Welcome to Rendering on Conscious, the Gradyva award-winning podcast about psychoanalysis and culture, with me your host Dr. Vanessa Sinclair. This is episode 407. Joining me today are Langston Khan and Alessandro Rose. They're here to talk about their upcoming event, woven, a ritual of belonging for queer men, a four-day immersive ceremony to be held in Sicily from July 23 to July 26. Welcome Langston, Alessandro. It's so good to have you here at Rendering on Conscious. It's so good to be here. Yeah, I miss you so much Vanessa and I just always love seeing your face, hearing your voice, so just thank you so much for having us. Thank you for being here. So good to see you both. Do you want to begin Langston? Yeah, I'd love to just start us off with a little prayer just to what's on my heart today is the queer ancestors. So I just invite us all to take a moment to tune in and first just feel that feel the love that never dies. That's always here for us, which is the good, true, beautiful, well-wives, loving ancestors. Inviting them to Draw Close. We honor you, grandmother's, grandfather's, gender-blessed ones. Please be here now. Got us on this call. We honor you, queer, and sister-helping spirits. You who were the walkers between you who transgress boundaries, you who follow the river of your arrows and your desire into new terrains, you who were consciousness-guets, moving at the edges, gathering medicine for the people, and then bringing it back boldly and audaciously to the center to change everything. We honor you and we thank you. We need you now. We're in a time where there are so many people trying to store up old broken systems to reinforce outmoded binaries to enforce with violence, false order over the wild, queer chaos of earth's living green dream. We need your help to break up that stagnation. So please help us each have the courage to do what's needed to bring back the spirit of play, to bring back the spirit of luminality, to bring back the spirit of audacious, fierce love, unyielding love. Please be here now. I mean, what needs to be said, what needs to be heard, be heard. And then it is for seniors to go forward in the way the benefits are living things. Thank you, Langson. So beautiful. Yes, so why don't you start off by talking about this fantastic event that you're having? Yeah, do you want to start other Sandra? Yeah, I can start. Maybe I can introduce myself a little bit and maybe Langson too. My name is Alessandro Rose. I'm currently in Milan, Italy, where I'm from, although I am based in California. And they are Langson and I just started brotherhood of lovers. We just formed this new organization, this new movement that calls in queer brothers, queer men, queer males of all shapes and forms and sorts together together in ritual and prayer and to remember how we can all belong together as a community of men who love men amongst other things that we love. And we are in the process of creating and hosting a beautiful gathering in Italy and Sicily, which is a dream, although I'm from the northern part of Italy. Sicily is still part of my homeland and so it felt really important to bring this work to my homeland and to call in all these European, Italian, Sicilian and global queer brothers who are looking for deeper belonging and sort of how to learn together to be brothers and to be lovers. How can we really tap into this erotic energy that so many queer men carry in a good way, in a way that is intimate and aligned and audacious and courageous and ultimately just really beautiful? So that's a little bit of what we're up to right now. Yeah, I think so, Alessandro. Yeah, so I'm Langston, Con and I'm a shamanic practitioner. I do work helping people restore their capacity to be in community to the standard of pre-contact Indigenous peoples like how to restore the architecture of intimacy in ourselves that allow us to actually move together towards a shared vision over time. And I also just do a lot of healing work around ancestral healing, soul level healing and helping people restore relationships with their emotions as like these liberating forces they're meant to be versus, you know, blocking up into good emotions and bad emotions and talk through positivity and all that stuff. Like how do we really restore authentic emotional response as the earth moving through us and trying to help us move into alignment? And yeah, I really was called to this vision of what we're weaving now by Alessandro because I mean, it's been a vision that's done on my heart for a long time as well. But Alessandro had just been leaving immense work organization that was saying they were like, you know, changing a lot of, you know, old patriarchal behaviors, but then ultimately there was still a lot of, you know, certain dimensions of homophobia that were in the organization. And you just be more about that. Essentially, he put out a call to other queer men who wanted to create work to help men step more into their wholeness, but from a queer centering lens. And me and other brothers came together to that call that Alessandro made and we had a week together. We were just sharing our medicine with each other, just doing sharing like what would I share if I was with a group of men and wanted to help them step more into their wholeness, help them make more trust in themselves and each other because I think people all can don't realize like maybe you aren't men. That men are so afraid of each other for the most part. So how do we love friends? Yeah. So how do we break that down? How do we really start to start to create real trust? And then of course, extend that trust beyond just the human to the