ABOUT CONSENT WIZARDRY
I’m Mia • Mission Statement • What People Are Saying • Press
The reason everyone listening to this should sign up for Unblocked right fucking now is because that broken narrative and the idea that there’s something that will fix me or save me and once I figure it out I’ll be set—it’s the one way we're ready to believe we’re exceptional: Like, I am the only artist in the world who struggles to make work for long periods of time. And Unblocked puts you in a room with 20 other people saying that same thing. So naturally, it's absolutely fucks over the idea that any one of us is alone in this. Just that, in and of itself, is so freeing. Being in this class brought me back to my belief in the inevitability of my art practice. I can trust my practice and myself so much more now.
—Sam
“I am so happy Mia Schachter found this work so helpful to them but they decided to share it so that others could use it not only for themselves but to teach others. The one thing I find hard about online classes is that teachers forget about the student’s safety, health, and capacity. Mia’s work addresses not only these issues through it’s overall content but Mia also walks their talk and what they teach. The classes create space for play, rest, openness, honesty, and acceptance while still being jam packed with useful knowledge that will open your mind and heart. Through Mia’s ability to embody what they teach, I could find my own clarity, confidence, and power to implement these teachings into my personal and professional life. I am so grateful!”
“As a sex coach, I wanted to participate in Mia’s Train the Trainer course in order to learn and then be able to teach their Yes/No Spectrum and Practice Saying No class to help people discover and confidently communicate their sexual desires. I love the simplicity of the tool and process and I appreciate Mia’s teaching style. Their combination of practical and theoretical/informational contributes to learning and the pace allowed for processing and integration of the concepts. They created a safe/brave space (e.g. through guidelines, expectations and the set up of the container) that was welcoming as well. They provided additional resources/homework that supplemented what was taught in class. I now have a simple, clear tool to add to my tool kit and how I support people in the work I do.”
“Mia is a patient and generous educator. The way they conceptualize consent is so rich and nuanced that, once you’ve encountered it, going back to a binary or reductive approach is inconceivable. It’s nothing short of a revelation. In [Unblocked], I found myself connecting with others around obstacles to creativity, and in so doing, I experienced increased lightness and ease around being creative. My expectations were met and exceeded as I found discussions on people pleasing, the inner critic, and perfectionism facilitated more comfort and confidence in my own creative aspirations and projects. The exercises, journalling prompts, and discussions enriched my creative practices and sparked self-reflection. For me, there is immense value in engaging with this approach to consent—for creativity and beyond—and I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone.”
“Before [the Boundaries + Consent for People Pleasers] class, I noticed myself saying I didn't want to do a specific thing, but then somehow I ended up doing it anyways. Thanks to the class, I got better at noticing when I really don't want to do the thing, and get more comfortable at saying No before I get into a situation where I might end up doing it anyways. I'm noticing and celebrating the small steps that lead me towards more noticing, more embodiment, and feeling more comfortable saying No. I also used to think I'm bad at noticing things in my body, and Mia was the first person to actually give me helpful instructions and pointers towards working through that. And now, lots of things are falling into place, and I feel like I'm on a great trajectory towards getting what I want and spending less time feeling bad about myself or forcing myself into things I don't want to do.”
— Reese
“The Consent Mini pulled back the curtain on consent and showed me how conscious consent practices can be applied to a wide range of relationships and social contexts (including our relationships with ourselves). I feel like I have a brand new toolkit for navigating and naming feelings that would have otherwise gone unexamined.”
I have been following your account for a couple years now, took a consent class last year and I also have one of your workbooks.
I've been learning so much from you and your collaborators in that time but struggled to put it into practice. The last couple months I have actually been able to turn down people's requests without excessive qualification.
I've made so much progress in the last year by applying the practices you teach and my relationships to others and myself has improved more in this time than ever before, moreso even than when I saw a therapist every week.
It's really changed my life and given me a way to heal from past trauma. I feel like a person with real agency and confidence.
