Queer Arrival: A 30-Day Practice of Coming Home

What This Is

Queer Arrival is a 30-day digital course and community for queer men who are ready to feel boldly and authentically themselves — passionate, aligned, playful, and turned on by life.

Not by reinventing who they are, but by stripping back the layers of adaptation that taught them to fit in, be impressive, or stay in control.

This course supports a return to an authenticity that can enjoy pleasure, feel deeply, take up space, and last for the long haul.

An End to Quiet Self-Editing

For many queer men, life looks good from the outside.

• There’s a solid job.
  
• A version of “success.”
  
• Plenty of sex.
  
• A full calendar.
  

And still, an underlying sense of reaching —
like you’re always just about to arrive.

The highs land, but they don’t always stay.
The confidence feels real, until it flickers.
And beneath the momentum, there’s a quiet tightness — a hunger for something more grounded, more honest, more here.

Many queer people didn’t grow up feeling at home in ourselves.
We learned early that belonging came with conditions:

• Be easier.
  
• Be sexier.
  
• Be successful.
  
• Be less this and more that.
  

So we adapted.

We learned how to perform connection —
how to look confident while subtly leaving our bodies,
how to stay busy, desirable, or independent enough to not need too much.

Queer Arrival is an opportunity to come home.
To your body.
To your truth.
To a sense of belonging that doesn’t disappear when the moment passes.

It’s a slow, supported return —
not toward a better version of you,
but toward the places you learned to step away from in order to be safe, to fit in, to belong.

The Context: A Culture of Disconnection Among Queer Men

After hosting hundreds of queer men on retreat, a pattern shows up again and again.

Different lives.
Different ages.
Different levels of confidence, “success,” and self-awareness.

And underneath it all, the same three forms of disconnection.

Disconnection from Self

Growing up queer in a straight world taught many of us how to edit ourselves — sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically — in order to feel safe, loved, or accepted.
Even years after coming out, it’s common for that editing to continue quietly.
Striving. Adjusting. Performing versions of ourselves we no longer consciously choose.

Disconnection from the Body

Self-editing takes effort.
It pulls attention into monitoring and managing ourselves, and away from direct experience.
Over time, many people become fluent in their thoughts while losing touch with sensation.
And yet, the body is where life happens — where joy, pleasure, emotion, and connection are actually felt.

Disconnection from Community

On almost every retreat, someone names a familiar story: I don’t belong.
When we pause to explore this together, it often becomes clear that this feeling isn’t coming from the room.
It’s coming from an internalized story shaped long ago — one that continues to quietly influence how we show up, even in spaces meant to welcome us.

The Practice: The Foundations We Return To

Queer Arrival is organized around three core foundations we return to throughout the 30 days.

These aren’t ideals to reach or identities to perform —
they’re lived experiences we come back to, again and again, through practice.

As I Am

This foundation is about reconnecting with yourself as you are — not as you’ve learned to manage, present, or edit yourself to be acceptable.

Rather than only analyzing self-perception, the work here is also experiential.
Through daily practices, you’ll slow down enough to notice what’s actually happening inside you — sensations, emotions, desires, impulses — without immediately fixing, suppressing, or reframing them.

Over time, this builds self-knowledge and eventually self-trust — not as a concept, but as a felt capacity to stay with yourself.

In This Body

This foundation returns you to the place where life is actually occurring.

Not in your plans.
Not in your explanations.
Not in the story you tell about yourself.

But here — in sensation, emotion, pleasure, and aliveness as they’re unfolding in real time.

Rather than thinking your way into presence, you’ll practice feeling directly.
Listening to the body as a living intelligence — one that already knows what brings you alive, what shuts you down, and what you’ve been overriding in the name of control.

This work isn’t about mastering the body or using it to become something better.
It’s about remembering that your body is the instrument through which meaning, joy, desire, and connection are experienced at all.

I Belong

Here, we explore belonging not as fitting in, but as resonance.

This foundation examines how belonging has been shaped by adaptation — and how it can be re-experienced through self-belonging first.

