10 days.
60 people.
5 facilitators.
5 lecturers and a music guide.
3 years commitment.
1 place: Tamera.
When I stepped into this container, my growing edge was to fully own my desires and accept my wanting as sacred. That meant stepping into visibility, and that is the real edge.
To be seen and feel accepted as I am, was my intention. "To be seen is to be loved," they said. I'm letting that percolate in my body. Being there in ceremony from threshold to threshold, you trust the process of Life. Set your intention, set it in motion, allowing it to come as it needs to.
On day one, we were playing “Common Ground,” a way to get to know each other in big groups. In a circle with all participants, you speak a truth from an "I" perspective and step into the center of the circle, and those who share that truth step in with you. The closer to the center, the more true it feels.
At some point, I said, “I believe in love,” as my intention was to stand visible, owning who I am. It was deeply touching to see so many standing around me. It melted my heart a bit. It felt like a glimpse of my desire: standing in my truth and allowing those who resonate to stand up right next to me. ❤️
A huge reminder during these days was to keep awareness of being in my center when in love. I can acknowledge now that many times in the past, when I fell in love, I lost my center. It is an active practice to stay in our center, and adding love to the equation makes it even juicier. In that moment when love comes, arises, let it open you up and feel it while staying there. Easier said than done, but important to keep in the awareness field.
Healing can appear when I accept love. Then inevitably, the question of what's love comes to me, because the conditioning of "love" as a one-on-one partnership or nuclear family is not what I have in mind. It is way bigger than that. I guess the Greeks were the ones that touched upon the subject and brought awareness of its many dimensions.
The eight different types of love, according to the ancient Greeks, are:
Eros (sexual passion)
Philia (deep friendship)
Ludus (playful love)
Agape (love for everyone)
Pragma (longstanding love)
Philautia (love of the self)
Storge (family love)
Mania (obsessive love)
These expand our perception of love and where/how it could exist.
Several questions were posted at the center:
How can I be a vessel for love to flourish?
How can I be a vessel for others to love?
Real love doesn't have to be deserved. Love just IS.
Global Love School is meant to exist as a network of allies of love in the world. A space to explore how personal issues in love and sexuality are part of a broader cultural transformation, as peace work.
Let me give you a bit of perspective and orientation on where it happened: Tamera. It's a community that has a very special place in my heart and journey. It is a peace research center.
Tamera is a healing biotope with the dream to build a Terra Nova: the vision of a planetary culture of autonomous and interconnected communities, a post-patriarchal civilization free of violence and war. Tamera empowers people around the world to build a regenerative, nonviolent culture through research, education, and outreach. For me, In certain areas, Tamera is a glimpse of how the world could be different. It is a work in progress, pure human research. It can be rigorous. It can be transformative. It is a morphogenetic field of healed sexuality on the transition of stepping out of patriarchal structures.
One main topic along the journey is Community, as a political endeavor. As a dedication to studying our behaviors and commitment to peace. It was evident that when we gather in community with that purpose, we touch upon our collective wounds. Often we take them as personal issues when they are indeed collective. The promise of community is to awaken the good in us.
Trust, truth, and transparency are the pillars of community. That's mainly what we worked on most of our time together. As we constantly find old patterns in creating a new culture, freeing love from fear, mostly rooted in our conditioning, was our main task.
Keeping the vision of global peace beyond our personal issues is key to moving forward in a healthy way. Melting the walls between humans, between men and women, between the feminine and masculine energies, between patriarchal structures, until we all re-member our power and attune to harmonize it with each other.
As an act of active connection among a big group, we had smaller groups: home groups, with whom we connected daily and shared constantly beyond the constraints of the big group. To create them, several pieces of matter were distributed along the room, and at some point, everybody walked to one of them to form the groups. It was a very interesting exercise because you can start seeing your conditioning emerge around who you like or dislike, who you prefer to be with or want to avoid, or, on the contrary, challenge yourself and move towards that consciously.
When a pot of honey was placed and named "Honey," I knew regardless of who would join, that was my group. That is what I was calling in: sweetness and tenderness. The honey homies became my home group, a beautiful, very diverse one, in ages, in stories, in personalities, in nationalities, and in realities. All very tender and vulnerable hearts, which I easily came to love deeply and felt supported along the way. A beautiful group of people willing to be, to listen, to learn, to support, to love. We challenged each other, and we went deep. Absolute gratitude for having you as my honeys!