Thank you so much for the work you do! I'm so grateful to have found it.
“Learning about consent felt like solving one of life’s great mysteries. Why do I feel uncomfortable with some people and not with others? Why do some moments, some interactions, feel good and others bad? All contact boils down to people wanting things from each other. That I knew. But consent and boundary work helped me see the matrix, and they continue to help me move through my life with greater ease. They help me understand why people treat me the way they do. They make me feel safer asking for what I want and need. They allow me to take accountability and to take things less personally when I make a mistake by breaching someone else’s boundaries. It is one of those very rare, life-changing, consciousness-raising kinds of lessons. ”
“I have been in therapy for ten years and Codependents Anonymous for one year. Both of these things gave me the conceptual framework to understand why my life was continuously dysfunctional, but I still found myself in a dysfunctional space. I felt that I didn’t deserve to be close to others when I couldn’t get a grasp on my own dysfunction. When I started working with Mia, that is when my life changed significantly for the better because they offered the actual tools and skills I needed to understand my own needs, meet them for myself, and interact with others in a healthy way through consent and boundary setting. I find myself practicing these tools and skills every day, in all facets of my life and feel a stability that is more secure than I’ve ever felt in my adult life because I’m able to set boundaries. I finally feel that I am deserving of giving and receiving love because of this stability and framework to care for myself and others. I would recommend these courses to everyone!”
-former student and private client
“Through this course, I was astonished to learn that I had been violating my own boundaries my whole life. It taught me to respect my own needs and form constructive and healthy boundaries. A life lesson that has significantly improved my mental health and one that I will never forget! ”
Mia's non-verbal consent class was a unique exploration of the language of consent which highlighted a part of it that doesn't receive a lot of attention or emphasis elsewhere. Like in other classes I've taken with them, they facilitated the group with great care and skill, presenting the material in an approachable and engaging way.
This class helped answer questions that I and others have had about how we can practice listening to our own body's cues in order to better discern our boundaries. It also demonstrated how the practice of actively observing non-verbal expressions in others can help us to become more grounded and present with them while calming the preoccupations we might have with our own self-doubt or insecurity.
I did not expect to learn as much about my own self and behavior as I did about reading non-verbal cues in other people, and I'm so grateful for this insight. I've discovered new and unexpected things in every class I've taken with Mia so far, and I look forward to learning more from them and our classmates in the future!
-former student
“Mia aka Consent Wizard’s Non-Verbal Consent class was an invaluable learning opportunity to open myself to a deeper awareness and embodiment of diverse forms of consent. Mia is a generous and thoughtful guide using storytelling, dialogue, well paced community listening and reflection to open up new portals to vital consent life skills.”
When I first started working with Mia, I was at the end of a years-long road filled with many losses, grad school trauma, toxic work environment stress, an overwhelming family emergency, and of course the pandemic. My spirit was exhausted, my body held tension in places I wasn’t even aware of, and I was so inhibited that I lost my ability to use my voice and couldn’t even fully yawn. I was so afraid of people and disappointed in myself that I pulled away from everything: society, my work, my friends, and my family. I wanted to hide or cease to exist and I didn’t care if I ever got back out there. And then I found Mia, or maybe the universe showed them to me. Mia listened without judgement, gave guidance to unwind my tense body, created space to grieve, and showed me how to be kinder to myself. Mia believed in me when I had forgotten how to believe in myself. I started to relax, to release my grief, to learn, and to grow. And one day I had a thought to myself that I had never had before: I love you. The next time I visited my family, the magnitude of this transformation hit me. It was like I was awake for the first time in my life. I had been so trapped in my anxiety for so long that all I had been able to see was imagined cruelty and catastrophe. But now I am able to view the world more objectively. I can recognize patterns of behavior in myself and others that is understandable and navigable. I have an awareness of what I want and need and strategies for remaining safe enough to ask. I have found my voice and a desire to move forward. I have found an ability to imagine, create, and play that is so vital to my existence yet was impossible to access in my state of fear. I am alive again because of this work, and what is even more profound is that I want to be.
