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.

Alumni Day

Thursday, Jan 15th - (Alumni Only)

7:00 PM - 8:00 PM: Dinner - Dining Room (circle at 6:50)
8:00 PM - 9:30 PM: Sharing Circle - Great Room

Friday, Jan 16th - (Alumni Only)

8:30 AM - 9:30 AM: Breakfast - Dining Room
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Time for Pop Ups
12:30 PM - 1:30 PM: Lunch - Dining Room
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM: Time for Pop Ups

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 6:20 for Dinner Circle)  

7:30 pm - 9:30 pm - Opening Circle - Great Room
Gather to connect, hear what’s ahead for the retreat, and set our intentions together. This year’s Opening Circle will also include elements of “Yes, No, Maybe and More!” with Ace Ricker and Andrew Deitch, offering simple consent and communication exercises using guided sharing, non erotic touch, and role play.  

9:30 pm - 10:30 pm - 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!

10:00 pm - Evening Activities
Our Wood-Fired Sauna will be running. There is also a closet full of games you can play together in the Great Room!

Saturday, January 17th

7:00–9:15 AM - Saturday Morning Cartoons & Cereal
Join Sean in the Sunroom for cozy, nostalgic morning cartoons on the big TV. Stay in your PJs and help yourself to a fun selection of classic cereals and milks. Drop in anytime during the block and ease into the day together.

7:30 am - 8:30 am (Three Choices)

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 Dean and Steve - Temple
Start your day right with a simple silent meditation

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 (Two Choices)

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 - 1:30 pm - Lunch

1:30 pm - 3:00 pm (Two Choices)

*Loving Our Bear Bodies with Goldenheart and Jay 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 Bear Your Soul workshop. It is not required, but is a recommended experience for newcomers. If you are interested, but apprehensive, speak to your group leader or a host.

The Path Less Traveled with Ace Ricker - Great Room
An invitation to 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. It invites participants to reconnect with their own story, acknowledge how culture and community have influenced their journey, and reflect on how they might continue their journey with more clarity, deeper self-compassion, and rooted in intentional choice.

3:30 pm - 5:00 pm (Two Choices)

The Bearamount Studios Experience with Adam B. Shapiro - Great Room (ends 5:15)
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 (Two Choices)

Winter Warmer Mocktail Laboratory with Travis Russell - Great Room
A fun, afternoon workshop. 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.

The Art of Mindful Gooning: Sexual Self-Care and the Rejection of Shame with Leo Taylor - Temple
Explore erotic self-touch as a practice of mindfulness, self-compassion, and release from shame. We will slow down, notice sensation and emotion with curiosity instead of judgment, and build a more intentional relationship with our erotic bodies. This work honors that our relationships to our bodies and to self-pleasure are shaped by intersecting identities, including race, body size, disability, gender identity, age, and religious upbringing. The second half of the session is a guided mindful gooning meditation using self-touch only, with no physical contact between participants. Penetration is not part of this experience. Participants may use toys externally, if they wish, and may bring personal items such as lube or toys. A small selection of supplies will be available.

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

8:15 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)

10:00 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!

Sunday, January 18th

7:00–9:15 AM - Sunday Morning Cartoons & Cereal
Join Sean in the Sunroom for cozy, nostalgic morning cartoons on the big TV. Stay in your PJs and help yourself to a fun selection of classic cereals and milks. Drop in anytime during the block and ease into the day together.

7:30 am - 8:30 am (Three Choices)

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 Dean and Steve - Temple
Start your day right with a simple silent meditation

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 (Two Choices)

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 and Erotic Intelligence 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 - 1:30 pm - Lunch

1:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Gender Demystified: Understanding Ourselves and Each Other as Men with Leo Taylor - Great Room
Every man here has a gender identity, and it shapes how we see ourselves, relate to our bodies, and connect with others. This interactive workshop offers clear, reflective conversation about gender, sex, and sexuality, exploring common myths, lived experience beyond binary categories, and how gender shows up in gay and queer male culture and relationships. Open to trans men, cisgender men, and gender-expansive brothers, the session makes space for nonbinary and transmasculine perspectives and looks at how language and pronouns influence belonging and connection. The focus is on strengthening trust, reducing harm, and fostering a community where more men feel respected, seen, and at home. The workshop is facilitated by a trans man who began his transition in 1999 and identifies as genderqueer and transsexual, bringing decades of lived experience and personal storytelling into the conversation.

Renewal Through Disruptive Change: A Collage Art and Divination Workshop with Jendi Reiter - Temple
Sometimes we can’t attain healing and creative flow until we break unhealthy attachments and mourn the collapse of a structure that no longer serves us. In the Tarot, this process is represented by the progression through the Devil, the Tower, and the Star. We’ll make our own artwork inspired by one of these cards, then pair off to interpret how these energies are manifesting in each other’s lives.

3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

*Massage à Trois 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 interactive workshop explores the subtle and not-so-subtle ways sabotage shows up in our lives and relationships. Together, we’ll look at patterns such as self-sabotage, sex-sabotage, and self-care-sabotage, and how these behaviors can quietly shape our choices, expectations, and capacity for connection. Through guided discussion, reflection, and practical inquiry, participants will examine how these patterns alter our frame of reference; impacting how we show up with others and how we relate to ourselves. The workshop offers a supportive space to increase awareness, challenge familiar loops, and begin identifying healthier, more intentional ways of engaging with desire, care, and personal responsibility. At its core, this workshop invites awareness where habit once led the way, and supports reclaiming agency in how we care for ourselves and connect with others.  

5:15 pm - 6:45 pm

Ecstatic Dance with Andrew Deitch - Great Room
In this workshop, Andrew AKA 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!

String Fling - the Art of Bracelet Making with Travis Russell - 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 - 9:30 pm -  Bear Your Soul Naming Ceremony with - 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, 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 19th

7:30 am - 8:30 am (Three Choices)

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 Dean and Steve - Temple
Start your day right with a simple silent meditation

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 am - Farewell Brunch