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lb_leeThe Hands of a Dozen Strangers: My Experience at a Compassionate Touch Workshop
Summary: “Loving, consensual touch can be a deliberate religious practice.” —Christine Hoff Kraemer, Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective, pg. 122.
Series: Essay
Word Count: 2700
Notes: Winner of the LiberaPay/Patreon fan poll! A lot of these ideas I originally got from Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective, especially chapters 1: “Divided for Love’s Sake: An Erotic Cosmology” and 4: “the Sacrament of Touch.” The author has generously uploaded it to archive.org; check it out!
Unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with my history, I (Rogan of LB) have trouble being physically close to people. So what was I doing going to a compassionate touch workshop in a mysterious half-renovated warehouse with a dozen strangers, most of them men? Well, I wanted a change. I wanted to change.
I had wanted to try something like this for a while, to the point of even considering hiring a “cuddle therapist” despite the massive expense. I never did, in part due to that cost, but also, I think, because on some level, I was so deeply tired of treating my issues like a medical issue, rather than a community one. From the medical perspective, I’d experienced individual trauma and psychological injury; from a community one, my community had violently failed me, leaving me feeling isolated and physically apart from it. Funnily enough, treating it like a case of individual medical pathology only made me feel more isolated and apart! I wanted to try something different.
I also wanted to answer a personal question. See, these days, my experiences with touch are overwhelmingly noncorporeal: I hug, snuggle and sleep with my headmates, but rarely touch what others would call “real” people. I consider my touch needs well satisfied, but after reading up on all the important health benefits of touch, I couldn’t help but wonder: was I missing out? Was there a big difference between noncorporeal touch and corporeal? There was only one way to find out!
I heard about the workshop originally through a local sex-positive mailing list. After a couple false starts, I was finally able to make it. Finding the location was a treasure hunt all by itself, requiring a journey through a warren of industrial parks and construction sites. I quickly found two other people as lost as I was, and between maps and a phone call to a facilitator, we found it: a warehouse with red doors and no visible marking, street number, or street sign. (Ah, Boston.)
Inside was a space only half-done, with raw ceiling joists and subflooring, mostly covered with rugs, cushions, and blankets. The effect was homey, in an artsy anarchist squatter kind of way. Art and sculptures were everywhere, including a homemade Croc rack, a wall of “community tarot,” a half-done enormous art collage, and a sort of cross between a love-seat and a porch swing decked in blankets and suspended from the ceiling with chains. This place felt like one where anything could be done, and I immediately liked it, even as I had a terrible sense that it wouldn’t last long. Still, I could do my best to support it and enjoy it while it was here.
There were two facilitators, a he and a she. At least one was a massage therapist. They welcomed us and invited us to sit in a circle. A place like this invited lounging, so I chose a thick, super-firm gym mat and took in the eleven other participants. Besides the two facilitators and myself, there were two theys, two shes, and seven hes, ranging in age from 20s to 50s or maybe early 60s; the guys, if I had to pigeonhole them, kinda looked like people who’d do yoga. Each of us had paid roughly $15, a modest sum for a three-hour workshop.
The facilitators explained that this magical punk fairyland was a community space still under construction. (I suspected that it would never not be.) They emphasized that this was a no-nudity, nonsexual space for decoupling touch from sex or romance, and that many of us lived touch-starved lives, especially since the onset of the great plague.
They weren’t wrong; I was raised to only allow touch from family, sexual partners, and medical personnel (and nobody likes that last part). If touch came from outside those extremely narrow categories, it was presumed to be sexual, especially from men, and to quote Cherie Sohnen-Moe, “A person who only feels intimate with someone when sex is involved might start to believe that intimacy and sex are the same thing.” (quoted in Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective, pg. 42) And I knew I wasn’t the only one! My boyfriend Biff had taken years to reach a point where he was able to admit that he sometimes wanted me to touch him and not have sex; apparently that was way scarier, more intimate, more dangerous than just fucking. And I often caught my foster, Bob, who is by temperament a very handsy, touchy-feely man, jerking back and restraining his own inclinations around me, over-aware of my history… which in the process made me aware of his own (an older queer man who came of age during an era where that meant “child molester”). No wonder the workshop slanted male! Where else could they/we explore touch without having to say, “No sex, no really, no really,” or getting gay-bashed?