As a whole, in the pursuit of transparency and truth, we use Forum, as a tool of revelation. In Forum, the entire group gathers in a circle, paying full attention to the center. There are a couple of facilitators leading. Mirrors by the attendants are encouraged as an echo of the sharing. One of the invitations is to just offer a mirror if you truly care for the other. A mirror is a love declaration. There is a 24-hour rule, meaning don't get hooked on every emotion that may arise, and let things settle. After that, if something persists, bring it in or speak about it. You take responsibility for your emotions.
Another tool is the "transparency sharing" where you speak up your desires and contacts. And where invitations are expressed publicly. And of course, in general, communication and speaking from the heart is the aim. Transparency is a base for common understanding; it builds trust.
What I do in a corner when no one is watching, would I do it at the center? A core question to remain in integrity.
The amount of knowledge in our group was a challenge as it created a lot of resistance. That was a source of frustration and a deep practice of patience. Trust wasn't there at the beginning; we were building upon it. It was clearly a challenge that we as a group will need to keep working on. Conflict and questioning are part of any experience at some point. It is definitely an art to keep learning and persist with the questions, especially considering the gap between expressive and reserved cultures. The pendulum of resonance and dissonance was in constant swing.
For me personally, that last point brought a lot of inquiry into how easily I can compromise or overstretch for the benefit of the group. And how far something needs to go for me to express my needs. I tend to prioritize the care of the group, and learning to balance that with my personal needs clearly involves a lot of cultural and (female) gender training.
We talked a lot about healthy boundaries and how clarity plays a big part, as well as the impact of trauma on our bodies, which is clearly at different intersections for each other. That is a point I would have liked to explore much deeper to understand each other better in such a short amount of time.
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While I am writing, this song keeps playing in my mind and heart, with many different tones of voices, overlapping choruses, and a deep sigh as we finish it.
Open your heart,
open your heart, let it overflow,
open your heart, open your heart,
let it overflow, let it overflow with love.
🎶
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Along the way, we had profound talks with different members of Tamera: Dieter Duhm, one of its founders. He is such an inspiration for me, like being in the presence of a love revolutionary. Boris, Sabine, Aida—all of them people who have dedicated their lives to what they believe in. A deep and true inspiration. I could talk about each of their talks and participations, but that would be another post in itself.
I had a rough beginning when we kind of started putting together the fact that not all the people involved in the group had the same depth of information about the work of Tamera, which was one of the requirements, in theory. It created a bit of chaos for many, then it was roughly sorted out, and we kept going with what we had. This can be a spiritual practice because it was a more accurate action of inclusion and peace work. Or it could be one of those examples of how far do I need to go to voice my needs, aka complain. There is a fine line between expressing your point of view, letting your voice be heard, and sharing your feelings. We all moved on, but I truly believe it was a factor that shifted the experience. Trusting the Universe that what happened is what we all needed.
How would life be if we took Love seriously? was another big question posted in the space.
What's standing in front of me in the way of Love? Questions that became part of our research.
A part that has resonated deeply with me since the first time I visited Tamera is the fact that their lives are a research experiment. I have adopted that philosophy of life. It makes it more interesting and juicy.
We talked a lot about patriarchy as the root of all oppression. About the need for soft qualities: vulnerability, tenderness, togetherness, humility, needs awareness to create a new culture. To create space to dedicate time to Love, the real hard work is to open the heart. To feel it all, decolonizing love from all the conditioning that has carried through millennia.
How does that conditioning play a part in our attractions?
How to decolonize our erotic body?
Stop trying to find recipes and lean towards inquiries. Everything in our world makes love openly and freely, why don't we?
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A belief that I'm working on anchoring:
Put out a prayer,
the Universe will organize and the answer will come.
To my desires, Life responds. May our desires always be clear.
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Something powerful that happened at nights was that I was having deep, intense dreams and powerful dialogues with my subconscious, so most days I woke up really charged and needing to process all that was moving inside of me. Movement is key, I know that, so a power walk around the lake or some days we had morning practice: Cosmic Dance.
Can we reclaim our dignity in love and sexuality?
Love and sexuality are whole and sacred; it is our relationship with them that needs to be healed. Then we can move towards true partnership, beyond one on one, but with everything that exists.
What do I really want in partnership?
What do I really want in love and sexuality?
"Boundaries are the place where I can love you and me at the same time."
Attachment in love and sexuality is an inheritance of the capitalist system, "it is mine." The more attachment, the more you close to all the possibilities around. Instead, can you imagine the sexiness of transparency and the lingering beauty of it? Attachment in many cultures, even today, means survival. We are dealing with deeply ingrained systems of oppression. Trust is fully seeing each other. Radical acceptance. Secrets in love create war. "Thousands of years of violence imprinted in our bodies is what's in the way of the Sacred Matrix of Life imprinted on our hearts," were the words of Dieter.
