What do you think?

1. I commit to following Jesus.

Not interpretations of Jesus. Not the so-called Christian church. Not the Bible as a whole. And not any particular preacher. But Jesus. I cultivate a personal connection with Jesus via study, practice, and exploration. 

I believe Jesus’ words and actions are most wise and useful for a happy, healthy life and community. 

Through Jesus, we enjoy the abundant life. 

2. We believe, as Jesus said, that conventional notions of marriage, patriarchal fatherhood, and limited family living is incompatible with true happiness. 

3. We believe in the Church as a circle of believers, committed to following the principles of growth and love as taught, espoused, and exemplified by Jesus. 

4. We seek to expand both our circle of empathy and compassion and caring and action as widely as possible. 

5. We believe in community that seeks to meet the needs of all its members. 

6. We accept the body as a most beautiful gift and seek to enjoy it to its fullest. 

7. We need the support of others to grow and flourish as we wish. 

8. We seek to use God’s example and teaching to support one another in this growth. 

9. We seek honesty in finances, using our opportunities to join our resources for the growth and happiness and the abundant life of God’s goals. 

//

This represents our current draft.

1. You are free to teach or share anything that I have taught you, provided that you make arrangements with me to ask any questions that might come up.
2. Share the material with no more than 6 new people at once. This is for your protection.
3. Credit your teacher. This is to prevent anyone getting ‘stranded’ in the teaching.
4. Generally, courses and workshops will be recorded and rebroadcast/sold. You will be required to sign a release for any of these.

What we will prove here:

1. The purpose of all relating (communication/sensual interaction) is to meet human needs. – Self-evident
2. Community was previously a support for meeting needs within traditional couple relationships and many other forms of relating as well. (Through religion, society, etc.)
   
3. Community is either absent or rapidly disappearing for many people. (Displacement, breakdown of religious of societal structures).
4. The “State” is currently performing many of the functions that were previously fulfilled by community, in a much less effective way. (Morality of state: CPS, ‘Divorce Court”…all enforced via violence.)
5. Conventional dating doesn’t work, primarily because of the death of meaningful community. (Lack of context/structure, responsibility) It devolves into manipulation from one or both sides at some point.
6. Many needs which are best fulfilled in community are currently being offloaded to the new (failed?) invention of the 1930’s-50’s: the ‘Nuclear’ family.
7. Pressures on the nuclear family lacking community support almost always doom it to failure, regardless of whether it continues or not.
8. The outcome of dating, even if “successful” is often extremely hazardous with only the State as arbiter of the relationship (and the third party to it).
9. Many of the needs seeking fulfillment in sexual and romantic relating can actually best be met in community (security with freedom, creativity, etc)
10. Restoration of structured community is our best bet for meeting more needs.
11. More people = more resources to meet needs.
12. In addition, communities of the future can take more responsibility for meeting needs of participants. Survival and safety being less urgent, more energy can be spent on ‘higher-level’ needs.
13. Sensual, sexual, erotic, and intimate needs of people can be met in community.

We are dedicated to creating a sex/sensuality/intimacy-positive, friendly, open community.

Sexuality is one of, if not the driving force of humankind

In a community like this, we don’t shy away from, or run from sexual interaction.

The body is seen as sacred and beautiful, and we don’t fear it being used or abused by others. We create a safe context for sexual, sensual, and intimate interaction.

This does not necessarily mean that we allow every possible sexual interaction that anyone ever wants to have with us, but within the community that we encourage expressions and connection through sexuality.

The key to all these interactions is, first, to see sex and sexuality as energy and energetic exchange.

If the energy of sex and sexuality does not flow freely, there will be a limit to energy within the system that has manifested the sickness of the world you see around you.

This shows up as physical and psychological illness within humans. Environmental degradation and destruction. War and strife. Competition and division within communities, families, and individuals.

Hunger, poverty, economic inequality, gender and race strife, and every other issue that faces humanity comes from a fundamental lack of flow of basic energies including sexuality.

If you would shift that world, you must allow energy to flow freely within and through you.

In our interaction, the only things that we can do to serve us are to stimulate our consciousness and our energy. We do so with the understanding that our meaning and purpose is to create a better world of togetherness and love.

