About
Austin Embodiment Festival is a transformational gathering curated by Everyday Tantra—bringing together movement, breathwork, tantra, somatics, connection, music, and conscious community. Rooted in presence, healing, and authentic expression, the festival creates space for exploration, nervous system regulation, intimacy, and personal growth through immersive workshops, experiences, and meaningful human connection.
Ecstatic Dance
A free-form movement experience with no choreography or judgment. Participants are invited to move intuitively, release tension, and connect with themselves and the collective through music and rhythm.
Qi Gong
An ancient practice centered on presence, breath, and energy. Tantra expands intimacy with self and others by bringing awareness to the body, connection, and the flow of life force.
Contact Improv
Contact Improvisation is a spontaneous movement practice based on touch, balance, and shared motion. It explores trust, flow, and connection through improvised partner movement, encouraging presence, creativity, and embodied communication.
AcroYoga
A free-form movement experience with no choreography or judgment. Participants are invited to move intuitively, release tension, and connect with themselves and the collective through music and rhythm.
Biodanza
Biodanza is a joyful movement practice that uses music, dance, and authentic human connection to awaken vitality, self-expression, and a deeper sense of belonging. Through simple guided exercises, participants are invited to move beyond self-consciousness and reconnect with the natural wisdom of the body, the heart, and the present moment. Biodanza helps reduce stress, increase confidence, and cultivate greater joy, intimacy, and aliveness. No dance experience is needed—only a willingness to move, connect, and celebrate life.
Latihan
Latihan is an invitation to step into the unknown. Beginning in silence and stillness, you surrender to the music and allow it to move you in whatever way feels natural, without choreography, expectation, or agenda. As the mind softens and the body awakens, you are invited into a richer experience of sensation, freedom, and presence, where the boundaries between self, music, and life begin to dissolve. The result is often a profound sense of aliveness, connection, and unity with all that is.
Dance Meets Tantra
Dance Meets Tantra is an embodied movement practice that weaves together conscious dance, authentic connection, mindfulness, and relational awareness. Through music, movement, breath, and playful interaction, participants are invited to awaken their life force, express themselves more fully, and experience deeper connection with themselves and others in a consent-based environment.
Latin Fusion
Latin Fusion Dance is a heart-centered partnered movement practice that draws inspiration from salsa, bachata, zouk, merengue, and other Latin dance traditions. Blending these styles into a fluid and accessible form, participants are invited to explore rhythm, spontaneity, attunement, and authentic connection through movement. With an emphasis on play, musicality, and presence, Latin Fusion Dance cultivates vivaciousness, creativity, and the joy of shared expression.
Meditation
Meditation is the practice of going deeper into the self through guidance, presence, and clarity, using breath and movement to shift energy and cultivate inner balance.
Tantra
Contact Improvisation is a spontaneous movement practice based on touch, balance, and shared motion. It explores trust, flow, and connection through improvised partner movement, encouraging presence, creativity, and embodied communication.
Rope Play
Meditation is the practice of going deeper into the self through guidance, presence, and clarity, using breath and movement to shift energy and cultivate inner balance.
Community
Being in community while doing this work creates connection, support, and shared growth. Practicing together encourages accountability, emotional openness, collective healing, and deeper self-awareness through shared presence and energy. It helps people feel seen, grounded, inspired, and more connected to themselves and others.
Peter Petersen
Peter Petersen is devoted to three core passions: movement, music, and meditation. For over 24 years, he has taught Sheng Zhen Qigong, and since 2011 has seamlessly woven dance into his offerings. Thus creating a unique, embodied experience that bridges stillness and expression.
He has shared his work in a wide range of settings, from health clubs and hospitals to retirement communities, international Tantra festivals, and luxury wellness resorts throughout Mexico and the United States.
For the past 11 years, Peter has traveled and taught alongside Monique Darling, offering Tantra and his distinctive fusion of qigong and dance across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. His work invites people to connect with what is most alive in their hearts, and to courageously express that aliveness in the world.
