Lab
The Touch and Play lab is a co-creative space for veteran community members to weave together an experimental intensive experience. In this year’s lab, we aim to foster an environment that can tolerate and support everyone sharing their unfiltered reality while staying in connection. We invite you to be as real with us as a group as you are with yourself in the privacy of your mind. What do you really feel about what’s happening right now?
This is an opportunity to practice the art of revealing your wholeness in a group context. Being a practice, we expect it to be a messy and nonlinear process. At the same time, we are optimistic that if we maintain an orientation towards love and respect our messiness may yield grace. This group will be limited to 12 or 14 people who have been to at least one Touch&Play. Recommended attributes: resilience, self-regulation, skilled at not taking things personally, bravery, self-love.
by Paul Vidich and Andrew Kalleen
Paul Vidich and Andrew Kalleen
PAUL: Touch and Play 2016 opened me for the first time to begin healing my inherited sexual repression that was delivered in the name of God and spirituality. Contact improvisation [CI], Circling and meditation have been the pillars of my unfolding journey towards a more wholesome relationship to body, relationship, community, and spirit. My journey with these practices led me to get certified as a circling facilitator, to train deeply in CI (holding jams and workshops in the US and abroad), to study counseling and offer myself as a therapeutic resource to my community, to train at the Monastic Academy - a Buddhist leadership training center, and to start a small intentional community aimed at healing and empowerment through rigorous daily practice. Outside of relational spaces, I spend most of my time tending to trees.
ANDREW: I'm on a quest towards wholeness. I wish to feel and express from the deep of my body: the flesh, bone, life-force, and emotions which I've been cut off from for as long as I can remember. I want to sing with all of my heart, and dance with all of my spine. I want to be free.
In my dedication to this becoming/undoing, I have found heart-centered social experiments such as Touch&Play and its various spin-off like gatherings I've attended and facilitated to be of profound utility. I look forward to co-creating with all of you a space to practice being free, being whole, being love.