The Portal House X The Play Network Presents
❋Sunday Stories
*An Alternative to the Sunday Scaries
July 12 - October 4th | 2-4 pm Sundays | Free 99What to ExpectEach week, we build resilience in our inner worlds with community, storytelling, and art. Together, we playfully nudge the stories in our minds towards active, fertile ground for powerful change. We explore what stories are running the show. We ask what inner narratives/patterns/wounds are slowly eating away at your vital life force?
2:00 - 2:15 We open with optional play prompts that poke fun at the way we each take ourselves and our problems too seriously. In reality, my problem is your problem. Just about every flavor of doom story we have in our minds has been circling in the collective for millennia. This series names it and shifts the narrative.
2:15-3:00 We tell our inner stories from the week (ex I’ll never be able to own a brick and mortar business because I’ve had 3 unsuccessful online businesses and I’ll never be successful meh meh meh) and then we take turns sharing each other’s stories from an outside perspective, imago style.
3:00 - 3:30 The final 30 minutes are for open creative play. We’re not trying to create anything “good” or even “of use”. We’re practicing transmuting the wounding of our stories into art by creating without an agenda. We paint, we sing, we write, we giggle, we cry.
3:45-4:00 Final thoughts, takeaways, circle closes
Goal: We build community by learning to identify inner patterns together in a way that creates freshness with play, active listening, and art.
❋ Intentional StructureWe blend guided moments, open exploration, and space to reflect, so the experience feels both focused and fluid.
❋ Collaborative EnergyConnection is a core part of the process. You’ll learn just as much from the group as from the content itself.
❋ Experimental FacilitationWe experiment with what has worked to help us get free: play, storytelling, art, and loosening our grip on the flow of life.
❋ A Supportive SpaceOur events prioritize play, authenticity, and respect. Show up as you are and be open to a narrative shift that might just change your mind.
Transmutation is our muse.Play is the movement.
Natalie Kinsey
Founder | The Play Network
Natalie Kinsey built her first intentional community at twenty-two. The motive, then and for years afterward, was plain: a single mother unserved by the institutions meant to hold a family like hers, she made the thing she needed instead, a place where children could live and bloom alongside each other rather than be parceled out and managed. She had no language for it yet. She was finding out in real time what makes a small human ecosystem hold, learning by building that the inner life of a person and the outer shape of a community are not two problems but one, each feeding or starving the other. The islands of coherence she would later find a physicist's word for, she was already living inside, because she'd had to make them by hand.
That necessity became a practice, and the practice became more than twenty years of the same work under changing names. She trained as a play facilitator and has run playshops professionally for two decades, mentored by Bernie DeKoven, the father of play, and a collaborator with him in the last years of his life. She has been a family and group coach across those same twenty years, has founded and lived in intentional communities the whole time, and built projects like Travel by Yes and Ten Million True, which sent a million appreciative love letters around the world before it grew into the next thing. Each one kept her deliberately on the fringe, out of enmeshment and out of reach of the status quo, close enough to the edge to feel the next thing forming before it had a name.
The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies made a film about the work, The Play Doctor, produced by Chloe Prasinos, that ran in The Atlantic. AARP featured her in an issue on play.
Collapse-awareness came later. For most of those twenty years she wasn't thinking about civilizational phase transitions; she was learning, in actual rooms with actual people, what makes a community real instead of performed, what makes play genuine instead of organized, what makes a group repair itself instead of fracture. Then the larger frame arrived and named what all of it had been for. The architecture she'd spent two decades building was already standing when the world began to need it.
Then the ground moved. When Helene tore through Western North Carolina, the communities built through this work didn't scatter. They organized, fed people, held each other through it. What had looked from the outside like play and philosophy turned out to be infrastructure.
She is a poet by first instinct, which is to say she treats language as the last tool we have against our own numbness, and precision in a sentence as a form of survival. She holds two master's degrees in English, is a mother of four and grandmother of two, has studied with Sadhguru for years, and works with the Gene Keys as a living instrument rather than a personality system. Her incarnation cross is the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix, and she reads the 2027 shift it points toward not as a prophecy to fear but as the one she's been preparing for.
The Greening is that same work grown to the size of a movement: islands of coherence, still made by hand.
Casey Urban
Founder | The Portal House
Before yoga, before theater, before motherhood, before The Portal House, there was play. Casey Urban found it early and instinctively, transforming ordinary objects into stages and stories, discovering that imagination wasn't an escape from reality—it was a way of meeting it more fully.
By five she was performing in community theater. By eight she was dancing four or five days a week. At twelve she joined a professional touring production of A Christmas Carol, later attending a performing arts high school where she studied theater and dance. Looking back, the throughline wasn't performance itself. It was an enduring curiosity about what allows people to feel fully alive—in their bodies, in relationship, and in community. That question would shape every chapter that followed.
Life, however, had other plans.
An eating disorder, multiple forms of trauma, and addiction pulled her away from performance and into a long search for another way of belonging inside her own body. She studied anthropology at the The University of Texas at Austin, less because she intended to become an anthropologist than because she wanted to understand what makes people who they are and the communities they create.
Movement became both her refuge and her laboratory. Beginning with Bikram Yoga teacher training in 2008 and Dharma Yoga teacher training in 2013, Casey spent more than a decade exploring embodiment through teaching, facilitation, and recovery work. Between 2017 and 2018, she created and led Body Love Workshops in Chicago, New York, and Phoenix, blending movement, education, and honest conversation to help people build healthier relationships with food, body image, and themselves. Around the same time, her work was featured in Lifetime magazine for its approach to body image and eating disorder awareness. Alongside this work, she spent nearly a decade as a flight attendant, quietly learning another form of facilitation: how to help people feel safe while everything around them is in motion.
The thread running through all of it was never yoga, aviation, or performance. It was creating the conditions for people to soften enough to become more fully themselves.
A near-death experience in 2021 returned Casey to art with unmistakable clarity. What followed unfolded quickly: she won first place in a semi-professional pole competition, toured nationally with Snoop Dogg in 2022 as a pole performer, began writing and performing original music, and ultimately created Favorite Lover, a one-woman show weaving together memoir, storytelling, movement, and song. Premiering in New York City as a fundraiser for the Lilith Fund, the work later traveled to the Reykjavík Fringe Festival and the Richmond Fringe Festival. More than a return to performance, it was a return to the language she had been speaking since childhood.
Today, Casey's work lives at the intersection of creativity, embodiment, motherhood, and community. Through performance, workshops, and The Portal House, she creates spaces where people can reconnect with their imagination and one another. She believes creativity isn't a luxury reserved for the few—it's a deeply human capacity that deserves to be nurtured, especially in seasons of change.