The simplest, easiest, most powerful way to access massive energy flow within yourself is to open yourself to ecstatic states within your own body, and to enable others to do the same thing in their bodies.

For this reason, we do not wish to concentrate on pathologies and returning to a state of equilibrium. We wish to focus on bliss and ‘ecstacisity’ as a path to transcendence and freedom.

If you no longer wish to live the existing paradigms which have been proven inadequate over and over again, instead opting for the transcendent reality of abundance which none of us has ever experienced, join us.

I am having the most powerful feeling ever that, in the space that I want for me, no one should be left out. There should be space for everyone. What do you think?

Sign up for our Newsletter to join us in making a tribe that will Change the World.

No child should leave school without having an understanding of their own and others’ fundamental human needs.

Yet, in conventional education, this topic is ignored at best, and suppressed at worst.

Did you learn what your fundamental human needs were in school? Can you provide a list of your fundamental needs now?

I certainly couldn’t back then. It is taken me years of study to find that there has been much research done about fundamental human needs. And this is incredibly important, because understanding fundamental human needs will help to interact successfully and  receive what we want from others.

Manfred Max-Neef has the best list of needs that I have found so far.

Although it is easy to come up with a list of 50 needs in any group, he has digested them down to only nine different categories.

Max-Neef classifies the fundamental human needs as:

• subsistence,
• protection,
• affection,
• understanding,
• participation,
• leisure,
• creation,
• identity and
• freedom.

Reducing your basic needs down to a list of nine makes it much easier to consider which needs are being met and are not being met and to take action to get them met.

It takes interaction with others to meet many of these needs.

Here at Peaceful Living, we believe that by playing together, we can more effectively meet our own and each others’ needs.

Sign up for our newsletter now to learn more about our events to help you meet your needs.

Every single person has not been raised nonviolently must be treated as a wild animal.

They’re completely violent, out of touch with their own needs, afraid of being used and mistreated, unable to ask for what they want, unable to recognize when they do get what they want, And in many ways far worse than the wild beasts.

This isn’t their fault.
Even someone who has healed much and is highly skilled in communication will find it extremely difficult to relate to these creatures in any constructive manner.

They come from a situation where most of the rules were provided in childhood. Even those who claim to been raised in a very open manner will have been socialized with violence the point that most of their natural feelings and instincts have been completely suppressed.

Some mistakingly feel that they have been raised in an open manner, however, had they truly been raised in an open free manner in this society, there is little chance they would have reached adulthood. At the very least, they would’ve been incarcerated.

There is almost no way to grow up in an atmosphere of violence without having it permeate  us deeply.

During young adulthood, they try to find themselves, but without any fundamental understanding of their feelings and needs, they wander strange paths and are often lost.

Like the Amish children were encouraged to rumspringa when they become adults, they err on the side of too much, thinking that their needs will now be met through crazy behavior, but having no guide to a happy way.

This false dichotomy obscures true freedom.

Thus “straight is the gate and narrow is the way the leads to life, and few there be that find it.”

Attempting a relationship with someone who has no relationship with themselves is a very difficult endeavor. Compounding the issue is a lack of support which existed somewhat in previous generations through the local community or through family who lived close by.

And, with our societal “don’t ask don’t tell” policy of hiding our weaknesses and failures from others, it is even more difficult.

Because we are taught that the world is fundamentally competitive, we will hide our weaknesses in order to appear more powerful and procure survival resources.

We have been trained in “survival of the fittest” and told that those who wish to get ahead must be better than other people.

All this makes healthy relationships virtually impossible.

And this is to say nothing of relationship duress, lack of healthy relating examples, and lack of positive encouragement.

If we achieved our true power, we would pay no obeisance either to our political leaders, or to the “priests” who run society, be they actual religious leaders, or their proxies today: the medical establishment of psychologists and psychiatrists.

Our cues of what is healthy and normal are taught by those to control the mental health establishments, organizations created to control and direct human behavior.

And they are strongly influenced by financial interests, such as the pharmaceutical industry.

These powers have an interest in the functioning of society (to profit from), but not in the individual power and creativity of the members thereof.

This means of the information we receive about relating, connecting to our true power and inner authority, and our real authenticity is obfuscated in just about every way one can imagine.

This dominant culture surrounds us, like water does fish.

It takes almost a miracle for someone to discover the truth of relating, connection, and happiness in this environment.