more than human world. Because to me, that's where the template for trust actually comes from. And it was just a beautiful week. So much medicine came through and that eventually began to see this vision we had of wanting to offer this work more for other people. That's amazing. I have to say, tell everyone just from hanging out with you all for this short time before recording. I just couldn't stop talking because you two bring positive like beautiful energy. It feels so good to be with you too. So I'm sure this is going to be a really magical time. Thank you so much for the mess. Yeah, I always feel the same way about you. Maybe I want to just jump in here because I was going to introduce myself and then I just kind of located myself in place and went straight into what we're creating. But you know, like Langston mentioned, I work primarily with men and primarily with queer men or with men who are ready and willing and desire to explore queerness. So I actually work with straight men as well who are just willing that space of questioning all of their programs or all the ways the heteropatriarchal program has infected them and they're looking to liberate themselves to a greater degree. But my background is mostly in menswear. And so I spent about three years with this big global organization doing menswear. I went as a participant because I really felt like I needed to reclaim my masculinity but also reclaim my relationship with men. And it was so intimidating and scary because it's mostly straight, heteroman and all of their marketing is like men boxing each other and these big emotional processes. And so I felt so much inner tension in going in. And then eventually I went and had such a profound transformation on my first gathering that I was like this is it and this is really good medicine. So long story short, I spent three years with them training with them, becoming a facilitator, becoming one of their leaders, becoming their community director eventually overseeing our community of trainees for a couple of years, traveling all over the world. All this beautiful retreats with mostly straight men and a few things happened. One was that I always had to disclose my career and as at some point.
because there was a participant in the group who at some point had to come out. And that felt, oh, am I the only one here? And so I kind of always had to eventually come out and actually learn to do it up front, right? To just put it up front for everyone to see so that the queer ones could feel a little safer in that space. But yes, that eventually I realized how much of, you know, even these beautiful, well-intention, quote unquote, spiritual containers tend to have this overimposed hetero lens through which they're looking at everything. All of the cosmology, all of the mythology, you know, looking back at King Warrior Magician Lover, Robert Bly, like all of these different men's work, you know, books and manuals that we've inherited are still working from this strong hetero norm. And I eventually had to come to terms that in order for me to become a leader in this organization and rise up and, you know, sort of gain status, I had to unconsciously relinquish parts of my queerness, which is, you know, a pattern growing up Catholic in a small town, like kind of a recurring pattern that nobody forced me to do, but I wasn't feeling safe. I didn't feel like all of me really belonged, although, you know, all of you as well, can was part of the slogan of this group. I felt like, well, in order for me to be accepted, I need to, you know, be as straight and as masculine as everybody else. And it worked until it didn't, you know, until I realized that I was really sacrificing the most brilliant parts of myself, which were never invited by the straight man to shine. So then, yeah, I put out a calling on Instagram. I found Langston, I found Giovanni, I found a bunch of other incredible queer practitioners, and we've been in this process of getting to know each other, working together, collaborating, spending, you know, beautiful times together, like, you know, in Washington last year, to really understand what is queer magic from a male perspective? What is a queer magic? And how can we reignite it in the bigger conversation around masculinity, around consciousness, around decolonizing in ways, and the ancestral work in all these different ways? So that's a bit more of context. - It's so fascinating. And what exactly is the retreat and like, how do people find you and sign up? And what can they expect? - Yeah, do you want to take this Langston? - Sure, I'll take some of it. So people can go to brotherhoodoflovers.com/woven. And so, and for us, the reason we decided to use the name woven is just the core we kept coming back to is this feeling of deep belonging, like this weaving together of people in themselves and to their wholeness, weaving together people between each other, the fabric of trust and community. And then weaving beyond that with the more than human world, like feeling how as queer people were not just auxiliary, like this extra thing that has to be tolerated or made space for, but actually essential to the fabric of life. How do we really weave back into that sense of that sacred calling and step into it with great responsibility and care? And so, yeah, that's the easiest way to find it. You can also follow both of us on Instagram. And the actual retreat is four days, well, this one is from the 23rd of the 26th, but we'll be offering more in the future as well. Sorry, yeah, July, July. And it's really about engaging the techniques of transformation and ecstasy to uncover, to get, essentially, to