Would you like to have more touch, more connection, more intimacy and more belonging in your life? Would you like to gain confidence in expressing your desires, meeting your needs, and navigating your boundaries (i.e. caring for yourself in relation to others)?
This workshop is for You. Through a series of exercises, we’ll cultivate the skills and awareness to support our experience of integrated and loving connection with ourselves and each other. We’ll create a safe container to explore our discoveries, and we’ll put them to use in open cuddle time!
Exercise themes will include:
- The wheel of consent: the dynamics of giving, receiving, taking and allowing
- Developing trust in Your Yes and No
- Aligning with your desires and resources
- Compassionate communication
- Receptivity, presence, and radiance
Notes on Gender and Ticketing
The workshop is welcoming of all genders. In order to meet the majority of people where they are at, and to support a balance of energies, I will seek to approximately balance male and female gendered participants. To guarantee your spot, please buy your ticket early. If there is a large imbalance, I may need to implement a wait list, or refund some tickets. You may purchase tickets at the door for $25.
Refunds: You may request a full refund up to 24 hours prior to the event. Half refund for the final 24 hrs until the event begins.
This event is for adults 18 and over.
Guideline and Agreements
Please arrive on time. To create a safe container, we will close the doors when we begin the opening circle.
What to wear: Aim for comfy more than sexy
You may want to bring
- Favorite pillow or squish
- Water bottle
- Pen & paper
You are at choice with your engagement in any exercise or interaction. We will ask for verbal consent before touching someone in the cuddle session.
We agree to respect the confidentiality of the other participants.
We agree to honor and make space for each others emotions, including tears, laughter, shaking, etc. If we need support we can ask for it from the facilitator or others.
The intent for touch is non-sexual. If sexual arousal occurs, we agree not to act on it within the container of the workshop.
The longer story:
What is it to be an embodied being, to be consciousness expressed and experienced through form? So many of our concerns seem to depend on our sense of separateness, what has been called the “original wound.” And so much of our activity in life can be seen as strategies for seeking to assuage that pain, often through expressions of the lower three chakras: accumulating money and belongings, focusing on food, substances and sex, seeking social recognition, power, or validation through relationship.
As embodied beings, we have needs. Those needs can be interpreted as limitation and separation, and our expectations of whether and how they can be met are strongly patterned through our childhood. If we do not have a healthy relationship to needs, we often try to meet them in dysfunctional ways such as abuse, manipulation, or the expression of neediness. At the same time, needs give structure and shape to our interdependency with others and with all of manifest Reality. In becoming conscious of our needs and shifting to a paradigm of worthiness and abundance, needs become valuable frameworks for interconnection and the giving and receiving of love. As many spiritual traditions have pointed to, our relationship to one another can show us a great deal about our relationship to All.
Cuddling as Spiritual Practice
Touch is a foundational need of our animal selves, and its lack or presence reverberates through our being. Our ways of giving and receiving it are highly conditioned by our personal histories (such as experiences of violence, boundary violations, or an abundance of healthy connection) and our cultures (such as the relationship of touch to sexuality, gender norms and touch within and across gender identities).
By using touch as a lens, we can explore our patterns around self worth, sensitivity, receptivity, presence, connection and love.
Aharon ben Or (Awakened Heart Counseling) is an intimacy, embodiment, sexuality and spiritual counselor and everyday mystic. He is an intuitive empath and has a lifelong interest in healing and embodiment that has encompassed shamanic study, massage and bodywork training, actor's training, dance, tai chi and chi gong practice, study of Jewish mysticism, time as a devotee of Guru, and work with Ayahuasca. He also has a strong intellectual current, with a BA from Harvard and graduate study in conitive psychology at Princeton.
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photo credit Ajith Kumar CC by 2.0