So what is the solution?

The solution is to create a space of positive relating and healthy community, where support is provided to the “poor misled” above and beyond the nuclear family (an invention dating only back to the early 20th-century).

The typical mother and father+children household (even worse, a single mother or single father household) has an unnatural lack of redundance.

This is even more pronounced when there are children. If one of the two partners becomes incapacitated , a full 50% of the energy that was available to procure survival resources and support children is lost.

In single-parent households, a loss of the parent would result in a 100% loss of survival and child-rearing resources.

In the current societal structures, based on the hamster wheel of ever increasing responsibility and heavy debt of financial obligations, this structure is unsustainable.

It is true that the state can step in to help alleviate some of the financial burden, however there is little sensitivity available in the state to care for the complex emotional, spiritual, and creative needs of those in the family.

Why have we created such fragile structures for the most important missions of our species: creating happiness for all family members and fostering and environment for the successful upbringing of children? Especially when we understand how to create triply-redundant systems for airplanes that fly over oceans and continents?

It makes no logical sense except as a control mechanism.

Therefore, the only solution is to create a more redundant system of energetic support, more than the simple nuclear family.

After breakup of the extended family and the local community due to “moving where the work is” and destruction of ‘mutual support societies’, general disillusionment with spiritual systems provided the deathblow to any support the family had beyond its nuclear structure.

Every community, every tribe must have its rules and regulations. It must have a way that it functions and maintains order and unity in the group, as well as supporting the members in the group in getting their needs met.

The state is simply too large and unwieldy a structure for doing this in any meaningful fashion.

Therefore it remains for each person to decide to foster, create, support, and benefit from a central tribe or community that he or she chooses, fitting his or her values for the successful redundant support of meeting his or her own needs and those for whom he or she is responsible.

Due to the fact that humans have identical needs, it should be possible to create an unlimited number of tribes that can have their own specific rules and systems to support like-minded individuals in meeting these needs. In addition, these tribes should be able to support children more effectively by providing a multitude of models of successful behavior in the world, as well as redundant systems of procuring resources, ensuring protection and survival, education, outlets for creativity, and the fulfilling of all other human needs

The many abortive attempts and false starts in this direction only provide meaningful information to how to successfully create the tribe or community that does this.

If we are dissatisfied with anything in life, it is due to one of only two reasons.

Either we have insufficient consciousness to handle the problem, or we have insufficient energy to solve it.

Often, women/female bodied have more access to the energetic realms in life. And men/male bodied have more access to consciousness.

Insufficient consciousness can manifest a number of ways. Perhaps we don’t realize there is a problem, perhaps we don’t realize the problem can be solved, perhaps we don’t realize that we have access to resources to solve the problem. And so on.

If we are in the desert dying of thirst, and we don’t realize that there is water nearby, or we believe that a mirage is really water, these problems of consciousness can prevent us from solving our problem.

Or, if we don’t realize that there is a way to quit smoking or to lose weight, then these would be problems of consciousness as well.

However, the issue that we very often face is that we have insufficient energy to solve a problem.

We have an understanding of what would be required to quit smoking or to lose weight, but we don’t feel that we have the energy to do so.

We understand some steps that could be taken to positively impact environment, but we don’t feel we have the energy to make that happen.

We have ideas about dealing with poverty and hunger, but we don’t have the energy in our lives to make changes in the world.

Our ‘real lives’ keep us so busy, so tired, so energy-less, that we simply cannot take real steps to change either within nor without.

And, how do we as human beings receive energy? What did those people do who accomplished amazing things that is different from you and I?

What secret or forbidden sources of energy did these people have access to that we do not?

Because raising our energy and consciousness will have a transformational effect on individuals and society, this natural universal tendency threatens whatever status quo exists within human groups. This threat is therefore minimized via numerous covert and overt methods.

Controlling the consciousness of a group of people can be done by controlling education, limiting access to information and knowledge, reducing opportunities to learn, access to powerful teachers and trainers et cetera.

Entire social systems are created to do just that. Money is also used as a way to prevent knowledge from flowing freely.

Without societal controls, information, knowledge, techniques, training, and teachers will flow freely between people. In addition, people can be shown how to receive access to more information on deeper levels within themselves.

This would provide a natural process for raising consciousness as time continues.

