Consent & Participation Agreement

A high-integrity Group Experience for Couples

Facilitator: Marie-Pier Gilbert, Owner and Founder of Authentic Counselling

Retreat Dates: October 10-12, 2025

Location: Brew Creek Centre, Whistler

Welcome

The Sacred Return is an intimate, guided experience for couples who are ready to reignite erotic trust, deepen connection, and come home to one another—with presence, play, and purpose.

This is a sacred, high-integrity container. As such, it is essential that all participants enter with clarity, respect, and informed consent. Please read and sign this agreement to honor the safety and sacredness of the experience.

The Facilitator’s Integrative Approach

Marie-Pier Gilbert, registered psychotherapist & sex therapist, blends attachment science, somatic therapy, and sacred embodiment practices. This retreat is rooted in the following core frameworks:

1. Attachment Science: Inner and Interpersonal Bonds

This retreat honors both your relationship with yourself and your relationship with your partner.

• Using attachment theory, we illuminate unconscious bonding patterns that shape how you give and receive love.
• With compassion, we’ll explore the ways you seek safety, closeness, autonomy, and connection.
• The intention is to move toward secure attachment—with yourself and with one another—through clear communication, nervous system awareness, and co-regulation.

2. Somatic Therapy: Love Rooted in the Body

We anchor the experience in body-based practices designed to restore safety, trust, and attunement.

• You’ll explore how love, longing, and boundaries live in your body.
• You’ll learn to regulate your nervous system, feel more deeply, and reconnect with your partner beyond words.
• These practices are always clothed, non-sexual, and fully consent-based.

3. Eroticism as a Mirror

Erotic energy is not about performance—it is a mirror of your truth, vulnerability, and desire.

• Through guided exercises, you’ll explore longing, play, resistance, and connection with new awareness.
• This approach invites a deeper relationship to self-expression and shared intimacy, without pressure to be or do anything.

4. Tantric Principles: Presence, Polarity & Union

Inspired by classical tantric wisdom, we work with:

• Presence over performance
• Sacred inner polarity—the feminine and masculine energies that live in all beings, regardless of gender identity.
  You’ll be invited to explore how these energies manifest within you and your relationship to create harmony, magnetism, and balance.
• Tantric practices here are about inner awakening and relational attunement to explore sexual energies

Important Clarification:

This retreat does not include or invite any sexual touch or nudity.

All somatic and embodiment practices are fully clothed, with no sexual behavior.

Physical intimacy between couples, if desired, may occur in private time only, outside of group sessions.

These guidelines protect the integrity of the container and ensure that all participants feel safe, respected, and sovereign.

Core Agreements

By signing below, you and your partner agree to the following:

1. Informed, Ongoing Consent

• I understand all practices are optional. I may opt in or out at any time.
• I agree to ask for and honor consent with my partner in all physical and emotional practices.
• I agree to check in with my body and respect its signals.

2. Confidentiality

• I agree to hold in confidence any personal stories, disclosures, or experiences shared by others.
• I will not share any participant’s identity or journey outside the retreat.

3. Emotional Responsibility

• I take full responsibility for my emotional experience.
• I will not blame others for my triggers, and I will seek support if I become overwhelmed.
• I commit to co-creating a safe space through conscious communication.

4. Respect and Group Integrity

• I will not engage in sexual touch, nudity, or erotic behavior during group sessions.
• I will participate free from drugs, alcohol, or substances for the duration of the retreat.
• I understand that the facilitators may ask me to leave if I breach these agreements in a way that compromises the safety of the group.