Reid visits the In Presence We Trust Podcast and talks to host Rachel Rickards about Facilitating with Intention

Are you a sexuality educator or other sexuality professional and considering facilitating workshops, retreats, and more? Then you should definitely listen to this episode of In Presence We Trust: The Facilitation Podcast.

In this episode, I get to sit down with my pal Rachel Rickards, and we’re talking about something near and dear to my heart: lifting each other up as facilitators rather than competing. I dive into how I got into sex education and facilitation—spoiler alert: it all started with me wanting to help people avoid the relationship landmines I watched my parents stumble through.

We riff on how we create workshops that really hit the mark for our communities, and why it’s so crucial to build spaces where people feel safe and free to explore sexuality without fear or shame. I also dig into my experiences with restorative justice, and how that shaped my belief that as facilitators, we’ve got to stay accountable, especially when it comes to the power dynamics we navigate in these spaces.

We wrap things up by exploring the power of peer support—it’s a game changer!—and the real-world challenges of running a facilitation business while keeping things playful and heart-centered. If you’re a facilitator, or just curious about what it takes to do this work, you’re gonna want to tune in!

About Rachel Rickards

Rachel Rickards is an international leader in the field of personal transformation, intimacy, embodiment, and relating. She is a group facilitator extraordinaire, event producer, and a new mother. In 2014 she and Buster Radvik co-founded Embodied Intimacy, which has become one of the most respected organizations globally that offers trainings and events focussed on intimacy, trauma, relational intelligence, somatic education and community. The work of Embodied Intimacy supports hundreds of people each year to come home to themselves, to their body and more regulated nervous systems, and become more of who they truly are. 

Since 2019, Rachel has led the Belly2Belly Facilitator Training after her teacher and mentor, David Cates, passed the torch and CEO position for this work to her. Belly2Belly offers a simple and yet profoundly healing set of embodied and relational practices, which support people to learn to regulate their nervous systems in a way that can be transformational for their relationships. Rachel has single handedly produced and facilitates most of the events with her extraordinary superpowers in the field of event planning and depth in embodied leadership. 

Rachel’s newest passion project is “The Field Facilitator Training.” This is a revolutionary new experiential learning environment for upcoming group facilitators who are passionate about creating fields of deep group-heart coherence and learning how to facilitate group soul emergence. This requires the development of radically new facilitation skills, such as learning to listen to the group field, collective surrender to the moment, as well as dynamic and fluid collective leadership to support the blossoming of the group soul that is longing to emerge in the space between us. 

About the In Presence We Trust Podcast

A podcast about the art and heart of holding group transformational spaces.

This podcast is here to empower facilitators, leaders, and individuals from all walks of life to harness the transformative power of presence in their work and personal life. In Presence We Trust is a sanctuary for aspiring and experienced facilitators alike, seeking to evolve their facilitation craft and embodied leadership. In each episode I will harvest insights from leading-edge facilitators doing transformational work in fields like: relationships, embodiment, therapy, intimacy and education.

Tagged as: Communication, Facilitators, In Presence We Trust, podcast, Rachel Rickards, Reid Mihalko, Workshop Facilitation