mini-retreats
Enhance Your Intimacy.
mindfully.
ONLINE Sexuality Retreats for Couples
more info, please!
IS THIS RIGHT FOR US?
Do you want to enhance your intimacy, mindfully?
Do you want to feel reassured, re-engaged, and empowered as a couple?
You might be in the right place. Read on!
why mindfulness?
Mindfulness is key—it’s your “superfood” for good sex.
While there’s no such thing as “perfect sex,” you can step out of numbing routines and limiting mindsets now and always.
When you bring a gentle awareness to your direct experience, you cultivate presence and a spirit of exploration that enlivens eros.
Let us show you how to establish a state of mind for creative, engaged, and intimate sex.
AS SEEN IN
mini-retreats
What Can You Expect
from a P&P Mini-Retreat?
You’ll focus on four elements of eroticism:
Pleasure
Connection
Healing
Growth
If you’re interested in our Passion & Presence™ couples’ retreats, you probably want more or better sex. You may be feeling hopeful about having what you want, or maybe deeply discouraged. Perhaps, you’re somewhere in between.
The beauty of our mindful approach is that
you can meet yourself wherever you are.
the experience...
Our retreats involve looking inside and engaging
in the mindful practices of awakened intimacy.
Because of this, they are experiential. However, please note that there’s no nudity in the group, nor do we focus on the “how-tos” of lovemaking.
who will we be learning from?
Meet Your Retreat Leaders
Our facilitators include Maci Daye, CST, the founder of Passion and Presence, Halko Weiss, Ph.D., and Julia Corley, LCMHCA.
Maci is a “possibilities doula” who gently supports the aliveness, pleasure, and connection that’s ready to awaken within and between you.
Halko‘s wizardry is showing up when couples are on the brink of getting “hooked” or derailing. His capacity to hold a judgment-free space of love and strength is especially palpable during our live offerings.
Julia is a heart-whisperer whose unabashed joy and open-heartedness helps participants feel welcome and safe.
Together, our collective strengths create a transformational container for erotic alchemy. We’re so happy you found us.
Are You Ready to Begin Your Mindful Sex Journey?
start here →
Begin by registering for our Intro Mini-Retreat: Enhancing Erotic Presence.
intro mini-retreat
Enhancing EROTIC PRESENCE
Gently “re-set” your erotic life — mindfully.
next...
After the Intro Mini-Retreat, choose your next mini-retreat, in any order.
mini-retreat
What Erotic Triggers Can Teach You About Self-care, Pleasure & Healing
Have more ease and pleasure in the places where you struggle.
mini-retreat
Expand Your Erotic Expression: Avoid the Perils of the Safety Trance
Create a shame-free container to be yourself and have more creativity and play together.
mini-retreat
Get out of Negative Loops and Shutdown: Reconnect Deeply with the RIL
Transform your erotic impasses into catalysts for connection.
mini-retreats
How does Registration Work?
STEP 2
Upon registration
STEP 3
Before the retreat starts…
We’ll send you some homework. Please listen to the pre-recorded talks to ensure you are oriented and ready for the weekend.
We limit the didactic content we provide during our retreats so you can practice the skills of awakened intimacy right away.
during the retreat
mini-retreats
What Does the Schedule Look Like?
before the retreat
Get READY
Before the retreat begins, please watch or listen to our recordings on our learning portal. We tell you everything you need to know about our participation guidelines and the program content so we can jump into activities without a long ramp-up.
during the retreat
LIVE SESSION
After a mindfulness practice, we’ll jump into an activity or two related to our mini-retreat topic.
during the retreat
at home
At home, we’ll give you an erotic exercise to try that will enable you to take the skills “to the sheets,” as we like to say.
As always, you’re welcome to modify all activities to best fit your needs by being fully clothed, limiting touch to particular regions of your bodies, or anything else that helps you feel comfortable.
day 3
SUNDAY
Experience the ever-popular Tribe Time. After, we offer personal coaching on the skills you’ve been learning.
mini-retreats
WHY US?
