Here are some of the fundamentals of the Intros which are designed to offer a taste of the powerful HAI workshop coming to Ontario May 18-20, 2007.

Intimacy ©  If intimacy means opening ourselves to see and be seen on a deeper, more personal level, then it requires that we be vulnerable. When we’re intimate, we expose ourselves to the possibility of being hurt, and so the tools we’ve grown up with concerning intimacy are mostly defenses. We learn to build walls and look for safety in isolation. We are loving and tender in private, with only a selected few. The shortcoming of these tools is, of course, they limit rather than expand our ability to love and be loved.

Love  ©  Love, a cornerstone of intimate relationships is the natural state of life. Being out of love stultifies life. Love and harmony are what we naturally seek, and when people are not in love, they have a problem. But what is really meant by love? Is it a feeling, a relationship, an energy, all these things? Most of us make distinctions among sexual love, family love, platonic love, etc.  The distinctions might fade if we come at love from a different direction.  What if we saw love as a space, a room perhaps.  When we enter someone’s room of love we are literally "in" love. Being intimate, and being "in" love involves creating a space of safety and trust so those of us in the room of love can be ourselves.

But so often the tools we’re taught around love are to limit it. We’re taught that love can be measured in finite amounts, that it is rare. We are often taught that the world is an unloving place, and our best chance at happiness is to find a little alcove in life to express and receive love. We are taught to live by distrust, and only when we find those small places where distrust isn’t needed can we afford to love and be loved.

So this workshop looks at skills to help develop and expand our room of love, to strengthen our self love, our ability to safely trust and be trusted. It stands to reason that the richer we can make this environment of trust, the safer, freer, and more in love we can be.

The workshop is like a laboratory which offers the opportunity to explore what love, intimacy, trust, choice, safety, etc. mean to you. And let’s put the emphasis on "you." It is you who decide what intimacy and love mean to you. Our workshop puts forward very little dogma. It is not designed to teach people what to believe, but rather to offer skills and an opportunity to explore. Here are some of the issues explored:

Safety: To accomplish the safety of the room, there are exercises aimed at familiarizing ourselves with each other, creating confidentiality, and practicing choice.

Choice: The facilitators emphasize that we are always at choice, that there are no expectations, nor will participants be manipulated to take part... yet how often do we relinquish our choice and do "what is expected of us" anyway? Exercises are aimed at helping us examine our relationship to choice, and how we may expand our choices in our day-to-day lives.

Communication: In group and paired sharing processes we look at what goes into creating a cooperative, respectful space to share thoughts and feelings, both positive and negative: focusing, active listening, responding without fixing, sharing time, taking responsibility for ourselves and not for others,

Touch: What are we saying when we hug? What is the person saying who is hugging us? Can we share ways to appreciate each other through touch and be free of a sexual agenda? The exercises explore how to make a space for people to express themselves through touch, and how to state our boundaries in respectful, non-threatening ways.

These are some of the issues explored during our workshops. If they pertain to you, we invite you to attend one. To register or for more information about the workshops or the Intros, write eric at ericnagler.com or call 519 925 2157.