Meanwhile, back at the workshop, we introduced ourselves and talked about what kind of touch we were willing to give or receive. As I did, I got more and more nervous. Was I up to this, touch with a dozen strangers? With men? What if I freaked out?
I personify my (hyper)vigilance and paranoia as a frazzled, feral dumpster rat with zigzag whiskers and twitchy eyes. It came into my awareness at this time, vibrating with tension. It did not like this at all. It wanted to leave.
Rat was not unreasonable; we could negotiate, and we did. I told it that I would take care of it and insure nothing bad would happen. I’d restrict touch to arms and back. Would that be okay?
Rat grumbled and glared. It still did not like this, and it made sure I knew it. But it was willing to extend me the benefit of the doubt; I had trusted in its judgment before, so maybe it could trust me. It settled uneasily, and I admitted my nervousness to the group.
Then the facilitators did the smartest thing: they put on a song and gave us a few minutes in which to walk around, stretch, and dance. It helped discharge the nervous energy and loosen us up. I stretched and watched the others shake, hop up and down, and do balletic moves, and I relaxed. Rat didn’t, but it at least became less twitchy.
The first part of the workshop was consent practice. One of the facilitators pointed out that it’s one thing to talk about consent, another to do it. What did a true yes or no feel like? A false yes or no? How could we tell the difference, in a society that often pressured us to go along with the flow (or, in my case, trauma making everything feel scary)? We needed to practice feeling that, learning our yeses and nos, practice saying them as complete sentences, without justification or explanation. So the facilitators lined us up, had us constantly switch partners, and practiced asking each other questions with a required “yes” or “no” (and the understanding that none would be acted out; this was purely practice). This required us to manufacture questions for total strangers about activities that we were positive they would or wouldn’t want, which meant the questions we did come up with were ridiculous:
“Would you like the cheapest rent in Boston?”
“May I stick my fingers up your nose?”
“Would you like to be able to fly?”
“May I drip poison ivy on your back?
The ensuing laughter helped defuse the tension, and absurd and remedial as the exercise might seem, it really did help. We had many times entered a group that claimed one social norm, only to enforce the opposite in practice, so all this questioning helped prove and enforce that no, truly, in this workshop, “no” or “yes” was all that was required. We didn’t need to apologize or explain or justify.
Having practiced saying “yes” or “no” as a full sentence to multiple strangers, and having proved that doing so would have no negative consequences, the facilitators then put us in random, constantly changing pairs. At first, I was a little nervous about this (it felt a little like the old school days of being assigned to a random group project), but in hindsight, it was a smart decision, preventing huddling with friends, freezing in panic, or the “last kid picked for baseball” problem.
“Sometimes we want to be touched but don’t have the words to describe how,” explained one of the facilitators, “so we’re going to practice four different kinds of touch: air, water, earth, and fire.”
Each kind of touch was demonstrated, with explanations of its ups and downsides. Air was light and feathery, the barest light touches with fingertips, ticklish if not done right. Water involved smooth, fluid motions, continual contact with many parts of the hand, not just fingertips. Earth was deep-pressure squeezes with little movement, grounding when done right, constricting if wrong. Fire was rhythmic light tapping or even smacking, to bring blood to the surface of the skin.
We were to practice these touches on each other’s arms and hands, from the shoulders down, but remembering Rat’s nerves, I requested to receive touch only from the elbows down, and it was instantly respected. Throughout the exercise, peopled asked permission and checked in: “Too hard, too soft?” “A little slower.” “That’s perfect, wonderful.”
As I worked, giving first, I felt my self-consciousness recede. I became a pair of hands, aware of nothing but the interplay of skin, bone, fat, and muscle. My mind went quiet. I did not know the people I was touching, and they didn’t know me, and that was fine. This was the intimacy of strangers.
