love + freedom
education
your highest potential, unlocked
love + freedom education
your highest potential, unlocked
What if feeling
deeply satisfied in your romantic life,
fulfilled in your work and your vision of serving humanity
(or your particular community corner of it)
and connected to your most authentic self across all areas of your life
could all be made possible by understanding just one thing?
That we are different.
That being human involves both masculine and feminine aspects is just a truth.
We are a combination of the hard and the soft,
the strategic and the receptive,
the logical and the intuitive,
the worldly and the wild.
Every human has a unique internal equilibrium of these two aspects.
Understanding your sweet spot is the key.
To thriving.
To that elusive feeling of satisfaction.
To sustainability.
To peaceful union.
To impact.
And, ultimately, to legacies that matter.
But, before we can find your sweet spot, you have to understand some things about the continuum between the feminine and the masculine.
This is not about labels and boxes.
It’s about cultivating an understanding of how these two complementary forces come together at every level–internally, relationally, and collectively–to create the very conditions of possibility that allow us to lead deeply satisfied and fully-expressed lives of service.
The essential diversity of gender is the most fundamental, the most nuanced, and the most generative diversity humanity will ever know.
That sounds great but…
Your business needs to be more profitable yesterday.
Your parenting schedule is packed to the gills.
Whenever you do stop working, you just feel too tired to do anything else.
You have other challenges that just feel higher priority, so you tell yourself you can live with the persistent sense of being overextended and undersatisfied.
Or maybe…
You’ve already tried several coaches, self-improvement systems, and even a shaman or two, so you can’t imagine why would this be different.
But there is no one-size-fits-all.
Solutions that don’t take into account your internal composition are short-term solutions at best.
You may get the more tangible result, but you still feel exhausted or unappreciated or like you can’t remember why the result mattered in the first place.
The truth is…
To effectively apply most of the tools and best practices that are available, you must first understand your internal nature.
Yes, it’s radical to suggest that the thing we’ve spent the last few generations trying ardently to overcome might actually hold the key to our liberation.
We have tried so hard to escape the hierarchy of our differences, that we haven’t considered the potential gifts of understanding them.
The way forward requires the healthy participation of both our masculine and our feminine aspects.
Your Highest Potential does too.
love + freedom education
The magic of gender,
without the limitations of roles.
We work with individuals, couples, and organizations who are at a crossroads of expansion.
Whether you’re leading a solo passion project, a social impact organization, a family, or just yourself into the next chapter of your life, you have a sense that something more is possible–for yourself, for the people around you, for the world.
There’s a choice in front of you. You can continue to do it big but in burn-out mode. You can choose to keep your dreams small or deferred into the endless future. Or you can learn how to leverage the masculine and feminine aspects for exponential creation now.
If you are ready to play your biggest game, we invite you to explore which of our four pillars is the right place for you to begin…
Freedom:
the highest calling of the masculinewe’re evolving…
If you’re reading this, you are alive in a time of massive cultural evolution. In the last 100 years, women have gained the right to vote, significantly increased their numbers in the workforce, risen to top leadership positions around the world, and become head of household at unprecedented rates.
But, with little exception, the rise of women in the public and professional sphere has seen little increase in the participation of the feminine aspect. Women have been asked to adapt to established masculine ways of working and being in order to be seen as valuable contributors. The net result is significantly more women in positions of power, but a negligible shift in bringing feminine values (like cooperation, multi-valent thinking, and feeling/sensing) into the ways that we govern, do business, or attempt to remedy some of our most intractable social problems. On a personal level, this has left many women exhausted, especially as they approach mid-career.
On the flip side, this same time period has asked men to become increasingly more emotionally fluent, sensitive, and constrained in some aspects of their masculine self-expression. The result has been men who have been feminized to a point of ineffectiveness or who have tried to hide or tone down their masculine aspects in ways that cause harm to their internal well-being.
Photo Credit: Summer Hokulani
About Our Founder
love + freedom education was conceived and created by Kianga Ford
Photo Credit: Luis Tejeda
My name is Kianga Ford, and I’m the very real woman behind Love + Freedom Education.
The Call
When I first heard the call of this path, I was a university professor and a fine artist, running one of the top fine arts programs in New York City and traveling the world for artist residencies and commissions.And I ran nearly all of that from my masculine aspect. I was very successful, and I was also very tired.
Then I had a series of encounters with teachers and practices that showed me the deep potential of the feminine way. I left the university, moved to the jungles of Hawaii, and started trying to find my own surrendered path.
And it was HARD. I still had to keep myself alive in a world that wasn’t attuned to the possibility of another way. I’d learned to soften, but I also found myself working multiple dead-end jobs to escape the pressure of a masculine-dominant career path. It took me a long time to learn my own balance. To master how to soften and sustain. How to build big vision with relaxed receptivity.
Eventually, I created a roadmap from my experience. We might call it–how a tenacious, hyper-independent, alpha girl, survivor who had already made it against-all-odds found the joy and power of living from pleasure and flow rather than strategy and control. And it’s the basis of both how and why I teach.
Joining Forces
Along the way, I also developed a compassion for my male counterparts who were also struggling to find their own unique varieties of healthy masculinity that were also not well-represented in the mainstream.