How are we different from other retreats?
Are you wondering if this is the right couple’s retreat for you? If so, consider these touchstones to see if we are a good fit:
Our specialty is helping you update your sexual operating system.
Sexual problems often have little to do with sexual function or poor technique and a lot to do with what encodes the “operating systems” of our erotic lives. These beliefs and mindsets are based on early learning and past experiences. We’ll show you how to access and transform these deep imprints to heal and grow together.
We make no false promises; there is no formula for sexual satisfaction that will endure through every season. In all long-term relationships, sex becomes complicated. Instead of resisting, fixing, or ignoring our real-life struggles, we can plumb our depths (gently and mindfully) to discover what is standing between us and our pure erotic potential.
It’s a paradox that we can open up to more creativity, freedom, and self-expression by befriending our difficulties.
Mindfulness is central to everything we do. Maci, Halko, and Julia have practiced and taught mindfulness for decades. As a couple, Maci and Halko use it to deepen their emotional and sexual connection every day.
While mindfulness teaches us how to be with real-life in a curious and accepting way, we also incorporate proven ways to transform based on brain science. Maci is a psychotherapist and certified sex therapist. Julia is a kink-aware psychotherapist and somatic experiencing practitioner. Halko is a psychologist and master couple’s therapist. The three of us are also trainers of Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychotherapy.
Again and again, we hear that teaming up around sex and the felt sense of “being in it together” is the biggest “takeaway” of Passion and Presence.
Even the most loving couples end up arguing, defending, blaming, or hiding from each other. We get it; we’ve been there too. When you recognize that you are engaging in understandable “protective patterns,” you can begin to hold hands through the hard stuff. Helping you connect around divisive issues is our priority, whether inside or out of the bedroom.
You won’t find diagnoses or judgment here. We aren’t “fixers.” We are gentle, non-pathologizing, sex-positive, and trauma-sensitive.
Roles, norms, and labels are changing rapidly, and we’re in confusing yet exciting times filled with uncertainty and possibility.
We celebrate that our experiences are unique, and in doing so, we can access our innate sense of wisdom, compassion, and aliveness.
mini-retreats
Mini-Retreat Details
mini-retreat
What Erotic Triggers Can Teach You About Self-care, Pleasure & Healing
Have more ease & pleasure in the places where you struggle.
For You?
- Can you answer yes to any of these questions?
- Are You In A Period Of Sexlessness?
- Have You Been Hurt Or Shamed Around Sexuality?
- Do You Dread Having Uncomfortable Feelings Before, During, Or After Sex, Such As Anxiety, Self-Consciousness, Or Shame?
- Do you want to heal and grow as a couple?
- Do you want ease and pleasure in the places where you struggle?
Transformative Concepts
- How to Work Mindfully with the Eros-Inhibiting Imprints, or “Hidden Factors” that Encode in Our Sexual Operating Systems
- How We Can Come to Thank the “Black Light Syndrome” (That Eventually Emerges In Most Long-Term Relationships) for Revealing How We Can Heal
- How We Can Turn Our Sexual Triggers Into Portals that Guide Us Towards Erotic Self-Care, Healing, Ease, and Even a Sense of Play
Skills
& Practices
- Learn our effective, couples-tested skills:
- Mindful Self-Study
- Reporting from the Observer
- Response-Agility
- Uncoupling 'Now' from 'Then'
- These skills will support you in working through your erotic triggers.
also
- In our supportive setting, you can practice how to pause your discomfort and reset to greater ease and pleasure.
mini-retreat details
What Erotic Triggers Can Teach You about Self-care, Pleasure & Healing
In Passion & Presence™, we’ve seen that over time most couples discover they have unwelcome guests in their bedrooms. No, we’re not talking about kids, pets, or bedbugs. We’re talking about intrusive feelings and thoughts that turn an otherwise pleasureful experience into something to get through or get out of as quickly as possible.
In any committed relationship, our eros-inhibiting imprints begin to show up. We call these the “Hidden Factors” because they are outside of our awareness and cast a pall on our erotic life.
