise so the signal can move.
That's it. That's the work. Not fixing. Not prescribing. Not performing expertise at you from behind a desk.
I walk beside people. I rain ideas and tools and strange little experiments, and your brain picks up exactly the ones it needs. The ones that fit the shape of your particular life. You build something that no one else could have built for you, because it came from your own geometry.
And the wild part is that the process of building it also builds the capacity to handle whatever comes next. It compounds. It grows. People stop calling. Not because something went wrong, but because they forgot they used to need help.
That's what play does. Not the word people use for it. Not fun, not recreation, not the opposite of work. Play in the way physics uses the word: the degree of freedom within a constraint. A hinge has play. A joint has play. A nervous system has play. When there's enough room to move, the system moves toward its own answer. My job is to make sure there's enough room.
I've been doing this for over 25 years. I've sat with people in mania, in addiction, in grief so deep they couldn't find the floor. I've sat with executives who looked successful from the outside and were drowning on the inside. I've sat with people who couldn't figure out who they were underneath someone else's shadow.
Every single time, the same thing turned out to be true: the system already knew. It just needed the space and the scaffolding for its own answer to surface.
Everybody asks about the ukulele. Alright, let's get into it.Read all about it →
“Sometimes the deepest reason is the simplest one. It’s fun. Not everything needs a framework.”
"He didn't fix anything. He just made it impossible to keep pretending I didn't already know."
Every page on this site, in one place, for whoever would rather scan than wander.
Curiosity is the master key. If you're curious, reach out.