Desire Lab
for FLINTA: femme (female, sapphic, women), lesbian, intersex, non-binary, trans, and agender folks
What do you desire? How can you tell?
What forces, stories, people, politics influence your desires?
Are your desires difficult to locate? Scary or seemingly too powerful? Elusive or feel impossible to verbalize?
How might your erotic and sexual desires entwine with/come out of your mundane, professional, political, ecological, and spiritual desires?
Do you worry that being honest about your desires could rupture connections or threaten responsibilities in your life?
Are you curious about expanding or shifting how sex and/or eros manifest in your life?
Desire is neither inherently good nor bad, but it is a very very big feature of being a human. Desire is shifting, relational, contextual, conditioned, embodied, painful sometimes, ecstatic other times, and often entangled with complex emotional and political terrain. Many of us have learned, in our bones, that there’s potential danger in diverging from norms and expectations around our desires, and especially our bodies; different dangers and stakes depending on how our bodies are raced, classed, gendered, sized and more.
In Desire Lab, we study desire so that we can cultivate more intimacy with ourselves, others, and the whole heartbreaking/heartbreakingly beautiful world. In doing so, we hone our capacity to trust our desires and discern how to work and play with their power. Together and on our own, we listen for, feel, experience, analyze, and articulate our desires—as well as our pleasures, curiosities, boundaries, needs, fears, and blocks—as FLINTA (female/femme/sapphic, lesbian, intersex, non-binary, trans, and agender) folks in a FLINTA exclusive space. Our tools include meditations, movement, breath work, touch, writing, creative exploration with the Internal Family Systems model, show and tells, witnessing/being witnessed, reading, and discussion. Erotic and sexual desire are core gateways/foci for our work here, however we always contextualize these arenas inseparably from other “categories” of desire including political, ecological, mundane, creative, professional, spiritual etc. We engage texts (particularly in the online version of the class) by Andre Lorde, Thanissara, Julian of Norwich, and/or others entwined with other kinds of activities. All practices are adaptable to individual needs.
I come to this work as a queer person, dancer and performer, artist, movement educator, meditator in the Insight Meditation tradition, Internal Family Systems practitioner, former sex worker, kink and erotic explorer, and Urban Tantra practitioner. I believe that desire, eros, and sex cannot be understood outside of socio-political context. I do this work because I am passionate about undoing limiting or violent or outdated holds on our hearts and what it might look and feel like when imagination, creativity, playfulness, humor, curiosity, ecology, sensitivity, and even grief are more thoroughly and often present in erotic encounters spaces and what that might illuminate about other areas of existence, other manifestations of desire.
*identites are fluid and categories are not hard and fast. If you wonder if this workshop is for you, please be in touch.
Upcoming Desire Labs
IN PERSON at GOODWITCH, Hudson
July 6, 2024, 11am-6pm
Sliding scale $80-300 (no one turned away). Scroll down for more on my sliding scale and be in touch if you need a scholarship and/or payment plan. Limited to 12 participants to maximize depth, individual attention, and group intimacy. Email hjvanderkolk (at) gmail (dot) com to register and for more information.
ONLINE over the course of five months
Wednesdays July 17, August 14, September 11, October 9, and November 13
7-9:15pm eastern
Limited to 6-8 participants to maximize depth, commitment, and group intimacy. Includes a 90-minute one-on-one body-based Internal Family Systems/coaching session with me at some point during the five months of the course. Since sharing, witnessing/being witnessed, discussion, and partner exercises are core to this work, attendance at all four group sessions is a requirement for participation (of course stuff comes up, but this is our strong intention). Readings, exercises, and mentorship offered between sessions, as well as opportunities to connect as a cohort. Sliding scale $400-900 (no one turned away). Scroll down for more on my sliding scale and be in touch if you need a scholarship and/or payment plan.
