Live • Interactive • Online
Dating From Self
The Heart Part - Finding Connection Without Compromise
With Drs. Lissa Rankin, MD & Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv
Live on Zoom • Saturday, May 17 & Sunday, May 18, 2025
from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm Pacific Time
Dr. Lissa Rankin, MD
New York Times bestselling author, doctor, researcher, and teacher.
Dr. JEFF REDIGER, MD, MDiv
Best-selling author, licensed physician and psychiatrist
PRESENT
DATING FROM SELF
A Journey Of Self-Discovery, Trauma Healing, & Learning How To Love Others Without Abandoning Ourselves
If you’ve been dating, looking for new friends, or generally thinking about putting yourself out there to make new relational connections, this weekend Zoom workshop is for you! When we think of dating, we tend to think about the other people we’ll meet. But what if dating could also be a way to take your “parts” on dates and get to know who shows up when new people are around? Imagine how much fun it could be for your parts if you help them feel appreciated, known, validated, and understood when you prepare to go on a date with someone else?
Through a series of guided practices and community connections, we will help you ritualize your intention to find companionship, pump up your profile, get dating tips that acknowledge needs for both attachment and space, and learn how to identify which “parts” of you show up on dates around different people. You’ll develop more self confidence and authenticity, learn how to make your boundaries clear up front so you feel safer around new people, practice discernment by spotting red flags or green ones, trust yourself when it comes to choosing safe people to become close with, learn how to ethically test whether someone else is trustworthy, and have fun meeting new people while being intentional about your own journey of healing relational trauma and building healthier connections.
Are you open to doing the work on yourself to prepare yourself to attract and be ready for someone more available for deep, soul-nourishing intimacy?
Join us for a playful, light-hearted weekend celebration of love and intimacy with our parts and each other as we discover how to make intentional dating fun, safe enough, growth-inducing, and pleasurable. Get to know the parts of you that typically show up on a first date or meet up with new people, and play around with letting other parts go first. Notice which people evoke which parts and pay attention to which parts you like having brought forward and which ones you’d prefer to give less airtime.
Maybe you’re on a date with someone who vulnerably discloses a severe trauma history right out of the gate, and you realize your parenting, rescuing, caregiving, or hero/heroine parts take center stage. Notice how that’s different than if you’re on a date with someone overly confident, attractive, entitled, bragging, alpha, and boundaryless. Maybe your strongly boundaried parts come out and you find yourself playing whack-a-mole with your boundaries but wind up feeling like you couldn’t relax. Maybe you’re with someone indecisive who doesn’t cast a vote and you notice controlling parts that will take the lead in the absence of someone else taking the lead. Or maybe you’re with someone who makes clear decisions, orders for you, gets it just right, and lets you relax into more submissive parts without making you feel unsafe.
Maybe you feel a strong erotic pull to someone but you also spot red flags and wonder whether your parts are eroticizing danger. Or maybe you have a great time with someone but you feel no lust at all and wonder whether you should just be friends or whether this is actually a good sign of someone healthy. Maybe you’ve done enough work to recognize exactly what your typical patterns are, only this time, you know how it ends and you’re going to make another choice.
Maybe you’re not interested in someone at all, but you discover parts that are afraid to disappoint someone else and you realize you’ve just said yes to a second date when you really don’t want one because a part that pities the other person takes over. Or maybe you feel bullied into a second date by someone who can’t take no for an answer.
All of these scenarios give you beautiful trailheads for getting to know your own parts through an intentional dating experiment! If you can spot those parts and do the work to become intimate with them, you might have a better chance of letting Self take the lead when it comes to who you might want a second, third, or fourth date with.
“Only when we embrace our own exiles do we become safe havens for each other.”
— Richard C. Schwartz (from You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For, paraphrased)
- Dreaming and visioning about what you’d ideally love to create in a romantic or friendly connection;
- Playing with the idea of taking your “parts” out on dates, as a way to get to know them better and celebrate your relationship with them;
- Daring to risk being honest with yourself about what you desire, what you can’t tolerate, what you need, what you’re afraid of, what you’re hoping not to recreate…again, and what you sincerely long for in your deepest heart;
- Fun writing prompts to help you write the most authentic Self-led online dating profile;
- Creative ways to access pleasure and desire (plus the parts that might be afraid of doing so);
- Opportunities to learn peer-to-peer parts processing, so you can pair up with someone else who’s thinking about dating and wants to process which parts come up on dates;
- Getting to know your “deal-breakers” so you don’t waste your time or anyone else’s with people who simply aren’t compatible;
- Sexy embodiment practices to get you in your pleasure zone;
- A series of experiential exercises to help you access more Self energy when preparing to date, so you can be less “partsy” when you go out with someone new;
- How to use IFS to get to know the parts of you that show up around even thinking about dating!;
- Creative ways to access pleasure and desire (plus the parts that might be afraid of doing so);
- Learning to foster the heart-opening, gobsmackingly effective Self-to-wounded child reunion- as an ongoing practice to help you reset to your best Self before and after dates;
- IFS guided meditations to help you find the sanctuary within your own heart- one you can return to whenever you need refuge, in case parts get activated during new connections with others;
- How to spot the green flags of healthy relationships, so you can avoid investing too much time in ones that are full of early red flags;
- Psycho-education about the predictable troubling patterns we can learn to avoid by spotting them early;
- Dancing to shake it all out and get your groove on!
