“A new study published in PLoS scientifically validates what so many drum circle participants have already experienced first hand: group drumming produces significant changes in well-being, including improvements in depression, anxiety and social resilience.”http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/group-drumming-better-prozac-study-suggests

It was round a queer pagan fire in a field in Dorset in the year 1999 that I first experienced the expansive joy of group energy united by the drumbeat – a circle of people all revelling in the feeling of being in union, connected by rhythm and emotion and something bigger, knowing that each is having their own experience of this, would describe it in their own unique way, and this fact is perfectly wonderful.

Each human is ultimately a mystic having a relationship with their own inner divinity – and when mystics merge their energy fields, in harmony with nature’s elements,magic is the word for what happens.

Other words might include healing, revealing, seeing, knowing

Uniting the human individuality with the spirit of the drum, the rhythm, the group can loosen blocked emotional energy, clear the mental frequencies, and liberate the spirit. It can rebalance the inner world, it’s good for our mental health.

shokti

radical faeries of london samhain drum circle ancestor shrine

Allowing the energy to rise and fall

Listening is the key to tuning in

The mind naturally takes a back seat

as the heart and spirit move into the dance with the drum

The body revealed as ecstatic vehicle

of the lightbeing you are and always have been

Step into eternity

Allow the elements to restore and renew you

All life is One Dance, One Power, One Strength

Flowing through you, me, space, time and mind

In the rhythm we find our way home

Humans have always communed this way.

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Albion Fae Samhain Circle at Oscar Wilde Temple, Clapham SW4.  Photos by Mike Kear.

SAMHAIN: the pagan new year festival of death and rebirth, when the dead are honoured and our place in the cosmic whole remembered.  Across the world so many people feel the call to mark Samhain, whether in formal ceremony or the informal celebrations of Halloween.  More ancient than any religion, this festival has deep roots in our souls, and gives us the chance to connect to them.

The veils are thin, we remember the dead, we make fun of the darkness, we celebrate the shadows and the spooks, we just know this is the witches’ time of year.

The veils are thin and we may pass through them, recall once more the ancient ways

the dance of creation, the rhythm of seasons, the power of moons, the light of the soul

and how the Goddess, through the Wheel of the Year, shows us how to be whole.

In London Queer Rad Fae witches gathered on Samhain night 31st October 2018 at the Oscar Wilde Temple in Clapham to remember our kin, honour our kind, celebrate our power and invoke the hour of our magical return as healers, teachers and soul warriors of the human race, reuniting the worlds, lifting the veils

rediscovering the Way, reinventing it for today

inviting a renewed understanding and experience of the relationship between the living and the dead

invoking health and balance mentally – emotionally – physically by honouring all parts of ourselves:  Samhain brings a time of endings as we release the summer and old beliefs that no longer serve our wellbeing, and a chance to prepare for the more inward journey of winter

to achieve this we remember the elementals and the spirit world….

Now comes the time of year when the cosmos is inviting us to enter into a deeper relationship with dimensions beyond the physical, to let our belief in our isolated individuality die and take a journey of communion and connection to the higher self and the collective consciousness. If we step through this portal, the Gate of Samhain, we will be ready for the rising fire of the centaur spirit Sagittarius and the journey through Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces months, taking us through to the Spring and giving meaning and depth to our experience of Winter.

blog by Shokti

Albion Faerie Philippe Viney is bringing his special understanding of the foreskin to the wisdom and practice of sexological bodywork:

Millions of years of evolution have fashioned and engineered the human foreskin to become a superbly and remarkably efficient ‘pleasure principle’ delivering apparatus. This is because evolution has maximised the strategies required to deliver a failsafe guarantee that the ejaculation mechanism will inevitably ensure sperm is released to fertilize the ovum and ensure the continuation of the human species. The foreskin’s other functions includes protection, lubrication, and connection. However over the course of documented human history, the practice of circumcision has cast a long, dark, insidious, persistent and enduring shadow which has plagued and continues to plague humanity to ensure that the foreskin has become the most maligned, vilified and misunderstood part of the human body.