This is more than a profession for Peter, it is his life path, a calling he intends to live fully, until he draws his final breath.
Monique Darling
Lead faculty for Awaken as Love; author of 'Beyond Cuddle Party' and workshop facilitator extraordinaire has led over 2000 workshops in the past 18 years. She was born on this planet with the unique gifts and soul calling to help you remember how magnificent you truly are! Messages from your ancestors, your spirit guides, your body, nature, your soul, are all called upon and utilized so that you walk away knowing how deeply the cosmos loves you for YOU, exactly as you are, so you can begin to love and accept yourself too. YOU, you are the Gift! She is the founder of Everyday Tantra an organization dedicated to empowering people who are questioning the assumptions of how their life should be and to offering tools for self expression that create trust, inner knowing and wisdom to enjoy the life they have. Monique has taught at colleges across the US including Yale. She has been featured on TLC and The Dr’s as well as various radio shows, podcasts and magazines across the globe. She specializes in helping others reclaim their power and natural sensuality by transmuting fear and repression into courage, self-love and freedom. Her primary purpose is helping folks bring out their vulnerability, energetic embodiment and fearless relating
Facilitators
Lawrence Lanoff
Lawrence is a teacher of embodied tantra. His work moves people from the head into the cells — where attention becomes information, breath becomes architecture, and pleasure becomes a medium for inquiry. He's been in the lineages without being defined by them, and what he offers is recognizable mostly by its quiet.
C — minimal, mystic:
Lawrence. Embodied tantra. Slow work. Body-first. The kind of practice that doesn't tell you what it's doing until it's already done.
Lèa Rochelle
Lèa Benavides is a Tantra educator, somatic healing guide, and empowerment leader who creates spaces for deep transformation through embodied presence and relational truth.
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Her work blends somatic healing, authentic relating, and personal development to help people reclaim self-trust, emotional clarity, and personal power. Through movement, breath, ritual, and conscious connection, Lèa guides individuals to release old patterns, strengthen boundaries, and step into confident, embodied leadership in their lives.
Lèa’s retreats invite people to embody both softness and strength, to live from their bodies, speak from their truth, and lead from an integrated sense of power, purpose, and presence.
Sir Pocketz
Sir Pocketz is a Houston-based somatic practitioner with ten years of rope under his hands, working in the Muganawa lineage of Akechi Denki and Osada Steve, the "empty mind" tradition translated into modern somatic practice. Hundreds of sessions across the country have shaped how he holds someone in rope.
He's also a Level 1 Instructor in Contact Beyond Contact, certified through Vangelis Legakis and Unity Space. The practice pulls contact improvisation, authentic movement, and qigong into one relational language, where touch begins long before skin meets skin.
James & Skye
Skye and James are two of our newest collaborators and friends, they bring a passion and commitment to this work unlike most people I’ve ever run into. Their joy as they tie or co-Dom people is contagious. Skye is also an amazing web designer, so if you want to be tied up or have a website showcasing your skills, they/she are a perfect fit. So excited to have front row seats as they continue to grow and evolve .
www.unikink.com
Briana Cribeyer
Briana is a sacred sexuality practitioner, who is enlivened by creating unique spaces for connection and self-awareness. She has extensively studied emotional intelligence, trauma-informed care, and leadership development. A facilitator with numerous organizations worldwide, including The International School of Temple Arts, she brings empathy and deep listening, as well as tough, playful love. An intimacy + relationship guide for couples and individuals, Briana is passionate about supporting people to find equanimity in all relationship styles. To stay connected, www.brianacribeyer.com
Yaw Tutu
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Brandon Gonzalez
Brandon Gonzalez is an interdisciplinary dance artist, educator, DJ, and facilitator based in Austin, Texas whose work explores movement as a transformational and relational practice. Drawing from Contact Improvisation, somatic inquiry, and ritual dance practice, he creates spaces that invite embodied connection and deep listening through the body. Brandon teaches nationally and internationally, is the Artistic Director and resident DJ of Ekstasis in Austin, helped establish the Texas Dance Improvisation Festival (TDIF), and is an Associate Professor of Practice in the School of Theatre, Dance & Film at Texas State University.
