A NAKED GATHERING
In the beginning of NAKED The Retreat we had a vision of community. NAKED was never just a retreat, it was always meant to bring people together long after their 7 day experience. For 4 years we kept an active WhatsApp group, a Facebook group and organised monthly Zoom hangouts (online meetups) where attendees of NAKED could join, discuss and share what is going on in their lives. Now it was finally time to move the online connections into a real time experience. NAKED the Gathering was born this year in September and almost 30 of us came together to co-create an incredible journey.
In many ways the NAKED gathering was NAKED next level.
We removed not only our clothes but also the comfort of our usual venues. We ventured into the wilderness of Greece. Armed with tents and wooden spoons we arrived a couple days early at a stunning, lush piece of land that two wonderful souls from the community (Gerhard and Melli) had found for us to use. To our pleasant surprise there was more convenience than expected – the beautiful enchanted house had water and electricity, a beautiful kitchen and space to linger. With a daily growing group of motivated NAKEDeer’s we worked our NAKED butts off to create a pamper room, a decent greek aCRAPolis (our compost toilet) and our workshop area, made from local bamboo, that we gloriously termed “The Temple”. We dug holes, put up solar lights, sourced carpets and speaker system, cleared the ground, cleaned and cleaned and… did we say we cleaned?
After 7 days of prep work on the land we were ready for the dive into deeper connection, sexuality and intimacy. We spent 7 days exploring consent, taboos, facing our fears and what it means to open in love. We enjoyed the sea as our daily wash off, as the land was just 10 minutes away from an incredible white beach and turquoise sea. It was simply brilliant.
When we are looking at our conditioning around sexuality and intimacy we are going for the big cake of personal development. Since it sits at the roots of our existence we can find a lot of trauma and pain there. Everything else that we are struggling with in life seems to be a watered down version of the initial agony that is stored in our genitals. Shame, guilt, powerlessness brew in these areas and rule us from the bottom up.
Our exploration into the depth of our human nature is once again to liberate more life force energy, so we can become the alive and thriving beings that we are meant to be. When we get rid of the blockages in our lowest energy centre, we can start to flow with life, instead of against it.
