It’s time for Portals of Pleasure, Body Trust’s annual deep-dive erotic residential retreat in New Mexico. Are you feeling the call this year? Find out more as Alex, Lizz, Zed, and Amy talk about the retreat, what to expect, how they are inspired by the work, and what their favorite Portals might be.
Registration for the retreat is now open. This year’s theme is “steadfastness” or what is steady and true in your body. Are you curious to learn more? Then head on over to https://www.bodytrustcircle.com/portals for more details.
Portals of Pleasure is a 5-day erotic retreat for genderqueer folks and women folks, held July 24-28, 2019 at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center in Jemez Springs, New Mexico.
Category: Workshops
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Announcing: Entering the Long Night
Hello beloveds —
Alex & I are doing an energy & BDSM focused workshop, Entering the Long Night, in Seattle in December, and you’re invited.
It’s all gender, all orientations, clothing optional. It’s limited to 12 people, and it’s already half full — so if you’re thinking about it, sign up quick & save a space.
This is related to the Wicked Equinox SM workshops Alex & I have done in the past, but this time we’re doing it at the very beginning of December, as we approach solstice and the subtle time of the year.
Here’s the information. Hope you can join us <3
Zed
The winter solstice is a time to pause and reflect. The days are shorter, the nights are longer, and what few hours we have with the sun are extra crisp and clear — even crystalline — particularly in places with snow and ice. With all the winter weather, hibernating plants and animals, and the sun low in the sky, it might seem like there’s no life activity; but underneath all of that, life is still there, resting, pulsing, waiting for the reemergence.
That’s the kind of resting life we will engage with in this weekend workshop.
Sometimes aliveness at its most full and actualized by being big, bold, and loud, but there is just as much vivid vibrancy in the small, subtle, and soft.
We’ll use various tools to explore the energy body and tap in to the wisdom of the body, through play, sensation from subtle to bold: intense sensation, bondage and holding, stillness and movement. We’ll build energy up, then slow everything down so we can reflect and embark on an internal journey. Using principles and theories of the energy body, of BDSM, of group dynamics and interaction, we’ll craft our own rituals to dialogue with our deep aliveness with curiosity and kindness.
This is an opportunity to meet the challenges, external expectations, and obligations of the (American) holiday season with intentional pause and stillness, strengthening a felt inner sense of home.
TO REGISTER
Go to the bodytrustcircle.com/year-wheel page and fill out the interest form.
Space is limited to 12 participants
Tuition: Pond $375-450, Lake $450, Ocean $475-595 (you decide)
Registration Dates: Open now until October 27th (six weeks before the workshop)
Open to all genders, all sexual orientations; participants should have previous experience with Body Trust or equivalent.
Accessibility: Private space has 5 cement stairs; we request all participants be scent-aware and do not wear scented products (we will provide additional information about that).
Questions? Email alex@bodytrustcircle.com
Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don’t know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. — Jeanette Winterson
You’re Invited to Dedicated To Your Body for Women in Seattle
With the shifting of our world, our bodies need tending more than ever, away from lovers, partners, children and media. This workshop gives us that time to listen deeply to our needs and desires.
In a safe, respectful, generous and joyful community of women* discover and connect with the aliveness and potency of your body. This workshop is designed for women* interested in the conscious cultivation and exploration of embodied presence and sexuality. You will slow down enough to listen to what your body really wants and needs, witness and be witnessed, receive on your terms, and go with your own flow. This workshop offers you deep honoring, full choice, and total permission to be exactly where you are in your body now and to explore where you might want to go.
Workshop highlights:
- How to have clear boundaries and self-trust
- Connect with erotic energy in your pelvis as a source of generative power
- Learn how to ask for what you want
- Uncover the power of giving and receiving without losing yourself
- Explore states of embodiment, from subtle to bold, through conscious touch, movement, meditation and ritual
- Develop a relationship with your whole body that serves as a foundation for everything in your life
- Experience the potency of connecting with eros.
Location: Seattle, WA
Date: Friday, May 26th through Sunday, May 28th (attendance at all days required)
Time: Friday 7pm, ending by 10pm; Saturday & Sunday 9:30am-6:00pm
Facilitated by Lizz Randall, hosted by Meg
Pre-registration required. Limited to 18 women*
*This retreat is open to all self-identifying women of any expression, including but not limited to straight women, queer women, trans women, cis women, masculine of center women, butch women, femme women, genderqueer women.
Click here & register for Dedicated To Your Body now
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Your invitation to rise up
Hey!
After the wild success of our “Get It Up After A Knock Down” webinar, Lizz + I decided to move the Rebalance workshop to an online format to offer it to more folks.
I’m excited to announce: the (new) Rebalance Midwinter Retreat!
Focusing on advanced awareness of our own needs around balance, listening to your body, staying in touch with the culture around you while remaining grounded, and using erotics as a tool for healing and connection, this four-day online adventure will be the first of it’s kind and guide you through a process to craft strategies for what your particular life needs based on the wisdom of your body.
Thursday January 26 to Sunday January 29, 2 hours (max) daily. The schedule is like this:
Thursday night 5-7pm PT
Friday morning meditation 7-8am PT
Saturday 10-12pm PT
Sunday 10-12pm PT
And remember, it’s all completely online! Sliding scale, $200-400 based on need.
More information here. Fill out the form on the Body Trust website to apply.
I’m really excited to explore this new form and to work closely with Lizz … we’re both struggling with the world right now (particularly of the political climate), and I’m eager to dive deep into getting myself more balanced, and offer tools and ideas to each other.
