Queer spirit festival returns for a second year - Shokti

Celebrating the union of sexuality and spirituality, exploring and deepening that union, expressing it through acts of love, dance, kindness and creativity…. Queer Spirit Festival returns to the Wiltshire countryside, July 26-30, 2017.

LGBTQ people are born rebels, explorers and pioneers. Coming Out is an act of self-affirmation in defiance of HUGE homophobia in the world, and five decades of law reform and changing attitudes in some places has not changed that. Coming Out is an act of rebellion against the norms of the world that shows the authentic drive within to be Who We Are is stronger than the idiocy and prejudice that exists around homo, bi and trans-sexuality.

Coming Out is a spiritual act. If the goal of spirituality is to know the true Self, even to its ultimate nature as the divine Presence of Love that exists in all things, then Coming Out is a step towards that. All of life is chasing this goal of knowledge, of re-union with the Divine Self that gave rise to existence. Natural urges rising from within push us to explore states of connection with others -through these interactions we get to know ourselves – and the urge to explore our own consciousness through altered states is strong in a lot of us too. Coming Out is a step on the journey, not the destination.

We could take the perspective that all the seeking for love, sex and heightened ecstasies that many queers are engaged in, are in fact attempts to reconnect to the bliss-filled Source of Creation, to know ourselves beyond the limits of our individual body and mind, to re-experience, while here on earth in fleshly form, the condition of union, peace and love that is the nature of the soul. Such an attitude could improve the quality of our play time immensely as we are affirm the soul in each other as well as the flesh in our games. Ecstasy and Joy have long been hailed by the mystics of the world as the frequencies of the divine. Religions used to try to repress such feelings, science tends to tell us they are merely the result of chemical reactions. Luckily we have at hand all we need to conduct our own experiments - our own bodies.

Many religious paths teach the renunciation of sexual urges – but throughout history there have also been pagan and tantric paths that have celebrated the holiness of sexual connection. Queer Spirit seeks to reclaim, reveal and release the divine magic in the body, in sexuality, and help us to heal shame, guilt and fear (around the physical form and sexual expression) that we may have inherited from the mainstream culture... so that our capacity for love, ecstasy and joy expands, our flesh itself become radiant with compassionate soul power.

Queer Spirit also takes us on the journey to Self via transcendence of binary male/female, light/shadow models of existence. It takes us into the exploration of connection with community and nature as well. Community is where we find true healing and support in our personal transformation. Nature is our teacher.

For many thousands of years before men wrote down words said to be God’s and used them to impose order on society, the divine spoke to humans through nature – through trees and plants and creatures, through the sun, moon, planets and stars, through elementals, faeries and other magical winged beings. We may have forgotten the language but they are still speaking, and the language of nature is the language of the soul, waiting in us to be remembered and spoken again. Listening is key here. Listening to nature and listening to each other. Also watching, smelling, feeling, tasting. The senses take us into the many layers of divine presence that exist in every moment everywhere. Time in nature wakes us the deeper levels of our senses and time with other queers in safe, sacred space in nature opens up a universe of possibilities….

500 Queers in Nature. It’s going to be earthy, emotional, radical and r-evolutionary.

Queer Spirit Festival 2017. JULY 26-30