Anchorhold

Welcome to a space for the spirituality of gay and bisexual men. We have within ourselves the resources for our healing, liberation, and growth. Connecting with each other, we encounter the grace to lay hold of a richer, juicier life. Losing ourselves in deep play, we rediscover the bigger, freer, more joyous selves we're capable of becoming. Here I share my interest in personal and communal ritual, making art that expresses my inner life, and an intentional practice of erotic spirituality.

Friday, August 17, 2018

Queer Utopias: Supple and Turbulent, Chapter Three

“My boyfriend-in-law,” I’d happily called Rajiv in those first heady months when we still thought we could make it work. On Saturday nights, we’d settle into a three-way snuggle with a bottle of wine and a movie. Then I’d kiss them goodnight as they left for Rajiv’s apartment and I went off in search of kindred spirits at the baths. It was bound to happen. The uncomplicated fun between them didn’t carry the baggage of what Jim and I hadn’t sorted through in ten years. I told Jim that I wished we could have found together what he was finding with Rajiv--but was glad he could find it with somebody. It seemed only fair. I was the one, after all, who’d opened Pandora’s Box.

I couldn't stop playing the "what if's" over in my head. I was the one who'd first wanted the freedom to explore, frustrated by how little seemed possible between Jim and me in bed. I was the one who took Pete's advice to go off for a week and learn erotic massage with forty guys on a mountain above the Napa wine country. There I discovered the long, slow sexual charge that took the top of my head off and left me euphoric and in love with the whole world for weeks. After that I saw no way of turning back. If I couldn't make that magic with Jim, then I had to find a way to make it on my own. I tried to take the quiet, stable domestic satisfactions of life with Jim for what they were. We made a perfect fit in the house and garden: moving around each other in the kitchen like pros; Jim happy to dig the flower beds I was happy to weed and water. But I'd find what I needed to feel fully alive somewhere else.

What if I hadn’t gone up that California mountain road? I still found myself asking, even though I knew I’d awakened again from the neck down only by getting to the top of it.

What if I hadn’t ended up by night in the arms of half a dozen of the guys I’d spent the day with, moving from one plateau of unashamed, open-hearted pleasure to the next?

What if the sex I had with them hadn’t been so shatteringly gorgeous?

What if I hadn’t told Jim I needed other men in my life? What if our first threesome, that seemed at the time like such a perfect initiation into a new stage of our life together, hadn’t turned out to be the beginning of the end?

What if I hadn't encouraged Jim to give New Age Slut Camp a try for himself, and he hadn't met Rajiv, on top of a massage table, glistening with oil and writhing in pleasure? What if Rajiv hadn't turned out to live a twenty-minute walk from us back at home?

And who wouldn’t fall for Rajiv? I asked myself. Eyes like the ocean at midnight, biceps that rippled under skin like polished chestnuts, a stark ebony beard, a smile that lit up a room, and the laughing, playful streak of a guy with twenty years’ less mileage on him than any of the rest of us.

Finally: what if all our lives hadn’t gotten bound up with the end of Pete’s? But that part of the story comes later.

“What if” was killing me slowly, leaching my confidence about everything that had seemed so right in my life for two years, shutting down the future as fast as fast as I tried to embrace it, despite regret and loss and a rising, corrosive tide of self-pity. But then, if joy and loss hadn’t turned out to be two sides of the same coin, I would never have found myself below a Tennessee woodland waterfall with these men. That was the price of the ticket, it had turned out, for each of us.

“Where did you go?” Billy asked me as we climbed out of the pool and gathered up the clothes we weren’t going to have much need of for the rest of the day.

"The usual," I said. He'd already heard the story too many times. Telling him again wasn't going to help me get free of it.

“I figured. Just give them a wide birth if you need to. It’s not fair to you or them if you can’t hack it. It’s not like there aren’t enough of us to distract all three of you from each other.” He reached for my nipple. I turned ticklish and giggling as he chased me back up the slope to the deck.

