Why I Garden Naked

On sunny spring and summer days at Easton Mountain, I usualy spend a few hours in the garden working naked.

 

 

Working in the Garden

I have three reasons for being naked.  The primary reason is that I enjoy it.  If being naked encourages me to do something that is healthful and useful, why not continue?

 

The second reason is that if I didn’t work naked, I’d have to wash clothes three times as often.  Consider the photo below of my knees after a gardening session.

 

 

After gardening

As I would shower anyway after working in the garden, I save the water and energy that would be expended on washing my clothes.

 

My third reason for gardening naked is a passage in the writings of plato that says, in the translation I read, that in warmer days men should work in the fields “commonly stripped.”  Who am I to contradict Plato?

 

I also find that some cleaning tasks. like washing the floor of a shower room, are best done without clothes.  And at Easton Mountain we have a tradition of painting naked.  Again, it’s easier and more environmentally friendly just to wash paint off ones body than to have to wash it off clothes too.  Here a picture taken several years ago of a volunteer who follows the Easton Mountain tradiiton.

 

 

Naked painter

This is one tradition that not everyone follows. At Easton Mountain, we respect people who don’t follow tradition.

Who Says Faeries Don’t Have Wisdom!

I’ve just returned from Las Vegas, where I attended my first five-day class in the 2012 Mystery School for Divine Mastery.    On Thursday, June 18, we visited Red Rock Canyon.  

 

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We brought with us some stones called “faerie stones” (or maybe “fairy stones”), rocks that float up from a lake in Canada.

 

 

These stones have an infinte variety of unusual shapes 

 

The school’s founder, AlixSandra Parness, preferred to call them “wisdom stones,”  but that led me to say, “Who says faeries don’t have wisdom!” 

 

We were encouraged to write short accounts about the stones that we were using.  The following is my take on the wisdom of “faerie stones.”

 

We are masters of everything fabulous.  We dance.  When we dance we don’t hide our bodies, as mortals do, beneath layers of fabric.  We weave spider webs into nets and use them to catch stardust and morning dew.  The songbirds are our orchestra.  Every time you hear a songbird singing, somewhere nearby a faerie is dancing. Sit very still to see us – or dance yourself.  When you truly know the music, we will dance with you.

Ralph Walker

My friend Toby Johnson has put a page on his website about the gay spiritual pioneer, Ralph Walker, founder of The Loving Brotherhood.  I recommend it.  Ralph was one of my teachers, as you’ll discover reading his page.  As I head Las Vegas for my first session of  the Inner Focus 2012 Mystery School for Divine Mastery, I think of Ralph and the example he set for me.

Affirmations for Change

For any of the practices in this blog to be effective you must be willing to have the changes in your life that these exercises can produce. You can do an exercise to open your heart for years, but if you are determined to hold on to resentments, your heart will not open very much.

One way to increase your willingness, or at least show you where your willingness is stuck is to use affirmations. My method for working with affirmations is covered in Chakra Affirmations.

The Mantram of Unification (found in The Externalization of the Hierarchy by Alice A Bailey) is a statement that, to me, expresses the results of spiritual practice

• The sons of men are one and I am one with them.
• I seek to love, not hate;
• I seek to serve and not exact due service;
• I seek to heal, not hurt.
• Let pain bring due reward of light and love.
• Let the soul control the outer form and life and all events, And bring to light the love which underlies the happenings of the time.
• Let vision come and insight.
• Let the future stand revealed.
• Let inner union demonstrate and outer cleavages be gone.
• Let love prevail.
• Let all men love.

This passage may be turned into a series of affirmations:

• The sons of men are one; and I, [name] am one with them.
• I, [name], seek to love, not hate.
• . . .
• I, [name], am willing to let all men love.

I don’t recommend writing the eleven affirmation on 110 consecutive days.

All of the practices in this blog have as a fundamental principal the fact that you have your own inner guide to spiritual practice – often referred to as your Higher Self. Your Higher Self will show you what is right for you.

When a Teacher of God Takes Off His Clothes

I learned something about God this past weekend. I was part of a photography retreat at Easton Mountain. On Sunday morning a facilitator from another group, Bob Pileggi, agreed to pose for us. I thought we would do portraits, maybe head and bare chest. I was delighted when first his jeans came off, then his shorts.

Bob on the deck of The Temple

I’ve known Bob for several years and know that he’s studied A Course in Miracles. I don’t know if he thought of the passage in the Course that defines a teacher of God as someone who “has made a deliberate choice in which he did not see his interests as apart from someone else’s”  - but that is exactly what he did.

I realized that when I undress another man and allow him to undress me – as I have in workshops and private sessions in erotic spirituality and as I will at the Edward Carpenter Community’s Gay Men’s Week this September (The Dance Between Power and Intimacy) – we are creating the sacred space in which we can use erotic energy to transcend ego and come into a new relationship with Spirit.

The other men of the retreat may not have realized that we were in sacred space, but the message of the Course was present: “God’s Son is guiltless, and in his innocence is his salvation.” In any moment when we connect with our innocence we connect with the Divine, and that’s what happened on the deck of the Temple at Easton Mountain.