Limiting the energy of the population is also done in many ways.

Left in their natural state, energy will flow in various forms within humans, between humans and within groups of humans, and between humans and their environment.

People will tend to greater and greater energy. Again, this represents a threat to the status quo.

The first three forms of energy that are bridled in human beings by society (during childhood) are: free and unstructured movement, deep breathing, and strong vocalized sound.

Restricting access to clean water and air, energetically powerful food, sunshine, adequate rest and relaxation, and opportunities to exercise are also used to reduce the energy of a population.

Many of these and other energetic exchanges within society are moderated by the flow of money, thus reducing many types of energetic exchange.

Perhaps most importantly, the free flow of sexual energy within individuals, and between two or more people is strongly limited as well. Sexuality is one of if not the strongest form of energy that is exchanged between people. Morality is one way these limits are achieved.

Teaching that specific sexual practices are wrong or bad, or that certain practices will be damaging to society can prevent individuals from receiving full access to this extremely powerful source of energy.

This “sexual morality” is created and enforced in an authoritarian fashion by “those in power”.

Once sexual morality began to be questioned, additionally creative means are utilized to control this energy within the population, such as fear of illnesses, fear of unwanted pregnancy, fear of sexual violence, etc.

Watch for those practices in society which are shrouded in fear, uncertainty, and doubt as well as those things that are being enforced by blame, shame, guilt, punishment, threat, or rewards to see where the force of authoritarianism is modifying behavior.

Also watch those people that seem to have a lot of energy, consciousness, and personal power. You will notice that they ignore the taboos that society creates to reduce access to energy. They will have little fear of using methods, systems, or substances to enhance their energy or their consciousness, and their sexual practices will not be limited to those approved of be society.

This is true in virtually all cases.

If we would be the ones accomplishing things with great power and an abundance of energy and consciousness, we must do the same thing.

We must not accept any limits to our consciousness, knowledge, or understanding. We must also break down all barriers within and without to the free flow of energy.

This is the only way to find happiness, get our needs met, and solve our own problems and those of the world around us.

The following is an open document describing a possible vision for our village. It may be updated as our vision updates!

• Education
• Sex
• Money
• Children
• Healing/Health
• Harmony/Dispute resolution
• Food as Nourishment
• Housing
• Arts
• Leaders

Education

There is a village. And in this village there is a center of learning. And this center of learning is unlike any school that you have ever seen before.

In this center of learning anyone, young or old can come and ask for support and learning those things that he or she desires to learn.

The community provides support for anyone who wishes to learn anything inasmuch as it is possible.

Not only is everyone a possible student without regarding rank, everyone in this place is also a teacher.

Once someone has learned something, they realize that the greatest joy often comes from sharing what they have learned.

Those with great knowledge share with those with much knowledge. Those with much share with those of little. Those with little, share with those with none.

It is a perfect waterfall for knowledge to flow.

No one in the village claims to have any authority to know what is important for another person to learn. They may make suggestions, but no one is forced or coerced into learning anything.

The system is as powerful in helping people learn what they want as it is simple in its concepts.

Sex

Sex, sensuality, and intimacy are seen as fundamental needs in the village.

Just as with money, sex is not a sign of value within the village. It is not something that is used to hold power over others.

Everyone in the village understands that specific human needs are the same for all of us. And all the village sees it as their role to allow space for all needs to be fulfilled for each member of the village as much as possible. This includes the needs of sex, sensuality, and intimacy.

Money

Money is utilized in the village as a tool, if it all, and not a block.

To the extent that money provides information or useful structure for doing things within the village, money is used.

If money is used for dealing with those outside the village, it is acquired and expended in ways that will meet the needs of the village.

Money is seen for what it is, namely a symbolic form of energy that can be utilized for certain problems, or not!

It is never an excuse to allow anyone within the village to go hungry, or cold, or naked.

It isn’t used as an object of power, to compel others in the village to do what the leadership or the “wealthy” want.

It isn’t used as a measure of status–to show how important someone is.

It isn’t used by parents to hold power over children.

Most of the time, it is virtually irrelevant and largely invisible.

Children

There is a village. And in this village, children are not “raised”.

Children do not “belong” to anyone within this village. No one “belongs” to anyone else in this village.