In this retreat, we will look at what we’ve encoded in our sexual operating systems that shapes our unpleasant reactions. Understandably, most of us dread having uncomfortable feelings during sex. In a safe, supportive space, we’ll be looking at the kinds of feelings that come up during sex or at the thoughts you have that turn you away from sex.
Why would we want to focus on what we dread? Because long-term intimate relationships act as a magnet for many of our unhealed wounds, but at the same time offer us a unique opportunity to heal and grow.
The good news is that our very discomfort offers us a window into our sexual operating systems. This is where we’ve filed sex-negative messages and painful experiences that snuff out our creative, life-giving erotic energy. The nakedness of committed sex shows us not only where sex-negative imprints and erotic wounds fester inside of us, but also how they can be healed.
In this mini-retreat, we provide a safe space to support you in working through your challenges, so that you can begin the practice of mindfully waking up together as a couple.
We’ll use the Response-agility technique to pause and adjust, then further explore what is behind our discomfort and set up a new sexual experience that uncouples “Now” from “Then.”
mini-retreat
Expand Your Erotic Expression: Avoid the Perils of the Safety Trance
Create a shame-free container to be yourself and have more creativity and play together.
May 20-22, 2022 – $349
For you?
- Can you answer yes to any of these questions?
- Are sexually active and ready to stretch a little to experience new adventures
- Do you sometimes hold back from expressing your erotic impulses?
- Want to expand your erotic expression and create more “We” space
- Does your sex life feel boring?
Transformative Concepts
- How and why even the most loving couples tend to hide in a safe but stifling “Safety Trance” over time
and
- The "5 C's" of the Safety Trance:
- We’ll Look At Care, Caution, Collusion, Containment, And Concealment
- And Why It Is So Important To Understand How They Play Out In Long-Term Relationships
Skills
& Practices
- The effective, couples-tested skills that can free your sexual expression:
- Mindful Query
- Mindful Co-investigation
- Embodied Consent
also
- How to create a conscious contract for both of you to energize and express yourself erotically
mini-retreat details
Expand Your Erotic Expression: Avoid the Perils of the Safety Trance
- Are there things you’d like to try that are off-putting to your partner or shameful to you?
- Do you have exciting sex in your fantasy life but not with your partner?
- Do you imagine you could be more sexually free with another person than with your beloved?
It’s paradoxical, but for most of us, the more invested we become in our relationship, the safer we tend to play it sexually. Yet when we opt for “Safe Sex,” repeating the same things over and over, we keep the juicy, more edgy aspects of ourselves hidden. No wonder our passion becomes flat. We’ve stifled our growth and clipped Cupid’s wings.
This retreat looks at the “5 C’s” that comprise the “Safety Trance:” Care, Caution, Collusion, Containment, and Concealment. By exploring your safety trance and how you got there, you will see ways you’ve hidden in a safe but stifling routine. Together, you will gently and mindfully explore what happens when you imagine expanding your erotic expression.
What fears do you run into, and how can you create a different kind of safety, one that supports expression rather than hiding and shrinking? How can you regain spontaneity during sex instead of side-stepping each other’s sensitive “hot” spots?
We’ll take up these questions and engage in a practice of embodied consent to see what you can open to while honoring your limits lovingly. You’ll create a contract for creative expression that enables you to expand your erotic “We-space” consciously.
mini-retreat
Get out of Negative Loops and Shutdown: Reconnect Deeply with the RIL*
Transform your erotic impasses into catalysts for connection.
*Reciprocal Interaction Loop
June 17-19, 2022 – $349
Friday June 17: 11 am-1pm EST
[5-7pm CET]
Saturday: 11am-4pm EST
[5pm-10pm CET]
Sunday: 11am-4pm EST
[5pm-10pm CET]
For You?
- Can you answer yes to any of these questions?
- Have you been arguing about when and how to have sex?
- Do you want to transform your ongoing deadlocks into catalysts for connection?
