Bear Your Soul: Winter Hibernation ‘26

Workshops with a * contain nudity and/or some level of erotic touch. If you have concerns or questions, please see the facilitator or a host.

Friday, January 16th

4:30 pm - 5:50 pm - Welcome Reception - Sun Room
Get acquainted before dinner with wine, non-alcoholic beverages, cheese and crackers.  

6:00 pm - 7:00 pm - Dinner with our Houses - Great Room (meet at 5:50 for Dinner Circle)  

7:00 pm - Opening Circle - Great Room
Gather to hear about all the exciting things we have planned and set our intentions for the retreat!  

Following Opening Circle - Puppy Pile with Jay Freeman - Great Room
A warm and fuzzy clothing-on, non-erotic guided group snuggle and relaxation experience. This is a great way to ease into the retreat with some connection and warmth!

Saturday, January 18th

7:30 am - 8:30 am

Morning Yoga with Tim Cooley - Great Room
Join Tim for a yoga practice emphasizing listening to your body. Fine for beginners or more advanced yogis! 

12 Step Meeting - Hunter Reynolds Room

8:30 am - 9:30 am - Breakfast

9:30 am - 10:30 am - Small Groups - Various Locations
Please attend your small group and be on time.

11:00 am - 12:30 pm

The Bare Truth: An Unfiltered Interview with the Man You Are Becoming- with Eric Dusseault - Great Room
This session invites participants to focus on and name the core truth of your individual ambition. This is a challenge to stop talking about "what if" and start detailing "what happened." In this session, participants will be partnered up to conduct an honest, revealing interview with your Future Self—the man who has successfully achieved his most challenging goal one year from now. Interview partners will support and push each other to move past the surface details to reveal the limiting beliefs to better understand the critical choices that need to be made to accept and move toward your deeper ambitions. Participants should walk away with the unvarnished perspective of the man who did the work and a clear understanding of the authentic steps required, not just the comfortable ones. This session will conclude with a debrief, providing each participant a chance to share with each other what their goals or action steps are, and for the group to offer helpful suggestions to move forward on these named ambitions.

Re-Integrating our Bodies - with Noel Ramirez - Temple
Queer men often inherit distorted messages about beauty, masculinity, and worth. This workshop invites participants to reclaim their bodies through decolonizing and liberation-centered frameworks. Together we’ll explore body image, fatphobia, and disordered eating as collective wounds—and practice embodied self-compassion and new narratives of belonging.

12:30 pm - 1:00 pm - Lunch

1:30 pm - 3:00 pm

*Loving Our Bear Bodies with Goldenheart and Jay and Freeman - Temple
A chance to affirm the beauty of your body and erotic self. Through touch exercises, we will give and receive support and appreciation with our brothers. The workshop involves nudity & erotic touch. This is a core workshop of Bear Your Soul. This is a CORE Bear Your Soul workshop. It is recommended that newcomers attend. If you are interested, but apprehensive, speak to your group leader or a host.

The Path Less Traveled with Ace Ricker - Great Room
We will explore the moments where our lives slowed, shifted, or quietly changed direction—and the choices, pressures, and narratives that shaped those turns. Together, we will reflect on the paths we were encouraged to take, the ones we resisted, and the ones we choose for ourselves. Through guided reflection and shared conversation, the workshop looks at how growing up, particularly within gay/queer culture and among the communities that surrounded us...framed ideas of success, belonging, masculinity, partnership, and purpose. We’ll examine the pauses in our lives: times of uncertainty, waiting, detours, or stillness, and how those moments often held just as much meaning as forward movement. This is a space to gently question inherited expectations, honor personal timing, and recognize the wisdom gained from paths that didn’t follow a prescribed map. You are invited to reconnect with your own story, acknowledge how culture and community have influenced your journey, and reflect on how you might continue with more clarity, deeper self-compassion, and rooted in intentional choice.