What’s Up?

I’ve recently updated the calendar page on my website.  It includes a couple of events in New York City, the first weekend of June:

• SOMA, a nude evening of yoga, dance and meditation on Friday, June 5
• Seed Saving: True Food Security with Ken Greene on Sunday, June 7

Both of these events are, for me, a part of my spiritual life.  The first is an enjoyable part of my personal spiritual growth.  The second relates to the part of my spirituality that urges me to work for social transformation.  I consider these two parts to both be necessary for a full spiritual life.

How I Work with the Chakras

When asked about my workshops in chakra energy, I begin by explaining that chakras, for me, are a way of thinking about energies, emotions and abilities being localized in different parts of the body. Common language bears this out. We say, “I have a gut feeling”; “I have a lump in my throat”; “My heart goes out to him.”

Take one finger and gently touch between your eyes. Find one spot that seems more sensitive, more pleasurable to your touch. This point is connected with the third eye.

In a chakra workshop, after some exercises to get people comfortable with each other, we awaken each of the chakras beginning with the third eye and working down. We use movements that draw our awareness to the chakra – also drumming, meditation, visualization and touch. We spend extra time with the heart chakra so that the rest of our work is done in heart space.

Work with the lower chakras is done without clothing. We use erotic stimulation, as discussed in other postings, to send erotic energy to all the other chakras. This is done first with a partner and then alone. The chakra work concludes with a meditation to connect with higher energies.

Early in my study of chakras I noted that the power chakra comes between the sexual and heart chakras. This seemed to me to show why issues of power often come up for people who are in committed relationships. Power comes between love and sex.

In The Dance Between Power and Intimacy, which will be Sept,. 12-19 in Scotland, we will focus on how this happens and how we can avoid turning our relationships into power struggles. Our work with the chakras will be a key element in this focus.

The Dance Between Power and Intimacy

For twenty years, I’ve been writing about erotic spirituality; and I’ve facilitated workshops and retreats that combine non-erotic and erotic touch with meditation, movement, and other techniques of spiritual awakening. The following is based on my experience.

There is a strong part of every person’s psyche that thinks of itself as separate.  Einstein called this “the optical delusion of consciousness.”  A Course in Miracles, calls this “ego.”

As I have worked with the Course and other spiritual practices, I have come to recognize two other parts of myself.  One I call the True Self.  It is the part that knows my connection with All That Is.  The other part I call the volitional self – the part that originally only listened to ego; but, through meditation and other spiritual practices, now is increasingly able to choose to listen to the True Self.

My goal in any workshop or retreat that I facilitate is to co-create with the participants an environment in which they can choose to listen to and identify with their True Selves.

When we choose to dominate or submit, we act from ego.  When we choose to share power and enter into intimacy, we identify with and act from our True Selves.  We desire intimacy, and that desire comes from our True Selves, but we subvert that desire, and thus every relationship becomes a dance between power and intimacy – between ego and True Self.

Last fall, along with my friends Marco Whiting and Vyvyan Chatterjie, I proposed facilitating a gay men’s week for the Edward Carpenter Community called The Dance Between Power and Intimacy.  Our proposal was accepted and the dates set for 12-19 September 2009.

Next week I’ll post something about how my work with the chakras will be part of this week.

Folleterre and the Serenity Prayer

Last August I posted an article that quoted Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer. This prayer begins, “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed.”  My trip to Folleterre tested my ability to accept what I cannot change.

Whenever I visit a radical faerie sanctuary, there’s always some tasks that would be simple at home but become much more complex and difficult at the sanctuary – and these tasks are always different at each sanctuary.  At Folleterre, one of the difficult tasks was showering.

Water for showers is heated in a steel drum over an open fire.  Then to get your shower, you must get a friend to help.  One of you dips a large watering can in the hot water and adjusts the temperature by adding cold water if necessary.  Then you stand on a spot with bricks in the ground to promote good drainage, while your friend, on a somewhat higher spot pours the water over you.

My friend Nathan getting a shower

 

 

So it requires two people to get a shower, though the man pouring can handle more than one bather if they stand close together.  I took one shower with two other men.

At one of the circles, we discussed possible improvements  to Folleterre’s property, and someone said they hoped we would never change the method of showering.

There were other challenges to my ability to accept – days that started out sunny, only to turn cloudy and cool by noon and remain so for the rest of the day.  But acceptance of this new way of showering brought some fun that I wouldn’t have had if conventional showers had been installed.

What’s Up?

I have an airline ticket to fly to London this Thursday.  The following week, I’ll travel with friends to Folleterre for Belatane.

While in the UK, I’ll be conferring with my friends, Vyv and Shokti, about the Gay Men’s Week that we will be facilitating for the Edward Carpenter Community in September – the Dance Between Power and Intimacy.

I anticipate being back at Easton Mountain on May 9th.  My next posting to this blog will be May 11th and may include pictures from my travels.