Soft Sabbaticals






What if a sabbatical doesn't have to mean stepping away from your life, but stepping deeper into it?

Soft Sabbaticals is for creative minds who want to reconnect with their curiosity and aliveness—without needing to complete a course, perform for a group, or carve out more hours in the day.

If you've ever felt both overstimulated and understimulated at the same time—this was made for you.


Join The Waitlist →

Soft Sabbaticals


A gentle residency in attention 
for creative minds

Soft Sabbaticals is a practice space for creative minds who want to reconnect with their sense of aliveness, curiosity, and presence—even when life feels full.

Through tiny, playful sensory and sound-based explorations, you'll learn to notice the poetics of the everyday, attune to what's alive around you, and discover how small acts of attention can transform your experience of being in the world.

These aren't practices that require you to go somewhere special or wait for the right conditions. They happen in your actual life—at your kitchen window, on your daily walk, with objects you already have. Small, repeatable acts of attention that become doorways back to feeling fully alive.





The Memory of Sound and Place


This first sabbatical explores how sound weaves memory into the spaces and objects that shape our daily lives. You'll listen to thresholds—what passes through a window or doorway versus what's held back. You'll choose an everyday object and imagine what sounds it has witnessed. You'll create a sound map that overlays present sounds with remembered ones, revealing how places hold time in layers.

Through gentle, playful listening and tiny explorations, you'll discover how sound connects self and environment across time—revealing the subtle relationships, stories, and mutual belonging that emerge when we offer our attention to the living world around (and within) us.







Here's what you'll experience



Soft Sabbaticals isn't a course or program to complete—it's a practice that meets you where you are, with enough structure to keep you engaged but not so much that it becomes another obligation.

These practices draw from acoustic ecology, deep listening, psychosonography, and sensory ethnography—artists and researchers who've spent decades exploring how sound and attention can be ways of knowing and belonging.


Eight Weeks of Guided Exploration 

Each week offers gentle directives for sensing and listening, daily micro-investigations you can complete in 5 minutes, and optional "rabbit holes" when you want to go deeper.One week you might explore thresholds—listening on both sides of a window—while another week focuses on objects as sonic witnesses to your daily life.


Weekly Tiny Dispatches 

A dedicated private podcast where I’ll introduce our week’s practice and guide you into the exploration and share context from the artists and researchers like Pauline Oliveros, Hildegard Westerkamp, Christine Sun Kim, KMRU, and Janet Cardiff. Mid-week, I'll offer guiding questions and support to help you lean in more deeply. Think of these tender audio dispatches as companionship for the journey. 


Your Personal Practice Dashboard 

A thoughtfully designed Notion template that helps you document what you're noticing without the overwhelm of a blank page. All of our practices will be accessible here, ready for you to engage with. It’s also a place to record sound observations, upload field recordings, jot quick notes, or map connections between ideas. It's yours to keep forever.


The Soft Sabbaticals Gallery 

A private Are.na space where you can optionally share your process—field recordings, photos, sound maps, written reflections—or simply witness what others are noticing. No likes, no comments, no performance. Just quiet co-presence around shared curiosity.


Sabbatical Support Line 

Wondering if you're "doing it right"? Stuck on how to approach an exploration? Send in your questions and I'll respond through the private podcast, so your inquiry supports our collective learning.



How it works

This is a 2-month experience (Mid-October through Mid-December) with all eight weeks of material available from the start. You can access content in three formats: website, Notion dashboard, and audio podcast.

This isn't a linear experience where you need to "catch up." You engage with the practices as they resonate with your available time and energy. 

You might spend a full Saturday doing a long soundwalk and creating a detailed sound map, or you might just listen for three minutes while making coffee on a busy Tuesday. Both are valid ways to practice.

You might engage deeply with Week 3 and skip Week 4 entirely. You might do Week 1 three times before moving on. The practices aren't building blocks—they're different entry points into the same terrain.

Participants have full access to all materials throughout their enrollment, and your personal Notion dashboard is yours to duplicate and keep forever. 






Still have questions?



"What if I sign up and then don't follow through?"
There's nothing to "keep up" with. All eight weeks are available from the start. You might engage deeply with Week 3 and skip Week 4 entirely. You might do Week 1 three times before moving on. The practices aren't building blocks where you need the previous one to understand the next—they're different entry points into the same terrain.


"I don't have time for another commitment."
Soft Sabbaticals honors your real time constraints and shifting energy. The explorations adapt to whatever time you have—some take just 5 minutes, while others can expand into longer sessions when you have spaciousness. There's no pressure to complete anything or maintain any schedule.


"Is there a community forum or group discussions?"
No, and that's intentional. This practice space is designed without the pressure of community forums, group calls, or expectations to show up socially. There is a private Are.na gallery where you can optionally share your process or outcomes—photos, field recordings, written observations, or other documentation—if you choose. It's a quiet space for witnessing, not discussing—no likes, no comments, no performative engagement. The focus stays on your personal practice and direct support from me through the weekly dispatches and Support Line—because for many people, removing the social performance aspect is what finally makes a creative practice sustainable.