Love,
Zed
PS: The workshop starts soon, so registration closes this week. Make sure you fill out the form if you want in.
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Getting It Up After A Knock Down
Tonight at 7pm PT / 10pm ET
Join Lizz & Zed to experience three key embodiment exercises for rebalancing, resilience, and starting over in times of struggle and challenge. Maybe you’re having trouble regaining momentum after the election, maybe you often experience a dip in energy after the dramatic change of daylight savings time. We’ll be offering three practices: pelvic floor integration, alternate nostril breathing, and cyclical breath that you can learn easily in this 1-hour webinar and take into your daily life when you need an infusion of energy or a moment of calmness.
Come rebalance your system, and get it up after being knocked down.
RSVP here:
http://www.bodytrustcircle.com/rebalance
xoxo,
Lizz & Zed
How to explain that the workshops are intimate but not personal
or
Why you aren’t being unfaithful when you do this work
In Episode #01 of the Pleasure Lab podcast, Amy and Zed talked at length about doing work in community, why it’s intimate and yet not personal, and how it can be a significant support to your existing relationships. Here are just a couple of pearls from that much longer conversation.
Zed: “I can bring all of those habits into an erotic workshop setting, instead of into a relationship where all my stuff is up in my relationships and my habits are running so hard that it’s really hard to shift them. When I get to go to a workshop and relate to those folks it’s kind of macrocosm of my habits and then I get the non-consequential moments to be able to practice changing those habits with that group. Also, because of the power of the community I can tap into not just my own energy but also the energy of the group. I can pull from that energy of the group and apply it to moving my habits in a new way and then bring my moved habits back to my relationship. Doing work in community makes my transformational potential much bigger and much quicker than if I were just doing it on my own.” (4:31)
Amy: “One of the freedoms I’ve found in erotic community is liberation from the relational aspects that, for me, can be confounding. If I’m in a relationship with someone and I’m being sexual with them, often I’m worried about or eager to provide a quality experience for them, but that means some portion of my brain is not paying attention to my pleasure but paying attention to their pleasure and our collective pleasure. So when I’m doing erotic work in community, I can focus completely on my own experience. In community, I can really focus on my own experience but also be really supported by other people. Letting myself be seen in community has been really healing for me. Shame, which many of us have about various elements of our erotic life—is hard to get over that if you can’t be visible.” (3:30)
“Being in community can break down our expectations about who and what gets to be “beautiful”” (20:30))
If you’d like to hear more, check out the podcast on iTunes and Stitcher. More information here.
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“But Will I Have to Get Naked?!”
by Amy Butcher
I’d been talking with a friend about our upcoming Dedicated to Your Body workshop. She had followed my journey with this work, how the erotic workshops had grounded me in my body, make me all sparkly, given me the growing confidence of my deep, embodied self-knowledge. She knew the power of the work. She was tempted. And yet, when it came to the point of signing up, all her anxiety funneled down into a single–and quite reasonable–question: but will I have to get naked?
The simplest and most truthful answer is “no.” You will never “have to” do anything, let alone get naked, if you don’t want to. The bedrock of these workshops is empowered choice. You own your own “yes” and “no” and can trust that others do too. So peeling back that layer to the question underneath, “but will I have to be naked with other women?” This required a different type of exploration.
For many women, especially heterosexual women, to allow your body to been seen by other women is fraught with difficulty. Culture has fed us so many messages about our bodies: where they should be curved, where they should be flat, where they should have hair, where they should not, what color they should be, how they should smell, etc. You name it and we’ve gotten a message about it. On top of that, we’ve often been trained to view other women not as allies, but as adversaries, as competitors in a battle for attention and partners and power. With all that, why would you want to let yourself be seen in your most vulnerable naked state?
Really the question isn’t ‘will I have to’ but why would I want to get naked? What happy confluence of factors might make you think–no, “know”, deep in your soul know–that’s a good idea? What if you were invited to show up exactly as you are and that was OK? What if you saw other women sharing the same fears as you had, women you might have said were too pretty/smart/successful to have that fear? What if you started to see how focusing on your own pleasure was not only healing for you, but for others who witnessed it too? What if you remembered that being fully in your own wonderfully one-of-a-kind body was your birthright? What if, in the end, being naked with other women felt like the fiercest, truest thing you’d ever done? What if it made you weep for the shear beauty of it? Not the kind of beauty of a glossy fashion mag, but the beauty of a spring rain, the beauty of baby’s cry, the beauty of an act of selfless generosity, the beauty of art that transcends space and time? And what if that knowing seeped into every pore of your body, giving you a gravity you’d forgotten, leaving you flush with the most beautiful thing of all: the fullness of you.
So will you have to get naked at this workshop? No, but you just might find you want to.
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Embodiment Meditation with Lizz
Sometimes potent and profound things can be simple.
In my 20 plus years of studying and practicing being in a body (and spending lots of money on seeing amazing and sometimes not-so-amazing practitioners!) I have learned that 5 minutes of being present and loving with your own body makes huge steps toward embodiment. Let’s face it, being in a body is not easy! But it’s what we’ve all been given this round in life and wouldn’t it be nice to feel more solid, accepting and even excited about being in one?
This is a short mediation that invites you into being your own body worker. The meditation invites your hands to be a vehicle of loving presence for your body. Just try it, just lie down for 5 minutes and follow my voice. And maybe try it every morning for a week and then make it yours, with our your own voice and rhythm.
Let me know how it goes, cuz I care.
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