“Safely Destroyed: Breaking, Healing, and Embracing Scars”
with Xanthine
We place pressure on ourselves to show up in scene as the best version of ourselves; fit, flexible, present and with a plan. We’re told we shouldn’t play in certain ways if we are injured. We cancel dates when we are depressed, and feel nervous about disclosing anxieties. As we age, we need to adjust our play to accommodate our changing bodies.
We will be exploring through group discussion and problem solving, fishbowl conversation, and hours of hands-on examination of each other, our motivations, and where we can go when we give ourselves and each other permission to be our imperfect, undiluted, extraordinary selves.
Our Instructor
Xanthine identifies as a queer, non-binary sadomasochistic science nerd with a fondness for rope, ridiculousness, agony, and release. They focus their community efforts on education and promotion of responsible edge play with a goal of safer, accessible spaces and a more diverse, welcoming crowd of weirdoes. They have taught at Fusion, Winter Wickedness, Kinkfest, Kinky Kollege, Westcoast Bound, Dark Odyssey Summer Camp, WinterFire, Surrender, and others.
As a physical therapist, they focus their play style towards channelling pain into healing, transformation, and empowerment for both bottom and top. As a clown and activist, they seek to smash the patriarchy by dismantling ego and promoting laughter, connection, and sincerity in the dungeon.
Class Prerequisites
Bring
- your rope bag,
- a short thick stick (1-2” diameter and 8”-16” long),
- unscented massage oil or lotion,
- and your lunch.
Please refrain from wearing heavily scented products or perfume.
Intensive Content
In this intensive, we will explore how to find pleasure in pain again after you’ve lost it, how pain and play can take us out of our daily misery and give us escape, and how to increase pain tolerance if that is our goal. We’ll look at how to assess bodies for play, how to manipulate each other for maximum benefit of both top and bottom, and how to address specific trigger points for treatment of common discomforts, chronic injuries, and muscle tension. We’ll discuss basic theories of acupressure and how you can use them to help your mental state. We’ll touch on circulation and blood issues, rope and play when either the top or the bottom is physically injured, and how limitations can lead to creativity and connection. We’ll talk about how mental health challenges affect us, and how to navigate them through kink.
Tickets are Sliding Scale
What is that?
“Sliding scale is an acknowledgment that just because something costs the same number of dollars to all people buying it does not mean that that something is equally as expensive for each of those people…sliding scale is an attempt to make it that every person pays the same worth instead of the same dollar value.” – courtesy of River Dark