"Do you offer refunds?"
Due to the experiential nature of this offering, no refunds are available.


"Will there be future sabbaticals?"
I hope so! This first offering explores The Memory of Sound and Place, and I'm already dreaming up future themes and practices. What comes next will be shaped by what resonates most with participants—what supports your aliveness, what feels too complicated, what you want more of. You'll be part of figuring out what Soft Sabbaticals becomes.




Ready to Begin?


Enrollment for The Memory of Sound and Place opens October 14th runs through mid-December

This is the founding cohort—a small group of us figuring out what Soft Sabbaticals can be. By joining now, you're not just participating in a practice; you're helping me shape what this becomes. Your experience and feedback will directly influence how future sabbaticals evolve.

If you're ready to reconnect with what makes you feel truly alive, if you want to trust that small acts of sensory attention can transform ordinary moments, and if you're drawn to being part of an experiment in creative attention—this space was made for you.


You don't have to wait for perfect conditions.

You can start exactly where you are.


Join The Waitlist →









Maybe some of this 
feels familiar:
You remember what it felt like to be fully absorbed in a moment—so present that time disappeared, coming back to yourself feeling more alive, not depleted. Sometimes you wonder if those days of feeling truly engaged are gone forever.


You spend so much energy taking care of others and tending to responsibilities that in moments of overwhelm, it's hard to remember what it feels like to be genuinely curious about anything.


You've started workshops and online programs that excited you, only to abandon them when the structure felt too rigid or your time too fragmented.







There's nothing wrong 
with needing depth and 
meaning in your daily life.   What you need is a practice that works with how presence actually happens—not through willpower or more hours in the day, but through small acts of sensory attention that fit into the life you already have.






Here's what shifts:
The constant mental chatter quiets down. Five minutes of attention can feel surprisingly full—not because time slows down, but because you're present to what you've been walking past: the rhythm of someone's voice in another room, wind moving through different types of trees. You start recognizing your space as something alive—how the corner where you drink coffee has its own sonic signature, how places hold the echoes of what happens in them.


Your relationship with where you live changes. The walk you take every day stops being just a route and becomes a relationship—you notice when the birds shift their pattern, when new construction changes the soundscape. Your everyday world, inside and out, starts feeling less like a container you move through and more like something you're in conversation with.


You recognize yourself again—the part of you that's genuinely curious, that notices connections others miss, that finds meaning in what seems small. It didn't disappear. You just needed a way back in.






You're not alone 
if you're thinking:
"Every time I start something for myself, life gets in the way and I can't follow through."

What's really true: you need a practice that fits into your actual life—one that works whether you have five minutes or fifty, whether your day goes as planned or completely sideways. Not a plan that collapses when life gets loud.



"I don't feel connected to that deeper sense of aliveness anymore."

What I know: It's still there; it's just buried. When you spend three minutes listening-with your environment—how cicadas mark the season in your body before your mind registers it, or how a floorboard's creak holds the memory of time passing through other footsteps, long before you were born—that curiosity starts surfacing again. Small acts of attention, repeated, create the conditions for aliveness to return.







I love this. But couldn't I just... return to my morning pages? Finally commit to that meditation practice?

You could, but morning pages often get quietly abandoned after the first week. You spend more time scrolling Insight Timer than actually meditating. These practices work for some people. But if you're someone who finds calm through engaging your curiosity and senses rather than emptying your mind—where deep presence comes from fuller attention, not less thinking—this offers a different way in.


This isn't mindfulness or meditation—it's creative attention through sound, sensory exploration, and the practices of artists who work with listening and place. This isn't about clearing your mind—it's about attuning to the aliveness that's already present in your everyday world.







Hey there, I'm Adrienne

I'm an artist-researcher who works with deep thinkers and multi-passionate creatives—brilliant minds who feel overstimulated by the world yet desperately understimulated in the 
ways that make them feel most alive. 


I used to believe that feeling lit up by life required perfect conditions. A clear calendar, no one needing anything from me, the house completely quiet. When life didn't look like that—which it rarely did—I started wondering if that part of me had simply disappeared.


Then my dad died, and I found myself listening differently—trying desperately to hold onto the sound of his voice, his laughter, the way he'd answer the phone. But in that desperate attention, I started hearing everything differently—not just sound, but texture, presence, and memory held in acoustics. The world became suddenly, vividly alive.


That's when I realized—aliveness doesn't wait for perfect conditions. It arrives through attention.


Sound became my way back in, though looking back, I realize listening has always been at the heart of everything I do. Now I explore listening as a practice of knowing and belonging—and create spaces where others can explore alongside me.

Meet Soft Sabbaticals →