Through practice, you’ll explore boundaries, discernment, and what it means to stay connected without disappearing — learning to orient toward relationships that feel spacious, mutual, and alive.

These three foundations weave together throughout the course, reinforcing one another rather than developing in isolation.

Why This Course Exists

Over the years, through our retreats in Costa Rica, we’ve seen what’s possible when queer men are given time, space, and the right kind of support.

On retreat, something shifts.
People soften. They land. They remember parts of themselves that had gone quiet.
They often leave shining their own light more brightly than they can remember — a light that feels needed in the world right now.

And we also know that not everyone can hop on a plane to Costa Rica.

Queer Arrival is our first digital course.
It’s shaped by what we’ve learned holding in-person retreats, translated into a format that’s more accessible and woven into everyday life.

It’s a way to experience the core of Qasa’s work — the practices, the orientation, the shared field — without leaving your life behind.

You don’t need international travel.
You don’t need weeks away from your responsibilities.
You just need a willingness to show up, a little at a time.

We’ll be there with you — live, present, and in community — as you explore what it means to return to yourself in the middle of your actual life.

The Journey

This 30-day experience moves through five intentional phases:

• Arrival & Orientation — naming self-exile and introducing Qasa as a different way of relating to self, body, and belonging
• As I am — ending the audition for worth and restoring self-loyalty
• In this body — returning to sensation, aliveness, and pleasure
• I belong — practicing belonging without assimilation
• Integration — weaving the foundations into daily life

Some of the work will feel natural.
Some of it may feel uncomfortable — often a sign of where there’s room to lean in.

There’s no pressure to transform, transcend, or become someone else.

This is not about a dramatic overhaul.
It’s about returning.
And arriving.

Arriving home in yourself —
as you are,
in your body,
with a clearer sense of what belonging can actually feel like.

🌿 What Shifts Over 30 Days

Mindset

• Greater clarity around how you’ve learned to edit yourself — and what that has shaped
• A shift toward orienting from who you actually are, rather than who you learned to be in order to belong
• Less internal negotiation, masking, and self-monitoring
• More permission to want what you want and be who you are, without explanation
• A softening of shame as presence becomes safer than performance
• Belonging experienced as something you practice from within, rather than chase externally

Practices — Reflection & Embodiment

• Simple, accessible embodiment practices that bring you out of your head and into your body
• Increased attunement to sensation, emotion, and inner signals
• Clearer understanding of what genuinely brings you joy — and how to integrate it into a busy life
• A self-reflection toolkit that deepens self-knowledge, values, and desire
• Rituals that help you recognize misalignment and support gentle return
• Grounding tools for nervous system regulation and presence

Connection — Toward Aligned Tribe

• An understanding of the difference between fitting in and belonging
• Clearer discernment about who and what actually nourishes you
• Less time and energy spent in relationships that require shrinking or performance
• Early steps toward choosing people and spaces that resonate with your values and authenticity
• A felt sense of connection that is spacious, aligned, and life-giving rather than obligatory

Course Details

Queer Arrival: A 30-Day Practice of Coming Home
Held by Shelby Clark & Alex Sloan
January 28 – February 26, 2026
Live calls: Wednesdays, 5–6:30pm PST

• Five live weekly calls (90 minutes each)
• Daily guided practices (~15 minutes)

This Course Is for Queer Men Who:

• Feel functional, successful, or outwardly “fine,” but internally unsettled
• Notice patterns of self-editing, people-pleasing, or performance in relationships
• Want to feel more present in their bodies and daily lives
• Are curious about embodiment, but want practices that are grounded and accessible
• Long for connection that feels real, mutual, and not effortful
• Are open to slow change rather than quick fixes

This Course May Not Be for You If:

• You’re looking for rapid transformation or peak experiences
• You want prescriptive answers, rigid frameworks, or performance-based growth
• You’re not currently able to engage in gentle self-reflection or embodied practice
• You’re seeking a purely intellectual or purely therapeutic container

This course values pacing, consent, and personal responsibility for one’s own capacity.

A Final Note

You don’t need to be polished.
You don’t need to be certain.
You don’t need to know what you’re arriving to.

You’re allowed to arrive as you are.