The Old Oak Dojo at 14 Chestnut Place in Jamaica Plain is a place where neighbors gather to rediscover how to create healthy and resilient communities. This small studio, which shares a half-acre residential lot with a community home, is an experiment in dissolving the boundary between public and private.

Practitioners from many disciplines bring their skills to the Old Oak Dojo to offer classes in acro-yoga, capoeira, dance, kung fu, qi gong, meditation, yoga and more.

The Old Oak Dojo is located in Jamaica Plain at 14 Chestnut Place, a tiny street of Chestnut Avenue near Spring Park. 14 Chestnut is the second house, at the end of the road. Please come to the top of the driveway.

The Old Oak Dojo is stewarded by Deborah Frieze, an author, founder, professor and musician. In 2012, after 10 years of working with leaders around the globe, Deborah was inspired to return home and build her own urban learning center.

The Old Oak Dojo is pursuing the world’s most rigorous building standard, the Living Building Challenge (LBC), which challenges us to ask the question, What if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place?

We engage in all kinds of play at the Old Oak Dojo. We dance, climb ropes, fight with toy swords. We invent games, compete at wordplay, cooperate to get new tasks done.

Jamaica Plain is a vibrant urban neighborhood in Boston. The Old Oak Dojo is situated halfway between Centre St., JP’s main drag, and the subway station. Long known as a racially and economically diverse community, in recent years, JP has faced increasing gentrification.

Among the many purposes the Old Oak Dojo serves, it is a practice space for learning how to become more graceful, strong and skilled at movement. It is the home studio of Awareness Incorporated, a holistic and multi-disciplinary approach to …

The Old Oak Dojo at 14 Chestnut Place in Jamaica Plain is a place where neighbors gather to rediscover how to create healthy and resilient communities. This small studio, which shares a half-acre residential lot with a community home, is an experiment in dissolving the boundary between public and private.

That’s why gardening is such an important activity at the Old Oak Dojo. Given the high lead content in our soil, we constructed four raised beds using materials already on-site or sourced locally. We created a layer of gravel as a water-permeable barrier between the new soil and the contaminated ground and then brought in 40 yards of locally ...