No comments:

Sacred Intimacy: Companionship in Spiritual and Erotic Healing

Different practitioners use the term "Sacred Intimacy" to mean different things. It's important to remember that Sacred Intimacy work is different from therapy, and can't replace therapy. I'm not a therapist. I don't claim to offer services in any officially regulated modality. (Some Sacred Intimates are also practicing therapists, but they're clear with themselves and with clients which modality they're working in.) Put simply, I offer heart-centered companionship and deep listening.

For me, first and foremost, Sacred Intimacy means that what passes between us is holy. It's filled and enlivened with the presence of the Divine. I will do my best to be as present to you, as available to you for your good, as I'm capable of being. My intention is to be open to working in whatever modality we agree will be helpful to you. A session begins with a short conversation in which you explain to me where you're at, and what you hope to take away from our time together.

The emphasis is on healing, growth, and the expansion of your life. You may, for example, have issues of erotic shame that you want to work on, or grief, or body image, or intimacy. I may ask for clarifications and make suggestions. Together we agree on the starting point for the experiential work that will follow.

A session might unfold through breathwork, guided meditation, bodywork, intentionally focused erotic interaction, creative movement, the shared creation of ritual, artistic practice, psychodynamic role playing, or some combination.

I can't hope to be of service to you unless I feel competent in the role I assume, and unless I have the sense that what we do has potential to help you move forward with your declared intention. So our initial conversation may involve some give and take around what's possible and what's useful.

It's essential for your integrity and mine that we maintain full confidentiality and respect one another's boundaries. We enter into sacred space together at the beginning of a session. We leave sacred space at the end, and what's happened within the safe container of the session remains distinct from any interactions we might have before or after the session. What happens in the session stays in the session.

Every Sacred Intimate has his own understanding of the nature of his work. Just below you'll find a series of links to the web pages of a number of Sacred Intimates working in various cities and areas.

Finding Yourself, Claiming Yourself

I invite you to celebrate who you are, and who you want to become.

Think of the times your life as a gay or bisexual man has flowed without effort.

Think of the times you’ve struggled to lay hold of your life more fully.

Maybe those times feel like opposites. But they’re parts of a single cycle: sowing and harvest, labor and rest, preparation and enjoyment. We can’t work toward a fuller life unless we already feel some trust that life will rise up to meet us. We can’t sink deeper into our present joy and satisfaction in life without being reminded that it took a long journey to get here.

Please join me in considering a place where the two halves of this cycle come together: in the safe, empowering container of ritual space and ritual time.

What's an Anchorhold?

For centuries in Europe, a handful of men and women took a vow to devote themselves to the cultivation of their inner lives and to make themselves radically available to their communities for spiritual counsel. Committing themselves to remaining in a single dwelling for the rest of their lives, they were known as anchorites; the houses in which they lived were their anchorholds. Those who needed what the official channels of the religious establishment couldn’t provide came to the anchorhold for conversation and support.

Neither priests nor monks, the spiritual practice of anchorites and their interaction with those who came to them fell outside formal control of the Church. As a result, religious authorities often viewed them with suspicion. One of the best known of these dropouts from ordinary social and religious norms was Julian of Norwich, a woman who had a near-death experience in 1373 and spent the rest of her life thinking about what it meant, for herself and for the world at large. The book she wrote about her revelation, the first in English that we know for sure was written in by a woman, is an astonishingly daring and original rethinking of Christian theology: a vision of a God in whom there is no wrath, who is both Father and Mother of Creation, and who will somehow, by a miracle beyond our ability to grasp, eventually effect the salvation of every living being.

Men and women of spirit who fell between the cracks, anchorites practiced what in its own way was a profoundly queer inner life, following the instincts of their own experience, flying under the radar of the powers that claimed to control access to the Divine.

Anchorhold

Friday, August 17, 2018

Queer Utopias: Supple and Turbulent, Chapter Three

No comments:

Post a Comment

Authorship