get more fluid within our bodies and transform in that fluidity. So, and liberate our expression with each other. And so, that includes things like ecstatic dance, deep inner somatic work, play fighting, like one of our facilitators, Asha, has a lot of beautiful work at both contact improv and martial combat, like you did see, but moving into a space of play, where you're sort of somaticizing the martial movements and feeling into what emotions come up when I'm in competition with someone or grappling with someone or when I completely surrender because they've got me. And what if I'm not in like this heteronmen space where that surrender has to be seen as an active, like humiliation or failure, but what if I can take a moment with my brother to enjoy having no control and let myself feel what pleasure there is for me in that, or let myself feel the pleasure of having someone completely and dominating in a certain way. And but what if it's not less domination, but more of this sort of sacred act of being in service to your brother to help him feel what it's like to have no control? You know, like so, and beyond that also will be doing lots of elemental ritual. So, fire rituals, you know, water rituals, bringing in the land as a force of transformation as well, because we'll be right at the foot of Mount Etna, you know, this act of volcanoes, they're not getting nor her in terms of what we're doing. And also the only in sea, of course, is right there too. And like these ancient theaters to that in Greek times, where like when times and more pre-performance is a lie, where it doubles a Dionysus. And so there's lots of energy there that we're going to be really working with and accessing to help nurture this transformation. Incredible. Yeah, and I realized one thread I left out was the erotic thread. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that, Alexandra? Yeah, yeah, yeah, so beautifully said Langston. Yeah, I would just maybe sprinkle in, you know, this idea of weaving together all of these threads, something that I feel like we've noticed that was lacking in a lot of the menswork and a lot of the more like gay retreat space was to bring in together all of these different elements versus this is an erotic retreat, this is a plant medicine retreat, this is a yoga retreat, right? To see how can we coherently bring together all these elements and sure it's gonna be chaotic and wild and liberating, but can we really include all aspects of ourselves so that nothing is left behind, nothing is left in the shadow, nothing is left in the door instead we invite it in. And so the erotic is another place that Langston and I have both worked on individually and we also just did a retreat together in Joshua Tree in California called Bloom. And really the exploration that I'm really curious to have is what does it mean to be erotically alive as queer men, as men who love men in a group of men? When sex is out of the picture, so we're creating this specific space where it's not a sex retreat, we're taking the sex out of the boundaries of consent and the agreements that we have together and to see what's available to us as men who love men when that is not available because there's what I've noticed in our society in maybe more mainstream gay culture, there's sex is very easily accessible, through apps and if you live in a big city, sex parties, there's all kinds of ways in which gay and queer men can engage with each other in a sexual way, but intimacy and eroticism, that's like very, that's gold and not so many people have access to that. And so we are wanting to create a space where we learn to be lovers, but having brotherhood as the foundation, which is kind of a bit of a cognitive dissonance, right? Like how can it be a brother and a lover at the same time? But really learning how to be in a consensual space with each other, how to have really strong share language of intimacy and consent, and then also honoring the arousal of erotic energy, honoring attraction, honoring all of these different ways in which our energy moves when we are surrounded or in front of a beautiful man, a man that has like a beautiful energy, right? And learning how to approach each other from this very holy and reverent and risky space and place within ourselves versus the more transactional ways in which our community tends to operate in the mainstream. And so that's gonna be like the relational thread of arrows and attraction and boundaries and contact and intimacy is going to be one of the main threads that will weave everything else together. Yeah, and one of the most beautiful things I think about that retreat we just did in Joshua Tree was to see how much came up when you entered that space and how by the end of the experience, people had cultivated this capacity. Some people that really had a lot of how to significant history of pain and trauma around sexuality and eroticism, By the end of the retreat hadn't really cultivated.
