Dancing the Mess of Relationship

April 3–12, 2026
Location: NYC
Art Monastic Experiment, Retreat
Circling, Contact Improv, Meditation

Dancing the Mess of Relationship

AN ART-MONASTIC EXPERIMENT IN RELATIONAL MEDITATION
WildHeart: Center for Performance and Embodiment Practice [1.5 hours from NYC]
Friday April 3 – Sunday April 12, 2026
Our initial application deadline has passed: Please fill out a rolling admission application below
$450-850

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 sensations throughout their body, this meditation practice will have us focusing on what is coming up between us in relationship moment-to-moment, the ever-unfolding dance between self and other. Unlike other retreats which focus on relational practices (such as Circling or Group Relations) this program will oscillate between verbal relational processes, most often Circling, and nonverbal relational processes, most centrally Contact Improv and Meditation.

Through meditation, expressive movement, language, touch and dance we will investigate what arises between us: attractions and resistances, patterns and polarities, tendernesses and ruptures, silences and chaos. As we dance, as we work and play, and as we eat and cook together, as we care for ourselves and each other, our attention will keep returning to our bodies and hearts as they move through the collective field of relationships, group roles and polarities.

From a dharma lens we do this for the sake of liberation, seeing the relational field not as fixed reality but as a conditioned weave of sensations, perceptions, and reactions—fluid, empty, and open to be played with and within. From an artistic lens we do this for the sake of aesthetics: refining and cultivating our sensibilities so that we may co-create experiences with greater precision, beauty, and expressive range. From a therapeutic lens we do this for the sake of transformation, seeing the group as a mirror in which recurring patterns, polarities, and parts of the self can be recognized, explored, and reimagined through sustained interaction. 

We will follow a highly structured daily schedule that will change somewhat from day to day, and allow blocks of time for rest or free time. We will have a consistent opening and closing of our days. Mornings will start around 7am with an hour long meditation that leads into Contemplative Dance Practice, followed by breakfast. The day will end with a shared meal and a collective evening activity or conversation. The bulk of the day will be spent in relational mindful practice including (but not entirely limited to) meditation, Contact Improvisation, and Circling. These core practices will be bolstered and complemented by exercises inspired by Process Oriented Psychology, IFS, Butoh, Group Relations, and Psychodrama. For at least one, possibly two, days of the retreat, we will open our community of practice up to the larger community of Wild Hearts and their neighbors for an open practice to share our learnings with them. We may have some silent hours or a silent day. 

Maximum Participants: 25

ART MONASTIC EXPERIMENTS

Dancing the Mess of Relationships is one of several programs that the Deep Play Institute that Fall under the umbrella of Art Monastic Experiments: long-form co-living retreats focused on integrating the artistic & psychosomatic with the contemplative & communal. Below is our vision of these retreats. 

We are guided by the call of the monk or mystic. We meditate, we pray, we play, we transcend dualisms, we seek not to fix or resolve the mundane or profound torments of life, we hope to transcend dualisms and illusions, and hope to bask in the unresolvable divine mystery. 

We are guided by the call of the artist or therapist. We cry, we scream, we care for the earth and each other, we dive deep into the psyche’s murky waters with therapeutic spells, we play with the diverse manifold of existence (the grotesque, the mundane, the dancing light on the maple leaf, the dissonant clanks of glasses as we clean) and we fashion this into art, poetry, dance and music.

We believe in the alchemy of aestheticization and wild, unexplained expression, of editing and precision and brilliance, as a beloved sibling to contemplative practice which orients life around the sacred as divine love, distance or attunement. We do not want one without the other – and this is part of what draws us to build something different from existing monasteries and artist communities. 

They are experiments, because each iteration involves us auditioning structures. Our communal monastic experiments are not faithful to any particular monastic religious or artistic tradition. We love the devotion and collectivity of various spiritual communities, we love the early mornings and days spent in service to ourselves and each other and the ceaseless welcoming of spirit, but we feel the need combine these spiritual practices with the soulful practices of the artist and therapist, in an effort to integrate the gifts of each archetype.  to draw more emergently and holistically from a wide array of practices to nourish this devotion. Each Art-Monastic Experiment is an outgrowth of our years of research into contemplative-artistic-therapeutic practices; a fantasy of how some of these practices could be combined to create a gorgeous flow of morning, to afternoon, to night; from tending, to expressing, to yielding, to trying, to floating, to toiling, to resting.

Practical Details

Venue

This experiment will be hosted at WildHeart: Center for Performance and Embodiment Practice a land-based culture hub incubating new performances cultivating deep community hosting transformational events in the Hudson Valley. Nestled in forests and fields, Wild Heart has a vision of a world with more “performances created as an expression of deep integrity, nourished by embodiment practice, while living close to the earth.” Our residency will be in collaboration with the WildHeart community, and we may cross pollinate our practices with the larger community.

Our retreat will be based in The Guest House, a private residence on site reserved in its entirety for our group that will serve as our center for sleeping, shared meals, and several of our collective practices. In addition, we’ll have access to the studios elsewhere at Wild Heart for movement practices, and time in these spaces will be arranged in conversation with the resident community. By sharing the studios with the broader network at Wild Heart, we are able to keep our costs low. The downside being: we won’t have guaranteed dance studio access for a certain amount of time each day. Our contact improv practice will ebb and flow accordingly, while non-dance based relational practice can happen anytime.

