Into Mysterium I: Inspirations
What inspires a pop-up mystery school?
From September 25 to October 9, I’ll be running Mysterium at Casa Tilo in Barcelona. I’ve described it as a “pop-up mystery school”, but I could just as easily call it a 2-week long casual ritual, a shamanic hang-out, an art space where we nudge the gods awake… more than anything it’s a space set aside for deep play with the Mystery, and with other folks who love the Mystery and want to set up a playground at the edge of it.
You can find more info on it here, and apply to join here. Below, I’ll be tracing out some moments and events in my life that feel close to what I want to build into Mysterium.
Emergent World-Poem
I read about renga last year, and immediately texted my friend “I’m not sure yet what I mean by this, but I think renga gatherings would be a near-perfect format for collective soul-making practice.”
Renga are a bit of a complex topic, so I’ll just summarize what’s relevant: A renga is a poem that multiple people write together. It begins with a '“presenting verse” written by whoever is chosen to be the renga master — you’ll probably recognize the name of these short presenting verses, haiku. The starting haiku sets the tone for what follows, and every successive poet has the duty to both close out the verse shared by the person before them, and to start a new verse that will be finished by the person after them.
There’s also a shared commitment to excellence and fidelity that I found inspiring, reading about these poems. The renga master (and the other participants, but the duty rests with him) can ask someone to re-do their part if it feels lazy, off-topic, or if it doesn’t fit with the way the poem seems to want to unfold. Basically, if you don’t keep attuned to the will of the poem itself, and the rest of the room senses this, you’ll be nudged back in the direction of attunement. Something about this feels to me both uncomfortable, and like an aspirationally awesome level of collective attunement-to-what-wants-to-Be.
Almost immediately after reading up on these types of poetry gatherings, my mind turned towards soul-making practice and some vague intuition of multi-media rengas. Someone sets out a theme and a direction, and the group drops into that current, attuning to what wants to emerge from there, and helping to give it voice, give it body, give it style. Writing poems and essays, painting and drawing and making music, dropping into Presence and conversation and movement, painting rocks and leaving them as gifts for the trees, ducking your head into the ocean and screaming your ancient frozen angers into its currents — anything and everything that comes out of attuning to what’s Present, building on one another’s expressions and attunements. Something feels incredibly sacred and open and awesome about this kind of shared space.
Collective Soul-Making
Last autumn, I attended a close-knit soul-making gathering, just ten of us in the countryside sharing space and running sessions for each other. There was a very minimal structure to it, a general camaraderie where we had a morning circle, ate dinner together, did an evening circle, and somewhere in the day we made room for 2 people to run practices they wanted to share with the group.
I won’t share anyone else’s practices, but I will say they were all extremely unique expressions of each person’s flavor, the rasa of their practice and Being. It was incredibly healing and enlivening to be immersed in. It felt like a good contrast to other things I’ve been at, where the practices are mostly a dozen different versions of either “sit down on a cushion and try out this specific mode of awareness” or “sit in a circle and speak from this specific mode of awareness.”
To give a couple examples just of my own practice sessions I offered:
I opened a space where we all visualized our hearts and the energetic veins running out from us and into the world — and how our heart-systems mingled with the heart-systems of the other people in the group. From there, everyone explored that shared heart-space, and did whatever felt right to move, love, appreciate, and heal what they found there. A couple of us stayed seated. Others walked around outdoors, gathering plants and gifting the smell of them to the people there. Someone found a mirror in the barn, set it in front of me and decorated it with plants. Someone else laid in the sun, feeling the warmth and running flowers along their skin. I think I heard someone tapping stones together rhythmically.
In another practice, we all started out by deepening into the body, then into spacious awareness, then into heart awareness — and from there, we paired off, silently sharing sensory worlds with the other person. One pair started wandering around like little boys, pointing out cool bugs to each other, excitedly grabbing textures from around the room and dragging the other person’s hand across them. Another pair poured hot wax on each others arms. Another pushed and pulled against each other, exploring the minutiae of each others force. The atmosphere of the room, with all this shared activity and tripartite awareness, felt almost terrifyingly Alive to me.
Other practice sessions involved poetry, music, dance, energy work, and monster stories around the campfire.
Casual Ritual
I was hanging out with K, and it became clear that we wanted to do something to mark this moment in our lives, a transition point for both of us. They asked me what I’d suggest for a ritual, and I said it was best to keep it simple, and to keep it closely related to what we were wanting to mark, and how we were wanting to move forward from it.
So each of us picked up a rock we liked, and carried it around for a couple days while we thought about this moment in our lives. We touched and held the rocks, felt their texture while considering our pasts and futures. We traded rocks for a bit, considering what we’d learned from our friendship. And when the time was right, we bought some candles and took them up to some boulders one night. We lit the candles, let the firelight flicker on the massive stones all around us, and we just talked. We called in the gods, the values, the guides, the atmospheres that felt important to us, and we talked — not just to each other, but to those other Presences we’d invited in. We talked about where we’d been, where we were going, what we were grateful for, what we were pained by, what we could feel emerging and how we hoped it might turn out. We found a rhythm of shaping and surrendering whatever came up. Owning what we wanted, owning the desires that had been given to us, feeling and honing their specificity within ourselves — and then releasing them, knowing that we couldn’t control them.
