This offer includes 16 hours of live facilitated practice, 2.5 hours of pre-recorded lessons, and guided home practices.
Wheel of Consent for Queers
8 Sessions from February 11 - April 8, 2025*
Tuesdays, 9-11 AM PT / 12-2 PM ET
*April 11 class will be replaced with optional community practice
We are inviting participants into the practice of the Wheel of Consent through the lens of our queerness.
bell hooks defined queerness as "about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
This class is about being in a community of practice to dream, create, and invent the ways we want to speak, thrive, and live.
We’ll be exploring the personal and interpersonal aspects of the practice of consent while also examining the impact of power and oppression in our lives.
We will draw on wisdom from the Wheel of Consent®, the Right Use of Power Institute, and Process Work through our time together.
About the Wheel of Consent®
The Wheel of Consent® is a groundbreaking framework and awareness practice developed by Dr. Betty Martin.
Since its inception, it has been brought into schools, universities, therapist programs, and organizations around the world, reshaping how practitioners are trained.
This is a deeply nuanced way to practice consent as an agreement that brings integrity, responsibility, and empowerment into all human interactions.
Our lens starts with the personal and expands to the global. It includes touch, relationships, power dynamics, and social issues of equality and justice.
The practice is simple, subtle, and profound.
Using the Wheel of Consent®, we develop our capacity to tune into our bodies and our ability to skillfully and gracefully navigate interactions and dynamics in intimate and professional relationships.
You will come away from this offering with a deepened ability to navigate consent in all your interactions, including these practical embodied skills:
Create a felt sense of safety in your body and nervous system
Connect to what feels good and brings you joy
Notice, value, and voice what you want, what you are available for, and what you don’t want
Notice your tendency to go along with what is being done and reverse it
Be mindful of others' tendencies to go along with what is being done and respect their limits
Access two ways to receive and two ways to give and feel the joy of each of these four possibilities for interaction
Navigate power dynamics, trauma, and systemic oppression and their impact on our capacity to access choice and respect boundaries
Make choices that support your well-being and connection with others
Express your desires, limits, preferences, and willingness with more nuance and play
Our increased awareness enables more authentic relationships centered in safety, clarity, and ease.
Applied professionally, it makes us more effective practitioners, able to affect human change and healing.
Applied personally, it allows us to access deeper and more meaningful connections.
Pricing
Pricing is based on a sliding scale acknowledging that we each have differing levels of access, capacity, and ability based on the season of your life and where you are living.
Ocean: $650 USD - I have investments and can afford travel, vacations, and self-care
Lake: $500 USD - I can afford some travel/vacations
Waterfall: $375 USD - I am making ends meet and can afford occasional treats
River: $250 USD - I am slightly above a living wage
Glacier: $150 USD - I am at or below a living wage
We encourage folks not located in the US to adjust their payment according to the exchange rate.
Contact Adam for payment plan options.
What participants say
It's helped by inviting me to notice what comes up for me when I notice a desire or a limit - do I judge it? Shame it? Value it? Honor it? Bulldoze it? choose to tend to it later? It is wild how often I violate my own boundaries and limits, and feels powerful to reflect on why and what taught me to do that, and remember I don't have to violate my limits. That in honoring this for myself, i learn to invite others into it as well. - Anonymous
"Life-altering" ~ Clinical Counsellor
“It's truly transformational work and so necessary for the healing and growth we are in desperate need of" - Chinese Medicine Therapist
The life-changing practice has helped me know that I'm allowed to have desires, wants, needs, and limits. I was raised to believe my worth is tied to what I do for others. I didn't realize what I was missing. I only knew that my relationships weren't as deep as I craved. I couldn't access my authenticity and queerness because I couldn't connect with my true desires. This practice has increased my capacity to listen, feel, and trust my own wants and needs, and to trust that others can communicate theirs. - Sonja
One thing I continually appreciated is that the facilitators reminded us on a regular basis of all the ways we could choose to participate (on/off camera, vocally, in chat, in breakout rooms vs solo, etc). I would have probably forced myself to participate in what I thought was the "right" way all the time, because I would have felt a sense of "should" without those reminders (only because I habitually capitulate to my internal "should" without interrogating it). The repeated reminders themselves also helped to reinforce the notion of choice for me, even outside of class. - Robin
"I know myself WAY more. I am trusting my impulses, my no's and yes's and I am able to voice them more clearly now. I am grateful for this modality. It is a gentle, deep, and foundational piece for creating healthy, safe, and intimate relationships with oneself and others." - Teacher
"Deeply grateful for the workshop last weekend. It has been sitting with me all week. The content and my experiences have made their way into many conversations since...I feel very inspired by my experience!" - Acupuncturist
“Deep gratitude. This was epic for me on so many levels. Feeling a profound shift.” - Plant Medicine Guide
“This was transformative for me in many ways.” - Sexual Health Educator
Training Guidelines
How we ask that you engage with each other:
Confidentiality — outside the practices and the group, share only your own experience and learnings. We ask that you attend the sessions from a quiet space and use headphones if anyone is in the same room as you. No recording or screenshots of each other.
