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.

A Spiritual Practice

 

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.

Holding Space for Phallic Reverence

In this guest post, Herne shares the story of how he came to hold space for "the beauty and raw power" of men's erotic ritual. As he says below, "What makes anything sacred is the intention to make it so." 

Herne is an initiate and teacher of the Unnamed Path, a pagan and shamanic tradition that works with the energetic current of men who love men. He practices an embodied spirituality and believes that authentic erotic connection can be deeply healing. You can contact him at HerneMtl@gmail.com, or through his profile on Bateworld.

Cock works in mysterious ways. 

And when we listen to its guidance, it can pull us into new discoveries. For me that has included stepping into the role of leader in cock worship sessions--something I didn't intentionally set out to do. Yet in being invited, things unfolded and evolved on their own. Much like the slow, inexorable swelling of an erection when it's pulled to something that excites us, there’s no denying the call.

Things started for me at a Montreal Jacks group masturbation event. In a room surrounded by men stroking, I exposed my bate and was seen in my practice of mindful and spiritually connected masturbation. I walk a shamanic path and commune with the horned gods of nature that embody unashamed erotic expression. So my bating is an offering and moment of immersion in this energy. It must have been palpable, because a few men around me felt the pulsing of this. The next day, a member reached out to me through Bateworld and invited me to lead a gathering of men in a mindful masturbation practice. 

And so I took on the role of a guide, creating ritual space for men to come together in brotherhood. At first I asked myself, who was I to assume such a role. I could feel myself going into performance mode, but I leaned into the current into which cock was guiding me and trusted the call. I saw myself not as an authority, but as a brother on the path, simply sharing with others what I had discovered. So doing, I could feel the desire from men who wanted to go deeper into their connection to cock and to their brothers.

It’s been a privilege to hold ritual space and welcome men in cock worship sessions--in large part simply setting the scene and creating the conditions for men to discover their own way of worshipping cock. I’ve learned that what makes anything sacred is the intention to make it so. So setting up a space with an altar that expresses appreciation of cock (a large phallus statue, cock rings, candles, popper bottles) is a good beginning. 

As men arrrive, we begin with a ritual of undressing and unveiling cock to self and others. There is a moment to release daily tensions and become more embodied--much of the time, so many of us live in our heads. I guide men to connect heart to cock and to begin charging their individual erotic energy. Then in a large circle we build the community of brothers and charge the container with our collective cock energy. I encourage mutual eye contact, seeing and being seen in our enjoyment of stroking. 

There is some form of prayer and gratitude that then trickles into the session as men are guided to say “Hail penis” or “Thank you penis” when waves of bliss overtake them. 

Through all this emerges the brotherhood: the simple, completely undefended bonding of men together, openly sharing a common experience. As we step into an integrated state of being, into connection within the self and with each other, healing happens. Bodies soften, stress and worries fall to the wayside. The primal magic of cock has full invitation to reveal itself. Beauty and raw power emerge in these moments--sometimes as vulnerability and tenderness; sometimes as the bestial parts of us allowed shameless expression at last.

I step back at this stage of the ritual into the role of sacred witness and allow things to unfold. My heart fills in seeing men shed their layers and come together authentically. And I've seen in my own life how this ripples out into the world and touches others. 

I'm amazed how simple it can be to shift into an expanded state of consciousness by going through phallus. I don’t think this experience has fully vanished from our modern world: echoes of phallic worship trace back in many cultures through time. More men are discovering this. The many mindful/tantric/spiritual masturbation groups on Bateworld demonstrate men's need for connection between the erotic and spirit.  

Cock has given me the profound gift of sharing this live, in person with other men. I’ve seen and experienced how the release of shame, being fully embodied, and connecting to brotherhood and something larger than us, benefits everyone. To those who feel called to experience this, I can only say, seek out the opportunities. Cock will lead the way.

Slouching Toward Dystopia

 This is not the cheeriest thing I've ever posted here. 

In George Orwell's 1984, the mottos on the towering government headquarters that loom over the city of London are 

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

...slogans that more or less encapuslate the spin that the Trump administration has put for the past six months on American public discourse.

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale seemed, when it was published forty years ago, an impossible theocratic nightmare. That is, until the Christian nationalists came out of the woodwork, a packed Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, natalists started bemoaning falling birthrates, and Moms for Liberty got down to the business of banning books from libraries.

It's sheer fantasy to imagine we've reached rock bottom. 

Insidiously, we've often been lured into thinking that the internet is the great leveller that democratizes public discourse, gives everyone a voice, and is essential to any means of resistance. Certainly, it's vastly extended the possibilities of connection for LGBTQ people. When we can't find each other down the street, we've found each other online. This blog, which I started fifteen years ago, is one small case in point. To my amazement, it's been visited nearly 300,000 times.

But what the internet has done for us, ultimately, is a sideshow. We don't control it. To a very real degree it's already controlling us. Increasingly, we imagine our lives as unthinkable, or at least vastly diminished, without access to it. What we've come to think of as a tool for liberation and protest can easily turn out to be a mechanism of surveillance. With the rise of out-of-control AI, we're facing  further erosion of critical thinking, and an accelerated landslide of disinformation masquerading as settled truth. In 1984, every home features a surveillance screen that broadcasts Big Brother directly into the living room. Uh, dude, we're more or less there.

