Touch&Play AUSTRALIA 2025
7-12 March 2025
Offerings
rituals · workshops · experiences
DAILY OFFERINGS
We will journey together through a series of facilitated workshops, semi structured experiences and co-created group processes. As the retreat progresses the content will slowly evolve to explore the deeper and edgier spaces of embodied relationality.
deCIDE Consent
By DeeJay
We’ll study and practice the Touch&Play’s deCIDE Consent Framework, empowering everyone to communicate their boundaries and desires in an effective and authentic way and collectively building the culture of care we envision.
The Oracle
By DeeJay
“What if you are holding the piece that I’m looking for?”
The Oracle is a semi-structured ritual space for collective emergence, reflection and processing what is alive in the group. It’s a group process that has many uses and is capable of showing us layers of truth that perhaps we were not aware of previously. (www.oracleprocess.org)
Liquid Love Ritual (TBD)
By DeeJay
An Immersive Sensual Experience of Communion. The Liquid Love Ritual is a collective journey of the senses. It is an exploration of sensuality in its purest form and can invoke a strong feeling of love for oneself, one’s community and for life itself.
Community Offerings
Offered by participants
Everyone can step into leadership with an afternoon dedicated to community offers. Proposals will be selected based on the groups interests and motivations.
Teachers
Dr Jess Aszodi
OODA
Many of us assume that our impulses and intuitions are somehow “true”, but research from across just about every discipline would beg to differ. We are begging for what we have had before. Eros (desire) is hopelessly entangled with Pothos (the desire for what we have had before). And those desires are etched into our hearts, minds and guts, so deeply its as if there were an invisible compass leading us home to what we already know.
During the workshop we will map an embodied topography of desire. We will learn from the knowledge of the fighter pilots and their theory of “Observe, Orient, Decide, Act” a technique they developed for making life of death decisions, at high speed and in 3 dimensional space. Using all our senses, we will articulate lands inside and outside of us. We will bring light into that landscape in ways that challenge familiar bodily habits. Listening for the unacknowledged magnetisms. Smelling the hidden forces that move us towards some objects and away from others. Singing into the dark. Projecting our bodies into space reaching for touch we may not yet know we were seeking.
Feeling The Body
The Sensorium
Natasha Verco
Isy Gabriel
Isy Gabriel is a renowned facilitator, trainer, and practitioner with over 40 years of experience in personal growth, facilitation and training. Her journey began with a Psychology BSc and PhD field research. Add a lifetime of an eclectic array of bodywork, shamanism, tantra, shadow work, family constellations, and you have her life’s work and devotion: “Obsidian”.
Obsidian addresses current day issues by tracking back in the shamanic field, deep in the ancestral lineage to the traumatic events that lie at the roots. As the Obsidian process unfolds, quantum shifts are made through time and space, these ancestral traumas are released and integrated and life-affirming new codes are rewired and embodied in present time, personally and collectively.
Isy is known for her zeal to address the arena of Eros and sexuality and it has been said that “Isy’s work is like a heroic dose of mushrooms”, Si Field.
As founder of Obsidian, Isy is now training facilitators. Her desire is for this potent life-changing opportunity to touch more lives, sending bigger ripples through the collective. Her mission is to clear the old paradigms that limit us, bringing through greater aliveness, healthy power, inner freedom and serving the evolution of human consciousness.
Links:
https://www.isygabriel.com/
https://www.facebook.com/isy.
Enlivening Your Eros Fire
Do you desire to clear what’s in the way of authentically expressing your Eros? Have you reclaimed your erotic innocence, our birthright?
Obsidian Quantum Constellations is a deeply embodied process that works best with a room of curious humans, that desire change personally and collectively, and wish to become the force of nature they were born to be.
We move through the interconnected and resonant shamanic field, track back to the seed of the dysfunctional paradigms that run our lives today. We will be doing this all together but in intimate groups of about four.
As the Obsidian process unfolds before us, quantum shifts are made through time and space, past patterns are released and integrated, and life-affirming new codes are rewired and embodied in present time personally and collectively.
Together we can contribute to a more alive world, reclaim our erotic innocence and expand our expression of Eros.