There is space and freedom enough in this village for every person, including children, to choose what they will do and when.

Instead of using “discipline”, parents, adults, and everyone in the village express their feelings and needs, with support when necessary.

If someone does something that seems to cause someone else sadness or distress, they simply express this and ask that something different happen.

They never use violence, threats, blame, shame, guilt, punishment, or rewards to manipulate others into doing what they want.

Instead, they maintain true connection with those around them in sharing their feelings about what is happening as equals.

Healing / Health

In this village, everyone thinks primarily in terms of energy. Not money or time.

Because in this village, everyone thinks in terms of energy, healing and health care function much differently than our current system.

They view disease as a fundamental misalignment of the energy flow within a person or the group.

Instead of crudely attacking symptoms or violently engaging with the person having the disease, energy is used to support the person in reaching their alignment.

That energy may have many forms, many modalities. These modalities are usually fun, focused on consciousness, and allow the blocks to energy to be removed for the free-flowing of energy.

Disease and injury are also viewed as messages, with deeper information for the individual and the community to uncover. They are invitations to consciousness.

Money is understood as a very subordinate level of energy within the healing system. While it may be useful or even necessary to use the energy society gives money in some situations for healing, energy is the focus of healing efforts.

Harmony

The village does not have what one would consider a “conventional legal system”, with punishments, threats, and rewards.

Instead, there are processes of communication and mediation to help all people within the village find ways to get their needs met and restoration made for any damage that does happen.

No one is labeled “bad” or “evil” in this village. Everyone knows that everyone is basically good, has similar feelings and needs, and is trying for a good result.

Much of the conflict resolution is informal. Structures exist on every level for resolution of larger conflicts.

Food as Nourishment

In the village, food preparation, growth, and storage is focused around energy and sensuality (meaning: to the senses).

The body is an incredibly powerful tool for determining the appropriateness of a food for a specific individual.

The group does not enforce any morality around food.

Instead, powerful positive energies are utilized to enable food growth and preparation to be most energetically overflowing processes within the village. Pure, vital water is treasured.

Housing

Housing in the villages is created and altered according to the aesthetic desires of its occupants in harmony with nature.

Many of the techniques used might be considered arcane or archaic by those who are used to the structures and building methods used by society today.

One key value of the village is to provide each person within it with enough space to meet their needs.

Each person has the opportunity to create a space or spaces for themselves the matches their aesthetic wishes and fulfills their needs and desires.

Arts and Beauty

Arts and beauty within the village.

Rather than the financial constraints being the primary concern of the village, beauty, sensuality, sensory activation, and pleasure are a high priority for the inhabitants of the Village.

Therefore time and space exists to allow the members of the village to enjoy expression and creative pursuits however they wish, so long as this does not encroach upon the needs or desires of other members. But since they will talk about their feelings and needs, conflicts are easily and quickly resolved.

Leadership

This village is governed not by authority, godly decree, or military might. This village is guided and held by the feelings and needs of those within it.

The members of the Peaceful Living Group have no special dogma and are pragmatic in using ‘what works’ to communicate and live together peacefully. We have studied and often share ideas from the following systems in looking for ways of relating more effectively in community and to inspire more happiness and fulfillment as individuals.

• Non-violent (compassionate) communication via Marshall Rosenberg. A method of interpersonal communication that focuses on acknowledging the feelings of and getting the needs met of all participants.
• The Core Protocols by Jim McCarthy – A system of working together effectively (best results) and efficiently (in shortest time while meeting needs of all participants)
• Eastern concepts of consciousness and energy. Meditation as a method to access the reality of this moment.
• Consensus and silent group facilitation
• The philosophy of Jesus, best expressed in the Golden Rule.
• Principles of logic as applied to philosophy
• Common sense

Most of these ideas are fairly simple to state and understand and just as difficult to live.  We work constantly to support each other in doing so.

New Ideas about Weight Loss (emotional healing and personalized movement and diet) — based on my personal experiences…

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:47 — 9.4MB)

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A philosopher is someone who is constantly concerned with *how* to live. In other words: what is the right way? Not because of authority, but because it is our inner truth.

And he shares and talks about that a lot?

Why?

Because he knows the world sucks, he is in tremendous pain, and he wants to be happy and have a better world.

Every man should be, in my opinion, a philosopher. Making his own life better and those of his loved ones and his community.

