Inner Constellations Lab [monthly]

October 24, 2026
Location: Portland (Oregon)
Workshop
Interdisciplinary, Partswork, Performance, Psychodrama, Somatics

Inner Constellations Lab

FLOCK Dance Center 2516 NW 29th Ave Portland OR
Saturdays Monthly | October meeting is 2-5pm Sat Oct 24th

REGSITER

Inner Constellations Lab

FLOCK Dance Center
2516 NW 29th Ave Portland OR
Saturdays Monthly
2-5pm Sat Oct 24th

REGISTER

Inner Constellations Lab is a monthly Saturday program in Portland that gives participants an opportunity to experiment with a psychodrama-inspired inner partswork constellation practice called Clearing.

Clearing begins as all participants sit in a semi-circle. After a few moments of silence, a participant stands up and elects themself to be the protagonist-director. They begin in neutrality, waiting to see what arises in their inner world. When they notice an inner part emerge—an emotion, an image, a voice, or an energy—they move somewhere in the room and embody that part using gestures, movement, sound, and words. Shortly afterwards, they then invite another group member to step in and embody the part they inhabited. As new parts emerge, the protagonist invites additional participants to embody them, creating a living, dynamic tableau of interconnected parts. The protagonist begins to subtly direct this constellation, experimenting with spatial positions, postures, movement, and dynamics. They might re-join a role, converse with their parts, make certain parts louder or quieter, or dismiss and re-role parts as their inner landscape unfolds.

Each moment involves waiting, sensing, seeing, and shifting the emergent system to see what happens if we step deeper into a part, move further away, or bring parts closer together. The practice encourages experimentation as a kind of “tinkering”—not merely for the sake of experimentation, but for liberation: for seeing ourselves more clearly and unfolding the beautiful imaginative depths of our inner worlds. At times, this might involve healing or reconciliation between parts; at other times, it can reveal the subtlety, intensity, complexity, collaboration, and conflict inside of us. One intention is to allow our inner worlds to become outer, and to play with what is often held only inside our own minds and bodies. Another is to experience stepping into the parts of others, embodying our own parts and emotions as they map onto another person’s inner world. We might come away feeling more connected, seen, changed, refreshed, shaken up, delighted, overwhelmed, and/or alive.

Each month our lab will play with different ways of tinkering with the practice, different methods of adjusting Clearing to help it deepen and expand. This also serves as inner research for the participants – how can I use this practice to help my inner system of parts unfold, be expressed more fully, more subtly? Which aspects of myself will I bring out? How will I put them in relation to each other?

Practical Details

Price

Our registration is tiered based on an sliding scales of income/subsistence.

Financially Abundant $45
Financially Secure $35
Financially Strained $25
BIPOC $25

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 needs it. 

 

Cancellation Policy

Refunds are available up to 30 days before the event – minus a $20 processing fee. After this time we are unable to provide a refund for the event.
Maximum Participants: 25

Note on Emotional Regulation

This program will involve the exploration of diverse emotional landscapes that unfold within and among our psyches. Many of the practices we explore are designed to cultivate vulnerability, with its pleasures and hardships, and might be compared to the way one’s deepest romantic relationships sometimes surface one’s most challenging psychological material. Conflict and hurt may arise that might conventionally be quieted or minimized. It is not uncommon for participants to encounter triggers of psychological wounds within these practices, and this should be considered a possibility. 

The facilitators will use techniques to contain and care for what arises, but will not be able to provide ongoing care for emotional fallout. We invite you to be watchful of your own safety and opt out in little and big ways as needed, and to have emotional processing methods in place (such as therapy, meditation, journaling, processing with friends, etc) that can help you learn with and from what happens at this program. Additionally, we ask that you have some inner settledness and calm available so we can play deeply together. If at this moment in your life you find you are highly activated by something you cannot set down, it may be best not to participate at this time. We understand that therapy can be very expensive and trusted therapists are hard to find, and there might be some temptation to come to this group for that kind of care, but it is not designed for that kind of individual attention.

Facilitators

Katie Eichner is an interpersonal artist and therapist living and breathing in Portland, Oregon. They performed for two years with the Deep Play Performance Troupe and are deeply in love with relational meditation, growing tomatoes, and being naked in the river. Katie holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology and has training in parts work, interpersonal process, and psychodrama. They move to create a world in which everyone can be more real and more connected, internally and externally.

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.

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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.​