The context in and around ISTA at this time is what has inspired this sharing. It’s my story with them, lights and shadows. The intention is to encourage gazing on a wider horizon, where all forms of the arts of loving and healing meet. A horizon where we all lovers of love can feel appreciated and included. Where the sacred and the sexual can be wedded happily and in peace.
A horizon where attacks are met together and where mystery schools can come together in appreciating ways that hostility makes us stronger and forces everyone to give an account of oneself.
My narrative emanated as a reflection on ISTA’s recent response to the attack of a fundamentalist Center in Israel. The response was thorough. And yet, some energies are not quite settled yet. Thanks for reading. I hope it is useful.
1. First Times
I am in Berkeley, CA, Dez is in the room along with Deborah Anapol. It must be sometime around 2009-10.
They are running a Puja.
We all bask in a cloud of glow, softness, cuddliness, light.
I feel the density of the oxytocin all around, even as I don’t yet have a name for it.
A strong intuition comes to me.
“As soon as it’s time for me to complete my career in academe, I want to become a teacher of the whole person.”
I tell Dez between one eye gazing and another.
I feel such joy and plenitude in my heart.
2. Doing It
Next time I’m in Angsbacka, Sweden, 2017 or so. I’ve just taken ISTA L1 for the first time.
We get out and people ask me.
“The curriculum is great,” I reply, “I could not have designed it better.”
It embraces many of my values, including the plenitude of bisexuality, the expansiveness of polyamory as lovestyles that are an option for those ready to expand.
It values women and expresses a positive sense of androgyny: the presence of feminine and masculine elements in all of us.
It emphasizes ways of healing and loving that are natural, even as they are inclusive, and reflect the wide horizon of diversity that nature itself encompasses.
These had been the main themes of my academic research, as a literary person with a penchant for narrative.
These are the ISTA highlights that were apparent to me at that time.
3. Wings
In my new life as a retiree, I endeavor to educate myself in all the esoteric disciplines and practices that today’s academic world keeps out of bounds.
I offer myself opportunities to explore and learn from several esoteric schools and intentional communities, including the Tao Garden and the Source School of Tantra, in Thailand, Lolia in Hawaii, the Sex-Positive education group in Portland, Oregon, a number of venues in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tamera in Portugal, Damanhur in Northern Italy, and many others.
Eventually, I take ISTA a number of additional times, as a participant, as an assistant, as a repeat participant, with several lead facilitators in Levels 1 and 2.
4. Awkward?
My experiences are mixed. Sometimes I feel a strong affinity for the facilitation, the organizing team, and location.
At other times, less so.
I NEVER feel abused.
Sometimes I do feel constipated and sleep deprived, due, not so much to the schedule itself, but rather to my desire to stay up beyond the schedule and socialize, and to my capricious bowels.
A number of times I feel out of touch with the bulk of the group for, as a participant who is also by age retired, I am so much older than the average.
5. The Entire Person
Teaching the entire person means, of course, going well beyond what’s allowed in today’s universities, namely visual communication, plus the written and the spoken word (logos/mind).
Teaching the whole person means activating all the senses and perceptions that our human species can avail itself of, as a way to learn about oneself, the world, and the universe we’re in.
There are risks involved in this. It was known even in classical Athens, as Eryximachus explains in Plato’s dialogue, The Symposium.
Yet the advantages far outweigh the risks, as the knowledge one can transmit is so much more transforming, impacting, profound and valuable.
It is initiatory in its character, just like it was in the ancient Mysteries of Eleusis.
These knowledges allow the initiated to transform energies. It’s like an alchemy where a wide range of emotions become transfused as love.
This happens in ISTA as in all other esoteric schools.
Today I can say that my awareness of all that matters, my sense of existence, of energy, of matter, of intuition, of souls, of heart, of health, of love, of initiation, of frequency, of vibration, of connection, of emotion, of the universe, has been so expanded from the time I met Dez, ISTA’s founder, in that Berkeley puja.
It’s been a great journey and I’m so glad to have embarked in it. I feel another big part of myself has been found and I’m proud of it.
So far ISTA is by far the esoteric school where I have invested more energies than in others. I feel an affinity and an affiliation for it.
At this time, I also realize how easy it is for fundamentalist associations to assemble what they call “evidence” against this mystery school. It’s easy because so many people afraid of mysteries are eager to believe it!
6. Peak Experience
My peak experience with ISTA is very recent. It’s related to the first 50 + ISTA that Laurie Handlers conducted in Mexico. There I felt totally at home. I felt totally connected with the group, the team and the conductors. I was assisting, which requires extra time, yet I never felt constipated or sleep deprived.
