FACILITATORS
This work is nervous system regulation, in practice.
At Contrast, we believe stress and bliss are part of life. The practice is to observe the changing nature of these experiences without getting identified with them.
How our mind approaches this depends on how well we have been training. The process of losing ourselves and coming back – over and over again.
Contrast sessions are a training ground for your mind and body. What you practice in these isolated sessions, will give forward to a new awareness, a new way of being. It doesn’t end with the session, it begins when you leave.
At Contrast, we are in the business of training facilitators who undrestand the necessity of this work in our modern life. Taking refuge to an ancient ritual and share it’s primal solutions for an increasingly digital world.
Heat and Cold teach us about comfort and discomfort and the space in between. We teach our facilitators how to go to the edges and learn to soften with composure. To begin again with breath. To re-center at the center of stress. To become proficient with change. To become practitioners first before embarking on the opportunity to help another.
Because helping one another is the highest human act in practice.
Contrast Certified
Interested to be a facilitator?
There's a moment in every session, right before someone steps into the cold, or chooses to stay one more breath in the heat where something shifts. That's the work. Not the sauna, not the plunge. The threshold itself.
We're looking for people who can hold that moment for others.
WHAT THIS ROLE ACTUALLY IS
A Facilitator at Contrast isn't a class instructor and isn't a wellness-industry hype person. You're someone trained to sit inside heat and cold with a room full of strangers and turn it into something real — sometimes through music, scent, and Aufguss/Saunagus ritual (we call this format Spark), sometimes through nothing but your own steadiness and the silence you protect (Settle, our original and still-signature form of the practice).
Both formats come from the same root: meditation, yoga, breathwork, Buddhist psychology, somatic and trauma-informed training. That root matters more to us than performance energy. We'd rather you underdo it and stay present than overdo it and lose the room.
A TYPICAL SESSION
You'll run sessions solo or alongside a co-facilitator, moving a small group through rounds of heat, cold, and stillness. Before doors open, that means dialing in music playlist, prepping scent, prepping the space. During the session, it means reading the room — is this group craving activation, or do they need you to disappear into the background so they can hear themselves think? After, it means resetting the space and, just as often, staying to talk with the people who linger.
Outside of scheduled sessions, we expect you to actually be part of this community — attending classes, building relationships, showing up as more than a shift worker. That's not extra credit. That's the job.
WHO WE'RE HOPING TO FIND
Someone with real training in meditation, yoga, pilates, breathwork, dance, martial arts, or somatic movement — not just a certificate, an embodied practice
CPR/AED certified, or willing to get certified (we'll cover it)
No prior Aufguss, Saungus or essential-oil experience required — we train that ourselves, using our own Urtegaarden/Dottera/Essential Oil Wizardry library
A nervous system steady enough to hold other people's discomfort without rushing to fix it
Comfortable with early mornings, late nights, weekends — the hours nobody else wants are often when this work matters most
Physically up for standing, kneeling, lifting, and moving between temperature extremes for a full shift
Punctual, detail-oriented, and genuinely drawn to this practice — we can tell the difference between someone who wants a wellness job and someone who wants this one
HOW YOU GET HERE
Every Facilitator goes through Contrast's own training — the physiology of heat and cold, breathwork technique, scent and ritual craft, and the harder-to-teach part: how to lead a silent room, read consent, and hold space without performing. Training ends in an audition. We're deliberately selective about who joins the roster.
PAY AND PERKS
Compensation: $50-100 base + per head model or Hourly $25-$50
Beyond pay, Facilitators get free access to Contrast spaces outside working hours, guest passes for the sessions they lead, early access to day-trip and retreat programming, and a front-row seat as we build toward a permanent home base here in San Francisco.
WHERE THIS IS GOING
Contrast didn't start as a business — it started as garden sauna sessions in a Corona Heights backyard, built one session at a time until it became a practice with over a two hundred guided classes behind it. We're now building toward permanent space and a certified cohort of facilitators who can carry this forward with us. If that's the thing you've been looking for, we want to hear from you.