Queer Dating and Relationships: Consciousness, Communication, and Consent
With Dawn Haney and René Rivera
June 6 - 8, 2025
Do you want to experience more joy, pleasure, and satisfaction in your queer relationships? Join us to learn skills to show up in queer relationships with delight and curiosity, while caring for our tender parts that take risks to foster loving queer relationships in a queerphobic world.
You will have opportunities to experience being in connection through optional exercises with other participants, alongside more personal practices and reflections to get to know yourself more. This retreat is less about finding the ‘right’ person and more focused on developing your own relational skills and mindsets, so that you can show up well for yourself, and in your connections with others.
As your retreat leaders, we bring wisdom from our own successes and lessons learned from our mistakes, as two queers finding our way to more successful relationships by strengthening our communication skills for boundaries, feedback, conflict, and accountability. We also bring an approach to consent that can open up your capacity to give and receive what brings you and a partner more pleasure and joy. We offer mindfulness as a multi-purpose tool that can help you be more conscious and aware of your own experiences. Together, these tools will help you communicate your desires, needs, and preferences with clarity and confidence.
Leaders
Dawn Haney
Dawn Haney (they/she) weaves together wisdom from Buddhism and social justice traditions, understanding identity, power, and change through their own experiences as a white, fat, queer, nonbinary femme. She began closer study of relationships and group dynamics in her graduate work in Health Promotion and Behavior at the University of Georgia, applying these skills to violence prevention efforts and queer organizing in Durango, Colorado. In the past decade, Dawn has been a voice for justice and inclusion in Buddhism and mindfulness, serving as a co-director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, mentor and leadership consultant for the global Mindfulness Meditation Teacher…
Learn more about Dawn Haney
Dawn Haney (they/she) weaves together wisdom from Buddhism and social justice traditions, understanding identity, power, and change through their own experiences as a white, fat, queer, nonbinary femme. She began closer study of relationships and group dynamics in her graduate work in Health Promotion and Behavior at the University of Georgia, applying these skills to violence prevention efforts and queer organizing in Durango, Colorado. In the past decade, Dawn has been a voice for justice and inclusion in Buddhism and mindfulness, serving as a co-director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, mentor and leadership consultant for the global Mindfulness Meditation Teacher…
Learn more about Dawn Haney
René Rivera
René Rivera is a meditation teacher and restorative justice facilitator working and learning in all the spaces in-between race, gender, and other perceived binaries, as a queer Latinx trans man. René teaches heart-centered, trauma-informed meditation, as a core teacher at the East Bay Meditation Center. He offers classes and retreats for many Buddhist centers and groups, with a focus on supporting LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC practitioners. He leads trainings on how to create spaces that are inclusive and accessible to transgender, nonbinary and gender expansive people. René is a facilitator in training for the School of Consent and a restorative justice…
Learn more about René Rivera
René Rivera is a meditation teacher and restorative justice facilitator working and learning in all the spaces in-between race, gender, and other perceived binaries, as a queer Latinx trans man. René teaches heart-centered, trauma-informed meditation, as a core teacher at the East Bay Meditation Center. He offers classes and retreats for many Buddhist centers and groups, with a focus on supporting LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC practitioners. He leads trainings on how to create spaces that are inclusive and accessible to transgender, nonbinary and gender expansive people. René is a facilitator in training for the School of Consent and a restorative justice…
Learn more about René Rivera