Blog #12 - What's Next?
Those who attended or viewed the video of our Q/A on April 21 heard us share briefly about our future plans. This is a more complete list.
Reintegration as Participants at Sex-positive Events
We will be attending select sex positive events if and when invited. Event hosts will be informed of our accountability process in advance and be given contact information for our coach and supervisors.
We attended Awaken as Love Tantra Festival and Stage 1 Training in Tulum, Mexico (March 13-24) as participants. The Festival included presentations by a number of internationally recognized Tantra teachers including Laurie Handlers, James Stevenson, Shashi Solluna, and Elaine Yonge while the Training included basic Tantra structures and how those might integrate with Ken Wilbur’s Integral Theory. Charity participated in an 18-month Living Tantra Training, which ended in November 2023. It was highly rewarding for us to have the opportunity to learn and grow without being in a power role.
Supervised Practice
We are engaging experienced Tantra teachers to supervise us and are choosing those who have some experience facilitating accountability processes and/or have specialized training in trauma-informed Tantra. They will review our event materials, organizational practices, and event structures. We are soliciting their feedback as individuals not involved in our previous events or local communities to limit conflicts of interest.
After event materials have been reviewed, we will be offering 3-5 pilot events. These will not be open to the public. We will invite participants with extensive experience in sacred sexuality/Tantra whom we trust to give us clear and unfiltered feedback.
Each participant will receive our updated informed consent where we will review risks associated with participation, potential benefits, and give clarity as to what to expect in any given specific event.
The events will be free of charge.
Each participant will be asked to complete an enhanced anonymous feedback survey that will go directly to our supervisors for review with us.
We will solicit feedback not only on how we lead events, but also on our interpersonal demeanor outside of the specific structures including whether we remain in an attitude of continuous accountability.
We will ask a few participants to serve as peer support/accountability to provide an avenue for the expression of complaints/concerns/conflicts from any fellow participants.
We will have direct and easily accessible outside reporting for complaints/concerns/conflicts related to ourselves as hosts and teachers. This will be managed by Kamela Love from Transform into Love.
Awaken as Love Facilitator Training
Charity learned about Awaken as Love while looking up information regarding accountability and Codes of Ethics in schools of sacred sexuality. As we’ve adopted a new Code of Ethics that fully acknowledges the power differential between facilitators and students and the potential harm that can result from any sensual or sexual engagement with students, we wanted to find schools of Tantra that shared this understanding. James Stevenson, founder of Awaken as Love, firmly and publicly adopts a policy of no sexual interaction between students and teachers during or within months of any event. Awaken as Love combines multiple modalities and is based in Integral Theory and practice, Tantra, Biodanza, and shamanic practices. They are a community that embodies accountability as a way of life, as we also now do.
Many of you know we have long desired to offer more multi-day retreats than the few we’ve offered in the past. Attending the Facilitator Training for Awaken as Love and joining their faculty will make that much easier for us to accomplish. The training includes practice leading event structures and eliciting unfiltered feedback from the trainers and fellow participants.
This provides ongoing peer and supervisory support along with opportunities for co-creation. It also gives us the opportunity to receive feedback about how our styles as teachers “land” with other facilitators who are not in a power imbalance with us. We are excited to receive genuine feedback from those who do not experience the vulnerability inherent in giving constructive criticism to people who hold power over them as teachers or community leaders. We will likely teach at Tantra Festivals and workshops internationally and intend to bring some of Awaken as Love principles and insights back to Portland.
Some Reasonable Questions You May Have
Will Empowered Pleasure reopen?
Yes, but we won’t reopen with the structure that was in place from January 2020 through January 2023. There will be many changes, and we have a few further steps in our accountability process prior to reopening to the public. Formal re-opening to the public will not occur until after we have completed our supervised practice.
When Empowered Pleasure reopens, what will be different?
There will be fewer local events. We overextended ourselves and burned out, and this was one of the issues contributing to harms.
We will initially offer events primarily to those with prior experience in Tantra and/or a referral from another member, similar to the model of Bonobo Network.
All events will be focused on sacred sexuality as a way to expand awareness and deepen interpersonal relationships rather than more general sex-positive events. Our new mantra is, “We want to teach Tantra to those who want to learn Tantra.” The spiritual component of conscious touch and sacred sexuality as a path to liberation will be central. Therefore, our events will not be suitable for individuals who are primarily interested in unfacilitated sex parties (which can be very enjoyable), BDSM (Portland has a thriving kink community), or those who are uncomfortable with ceremonial silence or are primarily seeking new relationships. Those with other interests have many wonderful sex-positive communities in our area to choose from.
The leveling system will be different.