After we had given and received all four kinds of touch (I knew I would use the vocabulary with my long-term partners later), we were split into random triads and took turns where two would give and one receive. I asked to receive last; it made me feel safer (though I had no need to explain this to the others). I worked together to give a woman a shoulder, back, and neck massage, a young man a rubdown of his forearms and shins. When my turn came, I laid face-down and had them gently but firmly squish me into the gym mat we’d placed ourself near.
“You can go harder than that!” I laughed. “I don’t know why this feels good, but it does!”
They leaned their weight onto their arms and hands on my back. I felt myself sink into the mat, and I heard strain when one of my givers asked, “Is this good?”
“I’m good now, you can stop; I need to breathe.” When they let up, I felt like I breathed easier, like my chest was more open. It was a liberating sensation.
As the culmination of the workshop, we were paired (again randomly, always randomly) to one other person. Here, we were going to try a challenge: letting the words go, communicating nonverbally. I felt another brief flare of anxiety: what if I touched someone awfully? What if they touched me awfully? But I decided I’d give it a try; things had gone well so far.
After a brief talk of the touch we’d like to give and receive (thus building on all the previous exercises and also reassuring me), we went quiet. One facilitator got out a set of crystal bowls on which to play quiet, soothing background music, and the other facilitator guided us through the exercise, asking the receiver (the bottom, my kinky side couldn’t help but think) to point to where they wanted to be touched.
My partner for this one was a younger, bearded man. His face was hard for me to read, but I sensed vulnerability in him as he asked for what he wanted. I ended up stroking, squeezing, and kneading his back, neck, and shoulders. Again, I felt like a transparent pair of hands, all body, mind quiet.
Had the facilitators not done such a masterful job at setting the scene and getting us ready, this could’ve been a miserably stiff, cold, uncomfortable, or sleazy experience. As it was, it felt flowing and intimate, in that special way of strangers. To these people, I was not a trauma survivor, not this or that. It didn’t matter why I said no or yes; all that mattered was that I was here, saying it. For once, I had no need to explain myself. My history took the back seat.
When I glanced around (and I hardly did, too engrossed with what I was doing), I saw others lying down, touching, at peace.
“Receivers,” the facilitator said, “think: are you just tolerating this? What could make this better? Givers, can you move 20% slower?”
My sense of time disappeared. In this secret anarchist fairy den, a liminal world opened up, a place where trauma and fascism could not reach, if only for a few hours. Was I massaging a Nazi, a dog-kicker, someone awful? In this moment, it did not matter. All those distinctions we left at the door, for that other world, that other time, which would be waiting for us upon departure. Here and now, in this place, all that mattered was being good to each other, as perfect strangers.
I had experienced similar intimacy before, while traveling or backpacking. Some conversations you can only have with a total stranger at a deserted train station at 2AM. Siblings of the road, you give each other rides, food, advice, stories, knowing you’ll never see each other again. But those past intimacies had only ever involved talk and resources, never touch.
Regardless of who this young man was, I wanted my touch to be healing and restorative to him, because he was a being who deserved care. There was no them in this equation, only us, and in this scary, fractious world, that was powerful.
When it was my turn to receive, I requested air and water touches to my hands and arms. I lay on my back, open and vulnerable, and closed my eyes.
This young bearded stranger touched me with such silent focus and intent, a tactile meditation. I relaxed into it. I experienced. All was quiet and still inside me. From the deep squishing to the lightest of butterfly touches, I wasn’t afraid or defensive or vigilant. I felt open to the experience, trusting, and I was rewarded: all was well, and nothing bad happened.
In the past, I had experienced this state from my headmates’ touches—Mac’s long familiarity, Biff’s spice, Grey’s steadiness, Bob’s casual affection. The corporeal touch didn’t feel better or worse than the noncorporeal kind, just subtly different in a way that’s hard to describe. Much as I would wither and wilt without having corporeal people to talk to, I think that maybe having both kinds of touch is better too, but there was only one corporeal person that I could remember ever sharing this kind of intimacy with previously: my first (and only) corporeal consensual partner, long ago in high school. That had taken years of friendship first, and both our trauma histories had always been silent partners in the room. Now here I was, experiencing this with strangers, over the course of mere hours!
