Psychodrama Retreat (Summer 2026)

August 6–9, 2026
Location: Portland (Oregon)
Retreat
Psychodrama

Thursday Aug 6 - Sunday Aug 9 2026

(1.5 hours from Portland, OR)
A private home 10 minutes from Carson WA

Register
Join for a weekend devoted to exploring the depths of psyche. Together with a community of curious & open-hearted people we’ll awakening into a fluid expression of body, mind, and spirit. And then dive into psychodramatic work — powerfully transformative methods for bringing our inner conflicts, relationships, and processes into living form.

Psychodrama is one of the original western methods of drama therapy. The founder of psychodrama, Jacob Moreno in Vienna in the 1920s defined it as, “the science which explores the truth by dramatic methods.” Psychodrama is practiced as a director guides a participant (or “protagonist”) through a dramatic exploration of their psyche. Scenes of the past, present or future, conflicts and resolutions, and/or dynamics between inner parts, are all expressed through gesture, sound, movement and words and then mapped in physical space as participants (or “auxiliaries”) stand-in for parts or internalized others. The core method of psychodrama involves role reversals, whereby the protagonist oscillates dynamically between the roles in whatever scene they are exploring, enabling empathy towards our dynamic self through dialogue. Directors typically guide a scene to not only repeat and reveal dynamics, but also modify them, allowing trauma to be re-negotiated through the power of our collective imaginations. A typical psychodrama lasts anywhere from 30-120 minutes. 

Our practice will include warm-ups, sociometry (to explore group dynamics), small group exercises, and full psychodramas. The weekend begins Thursday evening with gentle openings, gradually building toward full-length psychodramas, which most participants will have the opportunity to enact if they choose. Along the way, we’ll also break the practice into its core techniques—role reversals, doubling, empty chair, and more—so participants can engage both as protagonists and as auxiliary roles, learning and practicing the essential tools of psychodrama. The weekend may also include a few adjacent psychodramatic techniques designed for exploring inner parts.

Our collective intention is that this weekend will provide us with a greater capacity to hold, nourish and beautify our psyches (the rich and dynamic breadth of images, voices, parts, internalized others, complexes, and archetypes) and provide renewed creative vitality and agency to play with these inner worlds together towards the collective goal of healing and self expression. This workshop is for all levels of experience: those who have never heard of psychodrama, those who are novices in dramatic-authentic expression, and those who are deeply familiar and experienced with these things. It is designed for therapists, or healing arts practitioners who want to learn new techniques to add to their repertoire. And it is designed for those who want to transform, expand, and deepen their self expression (and who may have a career totally unrelated to the therapeutic arts). Our weekend will be more experiential than theoretical. Please come with an open mind and heart.

Structure & Rough Schedule:

Thursday

3-6pm Arrivals
7pm Dinner and Authentic Relating Games

Friday & Saturday

8-9:30am Breakfast
9:30am-1pm Psychodramatic Practice
1-3pm Lunch and Rest
3-6pm Psychodramatic Practice
6-7:30pm Break & Collective Dinner Prep
7:30pm Dinner

Sunday

8-9:30am Breakfast
9:30am-1pm Psychodramatic Practice & Closing Circle
1-3pm Lunch and Goodbyes
4pm Departure

Accommodations & Transportation

The retreat will take place at a private residence just five minutes from Carson, WA. This is a residential retreat, and all participants will stay on the property as we live, work, and play together for the full length of the weekend. Most participants will camp, but there are also a few private rooms available for an additional fee. The property includes a large open living room, a spacious and comfortable basement, and expansive grounds for camping, including access to a beautiful, secluded creek. Participants camping should bring their own supplies (tent, sleeping bag, pad, etc.). We will provide simple breakfasts and lunches, as well as the Thursday evening opening dinner. Participants are asked to bring ingredients for Friday and Saturday dinners, as we will create a collective “stone soup” together, sharing in the preparation and the meal as a group. We are not responsible for transportation to the retreat, but a rideshare document will be provided to help participants coordinate travel and assist those without cars.
 
Costs:

Price is tiered based on 3 income levels. All prices are in USD. 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. We are committed to covering our basic costs, while also making this possible for everyone who needs it. 

costs

EARLY BIRD (prior to May 1st): Financially Abundant $500 / Financially Secure 2 $400 / Financially Strained $300 / BIPOC $300

REGULAR PRICE (after May 1st): Financially Abundant $550 / Financially Secure 2 $450 / Financially Strained $350 / BIPOC $350

CAMPING: free

SINGLE ROOM ACCOMMODATIONS (limited): $50/night
Partial Attendance: All participants are required to arrive by 7pm on Friday for the opening dinner. We encourage participants plan to stay for the entire time, however leaving early (if necessary) is possible.
 

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.

Any questions? Please email: thedeepplayinstitute@gmail.com

Maximum # of Participants for the retreat is 15

 
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Note on Emotional Regulation

This intensive 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 one’s 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 the intensive. 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.

​”Aaron and The Deep Play Institute’s Psychodrama workshop was a joyous, deep, uplifting experience. I felt both held in safety and able to expand my range.”

“This was a fantastic workshop! Seeing internal experiences and dialogues played out physically was revelatory, and showed me how our internal worlds can be powerfully explored in a group.”
“The facilitator of the Psychodrama Intensive did an excellent job of creating a safe environment to play, explore and dive deep. I learned some valuable tools to help support myself. I experienced a lot of compassion for others as I witnessed their challenges.”
“Aaron creates a comfortable container for self and group exploration. He holds space for emergent expression and sensitive exploration. During the weekend intensive, there was a moment when I was in a role, got confused and panicked. I was able to say so and he was right there to help me get my bearings again. So grateful to get to explore my edge and psyche in a low pressure environment.”


“Aaron was a skilled facilitator and space holder. I felt myself go from feeling unsure and trepidatious about the weekend to feeling so much love, connection and safety by the end of the weekend. Aaron also taught us skills we can use on our own and with friends so we can integrate some of this work into our lives. I’d definitely recommend this workshop and look forward to attending more events with the Deep Play Institute.”

About the Facilitator

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

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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.​