the origin story of weaving resilient webs

weaving resilient webs starts october 29! note the date change; we are now starting one week later than originally scheduled to allow more time for sign-ups.

every thursday
29 october - 17 december
7:00-9:00 pm ET (4:00-6:00 pm PT)

tools to navigate relationships through radical, embodied practices of desire, consent, and power-sharing

week 1: orienting & housekeeping
week 2: core values/purpose
week 3: different relationships, different needs
week 4: midpoint reflection & integration
week 5: skillful boundaries
week 6: dynamics of systemic oppression & power
week 7: mental health & trauma
week 8: closing integration & future persistence

here is how weaving resilient webs came into existence:

when i was 21, i met the first people i would ever actually date: two queer women(ish) who were partnered. because it seemed like a good idea at the time, i ended up doing my first time dating, my first time doing non-monogamy, and my first time being in a kink dynamic all at the same time! i do not recommend this & yet i am also aware that there was no other choice i myself could have made at that time: my desire was powerful & while it was tough, it was not wrong. many mistakes were made & many fights were had & many things changed over the years those romantic relationships i was in lasted, and once those romantic relationships ended (at different times), i became chosen family with those partners for about a decade.

those partners were also the first people to mirror certain very icky things about myself back to me. i grew up in a family where there were essentially no rules and no limits; i was autistic but no one knew, so i would have meltdowns that got called "temper tantrums". i have a mom who does not really ever engage with her "negative" emotions, and a dad who had explosive, scary anger growing up, who verbally abused me when pissed off. i have a younger sister who really knew how to push my buttons and still did not deserve the verbal & physical retaliation i directed her way––and also, it was my parents' job to set boundaries & redirect me, but they never did.

in my early adulthood, these first partners mirrored a lot of things about myself back to me: that the level of anger (which i now know was often sensory overwhelm) i exhibited in conflict was not normal & needed tending (i got my first therapist that year), and also that whether or not i "identified" as a lesbian, that's how 90% of the world would see me. in this, and many other facets of our lives together, they made my whiteness and US upbringing visible to me in ways it had not been before. one of these partners also introduced me to heartfelt and fervent antizionism when, in our courtship, she shared her diary in the form of emails from summer at her family home in achrafieh during the 2006 zionist bombardment, and then later our other partner was like, "...and that's why we don't buy sabra hummus". sometimes doing the right thing is actually not complicated at all & solely has to do with trusting love.

i don't know if i necessarily would have ended up nonmonogamous if my formative romantic relationships hadn't been so polyamorous from jump, but it's also true that even as a high schooler i disdained the heteromonogamous romance script before fully realizing how gay i was & i did a bunch of my erotic firsts with a longtime dude friend i never dated, so the inclination was there. one of my therapists in my later 20s was like, "oh, so you come by [the non-monogamy] honestly," when i told her my parents had divorced but continued to coparent closely and do family holidays all together with their new partners and us kids.

near the end of the longer of those two romantic partnerships, i also entered leather community. i went to my first play party in 2009 and my first leatherdyke weekend in 2011––i went knowing no one, because i knew there were people & experiences there i needed whether or not any of my friends or partners wanted to go there with me. in leather community, i learned a much more robust & potent model of consent than third wave white feminism's ridiculous yes means yes, only enthusiastic! consent counts shit. in leather community cultural models of consent, risk is inherently assumed & planned for, and power is explicitly negotiated rather than perpetually unacknowledged. i had incredible teaching from leather olders & elders in those years, the dungeon & adjacent workshop spaces were basically the only places i had contact with queers over age 35––and there were dykes & queers up to their 80s in these dungeons, lifestyle leatherfolk doing the most creative weird shit because at that point, innovation has exceeded the imagination of any 20something.

& then, a few years later, i met an incredible femme who at the time was running queer meditation drop-ins at the ste-émilie skillshare (RIP). we hit it off & started facilitating together while also becoming friends & forming a fairly intense chosen family relationship, spending tons of time together each week with shared meals, meditation sits on our couches, & sleepovers in their & their partner's guest room, as well as cosupervision for our respective therapy practices. in 2015, i put together the first iteration of this curriculum that became weaving resilient webs, which at the time was called navigating non-monogamy: tools for self-accountability. we were both sick of what seemed to be a binary model of non-monogamy: either you were in a "primary relationship" of love & commitment and only fucked others on the side, or you were "polyamorous" which seemed to mean, do whatever you want whenever you want, regardless of how it impacts anyone else (thanks now-outed abuser & highly influential polyamory writer of the time franklin veaux who pushed a violently individualist form of polyamory––& far less sarcastic, more genuine thanks to andrea zanin & eve rickert, who have recently released a much better updated version of eve & franklin's original book more than two).

parneet & i did not see models of being both sovereign & interdependent, able to be grounded in one's own dignity & to own one's own responsibility for how we engage multiple relationships that may sometimes be in conflict with each other. we had kitchen table conversations constantly about this & many other relational & community vectors of harm, repair, and transformative justice. i drew on our conversations, as well as conversations around similar themes with my roommate at the time, kota rook, & our close friend kai cheng thom, and barbara carrellas's book ecstasy is necessary, among other lineages, when i designed this curriculum, then invited parneet to cofacilitate with me. when our collaborative relationship blew up a few years later due to deep triggers around race & class that we weren't able to move through despite multiple conversations, seeing an ancestral healer together, and having a friend mediate with us, we amicably divided the curriculums we had cofacilitated: they took the mindful justice series they had led on, and i took navigating non-monogamy, which i had led on. i didn't facilitate it for quite awhile, however; it felt too close to burned parts of me. a few years after that initial blowout, parneet & i had a stunning reparative conversation & in the decade since our fallout, have slowly moved back into each other's orbit with a huge amount of mutual adoration & respect. (parneet has also opened the healing centre we were originally working towards together all those years ago in their own evolved & current vision, & practitioners in mtl should check it out!)

in 2021, i started wanting to facilitate around relational skills & self-accountability again, and i was about to design a new curriculum...and then i realized that i already had one. i had been facilitating the work on boundaries as a stand-alone for several years, but when i reviewed the original full plans for this skillshop, i still loved them. i went through and updated this curriculum to be less specific to non-monogamy, and more broadly applicable to all types of mutually chosen, consensual relationships, and i began to offer it again. this year is the first time i've offered it since becoming a parent; i last offered it while pregnant in 2023, my last group before i went on mat leave.

so! self-accountability is the capacity to attune to our internal sense of what is good & right (shaped by family, community, culture, and systems of power/oppression) in order to be responsible for ourselves & responsive to the impacts we have on others. this is an embodied skill, not a cognitive skill: no matter how much we study & think about how to conduct our intimate relationships, no matter how much we theorize what an abolitionist future looks like, we cannot embody those ways of being without actually practicing them. that practice is what this skillshop is for.

partners, friends & roommates are fully encouraged to sign up together to build shared language, frameworks & practices, though the focus of the work in sessions will be individual! if you sign up together, you can each use the code OURWEB for 13% off.

lineages: somatic experiencing (SEP), generative somatics via vanissar tarakali, biodynamic craniosacral therapy, ecstasy is necessary by barbara carrellas, kitchen table education & practice on transformative justice & monstrosity/shame with many queers including parneet chohan, kai cheng thom & kota rook, leatherdyke community, lived experience of intergenerational madness/trauma & substance ab/use, turtle cypher, and countless more thinkers & cultural workers. you can check bodywitchery.com for more general info about your facilitator, and i share more detailed info about the teachers & peers in my lineages as we practice together.