Wednesday 30 September 2009

Power, Intimacy and the experience of a structured Edward Carpenter Community Gay Men's Week



Ten years ago, within a few months of having moved to Brighton, a friend suggested that I should think about checking out The Edward Carpenter Community and getting up to the Gay Men's Retreat at Laurieston Hall in Dumfries. He thought it would be my kind of thing!

I didn’t know what he meant and hearing his description of what happened when he’d been there, I thought he might have misunderstood me. I was vehemently monogamous at the time and the idea of thrusting myself into a community of randy, intelligent, articulate men seemed to be unnecessarily putting myself in the way of temptation!

Four years later my partner gets ill and our sex life peters out. He feels rotten and tired out so doesn’t want to spoil the memory of the great sex we used to have together. I remain dedicated and stay, at least conceptually, devoted to a fidelity towards him. I keep reminding myself that this is what was meant by the ‘In sickness’ part of the promise grown up people make to each other when they unthinkingly really expect ‘In health’. I keep hoping the ailment will resolve and our sexual intimacy will be able to re-kindle. It doesn’t. We stop going on holidays because he can’t bear spoiling my enjoyment with his tiredness and frustration. I go off for a few lone holidays to get a break from his unhappiness but I don’t really enjoy myself. We get into the habit of having holidays in Brighton and Guy’s relentless fatigue begins gradually to relent. However our clubbing, pub-ing and partying social life became moribund and rapidly expired in the early years of illness as the fair weather friends scurried off to their next engagements. I ultimately enter a social purdah when my two remaining friends move from Brighton and relocate to London and Equador! I start a blog and make some virtual friends. During all of this I’m developing a sense of my spiritual self and realising that it’s no use waiting for some organized religion to provide me with any kind of meaningful support. I have an acute sense that our tribe is seriously lacking a connection to spirit. My ordeal is helping me to know this and is goading me into doing something about it! I get serious about writing and manage to get a regular column published in the local LGBT magazine.

This is the context as I’m racking my brain for what to do for my holiday in August/September 2009. A ‘gay spirit’ yahoo group listserv email enters my in-box describing a workshop entitled ‘The Dance Between Power and Intimacy’ run by Sunfire, the resident Spiritual Healer at Easton Mountain Retreat. It seems radically different in its approach to male intimacy, erotic touch and spirituality. I bemoan that this kind of thing only ever seems to happen in the US. Then, still wondering about what to do about holidays, I remember my friend’s suggestion about ECC and check out the website to see if I can tie my holiday in with a Laurieston week. And there it is again-this radical workshop is being run not in the States but at Laurieston Hall! I hesitate and realise that I was happy to imagine that I would be someone prepared to attend this workshop when it was out of reach but now it is within my grasp I begin to find excuses not to go. I remember my conversation about Laurieston with my friend and contact him to see if he’d be up for it. He admits he’d be nervous about getting his kit off and exploring his issues- and in any case his mum is seriously ill and he can’t commit. What to do?

I print off the application and write a cheque and then wait, hoping that maybe there aren’t enough applicants for it to run and it will be cancelled!

It isn’t cancelled and so in September I set off from Brighton in my little smart car on my pilgrimage to Dumfries.

What happens next is a kaleidoscopic cornucopia of happy images, experiences, memories and dreams. Laurieston is my kind of place. The ECC are my kind of people.

What did I find?

Open, genuine, authentic, subject-subject, relationships between good, honest men.

A good old fashioned socialist co-operative providing the sustenance and structure to our activities.

An enchanted sacred space.

Fun. Playfulness. Dressing up. Make-up. Naked wrestling. Fresh air.

Wise and caring facilitators. Chakra cleansing. Healthy scepticism. Affirmation in bucket loads. Thoughtful reflection about my predicaments and how I was dealing with them.

Onion skins of security provided by the community, the base groups, and the intimacy ritual groups.

Qigong seven pearls yoga every morning before breakfast

Mind blowing exercises exploring erotic love and its potential to provide a vehicle for spiritual enlightenment. (Really!)

A new take on bondage and spanking!

What did I learn?

I had developed a pattern of not letting people see the real me because I believed that it was a source of power to be the only one who knew my vulnerabilities. Letting go of this attitude and exposing my vulnerabilities is the route to authenticity and true intimacy.

I needed to stop my mental masturbation and remember that:

Action moves the doubt the theory cannot prove.

I needed to stop thinking I could predict what people would do or say in response to my honesty.

I’m essentially an OK person with an unrequited libido.

What happened next?

It’s just one week down the line and I’m still processing and assimilating it all. My man has been swept off his feet by the energy of it all. The spare room is now our temple of erotic love and we’re working on curing his illness through sexual healing. It’s turning out to be lots of fun.

So thank you Sunfire for bringing your wisdom to these shores. Thank-you Shokti and Vyvyan for inviting him and organising the week. Thank-you to the gang of guys who were brave enough to have a go and especially my base group and the boys in my ritual group.

You changed my life!

Friday 25 September 2009

The Spiritual Healing of Erotic Love


Last month GaySocrates went on his first ever Edward Carpenter Gay Men’s Weeks at Laurieston Hall.

