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.

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Altared States: A Body Electric Sunday Workshop

Since the arrival of Covid, the New Body Electric School has offered online presentations by community members on Sunday evenings. I'm delighted to be leading one this week, on May 31.

Now, maybe more than ever, we need visible personal reminders of what sustains our lives—people we love, experiences that have shaped us, values we hold dear, images of the Divine that speak to our souls. Identifying our own sacred objects and arranging them together in a sacred space can bring comfort, insight, and deep satisfaction.

This is a good time to put some creative energy and imagination into building a personal altar. Think of this session as a Ritual Tupperware Party. We’ll talk with each other about our sacred objects. We’ll share ideas (and previous experiences) for creating an altar that expresses your Truth in visible form and helps you listen more deeply to your Life. We’ll model embodied practices that can help us hold body and spirit together.

Please bring to the session an object that you consider sacred, or which carries important personal meaning for you. We'll share these with each other in breakout groups. And please have a bell with you and a candle to light.

You can register for the Zoom session, which begins at 8 p.m. EDT, here.

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Dreaming the Beloved Community

In this strange time when Zoom is the best we've got and almost all community is virtual, at least we can dream. Maybe one of the best things we can do while the routine forms of daily life are out of the question is to put some added energy into imagining the world we might want to live in instead.

What do you think of when you hear the word "utopia"? For some, it suggests sheer, unrealistic self-indulgence. But imagining a world into being that you've never seen can be the starting point of Gandhi's famous injunction: "You must be the change in the world that you want to see."

Utopian imagination can be what queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz calls a "forward-dawning, not-yet-conscious" awareness that we don't have to accept the world as it is. Other realities aren't necessarily unrealistic. They're just unrealized. Yet.

What world do you dream of living in? What would it look like? How would its citizens interact? How might queer men live together in loving, erotically accepting community? What could we build together? How could we go about the healing of our souls and the repair of the world? How might lives lived richly in acceptance, gratitude, and abundance awaken the wisdom and compassion that we're all capable of manifesting?

Give yourself time to dream. Write a story about this world of yours. Or draw a map. Describe its history and customs and rituals. Build a model of the temple or the assembly hall where the community gathers. Do all of those, and create a journal full of those dreams--as Tolkien did, year after year, with Middle Earth. Make it playful. Make it sexy. Fill it with passion and longing and conviction. Fill it with courage to resist injustice and oppression. Draw on the memory of what we created in the years leading up to Stonewall, in the years after Stonewall, in the years of fighting for queer lives in the middle of the AIDS pandemic, in the more recent years when we're still a despised minority in much of the world--and often in danger much closer to home. Honour the half-fulfilled potentials of those times. Cultivate those memories like precious seedlings that can grow into what is yet to be.

The future is queer. If we make it so.

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.