of this capacity to feel their limits and boundaries, intentionally move past them a little bit, come back, regulate, find their footing again, and then re-enter the space and try again. And there wasn't this sense of like, "Oh, I have to stop because there's a wound here, but this real capacity culturally to show up for the selves that were stuck in old choices we made to survive in possible situations that we love because they got us here, but liberate them from their old functions, reclaim the energy there, and then use that energy and service of new habits and new ways of relating to each other." And so, yeah, I just think when we're in like so much, there are lots of queer spaces where you can enjoy sexuality, even like conscious queer spaces where it's like, "Oh, well, I gave you a little bit of them, I'm engaged in sexuality." You know, like, "I'm a young guy, I'm engaged in sexuality." And that's great. Like, I think it's beautiful. We need spaces to reclaim embodiment and sex and pleasure. And what I often see in those spaces is because these deeper, thematic levels aren't being attended to. There's like a bypassing, like, a leaping out of where your actual center is so you can engage in the intensity of sex, and then coming back to the center so no transformation happens. It's like ungrounded ecstasy is one phrase I have for that. It's like, "You lose yourself in the experience, but we're trying to cultivate as a level of rooting where you can move into the ecstasy and keep your grounding." So the heart has to stretch and expand and change and transform. And then when you come back to that ground, you get to integrate what you've learned about what truly satisfies you into every part of your life. It comes really radical because it's not just like, "Oh, I had this little compartmentalized experience here." It's like, "No, now I know what's possible." So as like, you know, ancestors, our Audrey Lurk teaches us in her uses of the erotic, the erotic best power essay, you can then demand no less from the whole of your life. I think is why the over culture keeps these things so tightly compartmentalized and separate. When they come together, they truly, they really just ruptured our ability to be good capitalists just following along with her good fascists. You know, we have to, we have to actually question everything because I think our bodies are of the earth, they're of the land and they know what satisfies them and it's never fascism, really, for honest with ourselves. This is going to be amazing. I'm so glad that you got this and that you found each other and what a great initiative. Alessandro. Yeah. So can you repeat? It's just such a great initiative. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, and fine in Langston was such a godsend, you know, just really, yeah, my brother, lover, sister, wild, heart-conquerater, co-founder, partnering, partner in love, such a such a blessing to be doing this with with with them and with, you know, for this specific one, we have Giovanni Perez and Asha Pasalacqua were coming to lead in their magical ways as well and and and part of the weave in two, you know, I'm going to add keep out, you know, I could keep adding to it forever, but part of the weaving is also what I've learned in menswork and what I've learned in facilitating spaces that we need different voices, we need different experiences to come into into the space so that we can really create a tapestry that's so rich and diverse and fertile for all kinds of experiences to be witnessed and and to feel invited in. And I feel so blessed because I, you know, I get to work alongside these incredible brothers, but I also get to learn so much from them. We get to learn from each other because we each carry our own specific flavor of of magic and tools and and history and it's yeah, it's just so enriching and I know the people coming in as well, the brothers coming in as well, that's what they receive, they receive all of these different frameworks and perspectives and languages and prayers that can really resonate in their unique way. Yeah. I also wanted to stick to this a little bit about gender because we get a lot of questions about like our trans people welcome because when you say men and you're calling up for your brother is it can feel a little triggering for for many of us who've learned that man is like like I was talking about in the men's work it's like this box that I have to prove I'm like heteropatriarchal now to fit into. And for us, this is a space to explore the territory of male nests that is the intention of this space to explore the wounds there to explore the freedom that might be available there and to expand what that territory even means, but that also means for us that you have transmit or very welcome non-binary folks are very welcome. I don't often use the word non-binary to describe myself because and I respect anyone who does but for me it feels like it like reifies a binary like there's non-binary folks and there's binary folks and like and for me it's like no I'm kind of militantly non-binary I'm non-binary and so is everybody with respect to everyone's personal identity and always wanting to honor that but um like on the fundamental level of the soul I feel all of our souls to some extent are in drodgeness and multifaceted and to me masculinity and femininity are just these cultural constructs that are designed to limit our access to our power that say oh because you are a sign woman in this culture you get to access the feminine you're not allowed to do these things labeled in the box of the of the masculine you know it's like when you go from culture to culture even within the same culture from different people with different ancestors those things are completely different what femininity is or but masculine is for a black time it might be totally different for someone assigned white in this culture you know so it falls apart very quickly we think we all know what we mean when he's saying masculine when femininity but you really get into the qualities of the behaviors it really falls apart I know you've done so much beautiful work but nestled like in the territory of gender and with your clear ancestors as well um but yes I don't you want to say anything about that yeah no I'm right there with you said that you know