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.

Showing posts with label The Artist's Way. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Between Equinox and Solstice

Andrew and David and Nick and Robert: for twelve weeks, we’ve formed a community of four men, in long-distance covenant with one another to explore together Julia Cameron’s course-book in creative self-empowerment, The Artist’s Way. We agreed we’d keep the channel open by writing three unpremeditated, unedited and uncensored pages every morning, then setting them aside without critique. We’d take the child within out on a play-date every week–to a sculptor’s studio; to an open mic poetry reading; into the woods to build a delicate assembly of twigs and acorns; to a pet shop to find plants for a newly set up aquarium. We’d share our process and our creativity with one another via e-mail. Who knew, when at the Autumn Equinox we undertook to walk this path together, where it would lead us?

Here is some of what we have become in one another’s presence.

Nick Bovalino: Hope for Release

Andrew Graham: Earthyman

David Townsend: Wisdom

Robert Gross: Daedalus

Andrew: Drew Blur

Andrew: The Offering

Robert: Scribble

Nick: Crystalline

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Putting It Out There

I returned yesterday from four days at Easton Mountain, a retreat centre in upstate New York founded and maintained by a community of gay men as a gift to the world. There I attended the Body Electric School’s weekend workshop, “Art and Eros.”

The twenty of us who registered included professional artists, deeply accomplished amateurs, men whose creative life lies outside the visual arts, and men who hadn’t picked up a paint brush or pastel stick since grade school.

The late capitalist notion that everything is commodity has robbed us of our birthright: that we are all creative; that our creativity, as Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, might put it, flows forth from us in the image of the Power that created us. Art doesn’t count because someone else judges its quality. It counts because it puts the shape of our inner lives out there, visible to ourselves and visible to the world, where what we’ve produced can become the Other with which we enter into dialogue–and in so doing, address the work and adventure of repairing our souls. (Shown at left is Andrew Graham's fox avatar.)

And repair our souls we did, as men in a loving if temporary community, losing ourselves in the sheer kindergarten magic of making marks on paper, in high silliness, in tears, in outrageous flirtation, in moments of ecstatic abandon.

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.

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.