Taylor
Taylored ACRO only does ALL CAPS ACRO, because that THE BEST KIND!!
With over 10 years of teaching experience and 15 years of ACRO experience Taylor brings a highly creative, energetic and wildly unique perspective to the whole of the ACRO world!!
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Join in for an entirely new perspective, fully grounded in safety, communication and exploration.
COME TRY ACRO TODAY!!
Dana Hood
For nearly two decades, Dana Hood has guided people back into their bodies through movement, music, breath, play, and deep embodied connection. A lifelong dancer, teacher, retreat leader, music creator, and founder of Studio iBODY Denver, Dana creates experiences that are sweaty, soulful, playful, freeing, and deeply real. Her work blends intentional choreography, nervous system awareness, emotional expression, fitness, creativity, and community into movement journeys that help people reconnect with themselves from the inside out.
Dana is the founder of Studio iBODY Denver and co-leads international retreats and immersive trainings through KINVOKE, supporting facilitators, dancers, and movement leaders in reclaiming authentic expression and embodiment. She also creates original music and immersive soundscapes through Rhythm Rebel Drops, crafting tracks designed specifically for movers. Her classes are known for their energy, humor, heart, empowering choreography, and the kind of music that makes people sweat, feel, release, and come fully alive.
Ross Lewin
Ross Lewin is the founder of EmbodiMEN and creator of the Big Depth Energy method, an embodied approach to men’s confidence and dating that builds attraction through grounded masculine leadership. He is also the creative force behind Affirmation Sluts, a bold creator collective exploring devotion, self-love, conscious sexuality, and the power of feeling deeply wanted and worthy in your body.
Since 2017, Ross has led men’s circles that support kind men in asking clearly for what they want while still honoring choice, consent, and emotional honesty. Blending men’s work, tantra, dance, breath, media, and embodied practice, his work helps people become more present, connected, confident, and fully alive.
Eden
Eden is a relationship and intimacy coach, tantra practitioner, speaker, and the visionary behind the Temple of Eden. She is also the co-founder of Tantra Philly, a tantra temple and conscious kink space in Philadelphia dedicated to connection, embodiment, and authentic expression.
With over a decade of experience in somatic healing, business management, and facilitation, Eden creates immersive events, mentorship containers, and tantric sessions that guide people into deeper presence, relaxation, pleasure, and self-connection. Like the garden itself, her work is an invitation to awaken the body, embody truth, and cultivate a life that feels fully alive from the inside out.
DJ Lady Vitamins
DJ Lady Vitamins invites you out of performance and into presence through sweat, laughter, catharsis, flirtation, trance, and uninhibited motion. Equal parts sacred mischief and full body release, channeling hypnotic global rhythms, ritual bass, and soulful hip hop textures designed to dissolve inhibition and awaken embodiment. Lady Vitamins is grateful every day that exploring and sharing the sounds and beats of people world-wide is their job. A DJ that dances! And sometimes wears ridiculous costumes! They've found a practice worth gifting to the world and are so excited to share it with you.
https://www.instagram.com/djladyvitamins/
https://soundcloud.com/djladyvitamins
Julia Grace
Julia is a sex and intimacy coach, muse, event producer and facilitator based in Austin, Texas. With authenticity, presence, and grace, she inspires others to delight in their innate sensuality, cultivate deep connection, and open to the mystery.
Julia is curates transformative gatherings that create community, honor the body and invite people to dive in to the juiciness of life.
She is the founder of Move in the Mystery: a Latihan Experience which has upgraded the tantric practice of Latihan internationally.
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