like you said I would respect that everyone's identity everyone can be whatever they want to be wherever they feel they are but I totally also was like we're all that binary actually if you go down deep enough and and even with sexuality it's like yeah sexuality it's sexual sexual energy it's sexual energy and you can have it be like homosexual heterosexual bisexual bisexual pansexual really it's just sexual energy and you just like making it go towards different objects you know like this object it happens to be male this object is female this object is whatever so it's just like yeah but at the end of the day it's just non-binary sexual it's just sexual yeah that's how I feel absolutely yeah and that's and it's so exciting where like while we liberate ourselves from the cultural conditioning of where it's acceptable for arrows to be glowing it changes everything because as we're sort of sensitizing our whole bodies to our arrows our desire is this in my experience this sacred compass that's telling us there's something here that I'm being aroused in the presence of that is speaking to my soul like I think every desire is some way holy and a messenger from our soul telling us about something our soul is longing for that's needed to do our unique thing we're here on earth to do so from an analyst perspective we all have a sacred calling and ancestral mission that we've been given that only we can embody in all the universe that you might call like souls purpose in some traditions which is not about like to be a teacher because of vehicle it's it's this unique energy that maybe is beyond words even you could find words that point to the frequency that you are but that actual frequency you don't want to know the wholeness of it until you're dead because every day there's going to be new ways life is coming to invite you to bring more of what's been unconscious in your soul into consciousness that's like a whole point and being here on earth and so when we when we say oh arrows only gets to express in this way it's like there's whole swaths of our souls whole territories of our soul that the world needs that we're putting in a closet or putting you know compartmentalizing or marginalizing or just or just making ice over you know that eventually comes out on conscious or just thwarted ways because even if we put this on to the unconscious it's still going to try to help us remember them which I guess I talked a lot about in my shadow talk at the at the conference one year which I love and actually I'm not putting you on the spot however since last year I started this Center for psychoanalysis where we do like online classes and lectures so this first year I started last summer and since September every month I've been doing an introduction to psychoanalysis class where we go from like Freud to contemporary times and it ends on in September and then the next thing we're going to do next year is we're going to read my friend Latishie's book let's call from the clinic to the streets psychoanalysis for revolutionary futures where she's talking about like despecializing psychoanalytic knowledge so that more people can have access to it because it's very helpful and also she she points out the lineage that like a lot of our
advertising, and media, and the way capitalism is like, you know, exploiting everyone's kind of inner void to like, you know, buy, buy, and buy, and buy, and etc etc and fascism as well. It's like a lot of it comes directly from Floyd's nephew Edward Bernays, who like basically like worked with the US government to like help them like, you know, execute these coups in South America, in Central America, and all sorts of terrible things, and also he also worked in advertising. So it's like, our monitor is like, advertising is like, has this direct link to Floyd. So I'm gonna, we're gonna read that book thoroughly because it's like, I read it, literally I read it, and then I read it again like, immediately after. So it's like, I need to make sure I absorbed all of that, and I read it like, in a weekend, and then over the next week again, but she has so many great authors and stuff that she references, and it's just like so helpful to think she calls her podcast that she started, it's called psychic militancy, and how you have to like constantly be aware of how these kind of powers that be your control systems are like infiltrating your psyche to make you feel certain ways. And of course, we have, you know, we all have like internalized, like you said, homophobia and transphobia and misogyny and everything, ableism. So I think that's really good, but I think a nice balance to that because it's very intense also would be like deep liberation, you know, and like, okay, so what do you do with this? Now that you know that these like systems are like trying to infiltrate you like maybe thanks to income and talk with that. It doesn't agree. I would be so honored and love that. Oh wow, and I'm that book's how's incredible. I can't wait to read it. Um, yeah, that's I can add to the center so that you're just like, Compton, you can come to whatever you want. Both of you. Sure, please do. Yeah, happy. Yeah, 100% always yes. Yeah, no, I'm so grateful for just that current. You've been attending so steadily. I mean, since long before 2016, but 2016 was that big international moment, when the first psychoanalysis are in the occult conference. But I, yeah, I don't know of an SM, just always an awe of the strands are weaving together and the wholeness you're demanding from the field of psychoanalysis to like be there in institution that has often been used to do so much harm in some certain times