Towards Sexual Initiation — Part 1: The Ecstasy of Escape
Prologue: this essay is written in support of my new documentary Love School — you’re invited to join us in raising $50K by Aug 12, 2019. Please watch the pitch and support on Kickstarter.
Six summers ago, nearly to this day, I left my stable San Francisco life as young professional, packed up all my belongings, and pointed my beater Honda Accord East. I remember crossing the Bay Bridge and breaking out into a raucous laughter. This feeling — the ecstasy of escape — carried with me for the next 1200 miles as I drove across the desert of the American West, unperturbed by the sweltering heat, each mile feeling more and more free, as the grips of my societally conscripted life, a life built of “should,” was dissolving ever more with each passing horizon.
What followed was an epic journey of discovery, of reckoning, of initiation, that kept taking me East, all the way into the cradle of civilization, eventually leading me to the Gates of the Tamera Healing Biotope in southern Portugal — a place that became my Shangri-La.
I detailed this journey in a series of four essays written in 2015, the cliffhanger ending with me on my way to Tamera for the first time. Part 5 — my story at Tamera — was promised in the coming weeks. It never published.
I’ve often retold curious friends that going to Tamera is like stepping into a fairy tale — a fabled kingdom that guards her secrets well. Leaving Tamera however, is like plugging back into the Matrix.
Every time as I left and crossed her gates back into “the other world,” bombarded by global capitalism and mass (mono)culture, what I had experienced was so vast and incomprehensible that I couldn’t really make sense of it, or speak it. And thus for the past 4.5 years since writing my original essays, I’ve been engaged in a film project LOVE SCHOOL to share what has felt ineffable.
—
I went to the Tamera Healing Biotope four times between 2014–2016, for a total of 6 months. However, like entering Brigadoon, days at Tamera can feel like years. I have more memories imprinted on my body in those 6 months than I have in perhaps the rest of my life.
And so after three intensive months there in the Spring of 2016 — I stopped going back.
It wasn’t intentional to not return, and yet somehow, life had it’s own intelligence around my need for integration. I needed to slow down. Tamera, that fairy tale, faded back into the deeper recesses of my psyche. However, like a great story once told, its allurement never fully went away.
Years went by until in early 2018, an invitation from Tamera came to join what was to be the inaugural voyage of an education program on how to actually do what they had done — how to build a healing biotope.
I was selected amongst a group of 55 others from across the planet, many from crisis areas, to be the cosmonauts for this pioneering mission. When a call like that comes — it’s hard to say no.
And so in August of 2018, I found myself once again on a plane across the Atlantic towards what would be my longest and most dangerous mission at Tamera yet — a 3-month community social experiment with a diverse group of humans, most I did not know.
I wrote two dispatches from Tamera in my first weeks during this time. You can find Dispatch 1: The Grief of Returning and Dispatch 2: The Congruence of Pleasure and Purpose at those links on the essay titles.
However, as the course grew beyond its opening, the experience became so immense, so twisted, gnarled and beautiful, that my psyche couldn’t keep up with expression (I had the original notion to write blog posts every 2 weeks). And so I had to just surrender to the experience — only now, nearly a year later, does it feel possible to make sense of this story.
The first weeks of the course were full of art-making (we began with a 10 day art course), new connections, and grounded by a period of celibacy that our entire group took on.
Celibacy, often met with eye rolls (also from myself), actually is a potent container to ground one’s energy when amidst a strong place of transition. This container took the edge off of 55 humans eyeing each other for possible sexual contact. Instead, our shared celibacy softened social interactions, allowing the more familial threads of connection to develop, upon which this group — its own social experiment in community — would have to rely upon for the coming months.
After a couple of weeks, the celibacy time gracefully ended, and the course, this group, and Tamera became my new reality. California, the U.S. and my old life began to feel very far away.
The course was full of highly stimulating intellectual and emotional content, covering the basics of building a thriving human-culture ecology. And yet what occupied my mind and heart was whether or not I felt accepted and seen by this group.
