Workshops

At the heart of Gestalt Practice lies the understanding that we can grow into greater wholeness and interconnectedness, both inside and out. Gestalt is an awareness practice that invites us to focus on the present moment as a path toward authentic growth, resilience, embodiment, and aliveness.

Its core principles are:

• Cultivating embodied presence and awareness
• Growing responsiveness, resilience, and choice
• Trusting the organism’s inherent capacity for self-regulation and co-regulation

In this workshop, we will focus on trusting the wisdom of our organismic self-regulation and highlight the role of somatic intelligence — our body’s innate ability to sense, respond, and adapt. We will explore how our emotional, mental, and physical well-being is shaped not only by our inner processes but also by our relationships with others, the more-than-human world, and the ecological systems we inhabit. Through embodied awareness practices and somatic inquiry, we’ll engage with natural regulation and balance, exploring vagal nerve and movement-based techniques that support emotional and physiological health.

The concept of an ecology of being invites us to recognize ourselves as living ecosystems within larger ecosystems. Just as nature thrives through balance and interdependence, we, too, rely on the rhythms of self-regulation, co-regulation, and our relationship with the earth. In this light, the boundaries of a “separate self” soften, and we enter an integrated ecology of being where inside and outside meet as one living process.

This workshop is appropriate for all levels of experience, with the understanding that participants will explore within the model of an awareness gym or lab, not that of therapy. A welcome letter will be sent upon registration along with additional information about our time together.

What if your greatest vulnerability could become your greatest strength? This transformative language arts workshop is designed for anyone ready to level up by unlocking their authenticity.

The curriculum draws from the wisdom in the instructor’s critically acclaimed book, Shame on You : How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification, which explores how shame is weaponized in our culture to keep us from knowing our worth and achieving our goals. Through reflective writing, shared stories, and guided readings, participants will explore ways to break free from shame’s grip and reclaim their power.

Through the act of writing and reading inspirational texts — along with learning about the instructor’s journey as a former sex worker and survivor of sexual exploitation and media humiliation — we will explore essential questions about the insidious role that shame plays in our modern lives. We will examine how shame hinders us and discuss effective ways to reclaim ourselves and our communities from its grasp.

Participants will be invited to:

• Learn about their own unique shame triggers.
• Develop a greater awareness of how shame functions in our society.
• Cultivate vulnerability by sharing intimate stories in a safe space.
• Practice empathetic listening as others speak their uncomfortable truths.

By developing shame resilience, we can reconnect to our highest goals and purest ideals. We can embody our most authentic self, and embolden others to do the same. The workshop is open to people of all gender identities and expressions and is appropriate for professionals and laypeople alike. No prior writing experience is necessary; all levels are welcome, and all course materials will be provided.

This workshop has a faculty funded scholarship to attend this workshop, please email melissa.petro@gmail.com for more details.

Since falling in love is biologically natural, but sustaining love is biologically unnatural, Soul Mate focuses on the art and discipline of sustaining love. You begin with learning how to appreciate your partner so specifically and frequently that your partner feels fully seen and loved.

You then practice both the art and discipline of hearing your partner’s criticisms without becoming defensive. For example, so you don’t have to fear “walking on eggshells” before sharing a concern, your partner first learns how to prepare her or himself to emotionally associate your criticism with an opportunity to be more deeply loved.

Soul Mate is designed as the next evolutionary shift beyond active listening. Active listening allowed the criticizer to feel heard, but failed to teach the person hearing the criticism how to emotionally associate the criticism with an opportunity to be more deeply loved. The problem? Unless the receiver of criticism feels safe the person sharing their concern cannot feel safe.

