RestLove Retreat
The TwoEye Brotherhood offers RestLove Retreat as a path to healing and spiritual awakening for men who love men.
Our primary spiritual practice is RestLove retreat. This is a meditation retreat modality for any committed couple who have been together at least six months. We recommend that the apprentice couple have an Elder from our brotherhood to help them prepare before commencing retreat. The Elder should have completed a couple retreat of at least one month's duration. The Elder-Apprentice connection is entirely non-sexual.
In the ancient clans of Albion the sharing of loving energy was understood as a sacred energetic nourishment for healing and spiritual awakening.
The Way of Love and Rest offers two ways to share loving energy -
1. Dewynnyanskerensa-
this means Radiation of Love in the Cornish language. A couple lie on a mattress side-by-side, facing one another. They wrap arms and legs around each other in a way that feels comfortable. Arms and legs can be adjusted as needed. They press chests and stomachs together. There is energy radiating out of the front of the torso at all times. This radiation comes from the internal organs. This energy is absorbed into the internal organs of the opposite person. In this way the organs can shed toxicity and tension that have accumulated as a result of energetic depletion. The internal organs begin to glow with light.
2. Unyanskerensa - "Union of Love".-
This means sharing loving energy through sexual union. This is a personal matter for each couple to approach in their own way. We offer no breathing techniques, visualisations or other guidance. We find that just by letting the body rest and by practicing Dewynnyanskerensa / Radiation of Love, the making love happens naturally.
As time goes on the energetic heart opens and the consciousness is absorbed back into its divine source.
RestLove Retreat
This is a description of a six-week RestLove retreat completed by Edward and Harry, a committed TwoEye / gay male couple in the TwoEye Brotherhood. Names have been changed for privacy. Any longer retreat like this, lasting longer than a month and no more than three months, is called a Journeyman retreat. Most couples begin with Apprentice retreats that have a duration of three days or ten days. We recommend that a pair be together for at least six months before commencing any RestLove retreat.
Thousands of years ago in the clan of Kernow on the south-west of Albion / Britain, we believe that a special hut would be built several miles away from the village. Men of our kind were called TwoEye because we hold both male and female polarities of Spirit in the one body. This term also has a deeper meaning: the TwoEye man sees with one eye in the world of the people and with one eye in the world of Spirit, thus standing as a spiritual gatekeeper between the two. A TwoEye pair would take vows of loyalty to become Anam Cara or Soul Companions. The Anam Cara pair would go into the hut to share limitless rest and limitless loving energy. In this way the body healed from physical and mental illnesses. The pair awakened into their true nature. Now
we reclaim and continue more than a thousand generations of the TwoEye ancestors.
Edward’s Story –
In June and July 2016 I completed a six-week RestLove retreat with Harry my lover at the time. We had already completed shorter retreats on Dartmoor in Devon, south-west England. We selected a small retreat hut at the foot of a green hill where there were no people or farm animals for miles around. There was fresh clear water from a quiet spring nearby. All food was stored in the hut so we did not need to travel or grow food. We had already both let go of all mind-altering chemicals. The purpose of this experiment was to observe what happens to the body when it is offered limitless rest as well as limitless loving energy from a lover. I hypothesised that I might experience temporarily the true nature of reality. The experiment was a success.
The First Gate – Dewynnyanskerensa –
– “Radiation of Love”
This first phase involves lying down to let the body rest completely and then flooding the body over time with non-sexual loving energy. Fear not, the sexual energy sharing comes later. On a mattress I lay down on my side and facing Harry. He lay down on his side and facing me. So we were lying side-by-side and not on top of one another. We pressed our chests and stomachs firmly together, with as much skin surface area touching as possible. We arranged our arms and legs as comfortably as we could, and rearranged these during the process if a limb felt uncomfortable. There is energy radiating from the front of the human torso at all times: there is a concentration of energy in the heart energy centre, the solar plexus and about two inches above the navel. As we lay together we each absorbed this energy into the internal organs – heart, lungs, solar plexus, kidneys, liver, intestines and so on.