“When we tune in to our parts, we realize no one else can ‘complete’ us—but they can join us as we heal.”— Richard C. Schwartz (paraphrased)
“Seeing your partner through the lens of Self-energy helps you hear them beyond your own triggers.” — Inspired by IFS teachings
The Workshop Program*
A weekend with Lissa Rankin & Jeff Rediger
All sessions will be recorded and are available within 24 hours after the workshop ends.
* Session content subject to adjustment.
9 am - 11 am Pacific Time
11 am - 1 pm Central Time
12pm - 2pm Eastern Time
Day One
Saturday, May 17th. 2025
9:00 am - 3:00 pm Pacific Time
Opening Desire Circle
9:00 am - 10:30 am Pacific Time
In this opening circle led by Lissa and Intentional Creativity founder and artist extraordinaire Shiloh Sophia, we begin with helping you get in touch with your deepest desires. What might you be too afraid to let yourself yearn for? Are some parts so afraid of being let down that they’ve quit dreaming or allowing you to feel your longing?
We’ll enter liminal space through ritual to open up a safe, brave space for daring to touch your desire for human connection, romantic partnership, or platonic friendship as a possible gateway to deeper relational intimacy outside the powder keg of romance.
Dating & Internal Family Systems
10:30 am - 12:00 am Pacific Time
Lunch Q&A
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Pacific Time
You’ll be welcome to take the whole hour off for a lunch break. Once Lissa eats, she’ll be available to answer Q&A during the lunch break.
Nuts & Bolts Of Dating
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm Pacific Time
Time to write your online dating profile, find speed dating options in your hometown, join a singles group, or otherwise plan how you’re intending to be proactive about meeting new people! We’ll talk about the differences between different online dating sites, brainstorm other ways to meet new people for those who are shy about meeting people online, and help you with prompts and inspiration to put your best Self (and parts) forward.
We’ll talk about how to spot catfishers, a quick way to test whether someone you meet online is real or fake, and how to avoid being the victim of deception or fraud. We’ll discuss safety and how to get clear on your dating boundaries- and what to do if someone violates them. Plus, how to let your parts coordinate to pick your wardrobe, consider what impressions you’ll make when you let various parts take the lead, and how to play around with various personas and how they relate to Self when someone new is around.
We’ll even teach you how to make a playlist that can evoke the parts you want to bring forward on your dating journey, just to keep it light, fun, playful, and meaningful. Remember, you’ll be dating not only someone new; this is also a chance to take your parts out on dates and get to know them better.
Day Two
Sunday, May 18th. 2025
9:00 am - 3:00 pm Pacific Time
9:00 am - 10:30 am Pacific Time
We talk a lot about trauma in our workshops here. But what about pleasure? And what about the parts that get in the way of letting us feel alive, embodied, and in touch with our pleasure? Lissa’s OB/GYN parts and the parts that wrote her book “What’s Up Down There?” and toured thirty colleges talking to women about sex and desire will come to our opening circle on Day 2.
We’ll also be joined by guest teacher, psychologist, author of DESIRE, and trauma-informed sacred sexuality expert Saida Desilets, who more than anyone we know, has a gift for making it safe to talk about sex, whether we’re exploring pleasure and desire or dealing with the aftermath of sexual trauma.
We’ll enter into this sensitive territory gently, with writing prompts, movement practices, music, and time to ask us anything your heart desires.
Have Your Own Back
10:30 am - 12:00 am Pacific Time
Lunch Q&A
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Pacific Time
You’ll be welcome to take the whole hour off for a lunch break. Once Lissa eats, she’ll be available to answer Q&A during the lunch break.
Get Your Mojo On
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm Pacific Time
++ BonuS PROGRAMS
Audio Recording
Relationships as the Guru
Audio Recording
When You're Single and Wish You Weren't
with Katherine Woodward Thomas
Audio Recording
When Others Don't Want You to Wake Up
with Joan Borysenko
Audio Recording
Spiritual Bypassing & Transformation Through Intimacy
with Robert Masters
Audio Recording
Expectation Hangovers-in Relationships
with Christine Hassler
Audio Recording
Sacred Sexuality
with Rachel Carlton Abrams
Audio Recording
When Death Doesn’t Part You
with Kristine Carlson
Audio Recording
with Tosha Silver
Audio Recording
The Soul's Prison or an Alchemical Crucible
with with Anne Davin
"What brought me here was a desire to live fully...wounds and all. I love the support of your community, Lissa. What better place to learn, love, and grow". – Donna, workshop participant
Dating From Self
EARLY BIRD PRICE IS ACTIVE
Only $197
USD
including all bonuses
If the cost of this workshop presents a financial hardship, we hope you will contact us for tuition adjustment options. Please write to support@lissarankin.com.
About Lissa Rankin, M.D.
Lissa knows personally how transformational that kind of safety can be for the creative process.