- Are you ready to get out of the "Defend Cycle?"
- Wishing that you could be more open-hearted, collaborative, and vulnerable with each other?
Transformative Concepts
- The powerful, couples-tested:
- Protector and Protected ‘Legacy’ States
- The Impasse
- Catching Each Other’s Moods
- The ‘High’ and the ‘Low’ Roads
Skills & Practices
- The effective, couples-tested skills of:
- Reciprocal Interaction Loop Diagramming Process (RIL)
- Self-Dialogue
- Disidentification from reactive states
mini-retreat details
Get out of Negative Loops and Shutdown: Reconnect Deeply with the RIL
In this retreat, you will use the Reciprocal Interaction Loop Diagramming Process (or RIL), developed by our Passion & Presence team member Halko Weiss Ph.D., to explore erotic impasses. These are the places in your relationship where your differences feel unresolvable, and your efforts to make things better seem only to make them worse. Instead of healing and growing, both of you end up feeling alone, hopeless, blamed, inadequate, and resentful.
At Passion and Presence, we believe that unhealed wounds from childhood invariably flare-up in our adult intimate relationships. When this happens, we are apt to rely on protective strategies that armor our hearts and activate our partner. We also believe that impasses can be catalysts for connection if we are willing to work with our “legacy states” and reveal our hurt parts without going into our “Defend Cycle.”
If you are ready to shift your defensive patterns consciously and compassionately, this workshop will help you become cooperative allies. The RIL is an easy-to-use tool that enables you to recognize your Protector and Protected legacy states without judgment or blame. It shows you how your non-verbal behaviors “hook” your partner in reinforcing ways and how these patterns become “hyper-stable.” We will show you how to help yourself when your partner is too triggered to offer what you need to regulate. Learning to disidentify from reactive states and work with your internal “Protectors” is crucial for Awakened Intimacy. It enables you to enjoy a more undefended way of loving that deepens your connection as a couple. It also builds trust. By sharing your hidden vulnerabilities, you become more willing to disclose your erotic desires and open emotionally during sex.
mini-retreats
Enhance Your Intimacy.
mindfully.
ONLINE Sexuality Retreats for Couples
mini-retreats
REGISTER NOW
When you sign up for this retreat, we ask you to commit– to yourself, your partner, and us– to show up, show up on time, and show up for the entirety of the retreat.
Many, if not most, of our participants arrive with mixed feelings– parts of you may feel open (or excited, relieved, intrigued, turned on, and any number of other pleasant feelings). Other parts of you may feel nervous (shy, scared, frustrated, angry, too busy) or have concerns that lead you to avoid putting both feet into the experience.
It’s natural and normal to have these feelings. We welcome your curiosity as well as your hesitations. Our mindful approach acknowledges the complex mix of joy and suffering, desire and aversion, and delight and disappointment inherent in our “real-live” sex lives.
Unfortunately, it’s easier than ever with online events to change your mind at the last minute or log off early if you start to feel uncomfortable. So, as you are poised to register for this event, be sure that both of you are committing to be there for the duration unless you have a genuine emergency.*
We price our virtual retreats to be accessible to as many people as possible and do not offer tuition refunds. In emergencies (see below), you can apply your tuition to another program through June 2022.
Part of the magic of Passion and Presence retreats is the feeling of the group. Hearing a bit about other people’s experiences builds a sense of camaraderie and understanding. You see that all couples, not just you and your partner, struggle and have resilience. We carefully plan each of our events to include time for this group alchemy, but some of this magic gets lost if a group is too small.
Primarily for this reason, but also due to financial considerations, if we have not met our minimum number of couples by ten days before the retreat’s start date, we will cancel. You will have the option to transfer your tuition to a future event or receive a refund if none of the coming events work for you.
So, check inside now. If your body says, “Yes, I am ready,” please continue completing the registration below. We can’t wait to meet you or continue to support you on the “naked path.”
[*An emergency is a severe health condition, accident, or family death.]
Partner Info
On the next page, you’ll select the retreats you wish to attend.