Plural Weddings of Ecosexual Love

Concept

ECOSYSTEM I Love You is a Plural Wedding of Ecosexual Love to be celebrated at a time when your expanded family and community wishes to bond with the Ecosystem that brings joy, abundance, love, and beauty to the lives of its members. Ecosystems can vary in nature, including Forests, Beaches, Mountains, Valleys, Hills, Coastal Areas, Towns, Villages, Plateaus, Lakes, Rivers, Seas, and more.

As a whole-day sequence of events, this plural wedding is intended to recognize this Ecosystem as a significant emotional partner for the community, its core members, and interested participants in the Ecosexual Wedding Event. A template and immediate precedent is Te Amo Playa Azul I Love You, celebrated in Western Puerto Rico on January 25, 2014. An important inspiring tradition is La Sensa, an all-day ceremony where the whole city of Venice, Italy, marries the sea, every year since Renaissance time. Another is Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’s series of ecosexual weddings recorded in LoveArtLab, 2005-2011. The all-day program at the Ecosystem starts in the late morning. It includes an ice-breaker contact dance and three workshops organized around the project’s leading principles. It culminates at dusk in the Plural Wedding of Ecosexual Love.

The program is complemented by healthy foods and beverages, registration, translation when necessary, and open sharing. Typically, it caps at 25-30 participants and runs over a period of several hours with breaks between workshops. Dr. Serena Gaia facilitates the workshops and the performance of the Wedding Vows. The program requires the collaboration of two or three models from among the participants, a production assistant, a facilitation assistant, and a priestess or priest for the Invocation of the Wedding. The Ecosystem is cast as the beloved ecosystem who becomes the shared bride for the “spice” (read plural of spouses) who marry her. Depending on the nature of the Ecosystem and its related community, the program can be adapted and expanded for larger groups with the co-facilitation of trained group members.

Invitation: A Contact Dance

This ice-breaker is a way for participants to meet and greet other wedding guests, to become familiar with the Ecosystem they are pledged to wed, and to prepare for the experience of a Plural Wedding of Ecosexual Love where the locale is one of the spouses rather than the décor. The facilitation of the contact dance is designed to help the group amalgamate.

Workshops

This sequence of workshops is structured to move from the self, to the planet, to humanity. It is based on the principle that knowledge is love.

I. Know and Love the Ecosystem Called Thyself.
The facilitated process for this workshop involves a participant’s physical, energetic, and aural reconnection with all parts, functions, and areas of their personal ecosystem.

This workshop is designed to generate an awareness of one’s body as an ecosystem. It’s an introspective workshop that enhances a person’s awareness of the flow of life in one’s inner ecosystem. An introduction briefly invites participants to consider the idea that an organism, including a person, is like an ecosystem. The practice consists in a restorative yoga type of meditation that brings each participant’s awareness within, to register the inner activity of one’s limbs, flesh, veins, cells, organs, bacteria, juices, and vital systems. The meditation connects the mind, considered the most important sexual organ, with all the vibrant complexity of this inner landscape constituted by one’s personal ecosystem. When we know our inner ecosystem, we become aware of the energy of love that flows as cells interact and exchange genes.

II. Know and Love your Most Compersive Lover: Earth.
The facilitated process for this workshop involves participants’ activation of their ability to sense the Earth as a sensual, amorous, caressing, devoted, fluid, generous, and inclusive lover, with sensual responses to the presence, movement and sound of all four elements in the Ecosystem’s environment, including water, air, fire/sunshine, and earth/soil. It concludes with an exercise of connection with Earth energies surging from the ground, and with geothermic fire.

This workshop is designed to generate an awareness of the Earth as a planet hospitable to love. It brings participants’ awareness to the natural ecosystem where the workshop itself happens, and the four elements of nature as they manifest in that particular locale. Participants are invited to experience their connectedness to these elements through synesthesia: the combination of sensorial experiences that enable one’s perception of water, air, fire and earth. The facilitation enhances these perceptions, activating sensibility through skin, nostrils, eyes, hands, and ears. Participants experience their personal ecosystem in connection with others and in the context of the surrounding ecosystems of a particular locale. They are encouraged to acknowledge Gaia as the partner we all share. The myth that the energy of love can be contained in a close circuit between two persons is dispelled. Earth is recognized as the most compersive of all lovers: the one who welcomes lovers in her beautiful ecosystems, and the one who offers hospitality, participation, and sustenance to all the loves that be. Participants become aware that sharing this lover fairly, honestly, and equally with others, including humans and other forms of life, is what makes love the ecology of life.

