Returning to the Queer Heart: The LGBTQ retreat in Wales supported by singer Charlotte Church
Returning to the Queer Heart is at The Dreaming Retreat Centre, The Elan Valley, mid-Wales on Friday 8-Monday 11 November
How are you? Three simple words. What happens when you hear them?
It’s a question I assume most of us get asked quite regularly, and if we’re honest for a moment, most of the time, we don’t really mean it. When we offer those three simple words, what we really mean is, ‘please provide me a simplified and digestible summary of how you are. Please don’t really tell me’.
We might also find ourselves responding with the classic, “Yeah, good thanks. You?” I really hope that is true for you and, how often does a variation of that spill out of our mouths without us knowing if it’s even true or not? Who knew that three simple words could stir up so much aversion, discomfort, anxiety and maybe even confusion in our own hearts.
Sometimes, we might get asked that question from a good friend, a lover, or someone we trust in a supported space and we find ourselves caught off guard, or realising we don’t know how we really are feeling? Have you managed to answer the question yet?
It’s no big revelation that this false hierarchy our society is enmeshed within, privileges the spectrum of men over all other bodies, whilst also simultaneously folding within itself along the creases of ethnicity, sexuality, body shape and mobility to ensure the straight white, able bodied cis gendered man remains where he remains. All this contortion comes at a cost.
Whilst we men may be soaking in the relative privilege and access this false ladder affords us, just like water flowing through lead piping, it’s also gradually harming every one of us. To be welcomed by the brutal expectations of our civic life, which is scaffolded by white superiority, patriarchy and capitalism, is to force ourselves into shapes which allow us to pass through that doorway. These doorways of conditional welcome existed when we were little boys and they continue to exist in our relational lives as men too.
Often what gets carved off us is our capacity to be in sincere contact with the full hearted, embodied and congruent feeling parts of ourselves. Barbara Demming once said, “Men in some deep part of themselves are homesick for the truth”, and this is especially true for queer folks, queer men and men who find home in the LGBTQ+ family. At some point, we have found ourselves on the sharp edges of some form of exile and estrangement from our authentic self.
Queer folks for generations have had the fullness of their humanity denied and the divine heart of queerness is often obscured by societal censorship and compulsory ways of being.
What parts of ourselves have we had to sever in order to find belonging, in our familial, social, working or even spiritual lives? Where do we find refuge and genuine invitation to full feeling and healing? Throw in the additional ingredients of work, relationships, family, children and the multitudes of administering our modern lives, and cultural expectations of what a man is, it can be quite a seductive story to start believing that we simply don’t have the time to ask ourselves on a deeper heart level, “how am I feeling?”
A heartbreaking phenomena of modern life is that we have normalised depletion and a disembodied way of being. James Baldwin likened this disconnection to ourselves as the death of the heart. And yes, while our queer ancestors and communities have historically demonstrated our expert proficiency in how to create late night temples of joy, ecstasy, pride and solidarity, we have often stumbled when finding places to hold the full spectrum of our fully feeling, complex, queer selves.
Audre Lorde reminds us that for the erotic, it is not a question only of what we do, but a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. So in this spirit of reclaiming and returning to our queer hearts, let us reclaim the spaces where this work is devoted upon and supported too.
In November, I join my dear queer sibling Dr Sanah Ahsan [above] to co-lead, Returning to the Queer Heart: Love and Full Feeling, a meditation retreat, suitable for all everyone, in the beautiful Elan Valley of Wales.
Earlier this year we were kindly invited by Charlotte Church and her team to curate a kinship retreat for Queer folks at The Dreaming retreat centre. This retreat as a reverent offering of love, drawing upon devotional practices for all our queer hearts.
You are warmly invited to join us as we gather and pay loving attention to processes of heartbreak, queer drama, community rupture, grievance and grief, with the loving company of remembrance, stillness, quietude, awakened care and spiritual practice.
This is an invitation to rest the tiring costume of performance, and welcome each other into full feeling, stepping away from the catchphrase psychology of “healing” and instead creating a more sacred radical welcoming of ourselves, into the rich and messy landscapes of our emotional, political and spiritual worlds.
The Teachers
Dr Sanah Ahsan is an award-winning poet, broadcaster and liberation psychologist based in London. Daniel Sutton-Johanson is a Psychotherapist and Buddhist practitioner, living and working in Portsmouth and Oxford.