Trust and truth in our relationships without lies is the actual recipe for loving freely. Read that again, let it sink in your body. The real shift is inviting healing experiences and the learning that comes with it. Love and compassion in your heart are the filters.
How much are we suffering alone, craving to be loved and touched? Turn the fear into a prayer or a question to the Universe.
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One morning I woke up surrounded by wild boars. I opened a window, and one was there; the other window, another was there; the third shade, and another one. I then opened the door, and voila: another wild boar right there. The spirit of Wild Boar teaches the lesson of confronting our own fears, challenges we may be facing, or situations we find uncomfortable. She is encouraging us to embrace the nature of the warrior inside of us and find the courage to face our fears with strength and all the senses at the center. Beautiful and peaceful, they surrounded me.
Then, in the outdoor shower, I was surrounded by frogs. Frogs tend to signify purging from emotions, calling in courage to move forward and more wealth, opening to new possibilities.
Later, on my walk and in the Stone Circle, the turtles were present. Protection, grounding, deepening your connection to Earth, tuning into ancient wisdom, cultivation of endurance to bring abundance and fertility.
Such a magical day of animal medicine! Thanks, Nature. Wow!
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Healing is a principle of the Universe. Nature always drives towards healing, and we are nature.
Are we allowing healing to happen?
How can we be in balance, contributing to the harmony of the whole? Peace is a reality. Empowerment means allowing others to be who they are. That, for me, is the key to deep transformative change in this world.
What decisions are we taking moment by moment? Love free from fear. Knowing your yes & your no.
Tell me, who are you now? This question can serve as a deep meditation to dismantle the labels we carry. Done over and over with a big group where you change partners constantly, it is a tool for discovering deep layers in yourself and others.
Some of the highlights and learnings of this Global Love School for me were:
Trust in life as moving toward flow, togetherness, and choice with all we have and know to do and entrusting the outcome to the mystery of how life unfolds.
Humility as surrendering to the limitations of our individual and collective capacity, opening to the unknown without forcing anything.
Courage as choosing to take action that risks our significance, in alignment with purpose and within care for the whole, even when we are in the grip of patriarchal conditioning.
Truth/Transparency as rigorously integrating new information about needs, impacts, and resources, embracing every bit of experimentation, even when it brings discomfort, as a pathway of liberation that realigns us with life at all levels.
Love as opening our hearts to everyone’s mattering, leaning into togetherness, orienting to full giving and receiving, and drawing from shared purpose in times of conflict.
Leadership as an orientation of serving life, bringing tenderness to engaging with power differences, and coalescing our collective capacity.
A lot of healing, a lot of mourning, a lot of tears, plenty of emotions, love, laughs, and dance. The personal issues I was dealing with:
Celebration of clear boundaries and requests.
Fear of falling in love again and repeating old patterns.
Being seen doesn't feel fully safe.
Liberating the source of my attachment and expectations.
Release of deep layers of trauma.
Release of power validation.
Shame, jealousy, and guilt for others' conflict attention.
Irritation with so-called privilege due to lack of transparency. (I'll write specifically about that later on).
Towards the end, I had a mini presentation of Flags for a New World. I spoke aloud for the first time about my dream to walk the world with the New Beginning flag. I shared the card deck. I was overwhelmed and in pure joy. I was there making myself visible.
And I can sit with the fact that it is not about me. It is about sitting with the question: how can I help heal the world, our world? With an open heart, I say, this is my offer, this is my prayer. This is the answer I receive over and over. And I am grateful and happy to bring it to life. May it be so! Sending trust ahead. I am here for global liberation from fear and violence. As long as I live, I won't give up. I believe in Love. And I am in service to Life.
My commitment to Life is beyond my understanding. It's clear that the container of 3 years is stronger because the work keeps going even when we are apart. It is happening wherever we are.
We'll see...
We are in ceremony...
May we learn to be humans living in true community.
May we be able to trust, be in truth and transparency.
May we step into radical self-responsibility.
May we love without fear.
Absolute gratitude to all who were part of this experience, seen and unseen, present nonetheless. Even the last day was full of gifts. One particularly important, due to my (s)history, was the persistence of a loving woman who showed me that I put distance towards women. When I acted as if it was enough not to hate them, an invisible wall that I can melt, I can trust women, I can rely on sisterhood even in deeper ways than I imagine so far.
Healing, healing, healing all the way.
Loving life and every moment I am here,
Aurora
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