Maybe it wasn’t just the liminal space, the skill of the facilitators. Maybe some of the magic was in me too. Maybe, after all these years of slugging away at healing, wondering if I was getting anywhere at all, I was finally reaping the hard-won fruit of my labor.
It felt wonderful.
We finished. We thanked each other.
The facilitators got us in a circle to bring us back into normal life. We talked, gave feedback and thanks to each other. Another young man said he was glad I had come, even though I’d been nervous. We shared events that we thought might be of interest: a “contact improv” lab, a Jungian archetypes workshop, an imaginal work group. I joined mailing lists, got some emails. We hugged, linked arms and hands, and said goodbye before leaving back for our regular lives. I felt loose, relaxed, happy.
Feral Rat was curled in a contented ball, fast asleep.
Summary: “Loving, consensual touch can be a deliberate religious practice.” —Christine Hoff Kraemer, Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective, pg. 122.
Series: Essay
Word Count: 2700
Notes: Winner of the LiberaPay/Patreon fan poll! A lot of these ideas I originally got from Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective, especially chapters 1: “Divided for Love’s Sake: An Erotic Cosmology” and 4: “the Sacrament of Touch.” The author has generously uploaded it to archive.org; check it out!
Unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with my history, I (Rogan of LB) have trouble being physically close to people. So what was I doing going to a compassionate touch workshop in a mysterious half-renovated warehouse with a dozen strangers, most of them men? Well, I wanted a change. I wanted to change.
I had wanted to try something like this for a while, to the point of even considering hiring a “cuddle therapist” despite the massive expense. I never did, in part due to that cost, but also, I think, because on some level, I was so deeply tired of treating my issues like a medical issue, rather than a community one. From the medical perspective, I’d experienced individual trauma and psychological injury; from a community one, my community had violently failed me, leaving me feeling isolated and physically apart from it. Funnily enough, treating it like a case of individual medical pathology only made me feel more isolated and apart! I wanted to try something different.
I also wanted to answer a personal question. See, these days, my experiences with touch are overwhelmingly noncorporeal: I hug, snuggle and sleep with my headmates, but rarely touch what others would call “real” people. I consider my touch needs well satisfied, but after reading up on all the important health benefits of touch, I couldn’t help but wonder: was I missing out? Was there a big difference between noncorporeal touch and corporeal? There was only one way to find out!
I heard about the workshop originally through a local sex-positive mailing list. After a couple false starts, I was finally able to make it. Finding the location was a treasure hunt all by itself, requiring a journey through a warren of industrial parks and construction sites. I quickly found two other people as lost as I was, and between maps and a phone call to a facilitator, we found it: a warehouse with red doors and no visible marking, street number, or street sign. (Ah, Boston.)
Inside was a space only half-done, with raw ceiling joists and subflooring, mostly covered with rugs, cushions, and blankets. The effect was homey, in an artsy anarchist squatter kind of way. Art and sculptures were everywhere, including a homemade Croc rack, a wall of “community tarot,” a half-done enormous art collage, and a sort of cross between a love-seat and a porch swing decked in blankets and suspended from the ceiling with chains. This place felt like one where anything could be done, and I immediately liked it, even as I had a terrible sense that it wouldn’t last long. Still, I could do my best to support it and enjoy it while it was here.
There were two facilitators, a he and a she. At least one was a massage therapist. They welcomed us and invited us to sit in a circle. A place like this invited lounging, so I chose a thick, super-firm gym mat and took in the eleven other participants. Besides the two facilitators and myself, there were two theys, two shes, and seven hes, ranging in age from 20s to 50s or maybe early 60s; the guys, if I had to pigeonhole them, kinda looked like people who’d do yoga. Each of us had paid roughly $15, a modest sum for a three-hour workshop.
The facilitators explained that this magical punk fairyland was a community space still under construction. (I suspected that it would never not be.) They emphasized that this was a no-nudity, nonsexual space for decoupling touch from sex or romance, and that many of us lived touch-starved lives, especially since the onset of the great plague.