We lay this way for between six and eight hours per day for several weeks. We did not constrain ourselves. If we felt like lying this way for ten or twelve hours on a particular day we did so. Neither did we force ourselves. If we needed to stop Dewynnyanskerensa after two hours on a particular day because of nausea we did so. We trusted ourselves and our bodies. But we did not introduce distracting elements such as going for a walk, reading or knitting. If we needed to walk a hundred yards from the hut occasionally just to feel fresh air and space from the hut we did so. But we kept walking to a minimum. We did not exercise strenuously, instead just doing gentle stretching when we felt like it. We put no pressure on the body whatever. Where possible we tried to gently nudge the body back to Dewynnyanskerensa.
Each day the internal organs released some of the toxicity that had been stored in them through a lifetime of energetic depletion. We had given so much energy in the outside world, often doing the work of two or even three men. In return we had received little to no loving energy. This is life in an overcrowded world. So the body had been operating with less than ten percent of the loving energy it needs. Now we were slowly filling the body with one hundred percent of the loving energy the torso can hold, like charging a cellphone with electricity until the battery is 100% full. Most days the body felt nauseous at sundown due to the toxicity in the bloodstream. In the evenings we regularly found ourselves crying as the body shed the tension and toxicity. We were filling with loving energy. After crying we usually held each other in Dewynnyanskerensa to replenish the body’s energy reservoir more. I felt quite weak in these early days. It was draining for the body to gradually empty out all the toxicity that had been stored in it over decades.
Each day the body was filling up with more loving energy. This energy could be stored in the internal organs unimpeded because we were allowing the body to rest completely. Gradually an immense sense of power built up in the body as the reservoir in the torso filled with energy. Day by day the internal organs shone brighter and brighter with Light. Toxicity was being released and replaced with energetic nourishment. Sexual desire was mostly muted at this point but if we felt like being intimate sexually then we did so. After a few weeks the body seemed to need less of Dewynnyanskerensa. All through the process we trusted the body. On this foundation of the Radiation of Love everything else happened naturally of its own accord. Over time we noticed the body gradually shifting from desiring Dewynnyanskerensa to desiring sexual energy sharing.
The Second Gate – UnyansKerensa –
– “Union of Love”
We found that the body was rapidly transforming as it filled with loving energy. Within the first few days of the retreat the nutritional desire inside us changed. We increasingly desired raw carbohydrates and proteins such as organic grains, beans, lentils and nuts. These are the most static and potent nourishment for meditation. We lost all taste for sugar. We no longer wanted refined sugars, dried fruits or even fresh fruits. Most vegetables were now too sweet for us also. The body had all the loving energy it needed so the desire for sugar as an anaesthetic and superficial fuel, was removed. The mind began to slow down and become calm.
The internal organs received more and more loving energy. Now free from the energetic depletion caused by the work and responsibilities of the outside world, the five chambers of the energetic heart unclenched one by one. The energetic heart is often pictorialised in spiritual literature as a lotus flower. The lotus has a long thin stem that connect it to its roots buried in the mud at the bottom of a lake. It has several concentric circles of petals, each circle inside being smaller than the last. Have you ever seen those little Russian dolls where you open up one doll and there is a smaller doll inside, then an even smaller doll inside that one and so on? The energetic heart is a bit like that. The five chambers of the energetic heart radiate out from the innermost small chamber at the centre and bottom of the structure. As this tissue receives loving energy the valve that closes each chamber unclenches.
I started to experience the innermost chamber of the energetic heart opening for brief periods, something I had not experienced since I was a pre-school child. The mind had implanted thoughts into the tissue of the energetic heart and these had been stored there as memories. With each passing day the chambers of the energetic heart opened one by one and these memories started to be released. I remembered things from my youth that had been entirely forgotten for decades. Memories arose from when I was fifteen years old, then the next day twelve, and so on younger and younger. When the valve of the innermost chamber of the heart unclenched, what flooded out were my core memories of self-hatred for being sexually attracted to the boys not the girls. It was emotional. Harry held me as I cried. But it was not a tragic experience. I knew the body was releasing these thoughts as the heart filled with love. When the innermost chamber of the energetic heart opened, the illusory mind began to be absorbed back into its source through this gateway. Thoughts became more faint and instead I returned to being a consciousness centred in the heart. No thoughts existed, only awareness in the present moment.