We will have new ways to ensure participants are prepared for event structures. The leveling system may evolve into something different, possibly using the tantra designations of “white, pink, red.”
Determination of readiness to attend eros-centered events will be a collaborative process between the participant and our helpers/assistants, and we will not be the ones making the decisions to reduce the impact of the power differential.
Boundaries and consent training will move away from the “yes, maybe, no” paradigm to practices of embodied consent including “mining for the ‘no’”. Participants, even very seasoned ones, will be asked to take a newly designed consent workshop ensuring they have the capacity to recognize and respond to their own somatic awareness of consent and remain in choice, even under pressure or in sex brain. Rather than relying on a single class, we will review the principles at each event.
There will be an internal peer group for reporting consent concerns, conflicts, or complaints between participants with a clear process that is confidential and focused on embodied accountability and growth.
There will be an external third-party reporting form for complaints, consent violations, or conflicts with us as facilitators.
We have adopted and will be publishing a new Code of Ethics, which includes that we will not be engaging sexually with participants. We will disclose pre-existing relationships when lovers are present and will not engage sexually with them during our events to avoid uncertainty about whether we are honoring our commitments.
There will be prerequisites for participation, including prior experience participating at a Tantra festival or residential workshop, or extensive experience attending local tantra events.
For those who are new and curious, we will offer a 3-day residential orientation that will be offered periodically. It will include:
Embodied consent training and practices
Introduction to Tantra
Training in relationship and conflict management skills and interpersonal expectations for participants
Slow introduction to conscious touch and body awareness
Participant education on trauma, ways trauma responses emerge in sacred sexuality settings, and what to do when participants witness this in themselves or others.
We want our future events to embody an attitude of collective accountability. We will seek participants who truly want to receive feedback on how they are showing up in sacred sexuality spaces as very few of us grew up in a world where that was taught. We are working to create a world where all are fully in choice, are open to understanding their shadows, and can embody universal love and liberation.
We will disclose our accountability process to all event hosts at events we participate in and to any participants at events we lead.
We will no longer serve alcohol at any Tantra-related events. We request that participants arrive free from all mood-altering substances. This does not include medicines being used for therapeutic purposes (prescribed or otherwise) as long as the effects do not impact the capacity to be fully present and in full choice. We will follow the same guidelines as facilitators and hosts.
Note: We do not judge anyone who consumes alcohol or recreationally utilizes psychedelics, plant-based medicines, or entheogens. Because Tantric and sacred sexuality practices often result in altered states of their own, it is paramount that everyone be in full cognitive, emotional, energetic, and spiritual clarity to fully benefit.
So, when is this going to happen?
We will send out invitations to our pilot events shortly once we have our supervisory team finalized. We will conduct the pilot events in summer 2024.
We will announce our supervisory and peer support team members in June 2024.
We will write a summary of our accountability process including associated harms, impacts, apologies, and what we have learned. This summary will be thorough yet succinct so that any who wish to know what happened can be informed without significant time commitment or emotional labor. This summary will be reviewed by our supervisors to ensure that there is no minimization or obfuscation and will include links to the RJ report for those who wish to read the description of harms in the words of survivors. We will complete this summary by the end of June 2024.
We will update our website by the end of July 2024 to include information about our accountability process and what we are doing, as well as updates on our mission statement, new Code of Ethics, and informed consent processes.
We will attend the Awaken as Love facilitator training June 10-20, 2024, and intend to complete the steps to become full faculty soon thereafter. We will announce any public appearances on the EP Facebook page.
Local events open to EP Meetup members will likely restart in the autumn of 2024 pending confirmation from our accountability supervisors that we are ready to open to the public. All participants will go through a new application process as we want to be as sure as possible that everyone attending has the appropriate background and interests.
How can I stay informed?
We will continue to post updates on the EP Facebook page, the blog, and via EP Meetup.
If you wish to be considered for participation in our pilot events, please reach out to one of us or to Miles Hurwitz. In many ways, for these events you will be our teachers. We will consider those who have one or more of the following:
Participation in a residential sacred sexuality festival or multi-day workshop (ISTA, Living Tantra, HAI, Network for New Culture, Sky Dancing Tantra, or others).
Prior Empowered Pleasure E3 or E4 designation.
Participation in 3 or more single day Tantra events (please let us know the event and teacher if it was not with EP).
If you feel you have the experience, are fully in your choice/power, and are willing to provide honest, open, and powerful feedback, we would like to hear from you even in the absence of the above prerequisites.
We will be saying “no” to some who desire participation. These workshops are only secondarily offered for enjoyment or community connection. Their primary intent is to help participants and ourselves learn, grow, and be accountable. Because some have suffered harm in the past, we want to be certain that those coming are operating from empowered agency before they attend any events.
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