Queer Spirit Festival

A gathering of lgbtqi+ tribes and individuals who celebrate love, nature and the spirituality in our sexuality:

Queer Spirit Festival is arriving on the planet this summer at the Aquarius Full Moon in the cosmic county of Wiltshire, home of ancient stones and mysterious crop circles. 5 days, 4 nights of magical happenings, spiritual explorations and lots of space to play in nature…. of dance, performance, ceremonies, campaigns, workshops, creativity, great vegan and veggie food and much, much more. The festival is aimed at all ages and all genders and is intended to be a loud and positive statement about the loving spirit and the healing power growing amongst the many branches of the queer community tree. Workshop topics include a Firewalk, Faerie Wand Making, Spirit Guide journeys, Yoga, Voice, Creative Writing, Kabbalah, Tantra, Mask Making, Circus Skills and Ecstatic Dance. Meeting in nature (there is camping space for 500), connecting from the heart, co-creating a zone of FREEDOM OF SELF EXPRESSION where we can play, heal, shine and show the world something about who we really are, at the Queer Spirit Festival the fun and festivity also has a focussed and serious intent as we open from the inside to the roots of who we are within the human family, and reach for the creative potential in our queer souls. We will open our hearts and celebrate our radical spirit.

Historically, same-sex lovers and gender fluid individuals have played roles in their communities associated with the sacred dimension of life – this is the largely hidden part of our history which modern gay culture has barely embraced. The decline of the controlling, censoring influence of the Christian churches in the west has enabled our political liberation but we have been coming out in a spiritual vacuum. Many queers have a deep, compassionate, mystical nature and seek to find ways to explore that. (Gay culture celebrates outer beauty and good times but does not (yet) encourage us to take the inner search to self-knowledge. It’s likely that many of those who ignore or resist that inner call end up going down the road to drug addictions, and end up coming to spirituality while in recovery from those). We can pursue the spiritual search within established religions, but many of us choose to find our own path, seek for our own truths, often through magical or esoteric pathways. This is leading to a massive growth in lgbtqi+ spiritual groups that explore meditation, shamanism, witchcraft, yoga, tantra, spiritual dance practices (etc) and which are not associated with any religion.

Queer people are starting out on the path of reclaiming the spiritual roles they once played among the Native American and other tribal peoples the world over, including in Europe in the pre-Christian era. To this day, our role as spiritual conduits is recognised by the Dagara Tribe of western Africa – in this tribe (see link below), as once in many cultures around the world, the combination of male and female energies within certain people is seen as giving those people the gift of insight and communication with the unseen realms. The Dagara believe “that to then limit gay people to simple sexual orientation is really the worst harm that can be done to a person.” (Malidoma Somé)

Today, as queer beings play with gender, as we open our minds and hearts and bodies, we are discovering and opening our souls, releasing the magic within, in order to heal ourselves and become healers for the world around us. The mystical inner marriage of the male and female has been seen by mystery schools since thousands of years as the way to birth divinity within a person. Jesus refers to this in the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, part of his formula for entering the kingdom of heaven is to “make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female”. He also emphasised that another crucial factor in escaping the pain and delusion of samsara and entering into the light of heaven is the ability to be as playful and free as a child….. At the Queer Spirit Festival we will be dancing through the gates to paradise – opening to a field of being where all are loved, all are accepted, all are cherished, where the faery child in us can play, dance and sing, leading us into places of connection and communion. In this way we will be able to remind ourselves and show the rest of the world that queer people are nature’s divine children, here to find new ways of being, of living and loving, so badly needed on planet Earth. This time was foreseen by our heroic ancestors Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde… and by mystics such as Aurobindo (who wrote about ‘the sun–eyed children of a marvellous dawn’)… was also foretold in the Native American prophecy of the Whirling Rainbow. The world needs our healing gifts. It’s time to dance, stretch and put on our butterfly wings.

The Queer Spirit Festival dedicates its drive to celebrate the spiritual nature of lgbtqi+ people to our sisters and brothers around the world, so many of whom still do not live in safety and peace, with the right to love whom they choose. The message this festival can send out to the world is that lgbtqi+ people are waking up to our own spirit, our own nature and gifts. Our existence does not need to be justified by religion, science or medicine. We are claiming and proclaiming our own nature – which is that of love, peace, compassion, tolerance, joy and love. We are connectors of worlds, conduits of spirit energy, healers and celebrants. At the Queer Spirit Festival the queer tribes are having a SECOND COMING OUT, and this time we are celebrating our spirituality as well as our sexuality, and the magical, healing transformation that comes from marrying the two.

QUEER SPIRIT FESTIVAL. 17-21 AUGUST, 2016. www.queerspirit.net

Malidoma Somé of the Dagara People:

“The gay person is looked at primarily as a “gatekeeper.” The Earth is looked at, from my tribal perspective, as a very, very delicate machine or consciousness, with high vibrational points, which certain people must be guardians of in order for the tribe to keep its continuity with the gods and with the spirits that dwell there. Spirits of this world and spirits of the other worlds. Any person who is at this link between this world and the other world experiences a state of vibrational consciousness which is far higher, and far different, from the one that a normal person would experience. This is what makes a gay person gay. This kind of function is not one that society votes for certain people to fulfill. It is one that people are said to decide on prior to being born. You decide that you will be a gatekeeper before you are born. And it is that decision that provides you with the equipment (Malidoma gestures by circling waist area with hands) that you bring into this world.” http://www.menweb.org/somegay.htm