If you are ever in Palm Springs you’d better check this guy out. I had the pleasure of meeting Austino at the Heartwalker Studio a few years ago. Paul Johnson, the Titan videographer, and I were filming for a segment of the DVD Opening the Gates – before Austino walked in the door for the shoot we’d never met. This is precisely why the Man in the Mirror video is so powerful – it is a live experience. He had no idea what I had brewing for the filming – he just showed up with a lusty smile and an open heart.

http://www.austino.com

Erotic Spiritual men, you are invited to immerse your selves in Orgasmic Yoga. Orgasmic Yoga involves dozens of pleasurable, intimate and transformative practices that individuals, couples, and groups can do while sexually aroused. Orgasmic Yoga is both erotic meditation and profound somatic education.

A team of somatic sex educators and erotic yoga instructors, led by Joseph Kramer and Ed Ehrgott, created Orgasmic Yoga for Men. The self- directed practice sessions involve arousal, breathing, savoring, movement, placement of attention and touch. Most often, this erotic yoga is practiced where you are—solo or with companions you choose. At its core, Orgasmic Yoga invites you into embodied, mindful self-accountability.

Use the discount code: SI-DB when signing up.

www.OrgasmicYogaForMen.com

Let’s chat a bit about WHY movement in general, and Ecstatic Dancing specifically, is important. We as men hold our bodies to mediate the environment, in addition to our breath – it is how we manage physiologically what we are feeling in our bodies. this tends to be become rote, patterned, because we humans gravitate toward what is familiar.

My niece Alexi, for example, only listens to music that is familiar whereas I often times listen to what is unfamiliar. I want to be surprised, to get out of that listening rut, to discover something new and fresh in the music I listen to. The same principle goes for movement, and as you may have guessed, how we play erotically!!!

The Ecstatic Dance, held in downtown Oakland every Sunday morning and Wed evening, is a perfect place to experiment, to find that unfamiliar place in your body to move in and out of, to let the music move you with eyes closed, and to MOVE OUT OF the patterned ways we move our bodies on a day-to-day basis. This is about taking a risk physically and emotionally.
I cracked up to see that women are comfortable taking their shirts off just as the guys do during the movement. It’s a nice crowd ranging from small children running around to folks in their 60’s, about half gay and straight, a circus at times with skateboards weaving in and out of the crowd to hula hoops.

Check it out as a great way to open your body, lose a few pounds, or just breathe……

Check it out guys! I’ve been doing this for the last 10 months or so – it is a great workout and a friendly place to move your body to some some rocking grooves………..

http://www.ecstaticdanceeastbay.com/welcome/

If you’ve ever watched how a baby breathes, it is effortless. The energy in the pelvis informs the rest of the body and the movement is spontaneous, undulating on an organismic level. Reich’s theory of his Pulsation Model describes just this after observing all matter of beings from a single celled organism to animals to man. All creatures/systems undulate from the micro to the macro level. Each morning we brush and wash and shower and clean up ourselves, we fuck and eat and shit all in rhythms. We move in and out of contact, even out emotions fluctuate a thousand times per day. Reich looked at our life force exploding outward from us in our orgasm – as I write this I’m reminded of the Big Bang theory, the beginning of the universe as we know it. I’d like to think that our orgasm is a micro level Big Bang, a part of the Pulsation Model in harmony with the universe.

I’m not saying that one position is better than the rest – IT IS THE CHOICE THAT IS IMPORTANT!!! When we become locked in our pelvis, dropped down posteriorly like a dog hiding it’s tail between its legs, we are in the discharge position and are unable to hold an energetic charge in our bodies – consequently we lose our choice in the world as to how we move in it. A man cannot hold these sexual feelings when his pelvis is in this position so he either has to act on them or squelch them, cutting him off from his very essence, his aliveness.

Ah, and our bodies, that wonderfully ingenious collection of breath and bone accommodates because that is what it does most efficiently, it allows. It builds musculature to support our rigid posture (not good).

Conversely, if our belly is soft and our pelvis tucked into a forward rotation, we can hold our charge. Our sexual feelings (not genital stimulation) are held here in the belly along with our feelings of sadness and power in the world. Scary, huh? Nah, it’s all good.

I’ve been mulling over in my mind about the idea of convergence – the concept that eventually, when looked at with a wide enough lens, all things can be distilled to a foundation, a set of ideas or beliefs that inform our basic nature, how we can live in balance in our bodies. Wilhelm Reich, the grandfather of Somatics, knew this. In 1961 he published the Function of the Orgasm, a seminal piece of work (please no puns), studying the connection between the mind and body. Here he commented on how a men’s pelvis can get locked in place by both circumstance and emotion, how a man lived his life including thoughts, choices, decisions, experiences could shape his sinew and bone. He designed cathartic experiments to free the body of blocked energetic bands running both horizontally and developmentally. Alexander Lowen’s Bioenergetics in the 70’s and Feldencrais’ Functional Integration all looked at the importance of the pelvis as a repository of all that is sacred and profane, our deep feelings of sexuality and our rage, tapping into our very life force.

The significance of the pelvis is not a new concept by far. Ancients in the East developed the system of yoga thousands of years ago after observing the vicissitudes of nature, how all beings seek out balance. I’m referring to the free-swinging forward and backward rotation of the pelvis as integral to our health. Think of it this way – imagine that your pelvis is a bowl of precious liquid (and indeed it is in Bioenergetics). In a forward rotation, the liquid would be spilling out over your feet while in a backward rotation your butt sticks out and you’ve got a nice curve in your lower back.