Love School
Love School provides a safe haven for exploring and accelerating deep personal and collective healing. Strong foundational ethics guide us to practice truth in love as we reveal ourselves in regular community building practices. In the field of trust, the universal energy of Eros connects us with each other, the Earth and the sacredness of all life. To build a new culture where violence is impossible, we work to liberate ourselves from the historic suppression of sexuality and fear in love.
Concept
In the Love School, we don’t offer personal therapy. Instead we focus on raising our consciousness at the innermost core of human existence and collaborating towards the necessary planetary system change in love. Both those teaching and learning in the Love School recognize this political imperative. The Love School creates spaces to allow us to follow ethical guidelines like:
- truth in love
- no deceit in relationships
- no claims to possession
- solidarity and mutual support.
The long history of patriarchal violence and oppression creates separation anxiety, jealousy, competition, mistrust and falsehood within us, especially in sexuality, love and partnership. That’s why we can hardly ever reach the goal of our longings. We work to transform these patterns into structures of sustainable trust and mutual support. As long as we see sexuality and love as merely private and emotional issues, we’ll continue to follow the old ingrained patterns of fear. We’re creating spaces that allow us to be truthful with each other, to become conscious of the patterns steering us and to make new choices.
Healing occurs through insight. When you experience jealousy, for example, you might see that you’re following unconscious patterns of thinking, based on the collective trauma that we all carry as a result of the patriarchal history of violence. Becoming conscious – of what you do, why you act the way you act and what you serve – facilitates a shift in decision-making, allowing you to choose trust rather than fear.
From the beginning of the project, we’ve seen how the transparency and solidarity of community offers new solutions for conflicts that would normally end in break-ups or illness. People who recognize each other in their hopes, fears and struggles, including in their shadow aspects, naturally begin to accept and support each other, realizing that we’re all struggling with the same longings and the same trauma.
Truth in love is a delicate issue. Couples concealing their attraction to others find themselves consumed by mistrust, and too involved in the situation to resolve any issues one-to-one. While all of the community practices regular Forum, the Love School facilitates special Forum sessions to delve into the deeper issues of sex, love and partnership and find solutions.
We can’t find sustainable solutions for the issues of love and sexuality on a private level alone, but only through creating a new social system of coexistence that embeds the individual in community. In a field of trust in love, it’s possible to live in partnership and have other relationships, live without partnership and have erotic friendships and encounters, or be monogamous if this is your truth. There are no rules about our sexual choices or orientation, as long as we free our love lives from lying and deceit, embedded in a field of community and trust.
An intimate part of the Love School is what we call the “Temple of Love.” Here, we explore Eros in authentic connection, and as a universal energy, not confined to relationship or conventional rules. Some men and women from our community undergo training to offer love service, guiding and providing new experiences to students of the Love School.
Love School holds separate spaces for women and men, to encourage them to step out of the conditioning of competition and enter into solidarity. When we realize that we need each other as friends and companions, we’re on the way towards building a new culture for sexuality and love.
Insight
- We use different, creative means to speak our truth, such as Forum, where we don’t hurt each other, but develop solidarity and recognize the silliness of most relationship problems. We liberate ourselves from the heaviness of these issues by transforming them into artistic performance.
- Eros is more than only a personal expression between two people, it’s the very life force of our sensual, bodily existence on Earth. Honoring Eros in its universal reality, we can experience our connectedness with life and its sacredness.
- It’s revolutionary to create protected spaces of trust where we can celebrate Eros as the free, sacred and universal force it is, after thousands of years of shame, degradation and humiliation.
- To liberate ourselves as women, we come together to reconnect to our feminine source in Eros, politics and spirituality, to recognize and take on our social responsibility for a love-based culture.
- To find a new identity as men, we come together to overcome our patriarchal conditioning and give rise to new expressions of sacred masculinity in service of women and the planet.
- Though we embrace homosexual and other non-heterosexual identities, our work has mainly focused on the relationship between men and women as we see it as a key area of humanity in need of collective healing. Independent of individual gender identity or sexual orientation, we recognize the basic, archetypal polarity of feminine and masculine powers, and work to bring them into equal balance in a culture of partnership.
- There’s no external law prescribing the right sexual choice. Whether you’re straight or gay, monogamous, polyamorous or celibate is solely a matter of your inner truth.
Seminars & the Global Love School
Our Love School accompanies community members and students, couples and parents, our youths and project groups on their path in love. We regularly run seminars internally and externally, for friends of Tamera and students of the Healing Biotopes Plan.
We host the annual “Global Love School” where we invite our cooperation partners – peaceworkers and leaders from around the world – to learn how to deal with questions of love and sexuality, both in their personal and public lives. Started by Sabine Lichtenfels and Benjamin von Mendelssohn in 2012, it’s become an important basis for developing and deepening our network for a new planetary culture.
Speech by S. Lichtenfels & B. v. Mendelssohn
Part 1: Water, Love & Eros – Oakland, CA, October 9th 2015