The body desired increasingly to sit up for short periods of a few minutes at a time. The torso was incrementally more free from internal obstructions and was also more and more energetically nourished. It was a joy to sit and meditate with such an internal circumstance. The body desired to do weight-bearing callisthenics, a little more each day. In the East such exercise might be described as yoga asanas. With the muscles rested and energetically nourished, there was no pain in such weight-bearing exercise. The muscle mass grew rapidly and any excess fat on the body melted away. The muscles grew large and beautiful and unforced like Hercules for they were fully energetically nourished.
There developed in the body a wellspring of desire for intimate energy-sharing. We could trust the body more and more each day. This sexual union gradually replaced Dewynnyanskerensa, the Radiation of Love. By the end of one complete moon cycle we rarely lay on the ground together as we had done in the beginning. Instead Unyanskerensa the Union of Love became our primary energetic nourishment. By this point we were sharing sexual union from the core of our energetic hearts. Uniting in this way, unobstructed by any depletion in the internal organs, is the full potential of energy sharing for two human beings. Yet this is in itself not the goal. Energetic nourishment was carried in the body into our sitting meditation some hours after love-making.
After about four weeks the inner ecosystem was shining with light – heart, lungs, solar plexus, kidneys, liver and intestines were all filled with loving energy. This is the state of the infant’s body when it is born. I began to sleep on the ground at night to connect with the energy field of Mother Earth. As the innermost chamber of the energetic heart unclenched I increasingly experienced returning to being the soul consciousness.
I experienced a rope of solid white light extending from the crown of the head down through the centre of the innermost chamber of the opened heart and on down to the groin. This is the soul. The illusory mind was completely absorbed back into this source of consciousness and I was abiding as this soul. When we made love it was as two souls sharing energy. This rope of solid white light extended down from crown of head through heart and on down through the hard phallus. The energy continued up through the soul of the partner, through his opened heart and on up through the crown of his head. So when I sat kneeling and Harry sat on my cock the energy union would have looked like a large ‘U’ shape connected through our two bodies.
The Reality Beyond Death
We were in the second moon cycle or about week five. The body was almost completely nourished by loving energy and rest. I was sitting in meditation on the grass beside our hut one afternoon and abiding as the soul. I was that rope of solid white light inside me. The soul was then pulled up through the crown of the head into a translucent tunnel. I could see galaxies flashing past as I travelled faster than the speed of light through the tunnel. I passed many souls on the Soul Plane who were making a distant cheering sound that I was having this experience. The Soul Plane is where souls congregate before returning into the next human lifetime. Yet the Soul Plane is beyond time and space and the souls never leave it. I as the soul continued travelling and saw ahead a light at the centre of the Universe brighter than a hundred suns. I knew that I would be instantly annihilated in that light and so it was. Like a puff of rain cloud meeting the surface of the sun the individual soul evaporated.
In the absence of that soul I experienced that I am the Light. The Light is the true nature of us all. There was no separation, no separate deity. It was an infinite and eternal ocean of light composed of infinite compassion, infinite knowledge and infinite love. I realised that this whole Universe is a dream manifested by the Light and that even the individual souls on the Soul Plane are a part of the dream. Only the Light is real. Nothing in this Universe was ever real nor will it ever be. Eventually a human being has experienced enough suffering over many lifetimes to realise that life in a human body is an illusion. Because of energetic depletion the nature of human life is also suffering. It is not possible to give the body all the loving energy and rest it needs in this material world. The only way we have found is through The Way of Love and Rest. Any happiness in a human body can only be superficial and transient. The happiness in the Light is ten thousand times greater than the most powerful orgasm you ever had. Sexual union is a taste of the divine and making love is the energetic nourishment required to return our consciousness home. My body was not one hundred percent filled with loving energy so after four minutes my consciousness dropped back into the body of Edward.
