February 5-week:
What is this feeling?
A polyamory workshop series
VIRTUAL: Wednesdays, February 4 - March 4, 10am-noon PT / 1-3pm ET. Recordings are included with registration in advance; they will not be for sale after the fact. Please note that this class involves a lot of breakout-room exercises, so attending live sessions is highly recommended!
What do your actions and nonverbal cues tell you about how you’re feeling?
For me, polyamory is a commitment to honesty, both to myself and others. It’s a commitment to self-growth through relationships, to understanding myself, my needs, my desires, my boundaries, and learning to express them in increasingly authentic and clear ways.
I don’t know anyone who’s polyamorous for the sex, contrary to popular belief. It’s too complicated! Too much work! For most of the people in my life, myself included, polyamory is about connection, intimacy, and care. It allows us to expand our definitions and ideas of what a relationship is and can be. Polyamory allows us to queer relationships, unlearn unhelpful and even damaging narratives of sex, gender, and love we receive from the media, and get our needs met without falling into codependent traps.
This class uses consent principles to support you in uncovering your own cues of crushing, falling in love, jealousy, pulling away, wanting more, urgency, boundaries coming up or being pushed, so you can express yourself fully and honestly and build sustainable, long-lasting relationships of all kinds.
Poly to go deep, not wide.
Is this course for you?
This class is intended to help you:
notice your body’s nonverbal cues and glean what they indicate about how you’re feeling, what you want, and what you need
notice changes in your behavior and deduce what they tell you about your emotional state
practice naming these and sharing them with others
cultivate strong emotional self-awareness so you can make clear requests and offers
become aware of your needs so you can articulate clear requests
become aware of your capacity so you can make offers that you can follow through on
practice making clear requests and offers out loud
This class will also be very supportive to people who aren’t polyamorous but want to work on these skills!
Poly to commit to deeper honesty with myself and others.
What will we be doing?
we will go over what consent is and what it’s not, my Yes-to-No Spectrum, and nonverbals including…
gaze
body language
facial expression
prosody (how you say what you say, beyond just the words)
breath
heartrate
sweat, and more…
we will use my Polyamory Workbook and the self-inquiry method of breaking down your behavior, thought, and speech patterns, “This is usually how I act/think/feel/talk when…”
sharing in breakout rooms what you’re noticing about your own behavior, thoughts, and speech
we’ll discuss Polyvagal Theory (the theory of stress responses) so that you can begin to notice your cues of safety, danger, fight, flight, and freeze and how to use that information to guide your choices
we’ll cover jealousy as an emotion that directs us towards something deeper and worth tending to and how, as well as how to make sure we don’t use jealousy to try to control other people
we will practice making clear offers that stay within our capacity and requests that help us get our needs met
we will prepare for new relationship energy (NRE), both when we’re in it and when are partner/s are
Class 1: What is consent? + Nonverbals + Getting to know yourself
Class 2: Yes-to-No Spectrum + Stress Responses + Flirting/Crushing/Falling in love
Class 3: Asking questions you’re afraid to ask + Pulling away/Wanting to de-escalate or break up
Class 4: Jealousy + Requests + Offers
Class 5: Preparing for NRE + Continuing to lift the veil
What this course is not:
trying to convince anyone to be polyamorous
intended to help you figure out if you are polyamorous (though it may help you ask yourself important questions that lead you to an answer)
“How to be polyamorous” or Polyamory 101
Poly for long-lasting relationships of all kinds.
Hi, I’m Mia Schachter. I’m an author, multi-media artist, intimacy coordinator for TV, film, and theater, and Tinder’s Resident Consent Educator. It’s my mission to make consent education as digestible and widely available as possible so you can identify your desires, needs, and boundaries and authentically express them to others in your own unique voice.
I’ve been dating non monogamously for almost 15 years, and yet I’m no expert on polyamory and am certainly not perfect at it by any means! What I am good at is making the unconscious conscious, examining my own nonverbal cues and learning from them about my emotional state, identifying my needs, desires, boundaries, and capacity and communicating that to others, and navigating sticky relationship obstacles. Relationships are my life’s work.
You can read my writing here.
About me…
My approach is to zoom in, so we can slow down and begin to make the unconscious conscious.
You’ll get the digital workbook for free with registration.
Much of a consent practice is about attunement, both to yourself and others. This is an unconscious process of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and describes how we notice other people's emotions. For example, noticing how a parent feels and how their feelings affect your feelings is attunement. It's part of what's called neuroception, the ANS's process of gauging safety and danger. You may not always be able to identify these feelings on your own, which is why speaking to friends and adults about what you are experiencing is so important. You can also practice the steps below to get better at it!
Slow down:
Removing urgency is crucial for consent to even approach being freely given. If you can slow down, you can pay attention to things that often go unnoticed, like nonverbal cues of emotional state such as body language, facial expression, prosody, gaze, and more.
Zoom in:
Once you've slowed down, you can zoom in. You'll see, hear, and feel things that you may not have noticed before and you can begin to notice your own cues of how you're doing. "When I'm nervous my voice sounds like this; when I'm feeling confident it sounds like this. When I'm telling a story about something hard, I look down; when I tell a story about something exciting I look up and outward." Great info!
Full-body listening:
This is the term I use for listening beyond and beneath the words someone is saying. All nonverbal cues are information, even though they mean different things for everyone. When we listen in this deeper way, we attune to each other and ourselves.
Register
Payment + Pricing
This class is $399 solo, $749 with a partner.
If you are in a country where the exchange rate makes this class financially inaccessible, you are welcome to make me an offer.
Please note: The deadline for refunds is 24 hours before the first class.