It's been something like six months now, and there has been sooooo much going on in my world of late. It's just now settling a bit (even now in Mercury Retrograde) that I can take some time, reflect, and figure out where/what/who/how/why this is going.
Firstly, a welcome to both of you who joined with tribe and I hope you find what you seek! You'll notice there aren't many of us here - that's because I've strictly moderated this group and I'm not about to just try and get a bunch of people in here for numbers' sake. I frequent several sites, and in most cases the people who have shown interest are either just looking for a shag or they're coming to flame. So I'm being selective. This is MY sandbox, and I'll choose who comes in to play. Just play nice, and it's cool.
Secondly - it now seems I'm moving areas! I'm going to have to move closer to London, so the tribe may need to be a bit more centrally located at least for me! There is NO law against creating your own tribe wherever you choose and putting it together; I used to be quite surprised at how often everything I wanted was right in front of me, until it happened with such frequency I just stopped bothering about it. *grin*
I am back together with my husband after a lot of soul-searching. This doesn't mean tribe is "off" - it just means he's now part of the equation, as well as my son! More on this in a bit -
Let me put an Oya "home truth" here; I learned long ago through my involvement in a project called Poison Temple that I should never try to hide myself. I show everything, warts and all; my failings, shortcomings, insecurities, my dramas, my rants, my instabilities. There is no "fantasy me" that I build up solely for attention's sake. I am honest, whether it hurts my "standing" with other people or not - painfully direct, that's part of being one of Oya's Children. Thus, I want to make this clear - I am not very sexual at ALL right now. Sex is the absolutely furthest thing from my mind. This is the result of several factors and I am having to work through a lot of blockage. This past six months has given me a lot to try and evaluate, namely starting with several major life changes and having to let some things go, and adapt other things to suit myself. This is all commonly called "baggage". I call it "life experience". Hence, my return to tantra on the vama-marga path, because it's literally "sexual healing" albeit not in the way most people tend to think...
I will also admit that my faith in the whole idea of Tribe (the Poly/Pagan/Kink thing, NOT the site), has been rather shaken. The responses I was getting from other channels was mostly from me old enough to be my father who didn't register anything else I was saying once I said "tantra". And the lengths these blokes would go to think they'd get it - ! Not that I gave in, but it was boggling how quickly they went from "Humble Male Servant of Divine Woman" to "I Never Liked You Anyway, You Fat Bitch". It also came to my attention the Goddess Tribe in LA - the one I quoted from in the opening post - has fallen apart. Several of my dear sister-friends whom I would have LOVED to have in tribe have been so monumentally burned and emotionally trashed by men over the past four months that they're going to take a lot of healing before they ever trust a man again. I had actually completely shelved the idea and shut all communities I had for this down, even though I still wanted to believe it could be done.
I came back here yesterday "by chance". You know what I'm talking about here - NOTHING happens by chance. However, I was looking up vamamarga resources, and there just happened to be a tribe for it. And lo and behold, I thought about deleting this one as I'd forgotten it. But then I found replies...and then, I read what I had posted in the past.
And I realise, I still want to believe this can work.
I am not a trained and true Tantrika. I am not a Brahman, or a bodhisattva. I am not a Swami, a medicine woman, or a babawo. I am not seeking enlightenment, a Cosmic truth, or an Escape From the Human Condition. I do not believe we are all paying for The First Sin. I do not believe we are guilty before we were ever born. I do not believe I am anything than I am, seeking what most of us are seeking; just another human seeking a group of people who "feel them."
Humans make mistakes, and they tend to get in their own way quite often. As a result, tribes are not an idealistic escape from reality. People are going to bicker and fight. They're going to get jealous. There are going to be explosions and blowouts and tears. That's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, you get some utter psycho in who tears the whole thing apart and then writes a best-selling book about their "experience". It is not a path taken lightly, with a unrealistic view of the trials and tribuations and heartache.
But I want to believe it is still worth doing.