Feelings are welcome and do not need to be justified or explained; honor the feelings that arise in others by allowing them to feel without fixing or advising.
Share with intention, using "I" statements. Listen with attention.
Use the names and pronouns people request and honor the lived experience of others in the group. Notice and set aside assumptions about people's identities and experiences (e.g. gender, race, sexuality, etc.).
Stay within the stated limits of each practice. The workshop is clothed. We will not state wants for, or make requests or offers for unclothed or genital during exercises. There will be options to engage in practices with other participants and it is not required.
What we invite for your own experience
Invite beginner’s mind — everything we offer is an experiment and an opportunity to notice yourself; take what works for you and leave the rest.
Do not do anything you do not want to do.
Participation can look many ways and you choose how you want to participate — actively join an exercise, witness, journal, take a break, and change your mind at any time. You get the full value from the workshop however you choose to participate.
Self-care and self-regulation — take care of your needs (for water, rest, movement, etc.)
Accessibility
Closed captions are available during the sessions
All practices are offered with adaptation options for ability, sensory, neuroprocessing and communication preferences/needs
Recordings (speaker view) and transcriptions are provided to participants up to two months after class
We ask that you have your camera on for the introductions in the first session. After that, you may turn your camera off whenever it supports your participation.
Acknowledgments About Racialization, Neurodivergence, Disabilities
The course is open to anyone interested in learning the Wheel, and our intention is for this to be a safe enough space for learning for everyone. However, we recognize that this offering will not meet everyone’s needs. As facilitators and humans, Helena and Adam are committed to serving you as best as possible. Please email Helena to let us know your questions or accessibility needs, and they will do their best to accommodate them.
Refund policy
If you are unable to attend, you may choose to have your payment refunded minus an administration fee, according to the following schedule:
More than 30 days before the event: Full refund, less $30 admin fee
15-30 days before the event: 50% refund, or, if you can fill your spot with someone else, a full refund
Less than 15 days before the event: No refunds, or unless you/we can fill your spot with someone else*
In cases of illness or family emergency, we will endeavor to refund your full tuition less any unrecoverable costs, or transfer to a future offering.
About the facilitators
Helena De Felice (they/she) is a Certified Facilitator of the Wheel of Consent® and has been facilitating Wheel practices since 2016.
Helena is passionate about developing individual and collective awareness that deepens our capacity to facilitate healing. Her facilitation is deeply trauma-responsive and non-judgemental, informed by many years in the field of prevention and response to gender-based violence, senior leadership roles in sexual and reproductive rights, attending births, deaths, and entheogenic session, and leading queer-centric erotic healing events. She has brought the Wheel of Consent® in a wide range of settings and trains facilitators in trauma-responsive facilitation skills.
Adam Nicholson (they/them) is a coach, mentor, guide, and facilitator based in Clarksville, TN. Their 1-1 and group work center around questions of how we can navigate relationships with more awareness of consent, power, and integrity. Their work is influenced by many teachers and thinkers including Paul Muller Ortega and his guidance within the Shaiva-Sakta non-dual lineage of tantra, Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent, Resmaa Menakem’s Somatic Abolitionism, as well as many other teachers. Adam’s work with the Wheel of Consent over the last 5 years led them to further inquiries into how we create spaces of agreement that generate more love, pleasure, and fulfillment.