April '24 Newsletter

Hello again, Nerds!

What's New this Month?

Every New Moon or so, I share updates on services I'm offering, travel stories, games I'm working on, and collaborations I'm excited about. With a long international trip ahead, this one is pretty light.  

This month's highlights:

• Games: The Old Ways Must Go continues in refinements and developments. While the Kickstarter is closed, pre-orders for the game and the companion zines are available at Galileo Games, and we continue to playtest with the coolest people and the wildest decks.

• Live Sessions Available in New York City: I've agreed to a fantastic mutual collaboration with the folks at Cosmic Fit Club in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. This yoga/acrobatics studio and the staff are an excellent fit for having an inclusive, welcoming space to do individual and small group sessions, including standard Somatic Experiencing and aerial somatics. I'm excited to start seeing clients and offering workshops in person when I'm in New York!

• Learn with Me: I'll be offering two embodiment classes in Pretoria, South Africa, April 26 &27th; two relationship/sexuality classes at Camp Crucible, Maryland, May 26 & 30; and the final iteration of Ghosts in Our Bones in Houston and online June 7.

Read on for more details.  

Games: The Old Ways Must Go & Tarot for Transformation

The Old Ways Must Go is my hopeful little bring-your-own-tarot-deck game reached it's funding goal, and I'm deep in playtests and revisions with Tim Rodriguez, my collaborator and publisher at Galileo Games.  Last week we had the utter joy of playing with the creators of the Negocios Infernales game deck (pictured above), my friends Carlos Hernandez and C.S.E. Cooney. We made a beautiful mash-up of our two games.

They wrote about their experience in their own (backer-only) Kickstarter update, quoted here:

The Old Ways Must Go is a very intimate kind of game--at least the way we played it, it was--and I could at once see how the game could be a tool for world building the myths and religions of one's fantasy world, be it a gamic or a fictional one--especially if one did it in character!

As it was, we answered The Old Ways Must Go's prompts using mostly our own personal community ritual histories. This gave the game a more reflective, philosophical, even biographical aspect. Indeed, there were more than a few moments of revelation, approaching catharsis!

In a very busy week, I had such fun with Carmen and Julia on the Pandas Playing Cellos podcast , talking about embodiment, dissociation, games as thinking frameworks, and living through times of upheaval and change. If you don't have time for the full episode, here's a short clip just about the game.

Learn with Me: Upcoming Events

Connecting with Others/Connecting with Ourselves

Pretoria, South Africa

April 25 to 27

Two three hour workshops hosted by The Voice Box, the music hall/movement space of Voice Movement Therapy instructor Lerina van Rensburg. Lerina and I are 3 years into a deeply joyous collaborative online relationship, and finally get to play, teach, sing, and move together in the flesh! If you have community in South Africa, please pass along this newsletter and/or this flyer.

Camp Crucible

Darlington, MD

May 25 to June 2nd

This event is sold out: if you are attending in person and want to arrange session time on site, please let me know. I'll be teaching two classes on relationships and sexuality at this event, but otherwise it's my early summer camp vacation.

Magee Ethics Workshop: Ghosts in Our Bones

Houston Jung Center

June 7  Ghosts in Our Bones.  the final offering in a series of ethics workshops co-taught with Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of the Houston (Texas) Jung Center.  Join us in a dialogue on complicity and complexity in the history and ongoing practice of the mental health profession, inspired by Alexis Shotwell’s hopeful book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times.  Online live attendance, recordings and continuing education credits are available to attendees.  Register by Wednesday, June 5th.  

 And More...

Made it this far? Here's what you get for sticking around:

Horses That Heal

There's a strong overlap in the Somatic Experiencing (SE) community with the adaptive/therapeutic riding community: horses have such huge capacity for holding our emotions and exploring our resilience, and the tools of SE are effective for building trusting relationship with the horses. The horses at Maryland Therapeutic Riding are a steady and generous pillar in my own support system. April 20th I ride in their spring horse show and open house. Check out my riding partner Mr. Fluffy below: he's a Norwegian Fjord Horse and a Very Good Boy.

But Did You File Your Taxes?

Money brings strong emotions for some of us, and is another domain to explore physiology, stress, and capacity. Just a gentle reminder to my US friends that the April 15 deadline to file your taxes or file an extension is rapidly approaching. The IRS website has several options for free file, and most local libraries can point you to free, low cost, and reliable tax prep services.

And that’s just the next few weeks! Let me know what you found useful or what your want more of, and please share this newsletter wherever you think it will be well received.

-Sam Savage

Post Script

 (*)Horses!! Mr Fluffy says "Hay"