Celebration and Healing

The qadishti facilitate connections with the divine, celebrate
life and love, and heal the wounded hearts of individuals and
communities. We do this through gentle heart, open ears and mind, the
written and spoken word, and healing touch. This may
include "sexualoving" touch. It may not.

What is our primary emphasis: celebration or healing?
I cannot speak for anyone but me. My primary emphasis is
celebration. I believe that great healing can occur through
celebration.

Why this emphasis?
First, life and love are worth celebrating. There are enough
religious and spiritual experiences that emphasize dour and sour
seriousness. I find tremendous joy in the garden of love. I also find
great spiritual fulfillment in sharing love whether physically or
otherwise. The free love spirit of the not too distant past is very
relevant to my life, including my priesthood.

Second, my approach to healing is more eastern than western. In
the east, you pay the doctor when you're well. It's a holistic
wellness approach of a fashion similar to what we're trying to
introduce at Aquarius in Cincinnati.
In the west, we tend to think of healing in terms of pain and the
need to eradicate it as quickly as possible. Not to understand pain.
Not to reflect upon it. Not to learn any lessons from it. Just to
heal it.

In terms of love and relationship, this means that we focus on
dysfunction. We front load the healing process with issues of low
self-esteem, social esteem, relationships that have gone all
cattywampus due to bizarre social expectations, and other serious
aches and pains.

We respond by strategizing ways to get past the problems. Get to a
healthy spot. It's an all out military-style assault on the bastions
of personal and relationship challenges using the tools of family
counseling and clinical psychology.

So rather than developing circles of sharing for loving
interaction between and among qadishti and/or between and among
qadishti and seekers, we create support groups, discussion circles,
and online communities that focus on problems, problems, and more
problems.

I am rather impressed that this approach is analogous to a Chinese
finger puzzle. The more you focus on problems, the tighter the
squeeze. When you begin to relax, you escape from the trap and have
the opportunity to explore and grow, spiritually and otherwise.
I should note that I am not disparaging the importance of clinical
psychology, family counseling, or support circles. Each is extremely
valuable.

I am merely affirming that I emphasize celebration first and
foremost. Celebration has a great potential to heal. I can imagine
few greater sources of personal affirmation than to be on the
receiving end of unconditional love, to realize that someone has
bared and shared body, mind, and spirit giving all of her or himself
in love and affection.

Dysfunction is not to be ignored. The question is how best may it
be resolved? The qadishtu or qadesh may serve best by borrowing a
page from Alexander. He cut through the Gordian Knot directly. He
didn't try to unravel it. He didn't get mired in its complexity.
When we offer love openly, honestly, and completely we address
basic human needs. We cut through many problems or at least do an end
run around them. As the well of positivity increases, as a person
feels better about her or himself for being on the receiving end of
such love and attention, some problems may disappear completely while
others become more manageable.

Of course, the very nature of the relationship between qadishti or
qadishti and seekers is such as to make the love shared seem very
limited and perhaps to a badly damaged person disingenuous. You may
not be in the position to offer the sort of time or attention desired
much less exclusivity, if a seeker is monogamous.

What then?
I encourage unconditional loving, especially with reference to not
judging someone on the basis of such inconsequential characteristics
as size or age. Just love. How shallow and self-centered would
someone have to be to overlook, dismiss or disparage an open and
honest offer to share love, to give of oneself in body, mind, and
spirit? Sure, they may want more than you have to offer, but they
could not question your sincerity.

I also encourage the education of seekers. They should be fully
informed in advance of the scope of your interaction, i.e., that the
love shared within sacred space is completely genuine, but that such
interaction is limited to sacred space and sacred time.

I do honor the need for healing. I simply go about it in my own particular fashion. I am, of course, always open to variations of opinion and approach in consideration of the fact that I feel diversity to be our greatest strength.

It's very easy for me to get stuck in my own sense of inadequacy and depression. I have worked through so many issues related to rejection and abandonment fear that if that's my personal starting point, I may never take the chance of interacting intimately with others whether sexually or otherwise. So I am inspired and led by my inner Pan. That aspect of me is joyful, innocent, and I admit a little naive. It is also hopeful, trusting, chance taking and amazingly resilient.

Many of us have had to deal with the words, or tacit suggestion, that we're "not good enough." I think, perhaps, we're not as far separated in opinion as one might think upon initial consideration, because context is everything; and the context in which I would be inclined to share the deepest aspects of self would be in sacred space with others of a like mind.

When I consider reaching out to others, to relative newcomers, it is in the hope that I will somehow touch and uplift and heal. I mourn for all those who sit in the shadows at the edges of the circle unable to move beyond their own senses of unworthiness, unloveliness, unattractiveness, or whatever; and so, my friend, I rip open my chest, tear out my heart, and hand it to them without compunction wherever and whenever I can. It is not that I think I am so fantastic as to heal with a glance. It is an awareness of something profoundly loving and healing and timeless that is simultaneously beyond me, courses through me, and is a part of me that I, as a qadesh, feel capable of sharing. It is a gift of deity.

There are times, I will also admit, that I feared that this gift simply welled out of some innate need for affirmation of self-worth, but then a calm, still voice spoke to my heart assuring me that it was out of my bruised and broken condition that I could best serve, as a wounded healer. So, I suppose, were I to place my own words from yesterday in the balance, I might conclude that my motivations were, and are, upon contemplation of intent, greatly focused on healing.

Michael
kelevh qadesh