You will learn a series of practices you may integrate into your everyday life:

• Six methods of sustaining a “conflict free zone” for 166 hours of your 168-hour week.
• A “Caring and Sharing Time” the remaining two hours by practicing six mindsets that allow you to not feel defensive when criticized.
• “Eleven Wisdoms” as a foundation for deepening your love.
• The four “depleters of love,” aka the “Four C’s” (Criticisms, Complaints, Controlling, and Complacency)
• How to use your new skills with your children, parents, work colleagues and people you differ with politically.
• How to use music and dancing to revitalize your love (to be practiced by dancing before each session)

To sustain your practice after the workshop, I invite you to free, ongoing, group follow-up calls to resolve stumbling blocks. If you wish to review the insights and exercises at any time, you will also have the option of purchasing a Zoom and book version of the course.

This workshop is for couples of all genders and sexual orientations.  Developed over the past 30 years, the workshop is also used by many health professionals in their work with clients and patients.

Recommended Resources: Role Mate to Soul Mate by Warren Farrell (BenBella: July 2024); additional video content on warrenfarrell.com.

Discover research-backed tools to create a loving relationship. Together, we’ll engage in a comprehensive exploration of the psychological and scientific aspects of dating and healthy relationships. We’ll delve into the science of attraction, unlocking the mysteries of chemistry and creating and sustaining meaningful connections — all grounded in the latest research on relationships.

Our key focus will be the art of building deeper connections through effective communication techniques and empathetic understanding. You’ll learn how to nurture skills that foster intimacy, trust, and lasting bonds. Mastering a comprehensive framework for effective communication is essential for stronger, more resilient relationships, and you’ll learn practical ways to apply these skills in your daily interactions.

In this workshop, you’ll find out how to create a personal relationship narrative that aligns with your current life. Reflective exercises will help you identify and rewire limiting beliefs about love for healthier and more fulfilling bonds. The “Dating Funnel” framework, a structured approach that demystifies the various stages of relationship development, will provide a clear strategy for navigating the dating world, from initial contact to a committed relationship.

By the end of our time together, you will be equipped with a comprehensive set of tools to navigate your relationship journey with confidence and clarity. Understand the foundations of attraction, develop communication skills, and reshape your love narrative.

This workshop is open to all gender identities and expressions and all sexual orientations.

Recommended Reading: Breakup Bootcamp: The Science of Rewiring Your Heart and Unsingle: How to Date Smarter and Create Love That Lasts by Amy Chan

This workshop includes an additional $15 materials fee.

Imagine your relationship expressing the true depths of your love and commitment. If you are in love, this retreat is an opportunity to rise even higher in love. If you are in crisis, it is an opportunity for healing on the deepest level. We all carry some degree of negative programming from our past, and there are loving and effective ways to transform this programming into a positive and vibrant celebration of our connection.

During this 5 day workshop, we will naturally dive into a deeper learning experience with much more material than we can cover in a weekend. The extra time allows for a fuller integration of all the practices. Each couple will experience exercises and practices to do with each other, therapeutic coaching by the Vissells, the support of other couples, and time for sharing after each practice.

We will share a collection of tools for deeper appreciation and communication building, including healthy communication of feelings, our partner as a mirror, understanding and respecting each other’s differences, conflict resolution, healing past hurts, sexual wellness, inner child/inner parent, taking responsibility and developing a true inner connection. Take the opportunity to explore these tools with your partner during the workshop and learn to incorporate them into everyday life as you continue to improve your relationship at home. For more information, visit www.SharedHeart.org.

This workshop welcomes couples of all gender and sexual orientations.

Warmth is a connecting principle. Somehow the barriers come down when warmth is involved. — Pema Chödrön

Warmth is a powerful and essential component of human connection, prioritized by the biological brain and spiritual heart alike.

To thrive, we humans need to experience interconnectedness between ourselves and the world around us. Psychologist Abraham Maslow described this as “the pinnacle of human experience,” and former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy called it “as essential to our well-being as food and water.” Yet today, nearly 40% of American adults report significant loneliness or isolation, increasing risks of depression, heart disease, dementia, and early death. In a world increasingly shaped by disconnection, how might we intentionally design for warmth, connection, and transparency?

