Meet Your Hosts
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 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 unfold 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 launched in 2022, “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.
David Cates
David’s passion is listening to bodies. In nearly 50 years of teaching about sex, intimacy and connection, David has become an outspoken advocate for slowing things down and learning from our bodies in real time, breath by breath.
He’s guided thousands through unresolved trauma in their own nervous systems, using his profoundly simple Belly2Belly practices in workshops, trainings and private sessions around the world.
His specialty is generating deep experiences of trust, safety and loving connection between lovers, friends, parents and children, and most surprisingly, even random strangers.
Beyond individuals, he’s been expanding these explorations into groups, helping to create synchronized, coherent group heart-fields in gatherings and crowds.
In Rachel Rickard’s The Field Facilitator Training, he’s teaching a new generation of group facilitators the secrets of leading from the inside out, listening to the wisdom of the group body, and speaking from vulnerable connection.
It seems inevitable that, as he approaches his seventies, David would also turn his attention toward dying. How can we help ease loved ones towards a peaceful death? How can we collectively grieve and honor the world that’s dying around us?
As always, the answers are right here, in our bodies, if we slow down and listen.
The Co-Hosts: Camp Counselor’s, Intimacy Ambassadors & Muses
This beautiful group of inspired souls is showing up deeply committed and in full service of this movement. We have grown a mutual love and support of them and they are an integral part of the potency and viability of our success. We are excited to introduce you to, and announce that the following beings will be with us in service of this adventure.
To be announced….