and just steadily bringing this warm fire of love and inclusivity and radical transformation is just so beautiful to see and I'm so just grateful to know you. Yeah, and that's exactly why because it is like if you undergo psychoanalysis with someone who's not imposing their views and will on you, someone who actually let you do your analysis, you know, it can be so transformative. Like it literally probably saved my life. But like the way the institutions use it, yeah, it's been totally transphobic like a habit trans friend who like the institute in their in their area, like, well, let them train just because they're trans. Like what? Like what are you talking about? Like no one here feels comfortable being your analyst because they don't know like what to do. It's like you just let someone speak, you know, like people speak about their lives. You don't need to do anything. You know, like what are you talking about? Anyway, and it's just like things like that are so terrible. Of course, like, yeah, homophobia, everything. So yeah, well, you don't need the institutes anymore because now we have an internet and we can just do our own thing and people can learn, you know, they can get their own analyst who they like, who they trust, they can get their own supervisor, if they like, and they trust and take online classes and learn what they feel is relevant to learn, not what these people say that you're supposed to learn. Yeah, it's more of that. We can do our own retreats. We can do our own thing. And it's really working because I feel like that's also like where psychoanalysis is now. It used to be like Freud like, oh, explaining to you like, oh, you're attracted this person because your mother did this and your father did this and like kind of telling you why you are the way you are. But like that is not the way it is or should be anymore. It's more like locating these internalized narratives that we all have that society has kind of placed in us and like breaking them down and be like, do I really believe that about myself? Wait, where did that come from? Like, who told me that about myself? Why did I take that on? Like, is that really how I feel? Is that really who I want to be? And being able to take that apart so like you said, you can like use that energy in a way that you want to create your life now. Yes. Yeah. And that's I mean, because I think you know, the future is a fiction in many ways. I mean, like that like if we don't have bodies, then time is nonlinear and circular. But if we do have bodies on earth, we have to experience linear time to some extent. And so the future is unknown fundamentally. Like every we have lots of stories about what the future will be, but it's ultimately unknown. And the past is also a fiction. It's made up so often of the stories we tell ourselves about the past that often keep us ruminating in like sort of stretched out across time. The German anestrospective is kind of where disease gets in. I think arrows are arrows is always in the present moment, actually. It's always trying to bring us back, bring us home, bring us into the wholeness that's right here, the living process that we are that is always in the unknown and just taking those lurching toddler steps for the next thing that's happening in our life. And so I'm just grateful. I'm grateful for arrows. I'm grateful also for yeah, this so the tradition I was trained like my heart center tradition. I'm I'm initiated in lineage of the African diaspora of the Costa people of the Urba people, but my heart tradition actually is a contemporary tradition that was made by a you know, Whitelman from Oregon who had a very classical shamanic initiation experience, Christina Pratt and brought forth these incredible teachings through that initiative to our experience that are about how do we as people of the broken path learn to reclaim our wholeness learn to an indigenous standard to go back to spirit and ask how do we be in right relationship, regenerative relationship with the earth and the more than human world and each other in these times. And I teach those teachings now and I take people through them as well. It's like a five year process of transformation, but are you know the beginning of that process is really about how do we reclaim our community selves, you know how to reclaim that possibility to to be to take those lurching steps forward and the unknown together to break out of the kind of a hamster ball we've created of culture and actually move our energy and service of life in these times. And so yeah, I don't know for in that tradition one of the spirits who gave us or she's telling archetype that gave us but archetype not in the original union sense like when you read the red book like these he taught described as like numerous forces that are pre-human that are like he calls them like ultraviolet spectra meaning they're not he specifically says it is so interesting to me to see how union and andals and transinterpret it often but he specifically says archetypes are not like fairy tale characters and things like that if you're reading like his original texts and there are these these pre more than human forces and that are always trying to flow in and remind life how to do life well. And so an architect that gave us the teachings of the cycle transformation is this spirit we call crazy woman and she is she that's obviously not her real name as its ancient force but she asks us to use that name because of how we treat people we label crazy and women in this culture she wants us to understand that and then to and what does it need to approach that as a sacred force and she is the force of