This temporary experience made my life meaningless. All my career goals for being a university professor were suddenly null and void. This world is a dream and now I desired to awaken permanently. I took a vow before my Elder in the TwoEye Brotherhood to complete a seven-year RestLove retreat. By completely filling the body with loving energy over a long period of time, I anticipate with confidence that the individual soul will melt back into the Light permanently, not returning into another human body. The dream of birth and rebirth will be over.
Conclusion:
Birth of the TwoEye Brotherhood
This six-week retreat has become the template for all the TwoEye Brotherhood retreats that have been completed since by committed pairs. Sadly Harry and I needed to part ways as I felt he was destroying himself in London. He was determined to remain in that city and continue his way of life unaltered. Six months after I left him I received a phone call that he had passed away. I was unable to save him. I named our retreat The Way of Love and Rest to honour his memory. It is my hope to remember Harry’s life by supporting thousands of gay men couples to complete their own retreats of one month, three months or longer. I have founded the Daily Gay Community Meal at the Edward Carpenter Centre in Auckland, New Zealand. We offer a shared meal for men who love men every day of the year. Part of the motivation is to learn from the voices of gay brothers who
died from AIDS.
RestLove retreat has considerable potential for healing addictions, mental illness and physical disease by letting the body rest completely and flooding the internal organs of the torso with loving energy. If you feel the Call then we invite you to step forward and claim your place in the TwoEye Brotherhood. We are restoring the Council of old, continuing over a thousand generations of TwoEye men who have held the knowledge of such paired retreats. We wish to help restore harmony for all animals, trees and life on Mother Earth. It is the destiny of the TwoEye Brotherhood to help lead the way to spiritual enlightenment for all people.
* To know the exact location of this retreat, talk to the organisers of the Daily Gay Community Meal.
Daimon’s Story –
As a toddler I was connected to a world of light and love through the centre of my heart. At about the age of five this sense of connection diminished as my heart started closing. It felt unbearable to be cut off from the source of my being. Life at home was for me an emotional war zone, and school was a nightmare. One of my safe places was the trampoline at the end of the garden. At age six I bounced on the trampoline, clenched my small fist and vowed to myself that I would find a way to experience that light again in my body. This became my quest.
In 1980 I was born in London, England. When I was three my parents emigrated to New Zealand with me and my baby sister. I grew up near the beach in Sumner, just outside of Christchurch in the South Island of New Zealand. I was a gentle child who loved to sit alone next to the frog pond far from all the people. I did not harm or keep the frogs I caught; instead I put them into a bucket half-filled with water, showed them to my family then released them back to where they came from. I felt connected to some pervading energy when I was alone in nature. Especially I was entranced by the purity of colour in rainbows. I repeatedly drew and painted rainbows, also asking my mother to give me rainbow-coloured clothes. I obsessed about rainbows to the point that my mother bought a crystal prism that I could hang from my bedroom window to catch the light and splay little rainbows across the cream-coloured wallpaper patterned with tiny cherries. Existing at the intersection of water and light in the air, rainbows could be understood as a gateway to the Light.
I naturally walked with one foot in the world of the boys and one foot in the world of the girls. I loved the camradarie, rough-and-tumble and teasing that came with being part of a gang of boys. I liked the way the boys smelled, as well as getting muddy and helping men to build things or harvest food from the land. The male polarity of my spirit was healthy and strong. Yet I did not like to kill anything, and often would run back to the women when the boys would fight each other or become aggressive. The boys seemed to sense my gentleness and sooner or later my own gang would shun and turf out the fag. This happened several times.
As I say I had one foot firmly planted in the world of women. The kitchen was my domain, the place where I fried pancakes for the family on a Sunday. Over time I learned to create soups, pies, scones, cakes and other recipes from my mother and grandmothers. Blackberry-and-apple crumble was a family tradition, first picking blackberries together during autumn holidays with the family in England. I gossiped and laughed, played music and danced with the girls. I loved singing, acting, comedy and skits, and with my friends would put on shows for the adults.
