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, September 30, 2025

Seven Phallic Meditations

These seven meditations focus on gifts that mindful masturbation can bring to your life. Each one has its own mantra and mudra-stroke.

Some of the mudra-strokes work best with at least a partial erection, while others don't require it. If the gift of an erection isn't available to you, you can still recite the mantra and develop an alternative practice. For instance, you can practice the stroke with a ceremonial phallus or dildo.

Each of these strokes affords its own quality of touch. Don't short-circuit your awareness with ejaculation. Your experience of the meditation will need time to settle subconsciously. You can choose to ejaculate later.

Breathing in sync with the stroke is a good way to enhance your practice. As you go deeper, the words may drop away. If they do, keep on making sound as you exhale, and stay focused on the idea the mantra expresses. Allow your experience to develop organically. Don't try to control it.

To begin, you might choose to go through the cycle of seven meditations over a week, one each day for five to ten minutes. (If you set a timer, you won't be distracted from your practice by watching the clock.)

In a second week of practice, experiment with picking two or three of the meditations each day. Spend five minutes on each--that is, practicing for ten or fifteen minutes total.

After that, try spending five minutes a day on each of the seven meditations, either in one session of 35 minutes, or spaced through the day.

Eventually you'll be ready to vary your practice intuitively from day to day. Some of the meditations may resonate more deeply than others. Pay attention to what surprises you, what challenges you, what you learn.

1. Mantra: Exposed Tip of the Heart

Mudra: Place your thumb on top of your glans, and your third finger on the sulcus--the furrow--between your meatus and frenulum. Your second and fourth fingers are on either side of your cockhead. Massage gently, and at the same time circle your heart chakra with the fingertips of your other hand. You can widen the circles on your chest to include your nipples if they're wired.

2. Mantra: Sorcerer's Staff

Mudra: Your hands are in a modified prayer position around your cock: place the palms of your hands on either side of your cock, making a penis sandwich, with the tip of your glans slightly protruding between your thumbs. Gently move your hands back and forth, rolling your penis between them. Focus on the sensation of your fingertips and the heels of your hands meeting each other The stimulation of your cock is incidental to the stimulation your hands are giving each other.

3. Mantra: Ladder to Heaven

Mudra: Place the heel of one hand against the front of your ballsac, so that your fingers are free to lightly caress your perineum and inner thighs. Wrap the fingers of your other hand around your shaft, your little finger closest to the root. Stroke upward along the full length of your shaft and over your glans, then release. Return to the beginning position and repeat. Stroke only in the upward direction.

4. Mantra: Key to the Inner Temple

Mudra: The mudra-stroke is the same as Ladder to Heaven, except in the reverse direction, storking only in the downward and releasing before the repeat. Instead of climbing the ladder from earth to heaven, you're inserting the key into the lock. (With the third and fourth meditations, it's important to stroke only in one direction, in order not to fall into a habitual "pump and dump" stroke.)

5. Mantra: Antenna of Brotherhood

Mudra: Massage the tissues around the root with your fingertips, so that your penis waves freely back and forth without being directly touched.

6. Mantra: Taproot to the Earth

Mudra: Place your thumbs on top of your glans and your index fingers below your thumbs, on the underside of the glans. Align the tips of your middle, ring, and little fingers further along either side of your shaft, your little fingers near the root. Point your penis down toward the earth, and gently massage without shifting the position of your fingers. Imagine your symmetrically placed fingers are the feeder roots branching from your taproot, as your breath draws the power of the earth up through your cock into your body.

7. Mantra: Wish-Fulfilling Jewel

Mudra: Cradle your scrotum with one hand. Wrap your other hand around your shaft. Thumb and forefinger of the hand on your ballsac form a ring to create a gentle stretch, while the palm and other fingers of the hand cup your whole scrotum. Thumb and forefinger of the other hand are wrapped around the base of your cock; the little finger is nearest the head. Gently and slowly vary the pressure. This is the only active stimulation of your cock and balls. You may feel your heartbeat in your genitals. The erotic energy you raise with this mudra will remain diffuse. Focus on your breath spreading it throughout your body. This is a beautiful meditation waking in the morning or falling alseep at night.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings know deep peace.

Sunday, September 21, 2025

A Spiritual Practice

Saturday, September 13, 2025

Monks in Love

During my years as a professor of medieval literature, I spent a lot of time thinking about the history of sexual minorities in medieval Europe. It took me a long time to realize that, on the subject of same-sex desire and expression, I find what medieval authors don’t say–and how they don’t say it–even more fascinating than what they make clear. To recover the history of marginalized sexualities, you have to develop an ear for hints of what can't be expressed directly. In the library, just as out in the world, it’s the guesswork of cruising that’s often most engaging.

So it was more or less a foregone conclusion that I'd write two monks quietly in love with each into my novel about Norwich in 1413.

Medieval literature includes some spectacular denunciations of homosexual attraction and behavior. One of the best-known is Dante's depiction of the sodomites in the Seventh Circle of his Inferno. When a group of shades walks toward him across the burning plain (one of whom he recognizes, to his great surprise), he describes them approaching like men who squint at each other for signs of mutual recognition on the outskirts of Florence at dusk.

At the other end of the spectrum, little in medieval literature matches the astonishing positive descriptions of same-sex attraction in the writings of a twelfth-century English abbot, Aelred of Rievaulx. In multiple works, Aelred insisted on the love of individual monks for one another as a positive value, a vehicle of spiritual growth, especially in his late treatise, On Spiritual Friendship, but also in his earlier work, The Mirror of Charity.

This flew in the face of widespread monastic suspicion of "particular friendship." Aelred doesn't condone homosexual activity: he makes it unequivocally clear that he condemns gay sex. (Or, to be a little more wary of the scruples of contemporary scholarship, "what we at present would describe as gay sex.") But his descriptions of men longing for one another in the bonds of charity are deeply eroticized--so much so that John Boswell in 1981 asserted that Aelred was undoubtedly gay. (Much to the pearl-clutching horror of conservative Catholic scholars, as well as of gay academics equally incensed by his apologia for medieval European Christianity.)

Aelred's openness to the the love of men for one another isn't just a modern misreading of his works. It earned him censure among his contemporaries as well. His writings bear traces of his own defensiveness against detractors.

Likewise, my two monks' chaste devotion to each other isn't lost on those around them who are ready to cast aspersions. As gay people have done for so long--as gay people are still forced to do in so many places, around the world, but increasingly as well in the United States--they're flying under the radar. (To use a very anachronistic metaphor indeed.)

You can find my book at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Indigo, bookshop.org, and other online platforms.

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.