We are at a time of collective unraveling of ancestral, cultural and personal trauma in our bodies.
At the heart of this unraveling lies a tremendous amount of confusion around the nature of consent— what it actually is — and how we consciously or unconsciously traverse in or out of the boundaries of it with our own bodies and in our relationships with others.
This class is grounded in the foundational work of Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent. Using the Wheel as a framework, we will map the landscape of consent through Giving and Receiving touch with the intention of mindful awareness, honoring, trust and communication.
With a deeper understanding and practice of embodied consent...
...we learn how to trust both our boundaries and our desires
...we gain greater fluency in asking for what we truly want from others
...we can more clearly identify common reasons we operate out of consent (including habitual patterns, held religious trauma, institutionalized systems of oppression and power)
And, ultimately…
...we gain access to more choices for ourselves in our bodies and in our relationships.
This workshop offers an opportunity to fine-tune your relational skills through somatic (body-based) explorations into the more radical and nuanced aspects of consent.
***This is a clothes-on workshop, and participation in any of the somatic practices is completely optional. This is not about sex, but certainly can be applied to all relationships, including and especially our intimate and sexual ones.
Through solo and partnered embodied practice and discussion, participants will refine their understanding of consent by:
Gaining a more nuanced understanding of giving and receiving touch
Differentiating between the act of giving versus doing, and between active and passive receiving states
Increasing one’s ability to fully receive (and why that’s important!), recognizing what brings us out of a place of receiving and how to get back there
Decreasing the risk of harm created by consent injuries and providing a common language for communicating consent