He does that through his mastery of conception of ideation, relying on his senses.

Finding truth feels mortally and existentially threatening.

Remember when Socrates took the boy out into the river who was looking for truth?

What would you answer to these questions?

1. If you were being lied to and deceived—even by people who you thought loved you—for your entire life, would you want to know the truth?
2. Are you willing to have an open mind to new information that may contradict what you previously believed?
3. Are you willing to trust your own senses, experience, and logic above any authority figure, “expert”, or group of these?

This is basically me barfing out truth because I can’t hold it in anymore. Warning: VERY EXPLICIT themes. Also, naughty words.

A survey of lies we believe. Especially talking about horrific abuse and abusers and why it/they are protected.

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How do we get the laws changed around free sexual association and family creation for consenting adults?

The 420 Solution baby!

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In which I discuss how much I learned about sex in Europe, how much we still have to learn in the US, and what I and perhaps you are going to do about it.

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You cannot pick up a spiritual phone and speak to your dead relatives. It is impossible.

You can speak to people claiming to be dead relatives. Or Jesus. Or Mary Magdalene. Or anyone else whose identity could be used to gain power over you.

I have lost many friends because of saying these things, but they are true.

Abraham (of Abraham Hicks?). Demonic deceit.

Hathors? Of Tom Kenyon – Deceit.

Matt Kahn? Same.

As well as documents created this way…

ACIM? – Deception.

The Book of Mormon? – Deception

Probably most ‘spiritual texts’? Deception.

Note that I don’t say ‘lies’. Because there is much truth in any and all of these sources. But that is how a spiritual con works.

Channeling/mediumship will send you–without exception–on a spiritual wild-goose chase or much worse.

Anything that you read or that is channeled to you which disagrees with your experience and inner truth must be discarded. For your own spiritual good.

These influences are, if you listen to them, capable of your entire destruction.

If you want wisdom, talk to God. God is infinitely wise, always available, can create miracles for you and loves you infinitely.

Why would you waste time talking to a fake dead relative or even some supposed dead mystic when you can speak to the ultimate Creator of All yourself, however you understand Him/Her/etc?

I will tell you why.

You know exactly what God wants you to do in any given moment. You know inside where the truth is and how to follow it.

But, it feels too difficult, too painful, too challenging, too scary too… etc to follow.

So, you settle for lesser spiritual knowledge, in the hope that you never have to confront what your deepest ultimate truth has already told you.

As someone who has run from god in many different periods in my life, let me assure you: there is nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

Your own soul will find you. It will confront you.

God will pull at your very heartstrings. And one day, you will yield…and that day will be one of perfect joy.

I was receiving healing this evening and I asked myself afterwards: What is fear about?

The answer came: Fear is about the idea (!) of not getting everything done.

Why be afraid of death? Illness? Anything else?

Was it really this simple?

Then, what is the cure?

Drop the idea of not getting everything done. God takes care of that, right? Fear is unnecessary.

Just pursue joy.

Why do we have anger?

Because something crosses a boundary of ours and we do not believe we can fix it.

I was angry about everything.

Poverty. Starvation. War. My parents not understanding. The religion of my youth. The government. Big banks. Money. Politics…

Why?

Because I saw these as violations of my boundaries–what is allowed in my space and world. And because I felt powerless to stop or change most of them.

And then a reframe happened. In the shower. As most good reframes do.

The thing that I perceive as a boundary violation is an invitation for me to expand my perceived ability to act.

It wouldn’t bother me if I couldn’t fix it. This might seem esoteric.

At least, I have some power over it because it is in my reality.

It’s in my reality at the very least because I pay attention to it. I give it my focus. That is an act of power-taking. Maybe not the power I want, once considered consciously, but nonetheless.

Are we responsible for our reality?

The exact configuration of our reality is what it is because of thousands of things we do and don’t do. So, yes. Disregarding all mysticism, we have configured and created our reality. By changing any one thing, that reality will change. Starting with focus and attention.

In other words, all anger, I believe, is evidence of believing illusion. (Or as Marshall Rosenberg says, thinking that is disconnected from our needs.)

I remember going to AVN–the annual conference of the adult industry in Vegas and schmoozing with porn producers, and sex toy inventors and sellers.

