This winter, I traveled to São Paulo, Brazil to attend—and contribute to—the Touch & Play Retreat. Located at the Centro de Experiências Existenciais, this immersion invited us to, “Leave your relationships more beautiful than you found them.” It an be difficult to describe exactly what happens in this kind of space, where queerness, kink, contact improv, and conscious erotic embodiment all come together in a sacred, playful container. But I’ll try.

Touch & Play was a beautifully facilitated, deeply immersive gathering of hearts, bodies, and stories. It invited us to explore the edges and expressions of erotic energy, embodied presence, consensual play, and authentic relating.

For me, it was also a portal—into new ways of moving, sensing, expressing, and offering my work in a new land.

At Touch & Play, those binaries began to dissolve. Through playful attunement, shared curiosity, and silent agreements, I was invited into a world where movement is negotiated moment by moment, without assumptions. Sometimes we danced in pairs, sometimes in groups. We explored collective flow, shared leadership, and touch as a language. It wasn’t about performing—it was about sensing, inviting, receiving, co-creating.

I realized how much this kind of movement mirrors the way I want to be in relationship: fluid, attuned, open to change. It cracked something open in me, and I know I’ll be returning to contact improv again and again.

My Offering: Ecstatic Breathwork in English & Portuguese

One of the greatest honors of my time in Brazil was offering my signature Ecstatic Breathwork practice in this new context—for the first time ever with the support of a translator. With my loving care team, Lyngar Daluz, Inge Veldscholten and the generously-brilliant Lucas Amaral da Silva, translating by my side, I invited a roomful of curious, brave souls into a journey through the seven energy centers of the body.

This practice—breathing through the chakras, charging the pelvic floor, inviting self touch, movement, embracing altered states of consciousness—has become a vital part of my work over the last eight years. But sharing it in a new language, with mostly Brazilian bodies and energy in the room, was a revelation.

We dropped in slowly. We softened. We shook. We released. We touched the erotic, the ecstatic, and the subtle. And we did it together—with care, consent, curiosity, and celebration.

This offering reminded me of the power of collaboration, of translation (not just of words, but of culture and presence), and of the universality of breath as a portal to the self.

Touch&Play Brazil 2025 | Ismael dos Anjos

The Ripples Continue

Brazil changed me. It opened new pathways in my body, my breath, my offerings, and my sense of what’s possible. It reminded me that my work—rooted in erotic empowerment, nervous system care, and queer embodied healing—can travel. It just needs fertile ground, solid collaborators, and the courage to say yes.

Touch & Play gave me all three.

With deep gratitude to the facilitators, participants, translators, dancers, lovers, and co-creators who made this retreat what it was—I carry you with me. And to those I’ve yet to meet: I hope to bring these practices to your city, your community, your circle. Let’s keep expanding.

In pleasure, in breath, and in reverence for the sacred erotic,

Touch&Play Brazil 2025 | Ismael dos Anjos