Embracing Your Animal Impulse: Predator & Prey
How often do you consciously drop into the “taking” energy in your sexual explorations? Do you ravish with abandon, relishing the opportunity to let yourself be wild? And on the other pole… Do you know the exquisite experience of full surrender to the ravishing? To be the prey, captured by rapture and desiring nothing but to be taken passionately by your lover.
How easily can you embrace and play with the “predator/prey” archetypes and energies?
This deeply embodied Obsidian process will evolve with a room of playful humans, that desire to clear the inhibitions embedded by society, culture, family and unconscious ancestral alliances.
We move through the resonant shamanic field, tracking to the seed of the restrictions that limit your expression and freedom, enabling you to move with more conscious awareness and freedom of choice.
The ability to act from impulse but still have an embodied sense of “knowing” what is right for you, would be the ultimate outcome of this workshop.
Intimacy of the Seven Brains
Are you aware that you have at least seven centres of intelligence (not chakras) that are like having 7 different personalities with you… and each of them have their own ideas when it comes to decisions.
We will delve into the wisdom that each brain brings. What perspective can it offer you that the mental brain does not tend to know or feel?
This is a somatic journey and experience. You will come away with a powerful tool of reflection and inquiry that can assist you with life’s big conundrums as well as the smaller but nevertheless important aspects of life, such as how far to go with a new connection or other daily decisions.
RITUALS AND EVENING OFFERINGS
Evenings will be semi-structured explorations, with space for dance, play, magic and sacredness.
In our revelry we remember to honor the seen and unseen energies that are dancing with us on this journey. We cultivate intentional spaces to be in reverence and relationship with the sacred spark of aliveness in everything. With love we offer and with love we receive.
We embrace our desires, creating awareness into our shadows and our interdependency, and we will invite sensuality and sexuality into our dances when it feels right.
Intro to Contact Improvisation & Jam
Contact Improvisation was born from academic dance research in the 1970’s in the USA and is at the heart of our practices. The form has spread all over the world as a Postmodern Folk Dance. It’s practice can lead to profound personal and relational refinement and flourishing. At it’s peak it allows the weaving of multiple dynamic flow states where the emergent dance is greater than the sum of its parts. We will explore the basics and the edges of Contact Improvisation.
Evening with Eros and Kink
By delving into the dark world of Rope, Role, Power and Sensation Play we choose a path of liberation. Confronting and embracing our shadows we hope to dispel shame , build confidence and find integrity in our boundaries and desires. This evening fusion explores the tools, terminology, and nuances of setting up scenes and/or experiences through the nuanced approaches & lenses of BDSM, Kink & Eros. Beginning with a short performance and demo, followed by Q&A with experienced players, and then flowing into self guided exploration.
Somatic Grief & Prayer Ritual
Life contains suffering and collectively embracing our pain and our sorrows will help us to digest and compost the things in our life that do not bring us joy. Being seen and held in our grief can cultivate our self compassion and our prosilience. This ritual centers around a simple embodied score, in order to invite grief, love, prayer, and presence to move through the body and be released in order to cultivate more space in and around the heart. Bring your grief, your longing, your love, your tears, your grumbly pain, your beauty, your Being.
Exploratorium
offered by the the collective
A space to explore the different possibilities of sensuality, play and touch. Areas to explore with a Guardian or a pair of guardians that can be replaced thru the evening. The areas would vary depending on the emergent offerings.
Touch&Play Jam
On the final evening, an emergent threshold ritual to relish and honor our experiences in this co-created dream. We will dance, offer gratitude, connect and turn towards the horizon of the dawn of living in deeper connection with our desires and boundaries. A yummy and supportive opportunity to prepare for integration and the return. How do we carry the fruits of our time here together back into the other realms of our lives?
Our time together
WORKSHOPS: the retreat is filled with inspiring offers that form the bedrock of the Touch&Play work.
SPACE TO INTEGRATE: Sharing groups, cuddle spaces, swimming pool and beautiful nature offer space to integrate our experiences.
EVENING ACTIVITIES: Evening activities will be full of intrigue and delight! Curated dance spaces, rituals, a costume party, an evening of performances, an exploratorium, and more!
Contact Improvisation · Movement & Dance · Consent & Communication
Self-Exploration · Creativity & Play · BDSM & Kink
Nature & Wilderness · Eros & Sensuality · Community & Spirituality
DANCE & EMBODIMENT
CREATIVITY & PLAY
EROS & SELF-EXPRESSION
