Shamanism, Sex, Soul Retrieval

Thoughts on my week-long ISTA Level One immersion

The Future of Consciousness seminar launches in under two weeks! We just received a good-sized donation to our think tank, The Elevator, which is coproducing the event. The donation allows us to offer 20 tickets at a scholarship rate of 50% off. Please use this link to access them.

I thought I would write a bit about my ISTA Level One experience which just ended in Hungary. I hope to convey why I think this is such essential work. I know I haven’t completed my process with it. I expect to be on a journey with ISTA – perhaps other related paths also – for quite a while. 

ISTA stands for International School of Temple Arts. I will get into the idea and practice of the temple at a later date. I am still an apprentice / neophyte when it comes to the temple culture. Temples are opportunities for connection, presence, play, eroticism, and embodiment. Another time, I may explore my current and ongoing struggles and what I am wishing for myself in these spaces.

ISTA brings ritual and ceremony back into our contemporary world in a way I find honest and real. As we know, our culture lacks for initiatory rituals, for ways to mark our connection with certain energies. These include the life-force energy that moves through sexuality — or, better, Eros — but also the cycles of life, the elements, our relationship to our ancestors, and so on. 

Some of the exercises involve roleplaying; for example, in one exercise (somewhat similar to family constellation work), we separate into groups of three. Within the group, participants rotate taking the roles of the “divine mother” and “divine father” as archetypes, telling their human child, the third member of the group, all of the things they always wanted to hear and feel from their parents when they were 6, 8, or 10 years old. At the end of the exercise, the now-autonomous child is released, free to enter into the world as a fully autonomous being, having anchored those archetypally supportive divine parents inside themselves. 

It is hard to believe such an exercise could be so powerful. But in fact, you do at times feel those archetypal energies entering into you and moving through you. Many participants burst into tears.

One surprisingly powerful experience for me was when I was in the divine mother role. The woman who was the child asked me to tell her what her mother never said: That she was enough just as she was. Her mother always pushed her toward certain careers, financial security, marriage, children, and so on. The mother couldn’t understand the life choices she had made, which included dropping out of the corporate world to pursue somatic work. I could feel a channel opening up, something coming through, that made my words truthful. Both of us cried. 

If you are in New York City, please join us for this unique event, discussing the darker forces hovering around our world today. I will be moderating. The $10 ticket price includes free drinks and musical entertainment (to be announced soon). Hope to see youi there!

Generally, a lot of the ISTA work requires going into a state of intense vulnerability, a place where you can let your defenses and guardrails down to allow a kind of reshaping and softening of one’s ego-based identity. Level One is called “SSEX” which stands for “Spiritual Sexual Shamanic Experience.” The work includes intense explorations of intimate touch, which is a huge boundary for many to cross. The week-long Level One is legitimately shamanic — as powerful as any psychedelic or plant medicine journey I have done. I definitely feel like I connect with archetypal energies and enter into altered states repeatedly during the workshops although no psychedelic substance or even alcohol is allowed during the training. 

This is one of many things that excites and inspires me about ISTA: