Queer Ancestors
Thinking about queer ancestors, a lineage of queer love becomes palpable, across generations and through time. Today I’m feeling so guided by Sequoia Thom’s life and death – and the way he navigated his “return to the beloved.”
6-Point Plan
What might a social revolution led by sacred intimates demand? Here is a playful manifesto and practical 6-Point Plan. Get Greedy. Want More. Pay for Love and Intimacy. Pay Extra for Injustice. Savour Inequality. Be Unworthy of Love. learn to Die.
Beyond the Window of Tolerance
I do think ecstasy is a key resource for social change. To push against what is socially valued, and ordinary, we need to expand our nervous system capacities. Instead of seeking safety, we need to build capacity to respond to danger with courageous commitment to one another, and to our values. With ecstatic practice, we start to inhabit the full spectrum of our nervous systems. We become resourced to build a counternormative relational world.
Orgasm – the music of origin and end
This orgasm music from Barry Carl is a beautiful expression of the music-before-music. Solar flares, the pulse of distant stars, birdsong, and orgasm share the same rhythms… I’ve written about how psychedelic medicine and erotic practice can connect us with the ecstatic rhythms of the universe.
Breath and Energy Orgasm
Listening to this free 15-minute “Breath and Energy Orgasm” meditation from Caffyn Jesse is a way to ignite and amplify erotic aliveness, and enjoy an energy orgasm.
Somatic Sex Education Professional Training
In a professional training for somatic sex educators, you will learn how to companion clients in the embodied reclaiming of sexual pleasure.
Make Water Not War
In the midst of an extended drought, I am glad to say that I spent all day with a loving friend, synthesizing water. When we devote 7 hours to erotic play (instead the 7 minutes that is average, in North America), it is truly astonishing how much water gets born through our cellular processes. Ejaculate, injaculate (we have to pee a lot), sweat and tears – newborn water comes to join the hydrosphere. Our love-making is wanted and needed, by the intricate emergent system of the biosphere.
What is Law?
In envisioning transformative justice, how do we contend with the concept of “law”? There is law as a system of rules, roles and penalties that serves a means of social control, in human societies. And then, there is the pattern language of the natural world – laws of physics, chemistry and biology. As a student of nature’s pattern language, I experience a powerful sense of excitement – and molecular realignment – whenever I encounter human words and ways that feel aligned with natural law. I experience the emergence of what adrienne marie brown identifies as: “the whole world/learning/from within.”
Psychedelic Medicine and Somatic Sexual Wellness
For me, Eros is our sacred well, our inmost core. Psychedelics weave us into conscious connection with the web of life and death; we feel wanted and welcome. So the intersection of somatic sexual wellness and psychedelic medicines can be a place of powerful magic – but also of grave danger, and potential for major misattunements.
Belonging to the Song
I want to be like birds, as I attune to my intimate world, both human and non-human. How can I belong to the song? Can I listen for the sweet music of each person I love, without getting distracted by all the noise? Can we keep on discerning what song only we can sing, in the weave of each particular us? What if I give my attention to the music, with more and more precision?
Empathogens: The Science and the Magic
These medicines light up both the serotonin and dopamine systems in our brains and bodies, so we feel both passion and peace, at the same time. Spoiler alert: we don’t actually need drugs to find this. These molecular messengers are part of every being in the biosphere, and the neuroendocrine systems within and between us. How can we use them in ways that help us belong to this global network of our true belonging? Instead, these medicines are getting mobilized to help people tolerate intolerable systems. Are we going to keep our trauma treatments confined to the very paradigms that created all this awful, ongoing trauma in the first place?
Trauma-Informed Psychedelics
Whether I’m working with the erotic, or with psychedelics, I want to support people in feeling empowered choice and voice. I want them growing their embodied self-trust, and capacity for discerning trust-worthiness in others. This takes actual, embodied practice.
Rewilding Our Bodies and Our Minds
Thinking about how we need each other’s help, to rewild our bodies and our minds….Trauma keeps the erotic imagination separate from any future we dare dream of. Minds keep muttering about the damage and the dangers. Bodies dissociate from terrors. We keep desires small. It’s all so wise. Muttering and muting are brilliant neuroendocrine responses to trauma. It’s what keeps us alive, until we find our way home.But once we are home, we need to co-create the safe-enough, brave-enough embodied practices, that help us come off mute, and rewild our bodies and our minds.
An Invitation to Feel Fully
I think most of us already know “We’re on the highway to climate hell,” as the UN Head told world leaders yesterday. We can’t always find words for what’s happening inside and around us, but personal and interpersonal neuroendocrine systems are responding to the ever-increasing danger. Fear is not just a good idea; it is a neuroendocrine response that impacts our souls, our intimate lives, and our relationships in communities. Even as we plan for a possible future, as if climate hell wasn’t already here, or imminent, we are manifesting embodied awareness.
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.
Welcome Home Ritual
What if there was no part of ourselves that was too shameful, ugly and unlovable to be welcomed home? I want to weave a world where we can bring our most our impossible-to-hold parts to our intimates, to have them listened to, and loved. Not fixed, denied, reassured, soothed, transformed or shamed. Welcomed. Cherished.
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….
Cultivate your fantasies
This is a free guided meditation you can use to cultivate your imagination. One of the simplest and most effective ways to amplify sexual wellness is to cultivate the erotic imagination. Fantasies can be much more than snippets of distracted erotic thoughts. Stories stimulate our nervous systems and generate physiological arousal. They help bring novelty, focus and adventure to our erotic lives. In fantasies, we have space to freely play, and generate new possibilities.
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.
Sacred Intimacy
Can sex be more than an exchange of pleasures? Can it be more even than the expression of romance? In the paradigm of sacred intimacy, sex is holy. Erotic energy is life force energy. It is an aspect of constellations, trees and tides. Sexual ecstasy is a way to honor and practice the divine in ourselves and others. It is a way to pray, celebrate, heal and transform. With every cell in our bodies, we can be and become love.