3:30 pm - 5:15 pm

The Bearamount Studios Experience with Adam B. Shapiro - Great Room
In this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to channel their inner movie star, clown around and build their confidence in front of a camera, and collaborate on a hilarious video trailer of a movie we all know and love…with a bearish twist. Lights! Camera! Confidence!

Intuitive Tarot with Jendi Reiter - Temple
What does freedom mean to you? Where do you yearn to move forward in your life? Often, we have a storyline about our present situation, and a mental picture of what we'd like to change, but we can't figure out how to get from here to there. In this workshop, you'll choose two cards to represent the present entanglement and the future liberation, draw a random card for the path between them, and journal about the story that the three cards suggest. Workshop leader Jendi Reiter will offer brief readings of your three-card spreads, if desired. A variety of Tarot decks will be provided. No preparation necessary! Whether you're new to Tarot or an experienced reader, simply let the images and feelings from the cards guide your imagination to the hidden path between your present self and the future you desire.

5:30 pm - 6:45 pm

String Fling - the Art of Bracelet Making with Travis Russell - Great Room
Unwind, get creative, and connect in this fun, hands-on workshop. We’ll provide a rainbow of colorful embroidery floss and beads for you to design your own unique piece. No experience or "artistic talent" is necessary. Just come ready to have some fun, get tangled in some string, and leave with a little arm candy.

Gooning with Leo Taylor - Temple *
Unwind, get creative, and connect in this fun, hands-on workshop. We’ll provide a rainbow of colorful embroidery floss and beads for you to design your own unique piece. No experience or "artistic talent" is necessary. Just come ready to have some fun, get tangled in some string, and leave with a little arm candy.

7:00 pm - 8:00 pm - Dinner - (meet at 6:50 for Dinner Circle) 

8:30 pm - 10:00 pm - Bearz Got Talent with your host Adam B. Shapiro - Great Room
It’s time for you to share from your heart with your brothers. You can sing, dance, juggle, read, whatever! Everyone has something to share! Show us what you got! (Signup required)

10:00pm - Evening Activities
Our Wood-Fired Sauna will be running and spaces in the Temple will be open to connect, discover, and play! There is also a closet full of games you can play together in the Sun Room!

Sunday, January 19th

7:30 am - 8:30 am

Morning Yoga -with Tim Cooley - Great Room
Join Tim for a yoga practice emphasizing listening to your body. Fine for beginners or more advanced yogis! 

12 Step Meeting - Hunter Reynolds Room

8:30 am - 9:30 am - Breakfast (with Morning Cartoons with Dave Dietz in the Great Room)
Stay in your PJ’s, bring your breakfast and your teddy for classic cartoons (with a selection of fun cereals). 

9:30 am - 10:30 am - Small Groups - Various Locations
Please attend your small group and be on time.

11:00 am - 12:30 pm

Bare Essence: Form and Feeling with Eric Dusseault - Great Room *
A workshop that invites artists of all levels to explore drawing from nude male models, seeing the bare body as a vessel of strength, vulnerability, essence and vitality.  Our approach will be expressive, bold, fun and experimental. We will start with a series of quick, gestural poses that emphasize expressive mark-making and fluid motion. Throughout the session, artists will be encouraged to play and experiment with materials which capture the beauty of the male form and also the raw, emotive presence of the models. The experience will conclude with a reflective dialogue, offering participants the opportunity to share their creative insights, discuss the making process, and connect over their artistic interpretations.

Healthy Relating with Noel Ramirez - Temple
In a culture shaped by apps, expectations, and performance, many of us lose connection with our erotic authenticity. This workshop explores how gay and queer men can reclaim intimacy by cultivating erotic intelligence—the capacity to integrate desire, values, and self-awareness.