I want to believe that I can be sensual with a group of people without feeling like I have to be a raging nymphomaniac all the time. I want to believe my son can be safe with these people, and they have as much (if not more!) patience with him. I want to believe that I can find a small group of people who won't see my struggles as "baggage" and will recognise the difference between working through something and WALLOWING in it. I'd like to be able to practice Tantra with people I trust. I'd like to be supportive for people without feeling like I'm their mum.
In short, I still want to believe this can happen.
So...this is back on the radar. I am shaking the mojo-stick. I am putting forth the vibe. I am sending out the energy, and all that sort of mumbo jumbo.
Let's see who else wants to believe, too.
Firstly, a welcome to both of you who joined with tribe and I hope you find what you seek! You'll notice there aren't many of us here - that's because I've strictly moderated this group and I'm not about to just try and get a bunch of people in here for numbers' sake. I frequent several sites, and in most cases the people who have shown interest are either just looking for a shag or they're coming to flame. So I'm being selective. This is MY sandbox, and I'll choose who comes in to play. Just play nice, and it's cool.
Secondly - it now seems I'm moving areas! I'm going to have to move closer to London, so the tribe may need to be a bit more centrally located at least for me! There is NO law against creating your own tribe wherever you choose and putting it together; I used to be quite surprised at how often everything I wanted was right in front of me, until it happened with such frequency I just stopped bothering about it. *grin*
I am back together with my husband after a lot of soul-searching. This doesn't mean tribe is "off" - it just means he's now part of the equation, as well as my son! More on this in a bit -
Let me put an Oya "home truth" here; I learned long ago through my involvement in a project called Poison Temple that I should never try to hide myself. I show everything, warts and all; my failings, shortcomings, insecurities, my dramas, my rants, my instabilities. There is no "fantasy me" that I build up solely for attention's sake. I am honest, whether it hurts my "standing" with other people or not - painfully direct, that's part of being one of Oya's Children. Thus, I want to make this clear - I am not very sexual at ALL right now. Sex is the absolutely furthest thing from my mind. This is the result of several factors and I am having to work through a lot of blockage. This past six months has given me a lot to try and evaluate, namely starting with several major life changes and having to let some things go, and adapt other things to suit myself. This is all commonly called "baggage". I call it "life experience". Hence, my return to tantra on the vama-marga path, because it's literally "sexual healing" albeit not in the way most people tend to think...
I will also admit that my faith in the whole idea of Tribe (the Poly/Pagan/Kink thing, NOT the site), has been rather shaken. The responses I was getting from other channels was mostly from me old enough to be my father who didn't register anything else I was saying once I said "tantra". And the lengths these blokes would go to think they'd get it - ! Not that I gave in, but it was boggling how quickly they went from "Humble Male Servant of Divine Woman" to "I Never Liked You Anyway, You Fat Bitch". It also came to my attention the Goddess Tribe in LA - the one I quoted from in the opening post - has fallen apart. Several of my dear sister-friends whom I would have LOVED to have in tribe have been so monumentally burned and emotionally trashed by men over the past four months that they're going to take a lot of healing before they ever trust a man again. I had actually completely shelved the idea and shut all communities I had for this down, even though I still wanted to believe it could be done.
I came back here yesterday "by chance". You know what I'm talking about here - NOTHING happens by chance. However, I was looking up vamamarga resources, and there just happened to be a tribe for it. And lo and behold, I thought about deleting this one as I'd forgotten it. But then I found replies...and then, I read what I had posted in the past.
And I realise, I still want to believe this can work.
I am not a trained and true Tantrika. I am not a Brahman, or a bodhisattva. I am not a Swami, a medicine woman, or a babawo. I am not seeking enlightenment, a Cosmic truth, or an Escape From the Human Condition. I do not believe we are all paying for The First Sin. I do not believe we are guilty before we were ever born. I do not believe I am anything than I am, seeking what most of us are seeking; just another human seeking a group of people who "feel them."