This workshop invites you to explore how designing for warmth — in your relationships, your work, and your communities — can build stronger, healthier, and more connected individuals and communities.

Over the weekend, we’ll explore the science, philosophy, and spirituality of warmth while examining how connection is either supported or undermined by the structure of our relationships, organizations, and communities. We will explore how warmth can be designed into everyday interactions and larger social and professional contexts — supporting trust, openness, and a felt sense of being seen and valued.

We’ll balance theoretical inquiry with practical experience for both intellectual grounding and embodied insight. Together, we’ll examine how warmth is currently designed — or absent — in our lives and experiment with new ways of shaping relational environments with greater intention.

There’s a threshold where the seen and unseen meet. A bridge between this life and the spirit world — and we can learn how to access it with openness, practice, and trust.

Join AJA Daashuur, medium and spiritual guide, for this weeklong experience designed to open the veil between worlds and deepen your personal connection to Spirit.  As the creator of the CCCE Method (Connect, Channel, Clear, Embody), AJA weaves together powerful channeling, energetic healing, and soul-aligned embodiment to help you step into your highest intuitive expression.

This workshop bring you to that liminal space—a place to receive, remember, and realign. With AJA as your guide, you’ll cross into this space where messages flow, past and future selves meet, and the love of your Spirit Guides becomes undeniably real.

During your time with AJA, you will be invited to:

• Expand your intuitive gifts through grounded psychic development and practical daily rituals.
• Create and connect with your own Spirit Language, a unique channel of communication between you and your guides.
• Explore past and future life progressions to unlock insight into your soul’s path and purpose.
• Engage in supportive practice circles that foster trust, feedback, and a sense of sacred community.
• Discover energetic modalities that align with your natural frequency and deepen your spiritual toolkit.

The Spirit Bridge is more than an experience — it’s a passage back to your deepest knowing. Step across with us. Your guides are already waiting.

Please bring your favorite oracle deck and a journal to use throughout the week.

Power without surrender is force. Surrender without power is collapse. True freedom comes from knowing how to embody both.

BDSM is often misunderstood as only rough sex or kink, but at its core, it’s the consensual exploration of power dynamics. It can include play with dominance and submission, sensation, and restraint — but ultimately, it’s about trust, communication, and the courage to feel deeply.

In this experiential workshop, we’ll explore power and surrender as embodied states, not just ideas. Using the Wheel of Consent® as our foundation, we’ll uncover how these dynamics show up in our desires, boundaries, and interactions. Through guided exercises, movement, and deep noticing, you’ll gain tools to navigate these energies with clarity and confidence — in erotic and everyday contexts.

You’ll be invited to:

• Engage in structured practices to embody power, surrender, and choice.
• Explore the emotions, sensations, and meanings behind these states.
• Use breath, sound, and movement to expand your awareness.
• Practice dynamics like take/allow, serve/accept, and lead/follow.
• Discover how power and surrender can bring connection, agency, and pleasure.
• Develop a deeper trust in yourself — unafraid of power, unafraid of surrender, and ready to claim both.

This workshop is somatic and participatory, with options to learn through touch and simple props like rope or blindfolds. All participation is optional — your consent always leads the way.

Please Note: This workshop will not include:

• Nudity
• Sexual activity
• BDSM technique tutorials
• Anything you do not enthusiastically consent to

This workshop includes an additional $50 of faculty tuition.

Recommended Reading: The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent, by Betty Martin

Longstanding relationship structures are now being questioned in ways that are both liberating and disorienting. As inherited models rooted in codependency, people-pleasing, and rigid roles lose their authority, many of us find ourselves at a threshold, no longer willing to sacrifice sovereignty for belonging, yet unsure how to relate outside of familiar and societal patterns. This moment invites a deeper inquiry: How do we stay connected without losing ourselves? What new forms of intimacy, partnership, and community might emerge when relationships are no longer organized around survival?

