Centring Eros

Navigating the Interface of Systemic Violence and Sexual Liberation

Training Description

This 2-hour workshop introduces Rewoven’s core framework for understanding, cultivating and embracing erotic energy. It provides a clear rationale for why centring eros in our lives, relationships and organising is essential to creating sustainable, transformative and liberatory change.

This workshop introduces eros as a dynamic sense of aliveness felt in our bodies, relationships and ways of being. Sex and sexuality are potent sources – yet eros encapsulates much more.

Centring Eros supports the embodiment and reclamation of personal & relational pleasure, while recognising and attending to the context of dominant political systems that cause harm and trauma.

Centring Eros also introduces Rewoven’s guiding theoretical model: Sites of Shaping (Strozzi Institute) and brings it into conversation with erotic traditions and somatic practices. This model understands the personal, relational, political and spiritual as interconnected sites that influence and shape our embodiment of eroticism. This workshop aims to support and resource individuals and communities to approach each domain as a site of possibility to safely and expansively engage with and cultivate erotic energy. 

Drawing from Politicised Somatics, Somatic Experiencing, Somatic Sex Education, Wheel of Consent and critical theory, this introductory workshop is a stepping-stone to engage with Rewoven’s other offerings.

Partipants will:

  • Develop a holistic understanding of eros and value it as a source of aliveness and change

  • Develop a critical framework for understanding how individual and collective ways of embodying eroticism are shaped by political systems and supremacy culture that perpetuate sexual shame and taboo (sites of shaping)

  • Explore somatic practices designed to engage with and cultivate erotic energy as a potent source of personal and collective pleasure, empowerment and resistance (sites of change)

  • Become familiar with Rewoven’s core framework and facilitation-style so as to comprehensively engage with our other workshops and offerings

How we Facilitate:

We adopt an experiential, somatic and interactive learning approach. 

This approach complements and at times gently challenges usual ways of learning through an academic framework that prioritises our minds and ignores our bodies. We believe that a more holistic and expansive experience of learning and change is available when approached through the body.

This training invites participants onto their learning edges - to practice, play and begin to embody the ideas and concepts through ourselves first. 

This learning approach is grounded in the principle of embodied consent. This workshop invites participants to notice and intentionally engage with eros from a place of authentic choice, bringing full awareness to their own capacity and desire to participate.

Centring Eros can be delivered in-person or online.

Assumed Knowledge

No assumed knowledge is required. Centring Eros is a primer for people looking to integrate sexuality and embodiment concepts and practices within an explicitly political framework – personally and/or professionally.

It is suitable for participants aged 18+, including: individuals, counsellors and psychotherapists, creatives, generalist and community workers, alternative-healing practitioners, activists and community groups. This training is designed for folks with a curiosity and willingness to somatically explore erotic energy within a group context.  

Centring Eros is a queer and trauma-informed workshop. We invite participation from victim/survivors of sexual and family violence and/or other trauma backgrounds, as well as those working directly with trauma survivors. Our understanding of eros is crucially informed by queerness. As such, we welcome participants of all genders, gender identities, sexual orientations and relating-styles.

Centring Eros can be customised to specific areas of interest e.g. for groups and teams working within a particular thematic, demographic or organisational context.

The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible

— Toni Cade Bambara