What It Is

Once Upon a Rasa is a facilitation-ready tool designed to support:

• Cooperative storytelling and world-building

• Embodied imagination and inquiry

• Relational choice-making and agency

• Collective reflection and meaning-making

The card game can be played seated or moving, indoors or outdoors, in silence or dialogue. It adapts to the needs, access requirements, and cultural contexts of the people gathered.

How It Works

Participants draw and respond to cards that prompt story elements, sensations, questions, and relational choices. The structure encourages people to listen, build, and respond—rather than dominate or resolve.

Facilitators may invite movement, gesture, drawing, or stillness as part of the storytelling process. The game can be played lightly and playfully, or held as a deeper reflective practice, depending on context.

There is no single way to play Once Upon a Rasa. The cards offer structure without prescribing outcomes, allowing each group to shape the experience together.

Who It’s For

Once Upon a Rasa can be used with:

• Community groups and cohorts

• Survivors and survivor-informed spaces

• Men’s work and gender-expansive groups

• Artists, cultural workers, and educators

• Intergenerational and family groups

• Organizations seeking relational, creative tools

No prior movement, storytelling, or facilitation experience is required for participants.

How It’s Been Used

Once Upon a Rasa has been used in a range of facilitated contexts, including:

• Survivor-informed gathering cycles

• Community healing and reflection spaces

• Creative and cultural worker cohorts

• Pilot programs exploring collective care and imagination

These uses represent examples, not limits. The tool is designed to travel across audiences and intentions.

Why a Game?

Games invite people into experience differently than conversation or instruction alone. A game creates a shared frame—one where curiosity, play, and choice are foregrounded, and where outcomes are not predetermined.

In Once Upon a Rasa, the game form helps:

• Lower the stakes of participation, making it easier to enter difficult or tender material

• Distribute agency, so no single voice or story dominates

• Encourage experimentation, imagination, and non-linear knowing

• Support consent, pacing, and choice through clear, external structure

Because the cards live outside the body, participants can relate to questions, images, and prompts with a bit of distance and freedom. This allows stories to emerge without pressure to explain, perform, or resolve.

The game is not about winning or fixing. It is a container for practicing how we listen, respond, and co-create meaning together.

Facilitated Use & Gathering Cycles

Moving Rasa offers facilitated Gathering Cycles that use Once Upon a Rasa as a core tool within a multi-session container. These cycles are adapted to specific communities and themes, and may include movement practices, shared reflection, and other Moving Rasa tools.

Learn more about Gathering Cycles and example applications [link to Gathering Cycles page].

Access & Care

Once Upon a Rasa is grounded in consent-centered, trauma-aware facilitation. The game can be adapted for:

• Seated or low-mobility participation

• Sensory sensitivity and pacing

• Language and communication access

Care is understood as a shared responsibility between facilitators and participants.

About Moving Rasa

Once Upon a Rasa was created by Moving Rasa, a movement-based framework and practice rooted in Southeast Asian concepts of rasa—the felt quality or essence of experience.

Moving Rasa works across movement, story, and cultural practice to support embodied agency, collective care, and relational ways of knowing.

Interested in Using Once Upon a Rasa?

• Explore facilitated Gathering Cycles

• Partner with Moving Rasa to bring the game to your community

• Learn about facilitation and training opportunities

[Contact us]

Click here for a 3 page PDF you can share with others about Once Upon a Rasa.