Belonging + the Body
Embodied Support for Change-makers
A SoulPlay Immersion
June 10-13th, 2024
Mandala Springs Wellness Retreat Center
Cobb, California
In this 4-day immersion, join an intimate group of change-makers for a replenishing and enlivening journey into collective depth work and towards joyful practices for liberation.
This is for self-identified change-makers - service workers, healers, artists, teachers, leaders, activists and community organizers - who are devoted to values of decolonization, liberation and collective care in your work, in the myriad ways that may show up.
This is a think-tank for our collective body. Our time together will be rooted in emergent design, including movement, sharing, experiential play, rest, reflection and more.
As change-makers we have a special vantage point, watching communities unfold, expand and contract. Learning beside each other we will swap lessons-learned, workshop possibilities and challenges with hopes of bringing fresh air and curiosities to stuck places which need it most, in ourselves and in our communities. We’ll also invite you into collective practices of de-armoring, building embodied capacities for both intensity AND rest, and utilizing unbelonging as a portal towards deeper belonging.
We’ll specifically work together with fragmented parts, personally and collectively, and we’ll embrace an embodied lens of privilege and oppression to bring consciousness and care to what we must include in our work to bolster liberation. Our time together will offer a place for rest and for challenge, for deep nourishment and new-found agency and support for your biggest visions, personally and collectively.
You do vital work in this world.
Your work for change in the world is essential and YOU need care and attention too.
✧ What are your most important embodied visions for yourself and your communities?
✧ Where do you get supported, replenished, affirmed, and celebrated?
✧ How do you continue to commit to the work of dismantling white supremacy and
other systems of oppression as they live in your body?
✧ Have you made space for the sacred work of ancestral healing and reclaiming indigeneity?
✧ Do you create time for grieving, discharging emotions, reconciliation, healing, unfolding?
✧ How do you tend to right relationship - with yourself, your loved ones and your community?
What to expect
Collaboratively, we’ll invite you into feeling, sensing, moving, not moving, expanding and contracting, just as you are. We will invite you to move thoughtfully, considering what embodied, sustainable change-making can feel like. Our explorations together will be a moving mosaic, many things at once. We’ll experiment with community somatic practices which bolster care and collective embodied resilience. Together we’ll learn, bow, heed and leap. We slow down to combine presence with understanding, intuition with acknowledgment, grace with awkwardness or discomfort. Perfection can fade away when we become devoted to and practice inner and outer listening. At times you may participate, at times you may witness. At times we may know what to do, at times we will not. It’s all welcome in this rich circle of emergent and embodied community.
Facilitation team
Odessa Perez
Odessa (she/her) is a trauma-informed somatic psychotherapist, and a movement and social justice educator. Alongside her therapy private practice, she facilitates dance, somatic and relational workshops and retreats throughout CA and internationally, and is the Inclusion & Belonging Lead for SoulPlay. She works from a liberatory/healing justice lens, and recognizes the body and right relationship as central pillars in decolonizing work..
vicki abadesco!
vicki! is a seasoned facilitator who has led programs for over 35 years, touching the hearts of thousands. She brings passion to every audience & inspires entire rooms to look at each other and themselves differently, dropping barriers & cultivating care and understanding. vicki! is the co-founder of Soul Shoppe, an award-winning org that provides social-emotional learning tools to schools. She also co-leads a year-long sacred circle for women of color.
Sage Hayes
For 25 years Sage (she/he/they) has offered a unique integrated approach to therapeutic change & transformation. Sage is a devoted healing arts practitioner who believes wholeheartedly in individual & collective liberation. Exploring lineage, embodied presence & emergent relational care are the threads braided together in Sage’s work. Sage is an integrative somatic practitioner, movement facilitator, bodyworker & a family/systemic constellations practitioner.
What kind of methodologies will we be using?
Theater of the Oppressed
Dance and Movement exploration
Family & systemic ancestral constellation exploration
Trauma-informed somatics
Liberation Frameworks
Tickets
before April 7: $899
before May 5th: $949
after May 5th: $999
tickets include camping and all meals.
a range of upgraded accommodation options are available for an additional price.
This immersive retreat is held in between weekend 1 and weekend 2 of SoulPlay Festival, at the same facility, and is a unique opportunity to experience a fully immersive retreat on a chosen topic with masterful facilitation, while benefitting from the SoulPlay care and production value.
When purchasing your ticket, in the Enter Details page, be sure to select
“Odessa, Sage & Vicki - “Belonging & the Body” from the drop down.
QUESTIONS?
If you have questions before you’re ready to register, please reach out and we’ll respond as soon as we can