Sexuality, Power, Shamanism
Archetypal forces and future hopes
I just came out of a week-long International School of Temple Arts (ISTA) workshop in Turkey that explored the underworld, death, and the archetypal forces that shape our psychology and our relationships. It involved a lot of embodiment practices, witnessing, ceremony, and physical touch. It definitely challenged my boundaries and pushed me far outside my comfort zones, particularly in expressing myself intimately in front of a group of relative strangers, and, also, in working to access and free my emotions.
The emotional release came far more naturally for many of the other participants, particularly the women. For me, liberating my emotional body remains a struggle. I almost never cry, for instance. I want to understand and remove the systems of control and self-protection I have unconsciously built around my own emotional expression. But I also realize everyone is different and unique.
ISTA considers itself a Mystery School. You are not supposed to discuss specific exercises or rituals with outsiders (although much information can be found online, including much mean-spirited criticism and Tabloid-style exposés). I think ISTA is very important work for our time, and I would recommend it for many people (but not for everyone).
This workshop was Level Two, but I discovered that I need to go back to do Level One again — perhaps several times. Level One — Spiritual Sexual Shamanic Experience (SSSex) — is more focused on integration of body, mind, emotions, and spirit. I often make the mistake of thinking it is enough to understand things mentally or intellectually, but many crucial things can only be realized somatically, which requires working with the body, giving it time, repetition, practice, and patience.
While ISTA Level Two (Spiritual Sexual Shamanic Initiation (SSSin)) is focused on the transpersonal dimension, death and the Underworld, I was still confronted with many psychological issues — hold-overs from childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. Along with ISTA, I want to find other work that helps in addressing my particular blockages. If you have recommendations, please leave them in the comments (someone in the program recommended Path of Love, also Osho-based, and I am looking into that). Talk therapy has never appealed to me, although I could see trying something like Gestalt or a Jungian or even Reichian approach.
One element of ISTA is the work to overcome bodily shame — shame and guilt around nakedness, sexuality, and so on. For Bruce Lyon, one of the founders of ISTA and the main facilitator of the Turkey retreat, the mission of ISTA is to “help those who love find their power.” Obviously, misuse of power, often tangled in the shadowy aspects of sexuality or Eros, is a massive problem in contemporary society: It is one of the core problems we face as a species. I have been studying this, thinking about it for years, and also reflecting on my own past mistakes in this area, and I do not find a clear answer… it is an ongoing process.
I feel we need more people — as many as possible — to undergo deep work so they can maintain authentic presence, without running stories or holding hidden judgements, kinks, and insecurities, and, also, so that they can handle leadership without misusing power. It seems increasingly evident we are spiraling into a deeper level of societal meltdown or collapse due to the still collectively-unaddressed ecological emergency, which is an expression of our consciousness at this evolutionary juncture.
We can’t say yet if this is a terminal crisis for humanity or if we might break through to another level of realization that allows us to deal with what we have unleashed. Obviously, systems and structures are important. But they are also, in the end, expressions of our collective awareness and understanding. One definition of capital, from the political philosopher Antonio Negri, is a “social relation:” Capital, money, private property, are mental constructs which humans have imposed on reality. They might be naturally superseded when we reach new, shared agreements.
We can only start from where we are, doing our imperfect best to evolve. We seem to be reaching an interesting threshold, collectively, where there is less and less pretense about the nature of our society or our future possibilities under this particular regime of post-industrial Capitalism, technocracy, and nation-state governments, whether authoritarian or liberal. Perhaps this can open up an authentic space for transformation and realization.
I was planning to write an essay about what might happen if Trump wins the election — thinking that perhaps this could unleash a powerful counter-reaction that finally changes the underlying dynamics of our civilization. Instead a poem expressed itself, which I offer here:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Liminal News With Daniel Pinchbeck to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.