They weren’t wrong; I was raised to only allow touch from family, sexual partners, and medical personnel (and nobody likes that last part). If touch came from outside those extremely narrow categories, it was presumed to be sexual, especially from men, and to quote Cherie Sohnen-Moe, “A person who only feels intimate with someone when sex is involved might start to believe that intimacy and sex are the same thing.” (quoted in Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective, pg. 42) And I knew I wasn’t the only one! My boyfriend Biff had taken years to reach a point where he was able to admit that he sometimes wanted me to touch him and not have sex; apparently that was way scarier, more intimate, more dangerous than just fucking. And I often caught my foster, Bob, who is by temperament a very handsy, touchy-feely man, jerking back and restraining his own inclinations around me, over-aware of my history… which in the process made me aware of his own (an older queer man who came of age during an era where that meant “child molester”). No wonder the workshop slanted male! Where else could they/we explore touch without having to say, “No sex, no really, no really,” or getting gay-bashed?
Meanwhile, back at the workshop, we introduced ourselves and talked about what kind of touch we were willing to give or receive. As I did, I got more and more nervous. Was I up to this, touch with a dozen strangers? With men? What if I freaked out?
I personify my (hyper)vigilance and paranoia as a frazzled, feral dumpster rat with zigzag whiskers and twitchy eyes. It came into my awareness at this time, vibrating with tension. It did not like this at all. It wanted to leave.
Rat was not unreasonable; we could negotiate, and we did. I told it that I would take care of it and insure nothing bad would happen. I’d restrict touch to arms and back. Would that be okay?
Rat grumbled and glared. It still did not like this, and it made sure I knew it. But it was willing to extend me the benefit of the doubt; I had trusted in its judgment before, so maybe it could trust me. It settled uneasily, and I admitted my nervousness to the group.
Then the facilitators did the smartest thing: they put on a song and gave us a few minutes in which to walk around, stretch, and dance. It helped discharge the nervous energy and loosen us up. I stretched and watched the others shake, hop up and down, and do balletic moves, and I relaxed. Rat didn’t, but it at least became less twitchy.
The first part of the workshop was consent practice. One of the facilitators pointed out that it’s one thing to talk about consent, another to do it. What did a true yes or no feel like? A false yes or no? How could we tell the difference, in a society that often pressured us to go along with the flow (or, in my case, trauma making everything feel scary)? We needed to practice feeling that, learning our yeses and nos, practice saying them as complete sentences, without justification or explanation. So the facilitators lined us up, had us constantly switch partners, and practiced asking each other questions with a required “yes” or “no” (and the understanding that none would be acted out; this was purely practice). This required us to manufacture questions for total strangers about activities that we were positive they would or wouldn’t want, which meant the questions we did come up with were ridiculous:
“Would you like the cheapest rent in Boston?”
“May I stick my fingers up your nose?”
“Would you like to be able to fly?”
“May I drip poison ivy on your back?
The ensuing laughter helped defuse the tension, and absurd and remedial as the exercise might seem, it really did help. We had many times entered a group that claimed one social norm, only to enforce the opposite in practice, so all this questioning helped prove and enforce that no, truly, in this workshop, “no” or “yes” was all that was required. We didn’t need to apologize or explain or justify.
Having practiced saying “yes” or “no” as a full sentence to multiple strangers, and having proved that doing so would have no negative consequences, the facilitators then put us in random, constantly changing pairs. At first, I was a little nervous about this (it felt a little like the old school days of being assigned to a random group project), but in hindsight, it was a smart decision, preventing huddling with friends, freezing in panic, or the “last kid picked for baseball” problem.
“Sometimes we want to be touched but don’t have the words to describe how,” explained one of the facilitators, “so we’re going to practice four different kinds of touch: air, water, earth, and fire.”
Each kind of touch was demonstrated, with explanations of its ups and downsides. Air was light and feathery, the barest light touches with fingertips, ticklish if not done right. Water involved smooth, fluid motions, continual contact with many parts of the hand, not just fingertips. Earth was deep-pressure squeezes with little movement, grounding when done right, constricting if wrong. Fire was rhythmic light tapping or even smacking, to bring blood to the surface of the skin.
We were to practice these touches on each other’s arms and hands, from the shoulders down, but remembering Rat’s nerves, I requested to receive touch only from the elbows down, and it was instantly respected. Throughout the exercise, peopled asked permission and checked in: “Too hard, too soft?” “A little slower.” “That’s perfect, wonderful.”
