HOT TAKES FOR WARM ENCOUNTERS by Gabrielle Revlock

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  • January 11, 2026

HOT TAKES FOR WARM ENCOUNTERS by Gabrielle Revlock

What this was

Good Vibrations: Micro-Encounters for When Socializing Feels Stagnant, was a workshop I offered for DPI through the Playing when the Playing gets Hard 2026 series.  It was an experiment in cultivating interpersonal aliveness in online encounters—especially when socializing starts to feel stale, performative, or effortful. The workshop combined research-based prompts, improvisational structures, and relational play to invite boldness, curiosity, and attunement.

Structures & Techniques

1. Warmth as an entry point
As participants arrived, I invited them to make a warm beverage. This was inspired by a 2008 study suggesting that experiencing physical warmth can promote interpersonal warmth. I like beginning with something simple and tactile—I personally find online group gatherings to be challenging so grounding myself in the physician reality of my environment at the same time is one of my hacks.

2. Agreements, with an emphasis on collaboration
While reviewing DPI agreements, I added on a value that is particularly important to me—collaboration. Even if someone feels a “no” to an exercise or idea I present, can that refusal still be framed as participation in a shared investigation? Rather than boundary-setting as withdrawal, I invited a “yes, and”—where subjectivity and somatic truth are part of the co-creation. I would rather someone speak up if they are disagreeing with me, instead of keeping it to themselves because I perceive all engagement as having the possibility for connection and collaboration.

3. Group warm-up: testing the edge through self-disclosure without pressure
One early activity began with cameras off. One person turned their camera on and shared something true for themselves. (I modeled this for the first few rounds.) If the statement was true for other people, then they too turned their cameras on or wrote “me!” in the chat. What I love about this structure is that it centers self-disclosure while preserving choice. Someone might say something tame (“I have a younger sibling”) or something riskier (“I’m estranged from my family”). Boldness was a recurring theme for this workshop, but never a requirement.

4. Gathering of excellent questions
As a group, we brainstormed a list of “excellent questions.” In about a minute, we generated 152! Again, I invited boldness. If we are only brainstorming questions, might you feel inspired to add an edgier question? As people considered this, some of the questions became darker, more specific, and less censored. A few that stood out:

  • What’s a place you’d tell someone to visit to understand you?
  • What kind of mischief do you typically get into?
  • Have you ever killed someone? (Wow, that caught my attention and maybe that’s more the point than getting an answer.)

I framed this list as a backup plan. Presence and spontaneity are the goal—but it’s helpful to have questions in your back pocket that are not the standard “How are you?” and “What do you do for work?” I’m leaving the google form open in case you, reader, would like to contribute.

5. Beautification break
At the halfway point, I suggested using the five minute break to beautify oneself or one’s space: lipstick, a favorite shirt, a plant, festival lights, incense, a silk scarf. This wasn’t about presentation but rather an opportunity to observe the effect of beauty. I find that beauty opens me up and incorporating texture, color, and sensory pleasure into my vicinity affects me on a bottom-up level. What I feel affects how I feel.

6. Bold, Observant, Authentic, Succinct (It’s pronounced “boss”)
After the break, I shared reflections drawn largely from my experiences with online dating. My guiding principles are: be bold, be observant, be authentic, and be succinct. I shared an actual text exchange with an anonymous person and pointed out moments where I took a risk—aware that it might not land well. This was a moment of vulnerability for me.
One participant shared that they wouldn’t have responded positively to my risky message. That moment felt especially alive. It revealed exactly where connection can fracture—and how subjective tolerance for risk really is. Their honesty, however, made me feel more connected to them, and I suspect vice versa was true because later they  told me that they wanted me to teach a dating-specific workshop. (Yes! I want to do that.) The type of boldness I’m interested in yields disagreement without disengagement–this is authentic connection.

7. Breakout rooms: mystery and rhythm
I used several breakout rooms with 2–4 participants per room to vary interpersonal dynamics.

  • Cultivating Mystery: Describe your work or how you spend your time without using titles. Don’t give it all away. Invite curiosity. This was primarily a listening exercise—notice what made you want to know more, without immediately acting on it.
  • Observing rhythm and f-ing with your normal flow:
    – Part 1: One person had two minutes to do anything they wanted while others observed their rhythm. The active person could scroll on social media, read emails, meditate, move…whatever.    – Part 2: Participants reflected verbally—and this is key—intentionally inserted pauses to disrupt habitual speaking tempo and create more space for sensation and thought.


Part 1 was inspired by an exercise from my friend Lauren Mark, a professor in communication and culture. Part 2 comes from a pandemic-era score I practiced daily with Sarah K Williams, where by embracing the pause, conversation slowed to an almost absurd pace—often about milk and pancakes—and generated a surprising tension. We later used this text score in a performance called Orientation.

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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.​