Each individual human being has the inalienable right to an intact body, but this isn’t the case for all humans. Regular and routine interference with this inalienable right by circumcising and mutilating both male and female genitals interferes with evolution’s ‘pleasure principle’ and is an affront to civilized behaviour and must therefore be challenged. Circumcision, for reasons of religion, culture, financial profit, social pressures (the ‘herd’ mentality), misinformation, disinformation, ignorance and indifference continues to be the ‘thorn in the side’ of humanity. The barbaric reality and horrific tragedy of circumcision is that it’s perpetrated without consent mostly on new-borns, infants, toddlers and children without anaesthetic. This ultimately contravenes and violates the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The physical, emotional, sexual, psychological and spiritual cost and repercussions to those violated humans (estimated to be more than one billion individuals) are frighteningly and horrendously unimaginable.

To redress the balance and to restore an element of sanity to this outrageous ‘globally psychotic behaviour’ it’s of vital importance that sound, sober and factual information be made available to elucidate all humans with the evolutionary ‘pleasure principle’ marvel that the foreskin is. As a civilized species we must acknowledge that there is nothing wrong with the bodies that we are born in and that we don’t need to ‘modify’ it because it is perfect the way it is when we enter into this world. We must therefore honour and take care of our own sacred bodies which we inhabit as the vehicles for our souls to travel in on this current journey on our blue planet. The embodied experience is the common ground that we all share with each other and is the hallmark of what it means to be human beings, alive and vital to the senses which include sexual pleasure and enjoyment. Our bodies are sensually pleasure-abled, erotic and sexual and it is of the utmost importance and significance that we value, respect and treasure every aspect of the ‘Intact’ sacredness of the bodies into which we are born into.

The field of human sexuality remains significantly un-researched due generally to the ‘sex taboo’ imposed largely on humanity and society by organised religions with such ‘loaded’ societal ‘moral’ terms as ‘decency’, ‘indecency’, ‘perversion’, ‘sin’, ‘punishment’, ‘sacrifice’…etc. To the detriment of those ‘brainwashed’ by religious dogma and practices which shackle them to their ‘fixed’ and ‘false’ beliefs, hope for deliverance from these chains is likely to be a distant and forlorn dream. Research into human sexuality is not generally at the forefront of funding by mainstream universities, thus this most important of topics progresses positively when certain driven individuals on a mission to make a difference manage to challenge the status quo and pursue to advance this field in holistic and liberating ways. Sexological Bodywork as devised and established from the blood, sweat and ‘pleasure principled’ tears of ‘The Body Electric’ founder, Joseph Kramer empowers individuals to be embodied beings by noticing and experiencing their physical, sensual, sexual and emotional awareness. The individual is encouraged to verbalise their sensual and sexual ‘yeses’ and ‘no’s’ and to be in control of what they want and what they don’t want, and if they don’t know what they want, they’re encouraged to try new things to test out to see if they like it or not.

So when the foreskin is connected to Sexological Bodywork, a new paradigm is created which has not been delivered before. As the average foreskin has definitively been researched by Canadian Dr John Taylor to be laden with 20,000 specialised nerve receptors designed to maximise pleasure ensuring ejaculation, the detrimental myths which have persisted over the ages about the foreskin must surely for once and for all be exploded, vaporised, annihilated and disintegrated. The principle of embodiment endorses noticing what’s going on within the senses and how these make us feel. Sexological Bodywork gives us permission to literally finally get to grips with the foreskin. It allows us to take it in hand, stretch it, pull it, caress it, shake it, insert a finger or two inside it, retract it or get somebody else to do it consensually and to notice what’s going on when these joyful, pleasure inducing acts are performed. We can then do it again with conscious breath and excite it with that array of bliss stimulant ways but this time with varying pressures and speed, to maximise and savour the enjoyment and ecstatic pleasure principle. Thusly Dr Taylor proposes that “it is a man’s foreskin that is analogous to the clitoris, not the glans or head as is widely believed.” And Dr Martin Novoa, (Bioethics Advisor at Doctors Opposing Circumcision) states that “The foreskin is not the candy wrapper – it’s the candy”.

On that tasty note, whether you are male or female, it is time to take the foreskin into account (if not already doing so) and place it on the ‘pleasure principle’ pedestal that nature and evolution always intended. It actually never deviated from that role but has silently endured the taunts, derision, abuse and battering from the vilification and ignorance from misguided elements of humanity. Sexological Bodywork reclaims and endorses its long neglected role and gives it the long overdue recognition that in the foreskin resides overwhelmingly ecstatic and enjoyably blissful sensations, the epitome of embodiment.