Email hjvanderkolk (at) gmail (dot) com to register and for more information
Testimonials
“Desire Lab is a gentle yet provocative container that supports participants to reimagine expression and possibility for desire. Hana is a skilled and unobtrusive facilitator who combines somatic practices in a group and pairs with readings, discussion and easy daily homeworks. Would highly recommend for anyone on a journey to be more compassionate and wonderous with themselves and the world!” ~~ Ratna S., 2024 participant
"Desire Lab offered the gift of sanctuary in which I could learn to listen intently to my body and begin to bring language to its many curiosities and hesitancy. Developing a deeper understanding and acceptance of the many contradictions within desire is life-changing work. Desire Lab introduced me to skills that aim to dissolve shame and confusion around desire and fortify tenderness and recognition of self.” - ernest, 2023 participant
"This class helped me connect with a range of other open hearted, curious people as a path back to myself. Through the exercises I got to embody the values I've been cultivating around pleasure, and with the witnessing of each other as a group I got to refine an understanding of my own desire.” -Sellers Webb, 2023 participant
“Desire Lab was fun, profound, and transformative. As with all of Hana's offerings, this course offered an accepting, nuanced, body-positive community environment, in which I learned to bring more animality and play, and less self-consciousness, to my relationship with my body and with others.” - Stephanie, 2023 participant
“Desire Lab is one of those opportunities that can change your perspective and therefore your life. I feel more free post-Desire Lab, and that's a pretty incredible thing. - online participant, 2023
A note on trauma
o Many FLINTA/SLINTA people have experienced sexual assault/abuse and/or harassment and/or violation
o I believe that acute sexual trauma and experiences of harassment/more mild forms of violation are inextricable from one another in our culture. However, not all kinds of sexual violation are the same and they require different attention/treatment. This workshop is trauma-informed (I am sensitive to the fact of trauma is inevitably in the room and design and guide exercises with an awareness that traumas could be triggered and so give ample space for consent, pausing and adaptation), but I am not a trauma specialist and addressing acute PTSD is beyond the scope of this workshop
o If you are a survivor and have been/are already getting support around your experiences, the workshop could offer you additional tools in the process of healing and expanding your erotic life in a trauma informed setting
o There will always be ample opportunity to pause, opt out, and/or modify any exercise/practice
o In Desire Lab in person I offer several practices that involve working with a partner or a small group. Touch in these practices is, however, always optional and there are powerful ways to engage in this partner/group work without touch.
o Consent (self-consent and consent with one another) will be emphasized throughout and we will move at a slow enough space so that consent can be identified more of the time.
o Please be in touch if you are a sexual assault survivor and wonder if this workshop is appropriate for you
A note on my sliding scale
People who pay more for my courses make it possible for others to pay less and for me to simultaneously cover the costs of the spaces I work in and get compensated for my work. I make my living teaching workshops like these and offering one-on-one coaching sessions. I also occasionally get paid for work as an artist and event organizer and guest artist/teacher in university settings. I come from class and educational privilege in my family of origin, but I DO have to earn my daily living expenses independently. I benefit from my class background and from white supremacy as a so-called white person in many other ways. I am also a queer, middle-aged person living with chronic health challenges and I regularly participate in mutual aid practices in my home community and in other places where I spend time and enjoy the land and culture. I consider all of these conditions, the cost to use the spaces I teach in, along with the economics of where I am offering things when pricing my work. Please consider your overlapping circumstances when choosing your pricing option. Let’s get all of us what we need/more free one little and large effort at a time. Thank you!
I do a sliding scale for everything I offer because I want what I do to be accessible to a wide range of people and because the co-called US is a country in which the state does not ensure housing, health care, and education for all, so I believe we must take it upon ourselves in part to actively participate in creating a more equitable society in which all are thriving.
I offer this rather involved explanation of my sliding scale because I think taking the time to really consider money/class/privilege in a measured, informed, realistic way is part of the work of embodiment and connection, part of the process of/a way to practice getting more deeply in touch with how we feel, the conditioning we are living with, and what a more abundant, joyful, and interconnected world might look and feel like.
Please make your price point choice from a place of calm and openness to consider the facts about your financial/resource reality, rather than from a place of scarcity (living in capitalism makes most of us feel like there is never enough). Please consider the following questions when choosing:
Are you able to work for money?
Do you currently have enough income to meet your basic needs?
Do you currently have enough income to meet your needs and pay for other things beyond basic needs?
Do you have savings?
Do you have debt? Are you able to pay it off?
Do you have housing security?
Do you have access to healthy, fresh food and are you able to pay for it?
Do you have access to health care (allopathic, alternative etc.)?
Do you have access to education (in the past, present, or future)?
Do you have access to generational wealth in the form of cash, loans, gifts, child care, property (now or likely in the future)?
Are you partnered? Does your partner’s income or family situation effect your answers to the above questions?
Are you living with ongoing mental or physical health challenges?
Do you have elderly parents or other family members for whom you need to provide financially?