Humans make mistakes, and they tend to get in their own way quite often. As a result, tribes are not an idealistic escape from reality. People are going to bicker and fight. They're going to get jealous. There are going to be explosions and blowouts and tears. That's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, you get some utter psycho in who tears the whole thing apart and then writes a best-selling book about their "experience". It is not a path taken lightly, with a unrealistic view of the trials and tribuations and heartache.
But I want to believe it is still worth doing.
I want to believe that I can be sensual with a group of people without feeling like I have to be a raging nymphomaniac all the time. I want to believe my son can be safe with these people, and they have as much (if not more!) patience with him. I want to believe that I can find a small group of people who won't see my struggles as "baggage" and will recognise the difference between working through something and WALLOWING in it. I'd like to be able to practice Tantra with people I trust. I'd like to be supportive for people without feeling like I'm their mum.
In short, I still want to believe this can happen.
So...this is back on the radar. I am shaking the mojo-stick. I am putting forth the vibe. I am sending out the energy, and all that sort of mumbo jumbo.
Let's see who else wants to believe, too.
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Re: I Want to Believe
Mon, June 25, 2007 - 2:24 PMHey Oya
I have been enjoying your ideas on the tribe ;)
My thoughts are I'm sure it can work, sure some who have tried it today it has spun out of control, could be interpretted as the ego being stronger than the bonds of the tribe. I should say I'm not a tantra expert at all, but it strikes me it's about working through all possible emotions so nothing is a suprise in your relationships with others. Once people know each other and admit everything then suppressed feelings can't suddenly appear and disrupt the tribal unity
People will piss each other off that's normal and good. It should be funny when someone exhibits their failings. I've been wondering if role playing at getting mad at someone could help. Try and find what annoys you about someone and let it out in advance
I suspect in our individualistic culture we are beginners at all this. We haven't the experience to make it work but sooner or later someone has to be the first to establish a pattern that works. In the past communal groups seem to have existed so it could work again
I don't know what happened in Goddess Tribe LA, but I don't see how anyone can seek to honour the Goddess and at the same time play some kind of macho game with emotions. Men I recon need to learn to balance things more. Grace is knowing you will get something, without ever demanding it because you give in return what the other person needs. It's like knowing you'll receive what you need without ever having to expect it. I think somewhere in this is how it works
It's idealistic but also realistic at the same time. It never gets old or boring or about making rules that people should follow. That just ends up being like what we're trying to move away from
I think feelings are what makes people heretics. I've heard BS like feelings are inferior and not to be trusted. Doesn't make sense to me. If our minds were so much more trustworthy and better then we would have come up with something by now that worked
Anyway, I'm sure we have nothing to worry about
"I see as clear as daylight that the time has come when women will lead humanity on to a higher evolution" Hazrat Inayat Khan
Martin -
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Re: I Want to Believe
Tue, June 26, 2007 - 12:17 AMThankya for your thoughts on this - nice to know I'm not just whittering off at myself *grin*
The tribe/village thing is, again, something we like to think of in idealistic terms. But it had its downsides. Take a fuedal village. It functioned in very close quarters as it was necessary with so many people who needed to keep a farm going to produce food for themselves as well as its landlord, with the harvest and all the other duties of a farm. By necessity people had to stay together. Most of the time they got on...but this was also the time period where women were labelled as witches for not being pretty - or for being old - or in some cases just for saying "no". All sorts of nasty things happened behind the scenes, and most people just turned a blind eye and pretended it wasn't there, because the community was more important than the individual. There was gossip, and infighting, and people other people didn't like.
On the plus side - the village was always there for you. A woman would be recently widowed, and more often than not her woodpile would be filled, quietly, before the winter. Maybe she got a bit of bacon delivered as well, or some bread. It wasn't talked about - it just happened. A wedding was a village affair, as were dances and the harvest. The men drinking scrumpy, the women round the well. The activities they performed was just a front for the really important thing - socialising and enjoying one another's company. The same old jibing jokes flying between the women and the men, the same old couple that had been together for years.