I felt I needed to hide this female polarity of my spirit. I knew I was not a girl but a few times at the age of eight I tried on my sister’s clothes and mother’s make-up. This felt like a part of who I was. My mother saw me and started to cry, so as a child I never did this again. I pretended to be like the other boys, lowering my voice and imitating their interests. I would secretly listen to the music of Cher and Madonna who somehow were singing about the survival of the female spirit in a way I could understand. There seemed to be no recognition in my world for a boy who held both male and female polarities of Spirit inside himself.
I was not like the other boys and learned to put on an act to survive. I knew that whatever this difference was inside me, it was unacceptable to Mummy and Daddy. To compensate I had a compulsion to be better than everyone else. I won several prizes at school but woke up nearly every morning not wanting to be alive. Had my true nature been discovered I would have been taunted, beaten up or even killed. This is how I survived at that time. I held inside my heart the dormant seed of my true nature. I had no words to articulate who I was. I thought I was the only one in the world: the only little boy who wanted to kiss another boy in his class, not a girl. I knew it would be dangerous to share this knowledge with anybody, so I stayed in hiding.
I yearned to be close with my family. As I grew older I lived in India on-and-off over a period of seven years. The Indian boys in my host family slept next to their parents on the floor each night. The mother held her boys close to her chest and stomach for several hours each day. I wanted to be like that, close to the energy radiating from the bodies of my mother and father. Those boys had such security in their eyes from sharing energy daily with their parents.
I come from a distant and hardy English family. My father’s ancestors come from Cornwall at the south-west tip of Albion, the island now called Britain. My father was sent to boarding school from the age of nine, where he was treated severely. He learned to be unnaturally self-reliant, and to work. He was taught that his purpose in life was to do whatever it took to be a provider for his wife and children. While I was growing up he seemed to not be able to stop working. I’m serious. He hardly ever stopped working except to collapse on the couch and watch TV.
My mother’s family also come from the south of England. Mum’s mother took her own life when my Mum was a little girl. Mum and her sister went into an orphanage for a while, then were raised by a stepmother who did not love them the way she loved her own children. My grandfather was an officer in the British Navy for twenty years. He was away at sea for months at a time and when he came home it was not always a happy place. There could be violence. Mum left home at fifteen.
My parents were both spiritual seekers. Dad visited more than thirty countries when he was a young man, including two years in India where he trained to be a yoga teacher. Mum was a devotee of Yogananda and the Self-Realisation Fellowship (SRF). This was a lineage of Indian male gurus who came to America in the 1920s. They taught a system of meditation and yoga that allegedly would allow a person to achieve spiritual enlightenment or Self-Realisation. A group of SRF devotees in Christchurch would meet each month at a member’s house in order to meditate together, sing bhajans (devotional songs) and share a pot-luck lunch. Once or twice a year my mother would take a turn hosting them at our house.
Dad remarried a German woman when I was twelve. I learned German at school in order to know her better, and later on German was one of my two majors at university. She is a devout Tibetan Buddhist. I learned much about the history and practice of Buddhism from her, including reading the story of the Buddha hundreds of times. I yearned to travel to India some day to be with all the men meditating in caves of the Himalayan mountains. I would sit like them not moving until full Enlightenment had been attained.
The background of my blood family was Christian. Great-uncle Nigel and great-uncle Leslie were both gay. They both suffered and died as a result of the views that the family held when it came to people with their nature. They wanted to be loved, cared for and celebrated for the gifts they could bring. Instead they were covertly vilified.
I was a bookworm, reading about the old pagan clans of England and indigenous cultures around the world. I gradually understood that males like me holding male and female polarities intact within their spirit, had been spiritual gatekeepers in clans and tribes across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas. I later travelled for ten years, including five months spent in America. The Native American Two-Spirit elders helped me to remember who I was and supported me to research my pagan roots in Europe. I realised that in my ancient ancestry men like me had often been the druids, witches, wizards, sages and seers. I pondered why this knowledge of our nature had been forgotten or erased. Perhaps there was no longer space for it as the world population increased.