Rough Schedule

7:00 Wakeup Bell
7:30 Meditation 
8:30 Contemplative Dance Practice (30 mins solo movement, 30 mins CI)*
9:30am Breakfast
10:30am Daily House Tasks / Chores
11:00am CI and/or Circling*
​1:00pm Lunch
2:00pm Rest / Free Time
3:00pm CI and/or Circling 
5:00pm Meditation*
6:00pm Dinner
8:00pm Evening Activity
10:00pm Evening Bell

* some of us will leave early to help prepare the next meal

Pricing & Accommodations

The base cost of attending our retreat is a sliding scale income-based tuition with 3 tiers: $400, $500, and $600. Please try to reasonably and honestly select the price that reflects your economic situation. If you are unable to find a price that is suitable for you, please get in touch [thedeepplayinstitute@gmail.com]. We are committed to covering our basic costs, while also making this possible for everyone who wants it.

Tuition includes all meals, and housing is priced separately, see below. Before the retreat, we will collect each participant’s dietary needs in order to plan simple, nourishing meals. Meal preparation will be a shared, communal activity: participants will rotate roles such as chef, sous chef, and dishwasher.

Housing accommodations are priced separately:
  • $50 Camping*
  • $150 Dorm Room: 5 beds per room (twin bed)
  • $250 Double Room: 2 beds per room (full, queen or king bed)
*Please note that April in the Hudson Valley can be quite cold and wet. Participants choosing camping are responsible for providing their own gear suitable for these conditions.

Application Process & Prerequisites

Our application process is designed to select participants who are well-suited to this specific container. As with many intensive retreats, the immersive environment may bring up strong emotions, relational challenges, and states of mind outside of one’s norms and habits. We ask that participants bring relevant skills, experiences, or prior practice that allow the group to engage from a shared foundation, ensuring that everyone can participate safely and fully in our practices.

Pre-Requisites*
  • Individual Reflexive Practice: Participants have maintained a consistent reflexive practice for at least two years: some kind of ongoing attitude of self-reflection that weaves into the fabric of daily or weekly life. Examples include therapy, journaling, or meditation.
  • Meditation: Participants have some experience with prolonged meditation, and are open to participating in silent, hour-long meditations multiple times a day. These can be seated, standing, or laying meditations**.
  • Relational Attunement: Participants have at least two years of applied experience with relational attunement practices. Examples include Group Relations, relationally focused therapy, Circling, Authentic Relating, Process Group Therapy, Processwork, and Nonviolent Communication. Formal training is great if you have it, but what matters most is not occasional workshops, but a lived aptitude for relational attunement (and its related principles) that extends into one’s relationships with friends, family, and community.
  • Somatics / Movement Practice: Participants have 1–2 years experience with Contact Improv. Formal training is not required, but meaningful familiarity with the practice is important. This is not meant for those entirely new to Contact Improvisation.
*These pre-requisites are intended as guidelines, not rigid barriers. Applicants with alternative experiences that demonstrate equivalent preparation and depth are encouraged to apply.

**We draw from several schools of meditation. While we will suggest practices such as Open Awareness or Metta to support relational presence, our approach is intentionally experimental. Participants are welcome to bring and integrate other styles of meditation they find supportive of relational awareness.

About the Deep Play Institute

The Deep Play Institute is a nonprofit organization committed to exploring life’s deepest questions through transformative play. DPI’s facilitators – therapists, artists, coaches, and philosophers –  aim to use play to bring people into an experiential questioning of what it means to exist. Each program that DPI runs is a unique container, creatively constructed and inspired by practices that include: Gestalt therapy, Process Work, Psychodrama, Internal Family Systems Therapy, Tavistock Group Relations, Relational Psychoanalysis, Authentic Relating, Nonviolent Communication, Circling, coaching, performance art, contact improvisation, experimental theater, LARPs, surrealism, existential games, and various schools of meditation.

Facilitators

Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, artist, and psycho-spiritual practitioner whose work aims to expand transformative inquiry through relational games, role play, performance art, and conversation scores. He co-founded The School of Making Thinking (SMT) and is the founder and director of The Deep Play Institute (DPI). His projects have been featured internationally at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Gallery 151 in New York, Maschinenhaus Kulturbrauerei in Berlin, UNAM in Mexico City, Performance Works Northwest in Portland, and MainLine Theatre in Montreal. Trained in Circling, Psychodrama, Buddhist Meditation, and Processwork, Aaron holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia University in Montreal and teaches philosophy at the City College of New York. www.finblooming.com

Netta Sadovsky is a therapist and artist living in Philadelphia, specializing in Somatic Internal Family Systems (IFS) with individuals, and Relational Psychodynamic therapy with dyads and groups. Netta has a Master’s in Social Work and Social Practice from Bryn Mawr, Level 1 training in Internal Family Systems, and an MFA in visual art from Tyler School of Art. She also has training in Tavistock Group Relations, Psychodrama, and Psychedelic Assisted Therapy. Netta leads retreats and workshops in their role as Assistant Director at The Deep Play Institute, building community at the intersection of relational, meditative, and creative practices.

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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.​