As I worked, giving first, I felt my self-consciousness recede. I became a pair of hands, aware of nothing but the interplay of skin, bone, fat, and muscle. My mind went quiet. I did not know the people I was touching, and they didn’t know me, and that was fine. This was the intimacy of strangers.
After we had given and received all four kinds of touch (I knew I would use the vocabulary with my long-term partners later), we were split into random triads and took turns where two would give and one receive. I asked to receive last; it made me feel safer (though I had no need to explain this to the others). I worked together to give a woman a shoulder, back, and neck massage, a young man a rubdown of his forearms and shins. When my turn came, I laid face-down and had them gently but firmly squish me into the gym mat we’d placed ourself near.
“You can go harder than that!” I laughed. “I don’t know why this feels good, but it does!”
They leaned their weight onto their arms and hands on my back. I felt myself sink into the mat, and I heard strain when one of my givers asked, “Is this good?”
“I’m good now, you can stop; I need to breathe.” When they let up, I felt like I breathed easier, like my chest was more open. It was a liberating sensation.
As the culmination of the workshop, we were paired (again randomly, always randomly) to one other person. Here, we were going to try a challenge: letting the words go, communicating nonverbally. I felt another brief flare of anxiety: what if I touched someone awfully? What if they touched me awfully? But I decided I’d give it a try; things had gone well so far.
After a brief talk of the touch we’d like to give and receive (thus building on all the previous exercises and also reassuring me), we went quiet. One facilitator got out a set of crystal bowls on which to play quiet, soothing background music, and the other facilitator guided us through the exercise, asking the receiver (the bottom, my kinky side couldn’t help but think) to point to where they wanted to be touched.
My partner for this one was a younger, bearded man. His face was hard for me to read, but I sensed vulnerability in him as he asked for what he wanted. I ended up stroking, squeezing, and kneading his back, neck, and shoulders. Again, I felt like a transparent pair of hands, all body, mind quiet.
Had the facilitators not done such a masterful job at setting the scene and getting us ready, this could’ve been a miserably stiff, cold, uncomfortable, or sleazy experience. As it was, it felt flowing and intimate, in that special way of strangers. To these people, I was not a trauma survivor, not this or that. It didn’t matter why I said no or yes; all that mattered was that I was here, saying it. For once, I had no need to explain myself. My history took the back seat.
When I glanced around (and I hardly did, too engrossed with what I was doing), I saw others lying down, touching, at peace.
“Receivers,” the facilitator said, “think: are you just tolerating this? What could make this better? Givers, can you move 20% slower?”
My sense of time disappeared. In this secret anarchist fairy den, a liminal world opened up, a place where trauma and fascism could not reach, if only for a few hours. Was I massaging a Nazi, a dog-kicker, someone awful? In this moment, it did not matter. All those distinctions we left at the door, for that other world, that other time, which would be waiting for us upon departure. Here and now, in this place, all that mattered was being good to each other, as perfect strangers.
I had experienced similar intimacy before, while traveling or backpacking. Some conversations you can only have with a total stranger at a deserted train station at 2AM. Siblings of the road, you give each other rides, food, advice, stories, knowing you’ll never see each other again. But those past intimacies had only ever involved talk and resources, never touch.
Regardless of who this young man was, I wanted my touch to be healing and restorative to him, because he was a being who deserved care. There was no them in this equation, only us, and in this scary, fractious world, that was powerful.
When it was my turn to receive, I requested air and water touches to my hands and arms. I lay on my back, open and vulnerable, and closed my eyes.
This young bearded stranger touched me with such silent focus and intent, a tactile meditation. I relaxed into it. I experienced. All was quiet and still inside me. From the deep squishing to the lightest of butterfly touches, I wasn’t afraid or defensive or vigilant. I felt open to the experience, trusting, and I was rewarded: all was well, and nothing bad happened.