This is probably true for many humans, and certainly has a historical basis, as almost all humans now on Earth are living in a trauma: the loss of a tribe, or village, as their cohesive safety net of humans. And so as I strived to “make friends” in the group — all my old fears and patterns of social awkwardness and isolation began — harkening many times of being outcast and even bullied in my teenage years.
And, I deeply wanted sensual/sexual contact with women, and this was also the avenue of my utmost awkwardness and inability to be a social human. After three weeks there, I was becoming heavily confused and isolated.
I felt like I was sinking in quick sand — layers of my falseness were melting away from all the deprogramming that being at Tamera initiates, but I wasn’t yet sure how to be with what was really true in me.
One Sunday at Brunch, I sat with a woman from our group, Ruth and shared a bit of this story and asked her reflection. She responded by telling me that for her:
“Men are beautiful, attractive and approachable when their higher task is clear, for this becomes an anchor in their life, not the sought after partner.”
I already knew this, deeply, for the past years had been devoted to the development of higher tasks in my life — the now 4 year documentary film project on Tamera, the Re/Culture Media Collective I co-steward, the dream of building a healing biotope in the Western U.S., and the Wilderness Rites of Passage work I hold with with puberty age boys.
Back home, it was easy and clear to have these anchors for my power, but here, those were all somehow faraway, and not known to anyone in the group — I’d have to stand instead on something different than my past or current “tasks” in the world.
And then it hit me — my group here was my task. We’d been together as a group for over a month, and we were not at all a “we,” — a cohesive group body — for many like myself were also feeling isolated and lost, on the outside of the group. I’d been so obsessed in the past weeks with my own process that I had not at all been thinking about or caring for the greater whole.
With this realization, a shift began…self-absorption was ultimately, BORING, and so I turned my focus.
I began to look out first for the group, then for myself. In the coming days, this translated into gravitating towards those people that previously I’d been avoiding — fearing that their isolation and confusion would pull me down further. I let go of chasing the “cool kids” and the beautiful women I had hoped to flirt with, trusting that contact would naturally come on its own accord.
And in this shift, something peculiar and beautiful happened — I slowly found my power again — by placing myself in service to others and something larger.
In this process I made a huge insight — when I care for the whole, my personal needs are met along the way — almost as a side-effect of being in service. Somehow this almost feels banal now as a I write it, but the shift is one of the most profound I’ve experienced in my life, for it’s the shift of existential perspective from scarcity to trust. It’s really a surrendering to a higher power and a loving universe.
And in this process of being of service and regaining lost power, I found a new clarity to speak my truth, especially in love and sexuality. Hiding one’s truth never serves, and so I didn’t shy away from or calculate how to speak when a woman’s beauty (much more than just skin deep) awakens something in my system.
It is a profound gift to let someone know that they turn you on, as long as it’s done freely, as in, without any expectation or demand (and with consent, which is very different in a trusted and cohesive culture like Tamera vs. back home in the States — stating one’s turn-on to another, especially from a man to a woman, can be highly problematic and threatening in the brokenness of patriarchal society — more on this nuance later). And of course, like almost most important matters here, it’s the safest to do this in a setting larger than just one-on-one.
And so, our time at Tamera grew to a month and we began the process of readying ourselves for a 10 day Love School — the core of Tamera’s educational pedagogy, what has held the community together for 40 years, and is central to their theory of planetary system-change.
I wanted to enter the Love School free of expectation — surrendering to the reality that perhaps this time at Tamera wouldn’t be about epic sexual openings or deep journeys in romantic love.
As the Love School began in early October, I reaffirmed my commitment to care for the whole, to be transparent about my desires, and accept that probably not much would happen.
So as we circled first morning of Love School — little did know that I was about to have all my “non-expectations” smashed apart, in a fire of passion I yet had known as a human being.
Thanks for reading! This essay is written in support of my new documentary Love School —campaign ends Aug 12, 2019. Please watch the pitch and support on Kickstarter.
