Twenty-two years ago, a Body Electric workshop changed my life for good.
One spring weekend in 2002, "Celebrating the Body Erotic" worked its indelible magic on my body, heart, and soul. Twenty-two men met one another as nervous strangers at 8:45 on Saturday morning. By 7 Sunday night, we were a band united and transformed in "the dear love of comrades," as Walt Whitman might well have put it.
I learned to breathe as though making friends with my lungs for the first time. I leaned to touch myself with a level of pleasure and unashamed abandon that I wish had been available to me--as it should have been--at my adolescent awakening over thirty years earlier. I learned to share those gifts with the men with whom I'd embarked on this two-day adventure. With astonishing speed and ease, we built for each other a space of safety and unconditional acceptance, where we could all flourish. We reached out to each other with delight and respect. I experienced, with a shattering intensity, the presence of the Sacred in my own body, and in the bodies of the other men who bared their souls and flesh. It left me weeping tears of joy, at the oddest and most upredictable moments, for weeks afterwards.
For forty years, the Body Electric School has offered a precious, life-giving vessel of deep erotic wisdom, a source of healing and growth, self-discovery and community. Its mission began amidst the physical, psychological, and spiritual trauma of the AIDS crisis. In the mid-1980's, founder Joseph Kramer extended a lifeline to men struggling to affirm the wholeness of their erotic selves in the face of that threat. Over the years, its programming has widened in scope to include workshops open to multiple genders and orientations--while continuing to offer single-gender workshops that provide safe space for men who need to do the work of erotic, emotional, and spiritual self-realization with one another.
The School's centre of gravity has always been in the US, and its presence in Canada limited by comparison. Celebrating the Body Erotic was last offered in Toronto in 2016. Happily, it will return there this fall, the weekend of November 22-24.
If you've never experienced the work of Body Electric, or if you're ready to return, and if you live within traveling distance, you couldn't spend a weekend in better service to your one wild and precious life.