Thank you, Mia, for bringing me back to life.
-Sharon, private client and student
“If you are a human, you need to take [the 6-Week Boundaries + Consent] class. Mia creates a welcoming, inclusive environment to bring clarity and a deeper understanding of boundaries and consent. I had so many revelations that I wanted to plaster on billboards. You will come away from this class with invaluable language and frameworks to navigate every type of relationship: romantic, platonic, professional, familial, and more. I can’t wait for them to create Level 2!”
“I would not trade this experience for anything. Mia really helped me build tools for understanding feelings and boundaries as they relate to consent and then worked with me on embodying and building the confidence to actually ask for what I need. I 10/10 would do it again. I highly recommend working with them.”
“As a gender & sexual health professional this class was invaluable to me. Mia is a content expert and their insights and instruction created wonderful space for contribution and contemplation from all participants. Understanding consent can be nuanced and gray and messy, and Mia makes this journey easier to navigate. I learned new skills to bring with me into both my personal and professional life and will be thinking about what I learned in this course for many months to come.”
“Learning about consent has given me a lot of structure to work with. And in that way, has made a lot of my interactions more restful, and less anxious because I have some kind of framework to lean on where I can build a request, and I’m not inventing the language, and I’m not inventing the structure....I think the thing that’s most exciting thing that I’ve gotten from this work was something that I didn’t anticipate at all, which is food for creativity.”
I began Mia’s 6-week Boundaries & Consent course at a time when I felt ready to shift some detrimental relational patterns as well as grow a more embodied self-awareness and mindfulness practice. As a SWer of 5+ years and a person of multiple other intersected marginalized identities, I saw that I had become conditioned to survive in a constant cycle of burnout and exhaustion. I wanted to deconstruct my ingrained dynamics and thoughts in the hopes that I could gain some insight into how to break this cycle.
This course helped me to see how having awareness of and confidence about my boundaries is absolutely integral to me being able to accomplish the things I want to do in my life and build the kinds of nourishing relationships that I desire. Boundaries are so often difficult to discern, especially because they are so nuanced and unique to each person and even to each situation. I already knew that I had been conditioned to ignore my own boundaries in order to appease others, but I wanted to learn how my community, friends, family, and I could better mutually support each other in recognizing and respecting our needs and boundaries.
The work we did taught me how to begin to access my body and my boundaries again, to honor them in all of their complexities, to more confidently and genuinely communicate them to others, and to graciously receive when someone communicates theirs to me. Learning and applying what Mia taught in these classes has been so transformational for me. I am excited to continue practicing the language of consent, as well as developing a more intimate awareness of my boundaries, and I am so grateful to have learned tools that help me to access this embodied intuition more easily. Thank you, Mia, for facilitating our classes, and for holding space for me and my classmates to engage in this valuable healing work for ourselves and with each other.
-V.
I had no idea what to do with my work. I had been running an extremely small business into which I had never put my full attention, sitting in the car 10 to 15 hours per week, providing services to a very affluent and white demographic who did not truly appreciate what I offered, and drowning in the shame of not actively acknowledging my privilege or addressing the ways that oppressive systems work through me. I needed to change, but I was overwhelmed and anxious and did not know where to start. I began a long journey of self actualization and lifestyle reimagining and found along the way that, as I set firmer boundaries and became more authentically me, I was leaving some relationships behind and others were also choosing to let me go on without them. I became very lonely and a bit discouraged and needed help.
Being part of Mia's Consent Educator Course was like being welcomed into a magical guild of explorers; nourished with care; and embarking on a comprehensive growth inducing quest. I was taken under Mia's soft wizard robes and connected with others traveling on similar journeys. I found that I was accepted. For who I am. Without question. I was given a practical guide, resources, and guidance to develop skills. I was told I can do this and wrapped in warm genuine encouragement as I tried on new ways of being my professional self. The glimpses of my future self and work became more clear. I saw and experienced magic in my own life, discovered who I am, and embraced the idea that I am a being who can allow magic to flow through me.