chaos and service of life that force that is always pushing up the soul that's wanting to be known so we can see it and I was reread at this retreat in Joshua Tree I was reading um so we were listening to Audrey Lord read the use of the erotic the eroticist power and I've heard that as I've shared that as a hundreds of times in different classes right over the course of my life I keep coming back to it because it's so helpful in this culture that divorces pleasure or something like auxiliary um and she reconnects pleasure to the soul and satisfaction to the soul but she gave this one little throwaway line that arrows comes from you know that the Greek god who was birth from primordial chaos and I was like oh crazy woman is arrows as mother so that's a long that's a long story to say that crazy woman also turns up at our retreat sometimes that she is the sport the sports of chaos and service of life that helps to like shake things up shake those old like ice flows up that we've created so that the arrows can come through again so the arrows can be birken our lives again and I just I think one thing I love about fear people I think we are inherently in relationship a bit with that primordial chaos with that force that demands the soul be acknowledged even when society has created a false order that's trying to keep soul out that we just can't help it for honest with ourselves and our true nature we can't help but begin to destabilize that in a way that lets life giving chaos in so we can find a new order that's actually more in service of
of life and not see order as something that has to be dominate chaos and like the colonial idea of like kill nature organize it you know like but actually order is something that nature is always trying to help us come back to help us be with these larger archetypal patterns of life that all indigenous peoples teach us are essential if we're to survive. It seems like we're living in crazy women times. Yes, well the times when we need her like the problem she's sometimes gets blamed for the cat she's like the cat isn't her fault she's just they're trying to help us navigate help us ride those waves but yes we're in times when we need her. Great family's barriers. Yes, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I love when crazy woman comes in. She's beautiful force and you know and everything you're sharing what keeps coming back to me is how much of masculinity is this rigid performance of like stiffness and you know closeness you know way right like so many young boys are not given permission to be chaotic to be emotional to be expressive that's why like liberating expression is part of what we do you know at our gatherings and even in working I just did a one-on-one client at the in-person ceremonies and retreats with clients as well and we spent you know three or four days together in Joshua Tree and I got to work with this straight man you know straight man in his 50s beautiful soul married to a woman really really you know happy married and yet you know both him and his wife have been in this beautiful exploration of queerness in the last in just in the last year of just like really wanting to deprogram themselves and and reclaim those forgotten rejected exile parts that were so alive when you know when he was a kid you know this bright light and so crazy woman feels like this force that oftentimes gets so rejected by the heteropatriarchal system for specifically you know young boys and men and part of the contemplation that I mean is like what does it mean to let her inhabit our life a little more especially for the heteronvent like embodied this divine wild crazy feminine instead of acting from this you know from above like imposing all of these rules all of this order right letting the chaos arise and the order be be born from that right there's a different energetic sequence that I feel like we are wanting to approach and you know last thing I want to say around this is working with so many straight men in in you know my men's work the only one of the only ways in which sort of they were able to connect with each other sure through songs through they had some good moments but mostly was like through count through through violent contact right so like the the sacred combat the the fighting was sort of the only way in which these men are able to yes create touch with each other and then after exhausting all this violence then then the embrace comes and the tear comes and the you know someone the more vulnerable you know aspects get revealed and then you know oftentimes right after was we kind of come back together to our own you know mailness oh yeah now to home now to gay which is something that actually hurting that organizational couple of times like oh that's to gay and instead realizing that we're all like you know back to what you guys were talking about earlier we're all a little bit queer we all have you know we're all a little bit non-binary we all have crazy woman and and you know mail you know and the warrior you know then both the can both inhabit our being and actually when we do let them that's when we find harmony and it's not just order it's harmony it's coherence it's the smooth dimensionality that so many men I believe crave and it's so out of access because it's so scary it's so scary for men especially certain men to be perceived as femme or as feminine or you know because misogyny right femininity equals weakness which is so not that right there's so much strength in in in the female form in the goddess form so yeah part of the work we're doing and and and although now we are mostly inviting in queer brothers the the big