In the past, I had experienced this state from my headmates’ touches—Mac’s long familiarity, Biff’s spice, Grey’s steadiness, Bob’s casual affection. The corporeal touch didn’t feel better or worse than the noncorporeal kind, just subtly different in a way that’s hard to describe. Much as I would wither and wilt without having corporeal people to talk to, I think that maybe having both kinds of touch is better too, but there was only one corporeal person that I could remember ever sharing this kind of intimacy with previously: my first (and only) corporeal consensual partner, long ago in high school. That had taken years of friendship first, and both our trauma histories had always been silent partners in the room. Now here I was, experiencing this with strangers, over the course of mere hours!
Maybe it wasn’t just the liminal space, the skill of the facilitators. Maybe some of the magic was in me too. Maybe, after all these years of slugging away at healing, wondering if I was getting anywhere at all, I was finally reaping the hard-won fruit of my labor.
It felt wonderful.
We finished. We thanked each other.
The facilitators got us in a circle to bring us back into normal life. We talked, gave feedback and thanks to each other. Another young man said he was glad I had come, even though I’d been nervous. We shared events that we thought might be of interest: a “contact improv” lab, a Jungian archetypes workshop, an imaginal work group. I joined mailing lists, got some emails. We hugged, linked arms and hands, and said goodbye before leaving back for our regular lives. I felt loose, relaxed, happy.
Feral Rat was curled in a contented ball, fast asleep.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 04:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 07:16 am (UTC)Consensual, non-sexual touch is indeed magic. Firmly believe all mammals (and quite possibly many other types of creature) need it to live.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 07:16 am (UTC)Awww... I'm glad you had such a good time at the workshop. It was definitely brave of you to go there! I think I would have run away screaming at the very idea of it.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 08:09 pm (UTC)And sorry I haven't gotten back to you yet RE: new phone thingies, things have kinda sideswiped me BUT I SWEAR I HAVEN'T FORGOTTEN
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 09:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 06:46 pm (UTC)Contact improv used to be a great space for us to dance without caring how we look - and without touching anyone. It was nice to notice that our No kept being respected. (Then the plague hit and we moved.) This workshop sounds intense but really well executed, I'm glad you and Rat had a good time.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 08:07 pm (UTC)Okay so what IS contact improv? Nobody defined it to me and I am so curious!
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 08:46 pm (UTC)The rules of the jam we went to were:
- it's a nonsexual and sober space
- ask people before touching them (nonverbal asking is okay if you know each other)
- a no is always respected and doesn't have to be explained
- you can't hold on to people in any way; you can touch them with the palm of your hand but you can't grab their arm, for example
- the point of contact between you is always moving, and ideally there's always at least one point of contact (while you're dancing together)
So you might touch your elbow to someone's shoulder, and then you both turn and now your shoulder is touching their back...it takes improvisation, as well as noticing what your dance partner is doing and responding to that. Although there's no rules against talking about it, and people frequently would coordinate with words.
It's an experimental space, people try out playful silly things and sometimes they don't work out, usually at some point some people lie down next to each other and roll over each other, someone always tries to bring acrobatics into the space...but you don't have to do any fancy tricks, sometimes people just do simple points of contact and feel what that's like. You don't have to do any *dancing*, as in moving to music, it's really up to you.
For us, it was tricky to figure out when we were done dancing with a certain partner, because there are no rules about that, we just have to know when we want to say no! So it felt like a practice in social situations, as well. But it was a great space to experiment with our kind of solo dancing (aka stimming to music) without worrying about how we look.
Also, these jams went on into the middle of the night! People would just drift to the sides of the room and give each other massages or chill on a yoga mat when they got exhausted. It was a weekly event and many people were there every week, and that was nice too, to know some faces already.
...now I need to figure out if we have a jam we could get to in our new town.
P.S. Thanks for the emailed stickers!
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Date: 2025-08-02 03:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-02 02:39 am (UTC)The session of practising saying no and yes is really clever. I think the silliness of it is helpful in a few ways: both that it's easier to practice a skill when it's fun and silly, but also its hard to feel 'too silly' saying "no, don't touch my back" after you've said "no, I don't want a cock roach sandwich."
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Date: 2025-08-02 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-03 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-08 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-05 01:31 am (UTC)- Gil-Galad
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Date: 2025-08-08 01:03 am (UTC)