When I look for evidence that I have traveled, I see that I am developing curricula for new service offerings, practicing with a group of people every week, continuing to engage in practices of play and learning, and collaborating with designers to develop an artistic direction for a new entrepreneurial endeavor. I have a new business name and I found more clear and effective ways to title my role and describe what I do. I have new clients who are fully on board with what I offer and who validate the ideas that form the foundation of my work. I have a network of other magical beings with whom I can continue to grow and I have strategies to keep developing skills in asking for help, remaining regulated, and advocating for myself and others. I am so grateful for the opportunity to have been a part of Mia's Consent Educator Course; it was an extremely significant component of my journey and something that has contributed to a strong foundation for a much healthier life.
—Sharon, founder of Human Canine Collaborative
“After Mia’s Consent + Your Business class, I felt confident about the development of my business. It affirmed that moving at my own pace and making offerings from a spiritually secure place makes me the boss I want to be as I develop a business which intends to operate outside of a capitalist pace of production”
“I signed up for the class as I have a lot of anxiety around setting boundaries and advocating for myself (thinking people will push me away), and honestly, I have trouble knowing what I actually want in certain situations too. I normally defer to other people's needs, believing that will make them happy. Because of this, I’ve found myself becoming passive in some of my relationships. I didn’t know how effective the class would be, as I’ve always struggled with this and have found it scary to overcome.
Through clear information, exercises, and discussions, I was able to understand why I act the way I do, and practice actions that are scary to me (just saying no to something without any follow up explanation or apology). The class has been a real breakthrough for me — I’m finding myself changing my actions, and being able to show up for myself and others. Not only do I have the tools now to slow down and work out what I want from certain situations, I'm less anxious, and feel more comfortable opening up and being vulnerable and sharing more of who I am.
I’m excited to take the tools and ideas I’ve learnt and continue to grow.
Thank you Mia, and everyone else that was part of the class.”
— Rob
“I signed up for this course because I’ve been following Mia’s offerings for over a year (since I first found out about their practice through Meenadchi). When Consent for People Pleasers appeared, I literally paused and kept re-opening the email. Something spoke deeply to my core about how I wanted to engage and this was what I needed in this particular time. When encountering requests, I sometimes struggle to discern where I’m at on the yes-no spectrum (and what I want or even am willing to do or what I might offer or need so that I can provide a response). I have been actively working on staying present and curious with where I’m at and wanted a space to continue this journey. I anticipated that the course would be scary awesome. I did not anticipate how grateful I would be or how much I would look forward to the classes each week. Thank you. Thank you for helping me to learn how better to trust myself and heighten trust with my relations where they can better trust my word, by receiving my no’s, yes’s and pauses.”
“I chose to take the consent educator course because I felt like most of my coaching clients really needed this work, but because many of them were navigating a lot of trauma, they felt safer getting this education from me than another person. I am so grateful that I made the investment even though it was really scary for me at the time. I have used what I learned in every capacity of my work: as a sex coach, as a surrogate partner, and as a restorative practices facilitator. I especially loved some of the guest speakers and learning about how to market and manage a business. I am still in close touch with my cohort, and we use each other as a resource and that has been invaluable. I’m so grateful I chose to invest in this program and highly recommend it for anybody that feels it’s an alignment with their offerings. ”
“Through these classes I have grown a much more rounded picture of consent, self consent, and the systems and dynamics in place that impede our consent practices. I have been able to cultivate a self consent practice that has helped me listen to myself and my boundaries, and in turn helped me to better hear others and their boundaries. I’ve deeply appreciated the class discussions and learning what different peoples’ consent and care practices look like. Thank you so much for compiling these resources and for facilitating these discussions. It’s been truly life changing.”