For my part I think in order for a tribe to work, it has partly to do with ego (good observation there, actually - in tantra, the Ego is often the most difficult thing to combat), but also with SCALE. The Goddess Tribe in LA was rather large - not massive, but about 15-20 people. That's a lot of people to manage and a lot of personalities all trying to meld together, all living in the same space and all trying to get on. Whenever you more people to that sort of community, it seems that problems due to personality clashes become squared. So to my mind I think keeping things small and on a personal level might be the way to go. I also feel one should have the right to stick up for what they want and need in a tribe, rather than trying to mold themselves to a tribe.
My son has rather severe autism and my husband is also on autism spectrum (as well as being a genius). I am already in a challenging situation - I'm practically challenged in my sleep! My husband is very anti-IC; he seems to have it in his mind that it means everyone lives in a communal house, takes meals together and is generally living on one another's backs. However, like my son, whilst he insists on having his OWN privacy, he isn't all that good at recognising the need for other people - he's the type of chronic lifter-of-pot-lids, knocking-on-closed-doors-asking -"what are you doing in there all by yourself?" type of bloke. He's quite happy having more girlfriends than he could possibly handle, but he likes knowing exactly where "home" is and what patch of it is "his". So I've had to be rather strict on requirements...and even then, the biggest issue will be "can people handle the double-whammy that is my family?" Not for the faint of heart!
As far as rules go - there are things that make me comfortable, and things that don't. I am, as I said, a human life form. I am also not the type of person to be so accepting and lenient and PC that my brains leak out my ears. There are things that make me incredibly uncomfortable and as such I am allowing myself a huge slice of Ego and being selfish when it comes to my own idea of tribe. When it comes to tribe, I would rather not have people about who believe I just need to "confront my issues with x, y, or z". I would just rather they were people who could understand where I was coming from and feel roughly the same way I do about certain things. Also, through experience, I've discovered that as much as we may hate rules, without them there's always one person who sashays along and flagrantly does what any sane person would know was the wrong thing. However these people are the first to take the Anarchists High Ground and say "Well it never said anywhere NOT to do this. You show me where it said I couldn't, and then I'll believe I did the wrong thing." With both my own personal home life and my experience with these blatant gits, I establish what I want and what rules there are ahead of time, for my OWN self. People can agree and wish to abide by them, enjoy the idea and say "wow, I've been looking for that!" or shake their heads and go elsewhere. We all have the right to preference.
I went on a bit there! Suffice to say that I'm still in the "what to do, what to do" stages. Granted, I'm also aware I need to reach a point when I need to stop smeggin' planning and actually arrange some meets or something with interested parties. Still trying to figure out when and where. Let me know if you're interested and I'll try and sort summat
Namaste
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Re: I Want to Believe
Wed, June 27, 2007 - 5:38 PMHey Oya, I like how you describe something idealistic in such a grounded way ;)
I guess I can only think back to past relationships and also having lodgers to look at how people get along not having lived in an IC
Seems to be about a community of individuals, more than a I don't know, one that tries chipping away at that so people fit into it. That could work for a while but suppressing individuality you could come close to 'the ideal' but would be very fleeting and soon end
On a personal note, I found lodgers to be easy enough to live with despite one who picked up blokes and brought them back at odd times. That was coming close to breaking a rule I guess.. I was kind of sympathetic though to her situation, whereas my gf at the time was on a war footing!... me stuck in the middle. But I found myself quite enjoying it. I can get very bored is much worse.
Hmmm privacy is another thing, even in an IC you could arrange private spaces? Like this couch is yours and you always watch this TV program. But others could have their own requirements too, their own space
With rules, I'm surely being idealistic, but maybe behind the rules there's a higher rule that's at work that people can agree on. The rules are there to jab you and make you think. Then, you sometimes need someone to come down like a ton of bricks at the right moment!
Just some thoughts anyway you have a great way of describing it Oya, would be interested in something
Oh, the other thing I nearly forgot is what would happen if the current go-getting society was to run aground and people had to depend on each other a lot more. I can see this happenning at some point
Martin
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