It was a so-called ‘structured week’ which meant that in addition to the free and easy access to this amazing enchanted space, there was also a full programme of facilitated sessions allowing for an in depth exploration of a given theme. So there was seven days worth of walking in unspoilt Dumfries woodland, swimming in the pure water loch, body painting, dancing, naked wrestling, late night saunas. And weaving these activities together was our theme ‘The Dance Between Power and Intimacy’

Many of our facilitated sessions were led by Sunfire- the resident spiritual healer at Easton Mountain Sanctuary in the USA- and were based on the ‘Body Electric’ workshops run there. Through a series of guided techniques we grew in confidence with each other. We were able to hold each other as we explored our issues with spiritual enlightenment. We began to see how our preoccupations with power and proscribed eroticism interfere with a fulfilling life experience.

Within days, a disparate group of gay thirty- to sixty-somethings had become a spiritually connected, respectful, erotically intimate tribe of lovers; open to each other emotionally, physically and sexually. I learned for the first time how a group of gay men could be capable of deep intimate, brotherly affection for each other. And I was struck by the relative paucity of this kind of love in the outside world. I asked myself ‘What gets in the way of this kind of love spontaneously erupting in our everyday communities?’

The answer, I fear, is that we have lost our connection to Spirit. Throughout the generations, organised religion has persecuted the LGBT members of their congregations to the extent that most queer folk now have abandoned hope of ever finding a spiritual home for themselves. Starved of spiritual sustenance we have also been deprived of the wisdom of those who would have been our tribal elders. These men were taken from us unceremoniously by the AIDS scourge of the 1980s.

The Australian Aborigine tribes also lost their connection to Spirit. Their elders were slaughtered and their ancient connection to the earth was disrupted by relocation to remote settlements where they learned the sensual pleasures arising from alcohol intoxication, which they then passed to their children and their children’s children.

I see parallels with our own LGBT tribe. We need to rediscover our ancient connection to intimate erotic love through a rediscovery of our spiritual selves. We need to stop our mindless preoccupation with empty, meaningless sex of the ‘bad gay porn’ variety. This leads only to the appalling state of affairs where our elders unthinkingly infect our youth with chronic incurable illnesses for the sake of a moment of bareback pleasure.

It’s time to get radical. Rediscover and sustain your erotic spiritual selves and begin the spiritual healing required to save our tribe from obliteration!

Check out my blog: http://gaysocrates.blogspot.com

Email me at gaysocrates@gmail.com

Saturday 5 September 2009

32 Socrates was killed because he believed in the improvement of the soul


I’m reading The Apology of Socrates at the moment. It’s a dramatised version of a real event-the trial of Socrates, the outcome of which was his execution.

Socrates was openly gay [as was his pupil Plato]. He was accused of being a worshiper of false Gods and a corrupter of the youth of Athens. In his defence he states that the charges are trumped up by 3 of his enemies. He is an old man in his seventies and he acknowledges that he has made many enemies over the years but never deliberately. However in his quest for those who might be wiser than him, [and he, himself believed that he was in no way wise but the Oracle of Delphi had proclaimed him to be the wisest of all men], he has systematically debunked the pretended wisdom of those who have been willing to present themselves to his scrutiny. And none have taken kindly to the humiliation of the exercise!

He says that if the outcome of the trail is that he is released on condition that he should desist with his teaching then he would prefer to die

‘I shall never cease from…exhorting anyone whom I meet…saying…why do you…care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul which you never regard or heed at all?’

‘…Fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown, since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend as the greatest of evil, may not be the greatest good’

So what is this soul, the improvement of which Socrates was prepared to die for?

I had a discussion recently with a young friend of mine about the possibility that I might be reborn as a tree

:-)

He was exasperated that a sentient, intellectually able individual such as myself might believe in the concept of the soul. It was only after much coaxing and cajoling that he was prepared to say that IF it were possible to be reborn [and this was a massive IF, relying as it did on a totally irrational and fallacious concept], then he might like to be reborn as a whale! During our debate it was clear that he drew no distinction between his intellect/thinking and who he was as a being. He literally believed that He Thought Therefore He Was. ‘My thinking is my being’

I was trying to get him to explore what happens when thinking is ‘turned down’ as for instance during the act of meditation. What happens before the development of formal operational thinking in a young child?

For me there is a clear duality in my being –the thoughts that I have and the being that I am. The thoughts and actions I am engaged in may be tools of expression for my soul or may be a chattering distraction from who I am. To imagine that my thoughts and actions constitute who I am would be like saying that the computer VDU screen IS the computer and that when it is switched off the computer no longer exists!

Ok so my advice for this week- for the improvement of your soul- is to demonstrate to yourself fist of all that it exists. Experiment a little with your thoughts and see if you can just turn them down. Take some time out, maybe 5 or 10 minutes and say ‘I will see what happens when I let go of my thinking’. Make sure that you won’t be disturbed. Find somewhere to sit comfortably. Close your eyes and imagine a very large tree by the side of a gently flowing river. As a thought arises in your mind imagine that it is a leaf on the tree falling into the river and being carried away. Each new thought becomes a falling leaf and is carried away.

Now ask: Did you cease to exist just then or was your existence enhanced?