As a teenager I wanted to meet a prince but that is not what happened. At the age of seventeen in 1998 I entered the gay bar of Christchurch and instead became addicted to alcohol, marijuana and prescription medications. I slept around. The soundtrack was a series of thumping hits from the pop radio of the day. I practically lived at the gay sauna for five years. In quiet moments I would wonder how it had come to this, how my dreams had slipped through my fingers. I yearned for meaningful community with my gay brothers. At the centre of my heart I felt worthless and disgusting because I was attracted to males. Each morning I woke up and did not want to be alive.
When I was twenty-one I tried an hallucinogen like magic mushrooms. It was at the nightclub Heaven in London with a bunch of other gay men. Nothing remarkable happened to them but I had a profound spiritual experience. The mind was switched off, with no thoughts possible. Instead I experienced a divine loving consciousness that animates every atom in the Universe. I experienced that this is our true nature, only the illusory mind separates us from this knowledge. A few days later I made a vow that I would find a way to let go of all alcohol, marijuana, pills and other mind-altering chemicals, and devote my life to discovering how we might experience this divine reality without any substance.
The alcohol addiction worsened until I was twenty-four. There were many things in my life by then that I was ashamed of: prostitution, homelessness, a night in jail, crashing Mum’s car while drunk, stealing money to get alcohol and drugs, and wetting the bed. I did not know who I was and apparently there was no gay man in Christchurch who could show me. Inside I felt blackness that deepened year by year and there were suicide attempts. One night when everyone else was sleeping I heard a deep voice coming from somewhere beyond myself saying, “You are loved beyond all comprehension.” My discomfort was considerable and the thread linking me to that voice was spider-web thin yet there was something that kept me holding on to life.
At twenty-four I surrendered. This was the beginning of my journey into becoming a co-founder of TwoEye Brotherhood. I could not live without alcohol so I reached out for help and found this sober spiritual family who helped me put myself together in a different way. I realised that some of the things I had experienced in our home life had harmed me even though my parents had done the absolute best they could. I learned to rely on sober human beings for the first time in my life. It has been a long process learning how to live sober. It took two years for the acute withdrawal symptoms to dissipate, and another five years after that for the lingering withdrawals to evaporate. I got honest about all the things I had done to harm myself and others. I made amends to those I had harmed through offering money or service as appropriate. I have done my best to help hundreds of other gay men who want to let go of alcohol and drugs.
Being sober has allowed me to return to what I call my TwoEye roots. I lived with pagan and indigenous cultures in New Zealand, Australia, India, Nepal, South Africa, Portugal, France, Germany, UK, USA and Canada. On each continent I discovered that males like me had often been the spiritual gatekeepers for their people, honoured for the power they derived from holding both male and female polarities of their spirit intact in one body. I was saved by reclaiming the power and beauty of my true nature, and I started to think that if it had transformed my sense of self then it might work for some of my gay brothers also.
In 2014 I travelled to India and completed a ten-month meditation retreat at the foot of the holy Arunachala mountain. The innermost chamber of the energetic heart opened and the consciousness did begin to return home through that portal. My body filled with light as it shed the responsibilities and conditioning accumulated over my lifetime. Yet the body could not let go entirely and became energetically depleted. I realised that the body might need loving energy with a partner in order to let go more easily.
The first RestLove retreat took place over six weeks from June to July 2016. I created conditions of limitless rest and limitless loving energy with Bernhard my lover at the time. In a simple set-up close to nature and with no contact to any other people, the body received so much energetic nourishment that the heart naturally opened. What had taken ten months to accomplish alone now occurred easily within the first four weeks. I temporarily awakened to the power and beauty of my true nature.
I made a vow before my Elder in the TwoEye Brotherhood to complete a three-year couple retreat during my lifetime. This is the highest aspiration for an initiate into the Brotherhood. After this experience I knew that I would spend the rest of my life doing longer LoveRest retreat and sharing this method with any gay men that wished to try it. I knew that together we could claim our place as the continuation of the spiritual gatekeepers of old, to meet the needs of our people and planet at this time.