About Our community
Community is at the core of what we do. We prize the transformative capacity of the presence, support, and reflection of a safe group of peers.
There is nothing that compares to watching the lights go on around the proverbial circle (which in Zoom is actually a square).
The diversity of our community is one of our greatest resources. In the space of transformational development, which can often be very monocultural, we are pleased to be able to look around our rooms and see faces that hail from all parts of the world, that have a variety of experiences with mobility across geography, class, and opportunity, and that are empowered to bring their stories as individuals and not as representatives of a group.
This is not an accident. It’s a commitment. If you would like to work with us, we will do our best to make sure there is an opportunity for you to do that in a way that fits the context of the economy within which you live.
Thanks to the beauty of the internet, the Love + Freedom community has had participants from all six of the inhabited continents, from all walks of life, and many journeys of experience. All who are curious are welcome here.
We work with organizations, leaders, and everyday individuals through a variety of group coaching programs, 1:1 coaching, retreats, workshops, and custom-designed curricula.
deep dive with us
the 3-year curriculum
At the core of our work with individuals is a 3-year study curriculum, with unique and distinct masculine and feminine pathways. We believe we come together most constructively when we create safe environments that speak first to our differences and allow us to cultivate those differences into strengths.
Grounded in the power of community-based learning, they are a unique series of distinct year-long group programs that focus on cultivating a generative understanding of the masculine and feminine aspects of our being.
It is not necessary to commit to all three years at the onset. Each year is its own deepening adventure.
Two Distinct Paths
What the masculine and the feminine require to cultivate deeper expression is quite different.
At the core of this work, we support women to recover from the over-masculinization that typically results from our encounters with the professional world and success metrics that still come predominantly from masculine values. We support women in becoming intimately familiar with the inherent power of the feminine aspect, so that it’s a choice available to them across the spheres of their life experience – from parenting, to intimate partnerships, to work and vocation.
We work with men to reclaim the power of healthy masculinity that they may have eschewed to feel safer as allies and supporters to the women in their lives, so that they can enjoy the full power of all they have to offer in service to humanity.
There are key points throughout the process, like The Coed Dialogues, which happen at the end of Year 1, where we come together to expand our mutual understanding and compassion for what the work looks like on the other side.
We welcome people of non-conforming gender expressions to begin with a consultation with us to determine which paths and programs would be most supportive for them as individuals.
get to know us
Introductory Courses
Typically, at least once each year, we offer a taster for our year long programs. Over three sessions, we give you a sample of the three quarters that make up our first year programs, excluding The Coed Dialogues. Come and experience the feeling of going deep in our communities.
step out of the ordinary with us
in-person Retreats + experiences
Our in-person retreats and experiences allow you the rare opportunity to step outside of your day-to-day life. Different than a vacation where you’re often trying to “get away from it all”, these sojourns provide a supported environment to go more deeply into you. Sometimes with a tribe of fellow seekers and sometimes in a bespoke experience designed to help you become more resourced to handle life’s challenges and to connect with the world from a place that is most deeply you.
shift your way of seeing with us
topical Intensives
While we do the majority of our work in long-form containers, occasionally we have offerings that allow you to journey with us for a brief time to shift the way you see the world in a single meaningful area. We regularly host courses that have to do with what we call the energies of exchange between the masculine and feminine. Money, Sex, and Power are some of the most potent. While some are only available to students with previous experience with our work and principles, those listed below are open to all.
Transform Your Leadership with us
1:1 + Leadership Programs
One-on-one coaching brings the insights of our group programs to busy executives and founders who may not be able to coordinate their schedules around our group program calendars.
Our leadership programs are designed to explore the masculine and feminine partnership as an essential component for the creation of any sustainable change, impact, or new paradigm in our current times.
Whether it’s showing male leaders the how-to and the benefits to making room not just for women but for feminine values in the workplace. Or helping female leaders who have found success primarily by driving in their masculine aspect to reclaim effective and sustainable feminine power.
We focus on inside-out leadership, going deeply Into the heart of each leader to help them lead in more self-expressed, authentic, and sustainable ways. It is our hope that through changing this way that people lead, we can impact organizational culture and the lived experience of the people who look to our clients for leadership and direction.
evolve Your culture with us
Support for Organizations
We talk about the masculine and feminine aspects on three levels: internal – the way each of us is made up of both aspects with our own unique balance; relational – how we relate to other individuals and the ways these aspects express through them; and collective – how our society is leveraging or missing the opportunity of understanding these aspects and how they unlock human potential. Every organization is a microcosm of this collective relating. How might understanding these aspects help your leaders and teams feel more “gotten”, connected, creative, and primed for contribution?
Which one best describes you:
We would love to learn about you. Who you are has everything to do with how we can best serve you. Please take a moment and share with us a bit about who you are. We’ll add you to our community lists and share more about offerings in this specific area.
Women
+ Feminine-IdentifiedMen
+ Masculine-IdentifiedCouples
Organizations
stay connected.
We invite you to reach out any time with any questions or feedback to: info@loveandfreedomeducation.com.
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