It was a major breakthrough in my life. Fifty people together for a week, in and around the themes and practices of sexuality, spirituality and shamanism. ALL aged 50 to 82, and feeling totally content in each other’s company, never for one moment missing having younger people around.
What a feat!
If only every life could be lived since childhood with this kind of imagination in mind! The world would be a much better place, I’m sure!
And it took energy, I hear, to persuade ISTA to set up editions that serve this particular age group.
ISTA rocks, especially when it hunts down its own shadows and appreciates its own harvests.
“It was easy to do this ISTA,” said Laurie. Why? Because most people in the 50 + crowd have already learned from life many of the lessons that younger participants struggle with.
Thank you for giving me MY ISTA, Laurie, with the rhythms that work well for people who’ve lived long enough to come to the high floors of existence, as we can count many decades while revolving around the Sun.
I look forward to bringing this to Italy and for senior Italians with you, Laurie!
7. Fundamentalism: A Blinder
I feel it’s sad that a fairly disreputable fundamentalist center in Israel has been slandering this school.
I consider fundamentalism a bit of a blinder. There is judgment everywhere and a big dosage of self-righteousness.
I am delighted that all claims were addressed with courage and panache.
I am proud to have done, been part of, and assisted others in doing all the rituals that have been reductively described in the attack.
It’s true that these rituals are evolving and empowering. They deserve to be described generously and expansively.
8. Sacred Sexuality
ISTA is very large. So in defending itself from accusations related to elements of sacred sexuality, in a way ISTA defends all school that teach and practice this.
In the Occident, sexuality has been desacralized for way too long. I’d say with the advent of monotheistic religious systems, the divorce between sexuality and the sacred has been sealed. Antiquity, with its multiple deities, had the nuptial Thalamus be the bed AND the altar where the sacred ritual of sexual union was performed.
In more monotheistic times, the feminine, the body and the erotic were evacuated from the sacred, which became an invisible disembodied entity imagined as masculine.
It’s about time to put back the sacred into the body, into the feminine, and into sexuality.
Right?!
Let’s do it!
9. Allies
My wish is that ISTA’s rebuttal of the fundamentalist accusations suffered be a tool that unites many esoteric schools of our day, schools that could, also, become targets.
Perhaps ISTA’s size has made it more visible and perhaps more vulnerable?
Perhaps, and pardon my penchant for the literary, this could be an opportunity for ISTA to look around itself.
Who else is doing good work? Who else could be an ally?
That would make the whole case of sacred sexuality and the arts of healing and loving a very strong one. And the world definitely needs this today!
10. Literary Mothers
When in doubt, I refer to my literary mothers. They are good teachers so please indulge me.
One is Lillian Hellman, a very famous American playwright of the 20th century.
Slander is slander and it cannot become true if the intention wasn’t there, or the fact.
Yet Martha’s phrase in The Children’s Hour comes to my mind. “The lie with the ounce of truth,” she says when she realizes that she had desired what she was wrongly accused of having done. Being lovers with another woman, that is, in the strongly bi- and homo-phobic context of the 1934 Broadway scene.
So perhaps this “ounce of truth” that can accidentally be contained in a lie, could be ISTA’s ultimate harvest from having overcome the false accusations.
What’s in the “ounce”? It’s not for me to say, as a humble assistant I really don’t feel comfortable speculating in any way about this.
Giving an Account of Oneself titles American philosopher Judith Butler when writing about September 11. Yes, being under attack allows one to see oneself with the eyes of the other, of the enemy. There is polarization. Enmity. It’s destabilizing.
What openness, what transfiguration does it take to transform this too into love?
I know this question is close to my heart. I don’t really know if there is an answer or what it could be. And, still following my literary mother, in asking the question here, I feel that I would rather “make the attempt and fail, than fail to make the attempt.”
I hope this is useful. ISTA has benefitted so many people, me included. Evolving again human awareness and practice around the arts of loving and healing, around the sacredness of sexuality, is what brings hope to out era.
Hope to our fragile existence on the Third Planet many call Gaia.
ISTA is a big part of it, along with many other schools, teams, and groups. Let’s feel the gratefulness we all owe to this.
For all those of you who have been reading so far, thank you!
The response article on the ISTA website is linked here. There all the fundamentalist accusations ISTA has faced are listed along with ISTA’s thorough answers.
Enjoy the reading and feel inspired by the devotion to love, awareness, and authenticity.
Thank you!
ISTA’s rebuttal as published on Fb, also available on ISTA’s website.
