Affinity Belonging Camp
2025 Facilitators
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Hema (she/they) is the founder of the Affinity Belonging Initiative and main organizer for the Affinity Belonging Camps. They are a Holistic Empowerment Mentor and help clients release what's blocking them from achieving their full potential so that they can freely live a juicy life of purpose, passion and abundance. Hema works with clients on a variety of topics including abundance mindset, intimacy and relationship coaching as well as generational trauma :
Workshops
Heart Connection Ritual
Join us on opening night for a beautiful, intimate Heart Connection Ritual (formerly known as puja) that will create deeper, meaningful connections between you and other campers. Be prepared to be seen and accepted just as you are and find deeper love for yourself and others. This is a sensual activity with no nudity.
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Aaron Johnson (he/him) is a facilitator, public speaker, and touch activist who works towards identifying and interrupting barriers between people. As co-founder of both Holistic Resistance and Grief to Action, Aaron takes the time to hold the stories of black people around homophobia, transphobia, internalized racism, and those that are Chronically UnderTouched. Because oppression is a part of historical and present American culture, the long term impact of those trauma stories should be acknowledged and held as a map for our collective healing. Aaron Johnson practices and invites various methods of moving through these stories, such as the communal listening ear, sound healing, meditation, and closeness to the earth.
Workshops:
Building a Nest That Helps Us Get Ahead of the Trauma Story
What change do you believe is possible? What change do you seek?This workshop is about birthing the diverse change that we seek in New Culture and our broader communities. We use singing, somatic practices and mutual listening to envision what we dream possible. We will notice the Chronically Undertouched material and explore the idea that listening is the first hug. We will start building actionable goals for sustainable diversity. All voices are welcomed. We prioritize and center People of the Global Majority (BIPOC). We will do our best to be trauma and carnage informed. We want and need your hands, voice and spirit to build this nest.
Song Circle with Holistic Resistance
Everyone is welcome!! This workshop is an anti-racist, black-led space to reclaim our community and our voices as singers. The song circle is partly comprised of improv singing, learning traditional African heritage songs, beatboxing, and sounding with our voices. We will be noticing where we can bring music back into our homes and community. All singers have a choice when it feels good to sing, and can also just observe.
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Victor (he/him) is an erotic rewilder, somatic (body-centered) sexuality educator, mentor, coach, and erotic activist. He is passionate about supporting people in discovering the truth of their erotic sovereignty and removing any self-imposed, internalized or socially imposed blocks that interfere with the expression of their erotic brilliance.
Using a full spectrum of supports, from counseling to experiential movement practices to sexological bodywork to partner surrogacy, Victor offers permission and a safe container for clients and communities to “normalize the normal” human desire of erotic wholeness.
Victor is also a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) educator, and works with people in understanding the intersections where the body, sexuality, inclusion, oppression, racism, white supremacy, and decolonization are interwoven.
To see more about his work or to make inquiries, visit his website and Instagram.
Workshops:
DeColonizing Eros
What does it mean to truly liberate our bodies, our sexuality, our relationships? What does it look like to begin to deconstruct the limitations and oppressions of colonized sexuality from our somatic and community spaces? Often when we attempt to rewrite the script on how we would like to inhabit our erotic and relational lives we end up recreating the obstacles present in mainstream society into the experiments that we hoped would liberate us. Sometimes we are left wondering why we still feel unfree and unsafe or why we are still struggling so hard. We fail to recognize the depth to which colonization lives in our bodies and the degree to which it impacts our sexuality and what we even see as possible within our our lives and relationships. We may end up having playful romps in the woods or cathartic experiences in workshop retreats yet never make the shift towards the verdant, empowered, and sustained erotic lives we yearn for. In DeColonizing Eros, we will begin to unpack and explore the foundations of somatic decolonization. We will look at the elements of secure attachment, community, erotic sovereignty and relationship fluidity from a somatic and decolonized perspective. We’ll get to play with these principles with each other in community. You will leave with a better understanding of how to take your next steps into erotic liberation.DanceEros
Eros is the glue of community and dance is one of our most ancient human community expressions. With permission to dance in erotic expression within community, what will you do? With the invitation to move your ecstatic body within the container of affinity and belonging and inclusion, how will you show up? DanceEros is your playful opportunity to invite Eros through the front door in ecstatic dance however it arrives: in decadent glory, in nuanced shyness, in quiet strength, in reverent irreverence, in bawdy ridiculousness — all manifestations are welcome as we create a powerful community field through the moving and celebration of eros. We will establish an erotic-inclusive, consent-driven container of agreements at the opening of the dance and then segue into movement, dance, and play!
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Tony (he/they) is a Pleasure Activist, Facilitator, Shamanic Practitioner, DEI Consultant, Yoga Therapist, Daka, Mediator and Officiant. His mission is to help bring humanity back into balance. He facilitates HAI workshops and Diversity Trainings for The Nova Collective, a global woman/Black/Queer owned consulting firm. Tony's specialization is shamanic massage and ceremony. He also founded The Society for Healing Arts Institute and LOVES connecting in play and vulnerability.
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Shiloh (they/them) - Moving at the rhythm of transformation, weaving somatics, justice & art into spaces for healing & radical change. Deeply devoted to pleasure, equity, narrative, & liberation, they craft contexts to activate others to show up, do the work, & honor our messy, beautiful selves. A certified meditation transformation teacher, w/ 30+ years as an abolitionist educator, they know Love is a Practice (bell hooks)— they invite truth telling, reckoning, repair, & the sacred act of being human in community.
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Alyx Somas (they/them) is a 2S Native American Culture Tender and Re-Indigenization Practitioner, honoring indigenous lineage teachings to help humanity remember our most sacred nature.
Their work, The Collectivity Project, is an indigenous response to the pain of empire, ecocide, genocide, and separation—anchored in the truth that we all come from wise and collaborative ancestors. Their work is based in holistic nervous system care and trauma-informed somatic practice that de-individualizes what is truly systemic, tends to this new era of multi-cultural weaving that calls for us to heal our shared history, and restores us to our ancestral ways of reverence for all that lives. They hold circles, ceremonies, consultations, rituals, and mentorships in Ancestral Reclamation, Decolonial Leadership and Relationship Life-ways, Grief and Initiatory Rites, and Spirit Healings. Connect on Instagram.
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Saffire Bouchelion (he/him) is an Ecstatic Dance DJ who loves and lives to see a room full of beautiful dancers enjoying his groove. He is 1st Degree Black Belt Nia instructor who has been passionately practicing Nia for over 20 years and has taught internationally for the past 17 years. He is also a professional performer and musician who has taught Drumming, Embodying Rhythm and Dance into Being workshops throughout the US, Europe, Mexico and Bali. His greatest joy is helping to Embody the world, one Community at a time!
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Osprey (they/them) is a nonbinary singer, songwriter, and song leader. They write quirky, authentic lyrics about love, healing, community, justice, and our relationship with the planet. Their songs have taken flight through the community singing circuit (such as Grief and Praise). Osprey’s catchy tunes go deep and stay in your head for days, but it’s all good because they hint at answers that are relevant to now. A blend of queer-folk-pop (with a hint of 90s R&B), their songs are genuine, heartfelt, and easy to sing along to.
See ospreyfliesthenest.com for more info.
