AUTHENTIC RELATING
Restore natural capacities of belonging, attunement, trust, and autonomy to experience what we all need: nourishing relationships.
Photos by Djamila Grossman
A Journey into Belonging, Trust, & Nourishing Connection
Let’s explore our core need to connect and create fulfilling relationships and their essential elements through embodied relating and touch.
Authentic relationships begin when we reveal our authentic self to another person. That means being genuine and vulnerable in our communication and interactions.
Trust opens up naturally when we are harmonious between what we feel inside and consistent with how we act and how we interact with others. To find our authenticity, we practice, play and learn together what are the essential features of relationality.
Understanding our core needs
We are all born with innate needs and the ability to connect. They are both our rights and our pleasure. Without connection, we can neither thrive nor survive.
At a basic level, our physical and emotional well-being and the ability to create healthy relationships are connected to five core capacities we need to develop and learn as children by interacting with our caregivers.
- Belonging and Grounding
- Attunement & Needs
- Trust & Interdependence
- Autonomy & Boundaries
- Love & Sexuality
Healing the wound of love
Our capacity for connection with both ourselves and others defines our emotional health. When our needs as children are satisfied, we develop these five relational capacities in a balanced way.
Most of us, however, experience some degree of difficulties in one or more areas. As children, we take that as a personal failure when our environment has not responded adequately. We couldn’t comprehend our caregivers making mistakes because our survival depended on them. This is how we develop a wound of love in our bodies and minds. Modern psychology calls this wound “trauma”.
In this series of workshops, we tune with the body and emotions into these delicate parts of us that have not been fulfilled with love and care. Gently and compassionately, we face together those pieces of us. As adults, we see freedom to give each other and ourselves what we were not given as children.
We use touch to love
The body feels loved when its needs are heard, acknowledged, and met. In a child’s experience, love means being touched, held, nurtured, comforted, praised, and reassured. When such pleasurable experiences are not given, the motivation and the desire for life itself—the drive to live— collapse.
Touch is our first language. Long before we can speak or even see or smell, the sense of touch is already there. It creates the first contact with the world, giving us a sense of security and belonging. Touch is essential to develop a healthy body, balanced emotional life, learning, and feeling pleasure. Touch influences how we perceive stress and pain, who we trust, and who we fear. Touch shapes us as humans. Love, vitality, and compassion are conveyed deeper through touch than words.
In this workshop, we explore five capacities of relationships through our bodies and touch. With various practices, we see how the spontaneous movement in all of us is towards connection, health, and aliveness. No matter how isolated or withdrawn we are or how deep the wounds are, we see this impulse of connections on the deepest level.
Self-regulation and co-regulation
We combine essential core elements to make conscious choices in the relational space with other people and build healthy and fulfilling relationships. The touch experiences in the workshops are of a healing and compassionate nature and are not intended towards sensuality.
This journey is inspired by such modalities as Neuroaffective Relational Model NARM, Neuroaffective Touch, Biodynamic Breathwork for Trauma Release, and Compassionate Inquiry. We are, however, not going through therapy. If we experience a deep degree of trauma and dysregulation of the nervous system, we should seek an experienced and compassionate trauma practitioner for our individual support.
Workshops
Belonging & Grounding
12th of February
We get in touch with our bodies and emotions. We feel we have the right to live in this world and belong to others. We explore how we disconnect from our bodies and social engagement as a survival strategy.
Attunement & Needs
19th of March
We feel our needs and emotions and recognise and reach out to them. We take in physical and emotional nourishment as our natural right. We explore how we lose the awareness and expression of personal needs and how instead, we focus on the needs of others.
Trust & Interdependence
21st of May
We allow healthy dependence and independence. We explore how we tend to give up on our authenticity to be who others want us to be.
Autonomy & Boundaries
17th of September
We set appropriate boundaries, say no and set limits. We speak our minds without guilt or fear. We explore how we block authentic expression and respond in a way we think is expected of us not to be abused or abandoned.
Love & Sexuality
19th of November
We live with an open heart and passion. We integrate a loving relationship with vital sexuality. We explore how we tend to cut the connection from our hearts, love and sexuality and how we perfect ourselves to avoid rejection.
A non-sεxual experience
In this experience, we connect with others in a non-sεxual way. We acknowledge that the line between sεxual and non-sεxual interaction is not always clear; therefore, we provide clear guidelines on the nature of the physical interaction during this experience.
We remain fully clothed during the event (unless specified otherwise above). We do not kiss nor interact with sεxual zones: genitals or breasts. We respect that the space is not meant for sεnsual or sεxual interactions. We encourage awareness of sεnsuality and arousal, as they naturally appear in the frame of touch and intimacy, but without actively diving into sεxual energy or pursuing the stimulative touch.
On gender balance
In our experiences, we do not limit nor balance the representation of gender among our participants. We allow natural unfolding of the group participants. Every event might have a different gender ratio and different energy ratio (masculine, feminine, and neutral). We embrace all gender identities and body configurations.
For some of us, experiencing physical interaction with one particular gender might come more naturally than with others. We are invited to question our patterns, and approach touch outside the limits we define for ourself.
The importance of integration
The process in which we revisit, work through and make sense of the insights and content of our experiences is called integration. We believe in making a sustainable change in our life.
An essential step for this is to find time and space to explore those experiences. We can either integrate by ourself by meditation, journaling, or creating art, or with others, our coach, therapist or close friends and loved ones.
For this, we can join the Integration Space: a container where we can share our insights from our experiences. We usually host an Integration Space event every month. Check our next experiences for more details.
Join the Cloud community
Authentical.li t’s a community of communties, a place to discover amazing events, including ours, and a place for communities to grow organicaly.
Cloud has a space there where we can engage with each other, discuss, share our journeys, ask each other questions, and more.
Next Experiences
Upcoming Experiences
Photos by: Dainis Graveris | Conscious Design |