During this weekend intensive, we will explore how societal conditioning has shaped our ideas of partnership — including the belief that we are incomplete without one, or that a relationship’s end signals failure. We will consider what becomes possible as codependent patterns, limiting beliefs, and outdated gender roles are released, and examine the challenges that arise when attachment is prioritized over individuality. Together, we will explore how relationships of all kinds can be approached as a reciprocal space of healing rooted in sovereignty.

This workshop will support you in:

• Recognizing and moving past societal conditioning toward authentic intimacy.
• Balancing the need for belonging and self sovereignty, while releasing fear-based relating.
• Integrating the masculine (structural) and feminine (aliveness) energetics existing within all of us, regardless of how we identify in terms of gender.
• Showing up to your community and relationships with a deeper sense of sovereignty.

If you find yourself standing at a relational threshold — ready to release old patterns yet uncertain about what may come next — join us for an exploration of connection grounded in clarity and self-authorship and discover an expansive framework rooted in the space of sovereignty.

Recommended Reading: Sovereign Love: A Guide to Healing Relationships by Reclaiming the Masculine and Feminine Within by Dené Logan

The Big Sur wilderness lives and breathes, listens, and speaks. Beneath ancient redwood trees, a shimmering creek journeys toward the sea. In the oak woodland, a polyphony of birds sings to the rising sun. Fog dances across chaparral bluffs, caressing sagebrush and sandstone cliffs. Every cove, meadow, and forest of this biodiverse landscape is alive with presences embodying agency, awareness, and beinghood.

Many of us, however, have inherited a modern Western perspective — shaped by human exceptionalism and reductionistic materialism — that dims our ability to perceive the living complexity and intelligence of our wild world. We are conditioned to see scenery instead of sentience, resource instead of relation. This objectification of the Earth has severed us from the natural world, yielding existential loneliness and environmental peril.

Animism — humanity’s foundational, pre-modern worldview — offers a different frame, regarding the cosmos and all within it as alive, awake, and irreducibly valuable. From this vantage, the world is a great family of interconnected kin, each with distinct perspectives and gifts, all possessing dignity and knowing.

Join us for five days of immersion in animism’s deeper, more ancient relational reality. Through mindful hiking on Big Sur’s trails — Esselen tribal lands — sustained time in the wild, and playful tuning of awareness, we will cultivate our attention and intuition to begin to see beyond modernity’s myopic view. Rather than approaching animism as belief, we will explore it as practice — a patient, embodied turning toward the living land as companion and teacher.

This workshop invites us to remember ourselves as kindred with all life, rooted in belonging to the Earth and our deeper-time ancestors. By encountering these older ways of being and knowing, we joyfully re-enter the enchanted, animate world.

Notes:

• Answers to frequently asked questions about the workshop can be found here.
• This workshop will consist of numerous, outdoor, physical practices and a great deal of walking, including two long-form hikes and one half-day hike. Various hiking abilities can be accommodated, bearing in mind that our long hikes are up to seven miles in length, over uneven and often steep terrain. Participants must be able to sit on the ground, practice outside in all weathers, and get a little dirty. If you have any questions about your ability to participate, please read the workshop FAQs or email info@wildtender.com.
• An additional $100 fee to cover parks permits and parking fees is included in the workshop cost.

Let’s be real — queer men are already masters of reinvention. We’ve learned to shapeshift, decode signals, seduce with a glance, armor up when needed, and sometimes dissociate in the name of survival. Our sexuality has been a battlefield and a playground — sometimes both in the same night. Sexuality offers a lens through which we may examine and deeply experience ourselves and our connection to all of existence. By fully immersing yourself in your sexual experiences, there is more — more pleasure, more presence, more freedom — hiding in plain sight. In your hips. Your breath. Your belly. Your no. Your yes. Your body.

This weekend is a playful deep dive into what it means to live in a queer male body — cis or transmasculine — with curiosity, with courage, and in relation to society and one another.

