UPCOMING EVENTS

All our events are creative blends of transformative practices aimed at bringing participants into a joyous exploration of self, other and world. We run experimental groups, weekend intensives, art-monastic retreats, nordic LARPs, virtual class series, and more.

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Upcoming events

September 6, 2026

PHANG (Philly Here And Now Group)

Philly
PHANG is a monthly, experimental, in-person “Here-and-Now” group in which we explore what’s emerging among us for two hours once a month. Anywhere between 3 and 12 people will gather to mind...
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September 13–October 18, 2026

Deep Play Fall 2026 Class Series

Virtual
Welcome back to school! And join the Deep Play Institute for our 2026 Fall Semester of Deep Play classes. Our curriculum will be more experiential than didactic, offering workshops that are ...
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October 16–18, 2026

The Second Gloam Ensemble

NYC
Join the Deep Play Institute for 3-days of collective experimentation into the aestheticization of group process. Our goal is to peer into the layers of our group process and to experiment...
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Past Events

A select archive of our past programming at The Deep Play Institute since its inception in 2020

PLEASE NOTE: we are in a process of re-populating this archive by October 2026

Events Archive

August 6–9, 2026

Psychodrama Retreat (Summer 2026)

Portland (Oregon)
A retreat diving into the transformative practice of psychodrama. Join for a weekend devoted to exploring the depths of psyche with psychodrama one of the original western methods of drama t...
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July 9–12, 2026

The Order Of The Amethyst Heart 2.0

Portland (Oregon)
Two Runs: July 9-12 or July 16-19, 2026. The Order of the Amethyst Heart is a 4-day immersive experience modeled off of Nordic LARPs. You will play as a member of the order in a near-future ...
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July 5, 2026

Call for virtual Deep Play Facilitators (Fall 2026)

Virtual
​The Deep Play Institute will be hosting a 6-week virtual series of workshops held over zoom during September-October 2026. DPI is seeking facilitators to lead a 2-hour workshop for the seri...
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June 23, 2026

Existential Playground: The Gods Our Inner Parts Worship

Virtual
Our existence is fluid. What it is to be, is to be in relation to others, and the embedded rules that define our togetherness. In Existential Playgrounds we play with those rules, by break...
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June 16–20, 2026

Between the “Real Me” & the Me that I Play

Berlin
What lies in space between healing and art? What play is possible on the edge of my performative personas and my “real” self? What tiny weeds can grow out of the cracks between the light and...
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April 18–19, 2026

Psychodrama +/- Intensive. Brooklyn NY

NYC
Psychodrama is an incredibly powerful and deeply transformative method of drama therapy. The founder of psychodrama, Jacob Moreno in Vienna in the 1920s defined it as, “the science which exp...
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April 3–12, 2026

Dancing the Mess of Relationship

NYC
Our intention for this 9-day program is to practice meditation on the relational field. Where a traditional meditation retreat might have practitioners focusing on their breath, or sensation...
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January 4, 2026

Playing when the Playing gets Hard 2026

Virtual
a 6-week virtual journey through playful practices to help us find play in the most unplayful of moods
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September 26–28, 2025

Gloam Ensemble

NYC
Gloam Ensemble is a 3-day immersive experience structured as a Nordic LARP. We will play a self described avant garde theater group that has decided it is ready to come out to the public. A...
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This statement marks a shift in our orientation. While the values we describe have been an undercurrent of our work, they’ve drifted in and out of our awareness alongside other, sometimes contradictory, currents. Through writing this statement we attempt to swim in this one more faithfully:

Some strains of Buddhism and psychoanalysis meet in an anti-capitalist critique pushing us to look at the nature of desire as an endless self-perpetuating cycle of attainment and loss. The marketing for a product explicitly or implicitly says something like, “if you buy this product it will relieve your suffering.” These promises fail to disclose the truth about desire, at best, providing bandaids, or temporary resting places along a journey. At worst, their marketing and our participation in the fiction of fulfillment perpetuates even deeper and more prolonged suffering.

We aspire to consciously uncouple from the logic of commodity in what we offer at DPI. We attempt to disclose the truth regarding desire itself: that it endlessly perpetuates, and that no material or immaterial substance given to our psyche will ever truly nourish us; we are hungry and insatiable.

