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, May 1, 2012

Colorful Realm

The scrolls flank the hall leading to the Awakened One seated at the far end: Ananda and Mahakashyapa attend him as he expounds the Lotus Sutra, proclaims compassion personified to all living beings. But interposed, the chatter of several hundred viewers drawn here, as I am, by the hype of PBS and the New York Times. A frenetic pilgrimage, this day of Amtrak back and forth from one imperial city to another for a few hours with these birds and flowers: jostling for a closer look at the filigree of feathers like cloisonné, built up stroke by stroke from shell-white ground in glue, craning, much like the herons that crane back, for a view of one scene entire.

Itō Jakuchū of Kyoto (1716-1800): well-to-do wholesale grocer, retired at thirty-nine; student of painting and Zen who spends the next forty-five years learning to begin. He starts with the lovely and innocuous, a flight of butterflies defining the space where they aren’t. Then his materials take over: viscous snow splattered on both sides of the silk, across draftsmanship that speaks of consummate control. Just below the white goose, a brushload of ink savage and elegant and more blatantly nothing but itself than DeKooning in his middle years. Streams and garlands that leave little for Klimt to invent. Gold applied sparingly for its dangerous opacity.

Om mane padme hum. Deep in the meditation hall, life bursts the genre, too many invertebrates neither bird nor flower. Sixty-seven species of insects swarm around the frogs, water seething with tadpoles, hanging gourd coiled round by a snake, foliage lovingly painted in every stage of decay, caterpillar chewing exquisitely around the edge of the widening hole into which the leaf will vanish. Fish swim through the air above a pond seen from five viewpoints at once, dissolving the viewer into confusion. And endless: the fascination with chickens nobler than the Forty-Seven Ronin.

And suddenly I love this random crowd of our samsara. I smile and laugh with the woman who walks smack into plexiglass as she approaches plum branches beneath the moon; long to speak to the two men pressed shoulder to shoulder before an octopus floating in space. “What a gift to see this,” I offer lamely to the elderly woman with whom I share a bench and broken ice. "The real gift," she replies, "is to have created it."

I want to say Yes. And No. We are the unfolding now. We are the chattering birds weaving among impossible chrysanthemums.

For more of the paintings from The Colorful Realm of Living Beings, go to http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/jakuchuinfo.shtm.

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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.

Finding Yourself, Claiming Yourself

I invite you to celebrate who you are, and who you want to become.

Think of the times your life as a gay or bisexual man has flowed without effort.

Think of the times you’ve struggled to lay hold of your life more fully.

Maybe those times feel like opposites. But they’re parts of a single cycle: sowing and harvest, labor and rest, preparation and enjoyment. We can’t work toward a fuller life unless we already feel some trust that life will rise up to meet us. We can’t sink deeper into our present joy and satisfaction in life without being reminded that it took a long journey to get here.

Please join me in considering a place where the two halves of this cycle come together: in the safe, empowering container of ritual space and ritual time.

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.

Anchorhold

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Colorful Realm

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