Together, we’ll explore the wild terrain of gender and sexuality — not from a textbook, but from the inside out. Through guided practices, embodied rituals, and communal reflection, you’ll get to ask big, juicy questions like:

• What kind of man am I when I stop trying so hard? If I move past the “masc” persona and its acceptable coded behaviors to embrace an energy that is both boundless and de-gendered?
• How much of my desire is mine, and how much is performance?
• What would it feel like to inhabit my sexuality without apology — or choreography?

We’ll explore how shame, culture, trauma, and liberation show up in our movements, our fantasies, our ability (or inability) to receive touch. We’ll stretch out of binary thinking and into something more fluid, more alive, more you. You’ll be invited to experiment with different ways of relating, touching, and expressing — from the tender to the wild, the sacred to the silly.

This is not about being “good at sex.” It’s about being honest in our sexuality. And maybe even finding new ways to experience it as medicine, mischief, and art.

Why this, why now? Because queer men are still carrying a lot — even in all our glittering freedom. We’ve inherited both boldness and bruises. While we celebrate open sexuality in our culture, we rarely get the space to slow down and feel what it all means in our bodies. This is that space. Join us to make meaning together — with breath, touch, and truth.

Please note: This workshop, designed specifically for those who identify as queer men, includes partial nudity, guided touch, roleplay, and somatic exploration of gender and sexuality. All activities are optional. The space we create together centers safety, sovereignty, and presence, prioritizing your agency and comfort at every turn. Your consent leads the way. Although we will explore touch and sensuality, no sexual acts of any kind will be instructed or included in this workshop. It will not include full nudity, nor anything you do not enthusiastically consent to.

Recommended Reading: Urban Tantra by Barbara Carrellas; The ManTantra Letters by Victor Bliss & Nathan James

Like flowing water, life is constantly changing, emergent, adaptable, and interconnected. With our bodies and the living process of the earth as our sacred laboratory, we will explore the dharma of fluidity. Through stillness and movement, contemplation and play, somatic inquiry and relational mindfulness, we will reawaken our cellular remembrance of flow.

While the dominant paradigm encourages mental effort and a mechanical/ reductionist approach to the body, we will explore the embodied and organic movement that emerges from an alternative approach — one of non-effort and getting out of the way.

What does the water element teach us about letting go and letting life flow? About maintaining our center amidst the dynamism and chaos of everyday life? How does deep embodied listening guide us to meet the ground of impermanence with creative and courageous response? How does the wisdom of curiosity, inquiry, playfulness, and levity support and resource us as we face the gravity and challenges of today’s world?

This workshop celebrates the nexus between Zen Buddhism, somatic inquiry, ecodharma, creativity, and conscious dance. You don’t have to be a meditator or dancer to participate. You just need to feel reverence toward water and curiosity about the water element within you.

To truly embody our “yes” to life, we must equally honor our “no.” Liberating our hearts and minds and taking responsibility for our contribution to consciousness requires cultivating ferocity alongside gentle compassion.

Drawing from the wisdom streams of Zen Buddhism, embodied change-making, somatic inquiry, earth awareness, and conscious movement/dance, we begin by learning to set conscious boundaries within our own minds and habits to affirm our authentic being and true nature. Only when we listen deeply, with devotion and attunement, to the still, small voice within can we take genuine and emergent authorship of our lives. By continually letting go of conditioned beliefs and the perceived expectations of others, we remember a wider, more life-affirming field of possibility.

This life-affirming work is an embodied, honest, heart-opening, and non-dual exploration of setting skillful, compassionate boundaries when it serves life. It is not about replacing “yes” with “no,” but fully embracing the full spectrum of our humanity and remembering the boundless love that we are. Embodied meditation teaches us how to skillfully express “yes” and “no,” yin and yang, courage and receptivity, conscious allowing and conscious protection. This workshop will empower you to cross the threshold into greater freedom and conscious response.

Recognize the body as both guide and truth-teller to deepen your attunement to your inner compass. It is about giving ourselves permission to slow down and savor that which speaks to us, somatically, invisibly, and energetically, through intuition and relational forms of knowing.