vision for for brother of lovers I think I can share is like to really my own man who are who are willing and ready to be approaching the sacred work from a queer lens to really reclaim all of themselves and it's it takes so much courage I understand you know for a straight man to actually put themselves in that place but what I've observed with this with this client just a few weeks ago the transformation is mind blame the expansion of the heart the the expansion of the way of the of the just like how the body now functions when those more queer more quote unquote feminine parts are reclaimed and and and integrated into the heart that's that's I believe what we really need from from men you know at this time the work we areness I love it and I love what y'all say too when I think I think it was on Instagram but I've heard you say before Langston that like specifically with queer people like you're here for a reason and like you have a part to play and like what the world is going through right now and the transformation that we're all going through is like a human community mm-hmm yeah yeah thank you yeah and I just found that to be so true I mean when I was a little little little time baby queer high school I the first person I found that really helped me like reflect my experience to myself was Harry Hay you know who was this white man who founded the first sustained queer organization in the US the Madaching Society and was a huge part of like the homophile movement that actually created the word homophiles that could bring it to court and then define themselves for themselves versus the work homosexual the time it was just seen the same as like criminal you know or pedophile like it was all one thing and so they were using anyway that's a whole other thread and we get into their time and oh we got to go through today but I'll just say that he was bringing in that understanding that queer people don't have to assimilate we're not we don't have to say like oh please respect us we're just like you straight people but rather to say we have unique gifts here to share and he was looking of course to indigenous cultures to learn that from you know he was looking at what the many of the indigenous first peoples in the US were doing around queer people and then using that to say hey we need to do more than just beg for our respect because we're just like straight but we need to say no we have a sacred essential role here that's actually different and we need to together find out what that is and start tending it and then later I found the same message from one of my you know degarah elders malatoma some and sharing the same thing about gatekeepers and gay men in that in that degarah context from Burkina Faso in West Africa so yeah I don't have to close now but but just yeah I'm at we we have a sacred role here to play as queer people and we just we just need people to get out of the way so we can do it or not get out of the way not meaning be isolate us but more come in and see what's here let go of the preconceptions that say we have to be marginalized and so up to side and we're just like some other weird thing that doesn't count and see no there's something here that's essential for all of us that we're trying to tend to thread of amits so much harm and so help us do it you know come on in we're not saying it's not for you to it is just come on in with respect we welcome you wonderful well so great to talk to you both and please you're welcome back anytime together or individually or if you have other friends or colleagues that you want to invite please feel free to be in touch anytime you're always welcome and if you just send me the link to the website and everything whatever you want me to post in the text with the episode if you just email to me I'll get it out by the end of the week okay thank you so much for an episode it's been so wonderful the copy of you as always bye bye thank you for listening to rendering unconscious you've just heard a discussion with Langston Khan and Alessandro Rose joined them in Sicily from July 23 to July 26 for woven a four-day immersive ceremony for queer men you can find all the information in links accompanying this episode visit their website brotherhoodoflovers.com and follow them on Instagram rendering unconscious is also a book rendering unconscious psychoanalytic perspectives politics and poetry published by tripart books available at amazon or every love to get your books online it is a two volume set that I edited if you're interested in undergoing psychoanalytic
and treatment or supervision with me, please feel free to get in touch. You may find my contact info at drvenessisinclair.net/contact. Thank you so much for being a paid subscriber at rendering unconscious podcast. If you are so far a free subscriber, thank you too. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber at the substack where you may access all previous archival episodes as well as all new and future episodes. Most of them are video discussions and are archived at the substack for your perusal. It's so important in these times to maintain spaces that are free from corporate influence, advertising and censorship and I'm proud to say this is one of those spaces. I take no money from advertisers or anyone else. This podcast and event series is fully funded by grassroots efforts, by fans, listeners, audience and participants like you. So thank you so so much. I wouldn't be able to do what I do without you. And now the song "Soft Explosion" by white stains. Available at Spotify and other streaming services as well as at
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