Jeffrey walks the two blocks from his apartment to the Kiva for the morning ritual. It has been almost a year since he joined the village, a community of sixteen men committed to co-creating, containing, and circulatingan “erotic vibratory force field for healing, nourishment and consciousness.” Some community members live together; others, like Jeffrey, live by themselves. All live within a few blocks of the Big House and the Kiva. Presence at the daily Heart Fire Ritual is central to being a part of the Village. The community members call each other, sacred brother.
Very quickly Jeffrey had discovered that being present at the Ritual took preparation. Within a month of his acceptance into the Village, his whole day revolved around the Ritual. He intensified his stretching and exercising, more aware each day of new levels of feeling. He stopped eating and drinking what wasn’t nourishing. He seldom watched television and stopped reading newspapers completely. He even started to enjoy his work at the Testing Center at the University. For the first time in his life, he felt he was developing a relationship–with himself, with his sacred brothers, and with the whole universe. And now, after almost a year of rituals, he feels and understands his life in terms of energy. Jeffrey, the erotic physicist, has learned how to generate energy, contain it, circulate it, focus it, and transmit it. Every day he celebrates the power and the mystery of eros, the evolutionary thrust. And most amazing to Jeffrey, he has discovered a sense of wonder and awe that often allows him to laugh and cry at the same time. Such are the effects of the Ritual.
Not a traditional Native American kiva, the Village Kiva is a Buckminster Fuller-type geodesic structure, containing one huge room about twenty-five feet in diameter, half in the earth, half above ground. The very top of the dome is glass; the wooden polygon sides provide privacy. An elevated platform, three feet high and three feet wide circles the edge of the room. Candles are everywhere.
Jeffrey usually gets to the Kiva a bit early. Leaving his clothes in the antechamber, he picks up two towels and some massage oil. He spreads one towel on the rug at his favorite place on the platform and prepares to enter Silence, one of the three realms participants can move among during the Ritual. Some sacred brothers jokingly call this realm “Voyeur” because it is about doing nothing, just being with the energy of the Ritual and witnessing what is happening. Those in Silence sit quietly on the platform. The Heart Fire Ritual begins and ends with all participants in Silence.
The second realm of the Ritual, Awakening, concerns the great human venture of waking up. This is the realm of shaking and stretching, laughing and screaming, self-massage and aerobic activity, breathing and masturbating. Remaining within his own segment of the platform, each sacred brother generates and circulates within his body the holy fire–the erotic life force. Having spent most of the rituals of the last year in Awakening, Jeffrey is totally comfortable stretching, stroking himself and screaming both in pleasure and pain. He often tells others that one of the great delights of the Ritual is watching the circle of men he has grown to love wake up while he too wakes up along side them. Jeffrey has learned to model and imitate the best and most effective of his sacred brothers’ movements and rhythms. In Awakening everyone is teacher and guide to everyone else.
When the physical, energetic body is sufficiently awakened, a sacred brother can move down into the center of the Kiva. Heart Fire is the realm of joyous movement, ecstasy, celebration, aliveness, communion, glowing eroticism, emptiness/fullness, synergy, creativity, magic and mysticism. During the Ritual, the center of the Kiva seems to be a place beyond choosing. Most sacred brothers are surprised to find themselves in Heart Fire.
The Heart Fire Ritual, usually an hour long, has no leader, only a time keeper who also plays the music.Sacred brothers can choose at any time to move from one realm to another that seems more appropriate. Often, one or more sacred brothers will sit for the whole Ritual in Silence. It is not uncommon for some sacred brothers to change realms ten or twenty times during a Ritual. His second time in Heart Fire, Jeffrey was receiving wild erotic touch from a group of sacred brothers when he got distracted by a desire: “I want this in my bed every night.” The thought pulled him out of the present away from one of the hottest experiences of his entire life. He was now thinking instead of experiencing. He knew he needed to shift to Awakening to get out of his mind. He gently extricated himself from the scene and returned to his place on the platform.
Each sacred brother has equal access to the co-created erotic force field that results each day from sixteen men consciously generating the highest fire possible in a human being. Sacred brothers often report that they are vibrated by this energy into trans-personal and mystical states. Most agree that this energy brings them clarity and generosity about the gifts they carry for others. Some sacred brothers impregnate the collective erotic fire with their individual intentions, often with extraordinary results. In some Rituals, the whole community agrees to hold the same intention in their hearts.
Here are some sacred brother reflections:
“We should invite visitors more often. They stimulate us out of our normal patterns and help celebrate diversity.” Response: “But some are unconscious vampires, totally unaware of the subtlety of what we are doing.”
“After charging my body with breath and sex, I often travel to other domains. My body is the gateway, but when I let go into another consciousness, I realize I am not present in the Ritual so I comeback, but I am frustrated. If my body is gateway, why not honor it as that. Why commit to staying present with the body for the whole hour?”
“I believe that it is possible for us to have as much influence on the world with the Heart Fire Ritual as did Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.”
“Whenever I am touching any of you in Heart Fire, I feel like I am touching myself.”
“My heart keeps getting bigger and bigger. I want to thank each of you. I used to hold back part of my heart waiting for the relationship that would last forever. Now I know that when I truly love someone, that love is outside of time–forever. This is what I have always wanted but couldn’t visualize clearly.”
“I would like to try a twenty-four hour version of the Ritual.”
“Why don’t we each write a special intention on cards that we place face down in the center of the floor before the ritual. When we are ecstatically moving in Heart Fire, we can each pick up a card and focus on that intention.”
“My boyfriend and I have been doing the Ritual together, just the two of us. I love to sit in Silence and watch him get charged.”
“Last week I sat in Silence for six days. I know some of you are concerned. I would like to read a few words from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself: I exist as I am, that is enough. If no other in the world is aware, I sit content. And if each and all be aware, I sit content.”
Joseph Kramer is a Somatic Sexologist at the New School of Erotic Touch. He will be a headline presenter at the Sydney Festival of Really Good Sex, 22-26 January, 2016, where he will be teaching the Three Circles Ritual with Deej & Uma.