Practice Dying

There are times of the year, times of life, and times like this moment in the history of the biosphere when the when the veil between life and death grows thin. Transitions between life and death get slippery. Ghosts and ancestors come out to guide us. Scary monsters suddenly emerge, and interspecies transformations can delight us. This season - and Halloween, Samhain, the Day of the Dead - remind me to take time to deepen into my personal commitment to practice death preparation. As they say, what we resist, persists. We live in a culture that fiercely resists dying, as it busily manifests more and more of it. Around the world there is so much suffering and death. Climate chaos and social chaos threaten all our lives, and the whole biosphere. What we accept, transforms. Perhaps a practice of integrating conscious dying into our living can empower us. We can be resourced by a psychedelic medicine called 5meo-DMT, and by our orgasms.

Presence with Suffering

I understand how, in the shock of trauma, there is a moment when hyperactivated nervous systems reach a zenith of panic. Suddenly, we experience a dorsal-vagal drop. We abandon our selves. It is as if there is no more separate self to inhabit. We have no ground beneath our feet. There are no boundaries. There is no mind. We exit the storyline of linear time. We cannot act on our own behalf, flee, fight or cry for help. Heartbeat and breath slow down. Awareness of agony is dimmed. We half-die, before we die. Through dissociative self-abandonment, we escape being present with suffering.

Queer Ancestars and Transcestars

Capitalist, colonial culture generates a binary between human and non-human, along with an ever-contested boundary between them. Those of us deemed not-fully-human can get preoccupied with seeking enfranchisement. Queers have been made to dwell outside the margins of “humanity”, alongside other two-leggeds deemed not-human, and all our biological elders, including birds, plants, fungus and frogs, the planet and the stars.

Traumatic Belonging? or Ecstatic Belonging?

Under the regime of traumatic belonging, each one of us trembles with reasonable terrors of running afoul of social norms. Can we dare find safe-enough, brave-enough ways to explore, and come together in the transpersonal belonging we access through ecstasies? Can ecstatic practice help us weave creative, supportive communities, where we can be both powerful and vulnerable?

Going Beyond Consent

Going beyond consent requires neuroplastic change. Sometimes this biophysical requirement is just too much for us. Can we get brave enough, and safe enough, to go on wanting, and co-creating space and time, to play in the neural learning zone within and between us? Can we want excitement and ecstasy, along with peace and solidarity? Where can we be in an ongoing learning, about living outside of threat-management responses and well-practiced cultural scripts?

Your Gender is Unique to You

In many other teachings on sex and intimacy, there are a host of rules for how men and women should behave and feel, based on a binary understanding of gender. My queer soul rebelled. In all my years of sacred intimacy practice, and in my teaching, I’ve tried to welcome each person in their gender complexity. In spaces where gender complexity is welcome, it can delight us, and inform our play.

Make love to your habit

Arousal and orgasm often unfold according to habitual scripts that keep eros accessible, but safe and small. It is the work and play of sacred intimacy to make love to our habits. What is your habitual path to orgasm? Celebrate your awesome habit! Then try making love to your habit.

Reflections on Enduring Love

Weaving life with other singular humans in enduring intimacies, we make a web where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Because of the intimate, intricate weave of each particular us, I am empowered to keep on becoming more fully me.

On Donut Massages and Donut Friendships….

Why are 6 square inches at the center of us excluded from massage therapy, and from friendship? We imagine and choreograph friendships in ways that – like “donut massages” – keep the erotic out-of-bounds. We say someone is “just a friend”, as if friendship were less than lovership and partnership. What if we explored our friendships without the boundaries of convention that keep them circumscribed and “safe”? I don’t want every friendship to include genital interactions, though I love to integrate erotic rituals into my relationships with several friends. But I do want my friendships to be erotic in the sense that they are deep, abiding intimacies, where we reach for ecstasies, together, again and again….

Sexual Healing

In staggering numbers, we are sexually, physically and emotionally abused as children – betrayed by the adults we rely on to survive. In later years, many of us experience unwanted sex, rape, and sexual violence. We hurt other people. We frighten ourselves. We are hated and punished for our sexual choices. And when people don’t have sex by the rules (and that means almost everyone), the punishments are real and they are terrible. Simply living in a sex-negative culture – where desire is so often shamed – profoundly wounds this most sacred, secret part of us.