One of them asked me what I did.

I said, “I teach tantra.”

From their reaction, I might as well have said, “I have ebola and am highly contagious.”

They stepped back. A look of disgust crossed their face.

What the hell?

I had done my training in sexuality Europe, where I had lived the past 15 years. And there, tantra is a curiosity and a movement.

However, in America, things look very different.

Here, due to a renegade few seeing something new they can cash in on, get laid with, and sometimes even abuse others with, there has arisen somewhat of a negative view around tantra.

Some people in the sex-positive world in the US see people using the word tantra as:

• Having few boundaries, nor respecting others’ boundaries
• Not teaching consent
• Being predatory
• Just a way to get sex

These are real problems.

I sometimes jokingly say, “A tantra workshop is where you go to learn a technique that has been handed down in reverence from guru to student for 5000 years after years of dedicated practice in a weekend from a guy who read a book on it two weeks ago.”

A famous sex educator in frustration told a group of tantric ‘teachers’: “I get to fix the people you people screw up.”

One of the most famous ‘tantra’ teachers in the US said, when asked how many women he had slept with, “I don’t know. Somewhere between one and two thousand, I think?”

All of these things contribute to people being wary of the word ‘tantra’ as taught and practiced in the United States.

Add that to the fact that numerous ‘tantric practitioners’ have been arrested and sometimes imprisoned on prostitution charges, and that ‘tantra’ is a cool word for an escort to write on her ad to drum up business, and it’s no wonder that it has a bad rap.

Indeed, even when I studied tantra, it was mostly about how to squeeze the most pleasure or healing out of every encounter. Little was said about what happens before that, in terms of negotiation, or after the experience, in terms of longer relationship dynamics.

And, many of the tantra teachers I know go from train wreck to train wreck of relationship. They enter someone’s life like an addictive drug, get them hooked, move on, and leave a trail of stilted lovers behind them.

To some degree, so did I when I first discovered this path.

So, with all of the crap that can go wrong and is bad with tantra, all of the abuses that can and do happen, why do I feel tantra is so important?

Tantra was life-changing for me. It was the first space in which my natural desires and skills regarding touch could be expressed freely, without guilt and shame.

It gave me clear ways to learn about both my body and my partner’s…and methods to maximize our pleasure together.

It became a non-denominational spiritual path for me. A way to discover my own divinity and that of my partner, and to connect in that devotional space as divinity–leaving outside whoever we thought we were before.

Tantra was my healing for guilt, shame, and fear. It became a doorway to loving and accepting my body.

A lot of great work is being done under this umbrella. And people’s lives do change.

We have Christian priests and yoga gurus who have been embroiled in scandals and embarrassed themselves. This doesn’t mean that yoga nor Christianity are without value. It means we learn and move on.

However, tantra needs to be redeemed, even if it will always mean something different to each person who participates in it. Because some people have caused offense with it, it needs to be redeemed.

After leaving the Mormon church, drenched in shame and body-negative messages, and not knowing where to turn, I decided I wanted to learn about sex and alternative relationships.

There were two places to do that: ZEGG, which was holding an intro weekend a couple hours from where I lived. I don’t remember how I heard of them.

The other was an ad I saw in the online classifieds in Dresden. “John Hawken, famous tantra teacher from the UK coming this one weekend only to Dresden.”

I was intrigued. I called the number on the ad and a gruff man answered. This was the convo.

“Hi! I saw your ad for a tantra workshop. What is that?

“What do you think it is?”

“Well, I think it’s about sex.”

“Uh huh.”

“Um, so can I register?”

“You can just show up, I guess.”

What I didn’t realize was that Stefan had placed the ad with the hope of bringing more hot women into the local tantra scene. I, as a man, was competition, so he did his best to gruffly dissuade me from coming.

In retrospect, he might have been wise to do that. In two months I was running the local group’s practice sessions and by the end of the summer I had spent *ahem* -time- with most the  female population of the local group.

When I arrived for the weekend, John began by paraphrasing Osho (but I didn’t know that).

“When you study an idea or a philosophy, you like it or you don’t. You accept it or you don’t. And, maybe later you find a different philosophy. Here, we don’t learn by memorization or rote or debate. Here we learn by experience.”