III. Know and Love Those who Share This Lover with You: Humankind.
The facilitation for this workshop involves three-way exercises among participants not currently in relationships, and as diverse and unknown to each other as possible. The exercise consists in taking turns in playing three different roles in the exchange of amorous and loving touch over the head, face, shoulders, and upper torso areas. The roles include giver (lover), receiver (beloved), and witness (also dubbed “moon,” or panderer, or Ecosystem itself). Each role has to be embodied fully at last once, with the giver totally intent in offering pleasure and loving touch to the receiver, the receiver intent in enjoying the pleasure and absorbing the loving energy without reciprocation while in the role, and the witness intent in providing the space hospitable, safe, and conducive of love.

This workshop is designed to help participants experience relating to others, and especially human beings that we encounter on our paths, as “metamours”: people who love each other because they share a partner they love. The witness is invited to experience him or herself as form of Earth, a form of Gaia. Namely: a partner wide enough, and generous enough, and compersive enough to be satisfied with the mere joy of contemplating the beauty of the lover and beloved together as a live work of art. The witness is encouraged to imagine a proverbial scenario were nature panders to the lovers, for example, when the moon shines and the breeze runs through the tree branches of the natural canopy where the lovers make out. How does it feel to be the compersive planet that hosts all of our loves? Can we find it in our heart to experience their pleasure as our own? Many participants report they enjoy the role tremendously. They can be observed with their arms wide open hosting the safe space of love, bringing their contemplative energies to add to the amorous joy of the giver and receiver’s more direct action.

Intermissions and Closure
Each workshop concludes with a facilitated ohm with group hug. This enhances the experience of closeness and the production of oxytocin, with the effect of deeper bonding among the “spice.” Workshops take about 90 minutes, including introduction, practice, and sharing. Intermissions of about 30 minutes are designed to give flexibility to the facilitating team and to allow the group to refresh and reenergize with healthy snacks and beverage.

The workshop process transforms participants’ sense of self, the planet, and humanity, based on the principle that knowledge is love. When this process is complete, the main tenets of ecosexuality are internalized: the Earth is a lover and each one of us is an ecosystem capable of hosting love as we learn the arts of love, ecosexual style. Each workshop is followed by a debriefing session, where participants share about their experiences and communicate with each other. The group may include participants who speak different languages provided enough bilingual speakers are present to offer consecutive translation. Volunteer translators are welcome to help, and when confusion happens, the whole group is encouraged to laugh wholeheartedly.

The Wedding

As the group becomes more self-servicing through the collaborative and emotional bonding process, as sunset time approaches, the facilitator and the minister move to focus on the Invocation and the Vows that constitute the Plural Wedding of Ecosexual Love. The text of this Invocation and Vows will be adapted and customized from an existing template. The Wedding will be celebrated by everyone, including participants in the workshops, latecomers, and other occasional visitors. The minister will recite the Invocation in English or the main language of the community, and will be followed by necessary translation related to other languages in use. The vows are recited by everyone, followed by necessary translations. All are encouraged to “kiss the bride.” At this time, participants can present a poem, a skit, a burlesque, or a song with musical accompaniment.

After the ceremony, dinner is served for the party of “spice.” This can coincide with dinner-time for the community. The dinner concludes the program and participants are invited to continued to enjoy each other’s playful company and the company of their newly wed natural spouse, the beloved ecosystem, as they also help to clean up effectively, responsibly, and collaboratively. In this kind of wedding, many new friendships get seeded that will likely result in further collaborative projects equally sustainable, symbiotic, and empowering.

A very important consideration for Event Organizers:

• Each workshop is also a stand-alone offering that can be included in a program regardless of any weddings.
• In a multiple day event, workshops can also be offered over a period of two or three days. The series can or cannot lead to a wedding.
• It’s important to schedule a wedding at sunset, and workshops in the afternoon.
• In stand-alone offerings, it’s important for event organizers to consider the context of the overall program and the awareness participants bring to the event.
• A stand-alone workshop can function in different ways: it can fill a gap in the program, it can bring a new twist to the mix, it can enhance the complexity of the transforming process the event auspicates.

Notes to Participants:

• Refreshments, foods, water, amenities: on the sidelines and during breaks.
• What to bring: your charming selves, a cheerful mind, a lovely smile, an open heart, comfort food, water, comfortable outdoor clothing for workshops time, a towel, pillows and soft stuff to find comfort on forest floor, eagerness, participation
• What to expect: magic, beauty, enchantment, love, healing, sharing, company, fun, joy, moderation, respect, continuity, togetherness
• Once we start the workshops, the group will be formed. We will expect continuity, and admission to subsequent workshops is subject to participation in previous ones. Presence is required. The degree of participation can vary.

We look forward to sharing this magic day with you!

Contact: serena.anderlini@gmail.com
Serenagaia.org or serenagaia.com