We have postponed this event until the spring due to family medical emergencies for both facilitators. Stay tuned!
Register here for How Do We Ask for What We Want? A Wheel of Consent workshop
Why is it so hard to ask for what we want? What gets in our way? How can we learn to know what we want, trust in our own desires, and communicate that to others?
Join us for a weekend guided practice laboratory to learn skills from the Wheel of Consent®. The Wheel of Consent® is a model of consent based on the idea of consent as an agreement between people, with a clear understanding of who an action is for. This practice allows for a much deeper engagement with understanding our own wants/desires and our limits/boundaries.
At the end of this course, you’ll:
Have a deeper understanding of how to know what you want
Be able to trust and value your desires
Better locate your authentic “yeses” and “nos” in your body
Be more connected to the pleasure of touch
Have new tools to communicate to others about your wants and limits
Because of who we (Max and Sasha) are, we offer a space that raises up marginalized voices instead of the default white, western, cis/het voice. We are offering a coalition space (hat-tip to Bernice Johnson Reagon) for practicing and learning the Wheel of Consent. For this workshop, we will reserve 50% of the participant list for BIPOC registrants in order to fully inhabit that coalition space. (Why are we making this choice?)
This is an in-person class, held in Chicago, IL, at Heartwood Center.
We will meet:
Friday Aug. 18 6-9pm CT
Saturday Aug. 19 10am-6pm CT
Sunday Aug. 20 10am-6pm CT
During the course we offer the opportunity to explore touch in a mindful way. Each person will be invited to explore what feels good for them in solo practice and partner work. These exercises are often limited to the hands. Touch is always optional. At this workshop, we are not inviting touch to the genitals or touch that is designed to arouse.
Couples are welcome and we encourage experimenting with touch with other participants. Please attend to your agreements with your partner beforehand.
COVID-19/Health Policy:
We require participants to be fully vaccinated with a booster within the last year or have had covid within the last year of the workshop date. We also will require a rapid test before each day of the workshop. You are welcome to wear a mask if you wish, but they are optional. If you have any cold-like or allergy-like/conjunctivitis symptoms, please take care of yourself and others, and stay at home. In this case, if at the last minute, you will receive a 75% refund. Since we are meeting in person, we ask that participants take reasonable precautions in the week before we meet together.
Your Workshop Leaders:
Max (he/him) is a Black, queer trans man who has been on a life-long journey of learning about and re-connecting to his body. He has been fascinated by the body, the spirit, and culture, and more particularly, the ways in which these meet, interact, and connect. He has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience, and a Certificate in Theological Studies from Pacific School of Religion. He started a Buddhist meditation practice in 1990. He has been trained in a wide variety of embodiment modalities, including Authentic Movement and classical Tantra. He has spent his vocational life in a wide variety of endeavors, from academia, to non-profit technology, writing, and most recently, teaching mindfulness, emotional awareness, consent, and embodiment. He is a certified facilitator of the Wheel of Consent. He lives and works on a ranch in unceded Kashia Pomo territory, also known as Cazadero, California.
Sasha (they/them) is a white Jewish queer non-binary trans person who finds joy in teaching from and about the body and how we connect our insides to the outsides. They have worked with movement, sexuality, gender, bodywork and consent education for over 20 years. They are certified as a STREAM practitioner and are a certified facilitator with the School of Consent. They have taught and danced all over the world in contact improvisation, aerial/circus and integrated dance companies, universities and spaces. Other influences in their thinking include years of hospice care work, elections work, and cooperative business and living structures. They currently work as a Somatic Sex Educator based in HoChunk land called DeJope (Madison, WI, US).