Lissa had never written a book when she first took Nancy's Writing From The Heart workshop at Esalen in 2007, right after her father died, she had a baby, and she quit her job as a doctor in the wake of her Perfect Storm (aka memoir-making material.)
After that workshop, her first memoir flew out of her. Nancy and the community of other memoir writers opened up her writing voice, and although that first book didn't get published (Lissa had no "platform" at the time), she's published seven books since then, including two memoirs.
Owning, writing, and transforming your own story from pain into magnificence is worth doing purely for medicinal purposes, regardless of whether anybody else ever reads your writing. But some trauma survivors feel passionate about sharing the lessons they've learned from their memoir-making material and have a bee in their bonnets about helping others who are still in hell when they've been to hell and made it back with holy grails of wisdom. >>>
While you certainly don't have to publish your memoir in order to receive the healing benefits of writing it, sometimes holding your story in a book in your hands helps you get it out of your body and into something beautiful that can help others, even if you self publish it.
Lissa Rankin, MD believes that writing and healing can be intimately related and teaches writing workshops infused with trauma healing and spiritual healing, both in person and virtually. Lissa agrees with Nancy Aronie that trauma is memoir-making material, and we can alchemize our pain into the most beautiful story-telling when we feel safe for the muse to come out to play, in a community of other writers who also feel safe and can help us hold our story while we rewrite it as art.
Lissa has been writing since kindergarten and was offered her first book deal when she was 12, which she turned down, since they were her private stories. She was a creative writing major at Duke University and wrote her first fiction book as her thesis on African American women's literature while in college. Throughout her medical training while becoming an OB/GYN, she wrote stories inspired by her patients and used writing to heal the moral injury she felt while working within a corrupt medical system.
When she quit her job as a doctor in 2007, she finally succumbed to her lifelong desire to be a career writer. Her first book Broken, a memoir about her journey through the wounded health care system, never got published because she didn't have an audience. So at the urging of her literary agent, in 2009, Lissa began blogging and publishing The Daily Flame, a daily email love letter from your "Inner Pilot Light" (Self) to your wounded parts, based on the healing model Internal Family Systems (IFS), a trauma healing spiritual path which Lissa incorporates into all the healing and writing workshops she facilitates.
Because her blog and Daily Flame emails quickly garnered a large readership, she was able to publish her first book in 2010 and has been blessed to have her last 7 books published.
Her third book, the New York Times bestseller Mind Over Medicine, has sold over 300,000 copies in 28 languages.
In addition to putting in her 100,000 hours and writing every day, in 2012, Lissa founded the Whole Health Medicine Institute, where she and a team of luminary faculty train physicians and other health care providers about “Whole Health” and the “6 Steps to Healing Yourself.” Lissa has starred in two National Public Television specials, her TEDx talks have been viewed over 5 million times, and she leads workshops, both online and at retreat centers like Esalen, 1440, Omega, and Kripalu.
Her latest health equity project is non-profit work committed to democratizing trauma healing and spiritual healing while eliminating the public health epidemic of loneliness, bringing Internal Family Systems and other healing modalities out of its current status as a luxury good to anyone who needs it and is open to it, regardless of socioeconomic status, race, or gender identity.
Lissa lives bicoastally, half time in the San Francisco Bay Area with her daughter Mira, who is also a writer, and her puppy Gaia, who would tell great stories if only she knew how- and half time in Cape Cod with her partner Jeffrey Rediger, author of CURED, who is currently working on his own memoir-writing therapeutic journey.
About Jeff Rediger, MD, MDiv
Jeffrey Rediger MD, MDiv, is a best-selling author, a licensed physician and psychiatrist, and on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. He was the medical director of McLean SE and Community Affairs at McLean Hospital in Boston for 22 years, and concurrently for many years also the Chief of Behavioral Medicine at Good Samaritan Medical Center. In addition to his medical and psychiatric training, he has a Master of Divinity in theology and philosophy of science from Princeton Theological Seminary. His investigations into remarkable recoveries from incurable or fatal illnesses have been featured on the Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Oz, and Anderson Cooper 360 shows, among others.
He has been nominated for the National Bravewell Leadership Award and has received many awards for leadership and patient care. His best-selling book, Cured: Strengthen Your Immune System and Heal Your Life, has been published in 22 languages so far and is available at both local bookstores and online.
Jeff is excited to participate in this class because the topic is very near and dear to his heart on a personal level. Having just survived a devastating series of traumas during the pandemic that caused him to rethink how he'd been living his life and the priorities he'd been putting first, he just took a leap of faith, stepped down as medical director at Harvard's Mclean SE into the uncertainty of his next creative career choices, sold his home in Boston, moved to California after decades on the East Coast, started aggressive trauma treatment, signed a book deal so he can write about what happened to him and make good use of everything he's learning in his trauma recovery, and is actively reviewing his life in order to reorient his future. He's motivated to co-teach this class in order to help people who might be stuck and in denial about how their lives are going so far live more authentically and do what's within your power to accomplish your dreams.
Frequently Asked Questions:
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Please contact us by sending an email to support@lissarankin.com
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