I was so tired of sitting in classrooms during childhood listening to teachers and religious leaders drone on–and I had been so betrayed by their ideas which hadn’t actually worked in my life, I immediately latched on to this new mode of learning.

I decided not to read anything else about this topic for the time being and learn experientially.

And why not? How do children learn about life? About their preferences? About what is dangerous?

Not conceptually, primarily. Experientially. They learn how to ask for a cookie and what that is because they want one, not because someone needs to drone on about how important cookies are for our economic growth.

John would give us an experience. We were randomly paired, men and women, and we danced elbow to elbow. Or we breathed and gazed into each other’s eyes. Or we wore blindfolds and embraced a stranger.

Each experience was about the experience. Not primarily our thoughts about what the experience would be like. Nor about our judgments or evaluations of it. What sensations did we experience internally and externally? What feelings were present? What were we thinking?

We became magnificently aware of the processes within us during each of these experiences. We noticed how the experience was dramatically different with a different person. Or the same person on a different day.

I had never felt so alive.

I remember during the break going to the local store and staring the cashier right in the eyes. I felt like I could conquer the world.

We did hear a little theory. But not to regurgitate or believe or reject. Simply to provide some context for our experience, if it were helpful.

“Religions argue about what you are. Are you just a body? Or a spirit in a body? According to tantra, there are two components. You are a point of point of consciousness, and a flow of energy. Energy is the feminine principle and consciousness is the masculine. The dance between these two creates the world and your life and your relationships.”

I will never forget those words. They clicked into place verifying to me an entire map of myself and my romances which I had always looked for but never found. My life from that point would be devoted to researching the experience of all the ways that dance could manifest in my life and how I could experience it with others.

I began to cry in the workshop.

“My native language is touch and I have no one to speak it with.”

Imagine living in a world where no one speaks your language. That’s how I felt most of the time. I had never articulated it like this before, though. Hence the tears.

Part of my passion, my work, my self is simply to get beyond words. Words are symbols. They can be useful. They can call meaning forth. They do not convey it, which is why there is so much misunderstanding with words.

Touch can be misunderstood and misinterpreted as well.

But I enjoy the conversations more, wherever they go. It feels real, visceral, impactful.

“When I touch you, I know that you are real.”

I want to foster touch as communication courses and experiences from our youngest years. I think much pain in our society is around touch needs not getting met–despite English people. They had so little touch they had to go around conquering the world to get that much-needed contact.

I often wonder how bullets and bombs are substitutes for penetrating others in much less violent ways.

First of all “single” doesn’t exist. That’s another article.

I was sitting with some friends and one woman mentioned that she was single, unhappily so. And when I looked at her I saw ‘the energy’.

The ‘single woman’ energy.

I find it quite repellant.

It doesn’t come from being single.

It’s a total energetic structure of loneliness.

I can’t even describe it yet. Working on it.

But I do know how to fix it.

“When I left school at the age of fifteen I was halfway through the tenth grade. I left for two reasons, economic necessity being the first of them. More important was that school was interfering with my education.”
― Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man“

This will probably be short. People ask me all the time, “Will you go back to school?”

Meaning, formalized education.

I survived 14 years of formal education. Barely. I found it difficult to conform, not ask the wrong questions, give the right answers (that didn’t make sense), and get along with the general nonsense of organized education.

Though, of course, there were amazing moments as well.

Why would I go back to school?

The #1 reason that people give is ‘to earn more money’.

Shall I leave the answer about whether school = more money as an exercise to the reader?

What would the other reason be?

To learn things? In my experience, I’ve had to unlearn much of what I was taught there already for my happiness. And, I can learn 99% of things faster “my way” than I ever could at university.

How do I learn?

• Direct experience – doing the thing I want to learn about
• Thinking – Which means writing about it, most often
• Finding amazing teachers for a topic and learning from them

For me, formal education provides maybe a 2/10 in each of these. When left to my own devices, I manage an 8/10.

I will tell you where I am going to school. Probably for the next hundred years: The University of Superheroes, from Michael Tertes.

Traditional education is a process of homogenization and ‘giving you information until you are good enough.”

Superhero U is about showing you how you are already amazing, helping you unlock that, and bring it out into the world.

And oh yeah.

Circling is probably the most powerful modality to establish connection and intimacy in community of any I know of. If you want to participate with me, follow this link.