We watched the candles burn down, said thank you to the stars and stones and Presences. And we walked out of the space. We traded rocks with each other, and when we both moved on to other countries, we buried each others rocks in special places, with an intention to let the other person’s world take root and emerge in the best way possible.
Un-Selfed Devotion
Earlier this year, I spent a couple weeks at an ashram where the schedule was packed with meditation and ritual activity. I don’t want to make Mysterium a place where we’re waking up at 5am to do temple cleaning and aarti, or a place where we’re meditating for 7 hours straight without leaving the mat, or where we’re generally running ourselves ragged with ritual activity. …But there was something about the shared sense of dedication and devotion to something outside of ourselves that felt really good and right.
It wasn’t like a meditation retreat where there’s any focus on getting into particular states, or increasing our own skills at certain mental moves or types of awareness, or building up changes in our neural architecture or moving towards awakening or whatever else. At a certain point, it was just… hey, there’s certain gods present in these mantras and statues and spaces — so we’re going to manage that ritual space in a way that aligns with that. We’ll probably be blessed by doing so, but that’s pretty much beside the point and we’ll largely forget about that within a couple days if we keep the schedule full enough and work on the tasks at hand.
I’m not sure how else to get out of that ego space and into the devotional, don’t-care-what’s-in-it-for-me space… but I’d like to see if there are ways to cultivate that while still having fun and hanging out and not asking everyone to spend hours placing offerings and oil lamps and gathering wood and so on.
(That said, the blessings that came out of that stay were definitely very real and present and shockingly direct, and they feel pretty directly related to the sacrifice/offering of time and effort, so. I don’t know. I haven’t really resolved much of this yet, but it’s on my mind.)
Minimum Structure Gatherings
I’ve been to a few long gatherings the past couple years, gatherings that were very light on structure. There was Medley, a two-month co-working space in Berlin, about 20 people. Portal, a month-long co-working house in Porto, I think there were around 20 people there too. Tree Week, a week-long hangout house in Germany, I wanna say there were 70 or so people at that one? And of course the soul-making retreat, a week in the countryside with 10 people.
One thing I loved about each of these was the serendipity. The minimum viable structure allowed a lot of space to simply bring people together and allow them to cross paths and find what wanted to happen. Some of my closest friendships, my best walk-n-talks, my most destabilizing encounters, my most challenging growth opportunities, and my biggest heart-openings have come out of these serendipities.
Near the end of Medley, someone referred to it as an “interpersonal microwave.” That phrasing stuck with me, and I brought it into Portal where the phrase also resonated and stuck. There’s something about gatherings like this where people kinda fry each other. Where we run into each others projections and shadows and lil frictiony weirdnesses, and people start getting triggered by who-even-knows-what.
I think part of this is good — it unearths a lot of shit that needs to be unearthed, and at least for me it has over and over again showed me where my next few months of work will be.
I also think part of it is simply avoidable unpleasantness — there’s no need for all that unearthed shit to linger in the margins and permeate the whole event. Some way of making room for it, having shared understanding and vocabulary around it, and being able to navigate it together from that feels possible. Not sure I’m the guy who can figure it out, but I’ve got some ideas and some smart, attuned people around me. This seems like a fascinating problem to poke at and I’d love to try some stuff around it. Ideally trying out ways of keeping the growth edge without unnecessary friction and stink.
Nano Gatherings
I’ve done a couple of very small gatherings lately as well, and I have a couple more on my schedule in the next months. By very small, I mean 2 people. Me and one other person, deciding that there’s something we want to work on and that we can best work on by making intentional space together for it.
This format is kinda great. I love it so much. It can also be insanely difficult. I’ve written before about the “Love Dojo” me and Rachel did, organized around the question of “how can we learn to love better?,” and “how can friction and fights bring us closer together rather than creating distance?” That was in many ways a luminous 3 weeks, and in many ways an incredibly difficult 3 weeks. But the shared dedication to a shared intention — to a question that mattered deeply to both of us — made all the difference.
In a much lighter vein, me and Tasshin did a short writing retreat together, organized around an attempt to focus on our writing practices and get something on paper that we’d been meaning to get around to for awhile. Again, the shared intention was a very helpful guide for creating a certain field where the work can happen, and where we can support each others work.
In the coming weeks, I have a couple 2-person containers scheduled around Truth and Deity Yoga, respectively. I’m expecting both of those to be fruitful and challenging, probably in ways that I can’t quite predict.
I have something in my mind about the dyads and triads and so on that can emerge and be encouraged within a larger gathering. If it’s possible to do a 15 person ritual container where within those 15 people, there are a couple of pairs or triads that dedicate themselves to their own shared focus within the larger shared space. Something about that feels powerful to me, and I’d love to be able to support explorations like that. A renga within a renga.
There are more things coming to mind, but I’ll stop here. These are some of the main threads on my mind while I’m mulling on Mysterium. I’d like to pull together a playful, casual event where we can step into sacred mystery, attune to what it wants from us, and share our ways of embodying that attunement through practice, action, art, friendship, and personality.
I hope you’ll join in. You can find the application and other information at these links.
Wonderful! The renga motif feels so generative. Godspeed.