12:30 pm - 1:00 pm - Lunch

1:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Gender Workshop with Leo Taylor - Great Room
TBA

The Devil, The Tower, The Star with Jendi Reiter- Temple
In this hybrid collage and Tarot workshop, we will explore experiences of disruptive change and renewal through a three-card progression from the Major Arcana: The Devil (what is holding you in bondage), The Tower (what structures need to be demolished), and The Star (what new life is emerging from this crisis). After looking at how different decks interpret these cards, participants will create their own collage version of The Devil, The Tower, or The Star, whichever feels most relevant to their life or the current world moment. The facilitator will then pair participants to exchange one-card readings using the guiding questions above, without knowing their pairings in advance. We will close with brief optional group sharing about insights that emerged during the paired readings.

3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

Massage a Trios with Adam B. Shapiro and Goldenheart - Great Room *
Join us for an erotic massage experience. We will work in trios, each taking a turn on the table, building individual and communal erotic energy. Nudity and erotic touch are required for this workshop. Space is limited!

When Comfort Becomes Constraint with Ace Ricker - Temple 
This workshop invites awareness where habit once led the way, and supports you in reclaiming agency in how you care for yourself and connect with others. You will look at the routines, coping strategies, and familiar roles that once felt protective or necessary, and consider the moments when they began to limit growth, intimacy, or authenticity

5:15 pm - 6:30 pm

Ecstatic Dance with Andrew Deitch - Great Room
In this workshop, DJ SYNES will take you through a series of 5 musical rhythms to get your body moving and your spirit soaring. This is a silent event. Speak only with your body and sounds, but no speaking words. Let’s get primal!

Winter Warmer Mocktail Laboratory with Travis Russell - Sun Room
Bring your tastebuds to experience enticing, alcohol-free takes on classic winter drinks. Play with sweet, sour, and spicy ingredients to create your own signature craft concoction, perfect for a fireside rendezvous.

7:00 pm - 8:00 pm - Dinner - (meet at 6:50 for Dinner Circle) 

8:30 pm - 9:30 pm -  Bear Your Soul Naming Ceremony with Jay Freeman - Great Room
Your chance to step fully into the tribe, claim your name, and celebrate your brother bears. We will gather in the great room by the fire, where we will drum, chant, celebrate and honor everyone! An important ritual of Bear Your Soul you don't want to miss!

9:30pm - ?? - Bears in Motion with DJ Sean McLaughlin - Great Room
DJ Sean McLaughlin, former 25+ year veteran of "HomoRadio," will get you movin' and groovin' with his big bear boogie! It might be chilly outside, but this dance is gonna be HOT!!! Feel free to dress up, raid the drag closet, come as you are, or strip down as bare as you dare, and enjoy a non-stop mix of fresh, fab, and funky flashbacks!

10:00 pm - Evening Activities
Our Wood-Fired Sauna will be running and spaces in the Temple will be open to connect, discover, and play! There is also a closet full of games you can play together in the Sun Room!

Monday, January 15th

7:30 am - 8:30 am

Morning Yoga -with Tim Cooley - Great Room
Join Tim for a yoga practice emphasizing listening to your body. Fine for beginners or more advanced yogis! 

Silent Meditation with Intentional Journaling with Shaan Prokopton - Temple
Shaan will guide you through a calming, reflective experience of silent meditation and journaling. Step away from the noise and reconnect with your inner voice. Through thought-provoking prompts and simple techniques, you’ll learn how to start a daily meditation practice. No experience needed, and people of all beliefs are welcome. As a student of Zen meditation and a practitioner of Stoic philosophy, Shaan offers thoughtful guidance on this journey to everyday serenity.

12 Step Meeting - Hunter Reynolds Room

8:30 am - 9:30 am - Continental Breakfast

9:30 am - 10:30 am - Small Groups - Various Locations
Please attend your small group and be on time.

10:30 am - 11:30 am  - Closing Circle - Great Room
An important time to affirm, appreciate, and bid farewell to your brothers before you head home.

11:30 pm - Farewell Brunch

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• The Sauna will be available each night at 10 pm Saturday and Sunday nights. 

• We have a full closet of games in the Great Room that folks can play together. 

• You can book an individual massage with Tim Cooley. See the Front Desk for prices and sign up.