Will reactionary forces come after blogs like this? Political advocacy websites? The web presence of community organizations? Online information about Pride festivals and NGOs that serve sexual minorities? 

There's no turning back from the transformation of information technology over the last forty years. But it's time to ask: if unconstrained, grass-roots access to the online world ended--and that's hardly unthinkable at this point--how can we continue to find each other? How can we go on creating community? How can we keep each other alive, and safe, and flourishing?

I have no solid answer to propose. But I know it's time to ask the question. How do we build community, how do we connect with each other, how do we preserve and foster queer men's culture, how do we sustain the memory of our past struggles and victories, apart from online access? If we were to lose it, how do we imagine going on? 

Because go on we will, and must.

The gay and lesbian movements didn't build themselves online. Amidst the Lavender Scare of the 1950's, the Mattachine Society met in small, independent local cells modelled on the organizational tactics of the Communist Party, of which founder Harry Hay had formerly been a member. Early lesbian 'zines were typed a few carbon copies at a time. Leaflets and phone trees spread word of gatherings and protests. Nobody at Stonewall was texting from a cell phone.

I'm not suggesting that we can simply return to those dogged, against-all-odds analog tactics from sixty or seventy years ago. But we can witness in them the resilience and resourcefulness that we manifested at another time when the arc of history showed no immediate sign of bending towards justice. We can find inspiration for the courage and determination that we may have to muster once again in a neofascist America.

Noble Silence

(Friday, July 18)

At the San Francisco Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm these few days I'm here, I eat breakfast amidst a community sitting in silence. I haven't received such a gift in a long time, immersed in the sweetness of the experience.

The silence isn't an absence. It's the womb of possibility. I'm invited to protect it for the sake of everyone else in the room. They protect it for one other, and for me, whom they've never met and likely won't see again. We all protect it for the sake of the silence itself.

As I sit here with a dear friend, I look out the window to the trunk of a coastal redwood, its bark a deeply scored record of decades and centuries. Its life unhampered by the prison of identity. Its roots buried deeply and invisibly in the earth, reaching out to communicate wordlessly with the roots of other living beings.

Contemplating its trunk, I remember my grandmother living on the edge of poverty in the 1920's and 30's with a family of seven children, yet somehow scraping together donations for conservation of the redwoods that she never saw.

This tree's roots somehow reach out to embrace my grandmother, to migrate and transmute her life into its life. She's become the tree, rooted here just outside the room where I'm starting my day, 2500 miles from where she's buried. Visible only because of the silence. 

When communal silence is reframed--when it no longer seems an arbitrary discipline but instead something we all tend lovingly and reverently together--a space of unpredictable magic opens up.

Finding the Language

I want to live in the faith that we're on the verge of something new among men creating erotic ritual community togoether.

It's been building for decades: among Radical Faeries, at queer retreat centres, in groups like the Billies and Gay Spirit Visions. On the rare website like Bateworld that feels like genuine online community. On blogs like this. Sometimes we draw on the resources of existing traditions; sometimes we create new forms and structures more or less from scratch. The emerging variety is wondrous. 

At some point, experimentation starts coalescing into continuity. Repetition creates familiar patterns and confirms expectations. We move toward consensus about what brings us together, what we value, what we reverence. Every time we gather, actions become more familiar. Every time we gather, what they mean to us changes. What they mean to you may be different from what they mean to me. The ritual is the container in which all this can flourish spontaneously--essential, but not an end it itself. 

None of it requires complete agreement. Our sense of belonging is based on things we do together, not necessarily on all of us understanding what we do in the same way.

Ritual is like a language. The objects we use in ritual are like its vocabulary: fire, water, earth; food and drink; bells, candles, incense, ritual garments; images, altars, mandalas. How we use them, what we do with them, follows a grammar that we perfect with practice. Formulas of greeting and beginning, formulas of completion and departure. Rituals of initiation; of membership in community; of gratitude; of mourning; of renunciation; of remembrance.

Before any such language is there to be learned, it has to be made up and then consolidated in the first place. This has always been true, in the case of every spriitual tradition, no matter how ancient, no matter how established. Now, it's emerging among men who feel called to reverence the sacred, transformative power of our erotic pleasure and of our desire for one another. We've been inventing the language for a long time now. We're more than ready to speak it to one another.

The internet has helped us find one another more easily, but the internet is not the magic. The magic is what we do--and did long before the electronic age. The magic is what we do in and with our bodies--together, weaving the webs of connection that transcend the isolation of the false self.

Yes, Over the Top. And I Love It

The trenchant satire of Aleksander Constantinoropolous, aka Virgin Monk Boy on Substack:

Modern wellness culture has achieved the impossible: it has fused quantum mechanics with kale.

What once began as a sincere desire to feel less like a walking cortisol ad has now metastasized into a full-blown industrial complex with the aesthetic of a Whole Foods altar and the pricing of a small liberal arts college.

As a celibate monk who once accidentally biohacked his pineal gland by eating expired tofu, I feel qualified—nay, spiritually compelled—to address this.

Dear seeker, it’s time we talked about Rainbow Diets and Chakra Cleanses.

Or as I like to call it:
“Late-stage capitalism dressed in hemp pants.”