Through this orientation, where commodity acquisition offers transcendence, we attempt to offer immanence. Like monotheism’s vision of the afterlife as a relief from the present, capitalist consumption dangles a more pleasant future just ahead. We design structures and rituals to sanctify the mess of the now.

Even as we attempt rigor in this regard, we constantly fall into traps of desire. It is endlessly tempting to read salvation into our offer to sanctify the messes of the present. As facilitators we too want to be saved from suffering, and we unknowingly bake that longing into our offerings and affects. The same unfortunate situation occurs within both Buddhist and psychoanalytic traditions, where students encounter the truth of each system as a salvific balm.

Our task then is to keep insisting that we will not heal you. That you are always broken. And that playing with your brokenness, our primary task, will ultimately fail as well. And that, as Pema Chödrön insists, real bravery is not about holding on to hope, but about allowing ourselves to touch hopelessness directly. That when we lean into our groundlessness, rather than scrambling to escape it, we discover a deeper kind of courage — the willingness to rest in the unknown. Can we hold that immeasurable loss? Can we at least touch this loss together? Can we play with it not by only offering lightness and buoyancy to it, but also by merely sitting with each other with our shrunken, bated breaths, as we encounter aloneness together? That is the kind of deep play we aspire to offer.

We, the leadership and facilitators of The Deep Play Institute, want to speak to what it means for us to hold authority in our programs. We want to acknowledge the lineages of what we are offering, as well as our ignorance of many of the branches of those influences. In this acknowledgment, we borrow heavily from the language of Hana Van Der Kolk in their facilitation of somatic practices. The methods we offer are only in small part influenced by our own creativity—they derive from a complex interweaving of teachings and teachers, who themselves are complex interweavings of teachings and teachers. We will name these teachers, lineages, and influences wherever we are aware of them. However, as Hana writes: “We recognize that colonization, white supremacy, and globalization have erased some of the clarity of influence. We will do our best to unforget in the context of a culture that actively produces ignorance.”

At DPI we see it as our responsibility to explore barriers to play—to explore the question of: “What makes play hard?” We work this question into the structure of our play so that we don’t miss out on the wisdom that’s offered by participants of various social identities, legacies, and landscapes of ability. People of different races, classes, ethnicities, ages, neurodivergences, sexual orientations, abilities, and genders may find particular play with particular people and leaders challenging in ways that reflect the impacts of their intersecting identities. Rather than orient toward these hardnesses as obstructions, we work to see them as opportunities to play more deeply and reverentially with one another’s perceptual gifts. The play becomes magical, political, and deeply experimental as it continually welcomes friction as an impetus for creativity.

We recognize that people from marginalized groups—whether due to visible or invisible identities such as race, age, ability, or disability—often carry a heavier burden in shared spaces, including our play spaces. For someone with relative privilege, it might feel brave to say something like, “I feel shy” or “I’m struggling to speak up.” For someone from a marginalized identity, however, speaking a simple truth—such as acknowledging the discomfort of being the only visibly disabled person in the room—might feel profoundly vulnerable—in large part because they might reasonably expect the dominant group to struggle to gracefully receive this. The challenges and tensions in these spaces are not evenly distributed, and there can be an illusion of equality when everyone is invited to “speak hard truths.” At DPI we are committed to exploring ways to reduce and cope with this inequity. We also believe profound creativity and resilience can emerge when people play with these tensions, and discomfort can be redistributed in ways that are meaningful and liberatory for all involved.

When friction arises during our workshops, we observe it through the lens of the inequities and dynamics we’ve described. In these moments, we improvise to understand the unfolding group process and learn from the experience rather than rigidly follow our original plans. This is much easier said than done, however, and we recognize that as facilitators, our various privileges and limitations can impair our skillfulness in navigating how to responsibly and reverentially hold authority. Sometimes, our own shame, resistance, and avoidance prevent us from seeing, let alone playfully encountering, these frictions. We see these moments as some of our most profound opportunities for growth and seek feedback throughout our programs to that end. We hope for your grace and patience as we continue to refine our practice.​