Honor, Service, and Devotion
Love in a Power Dynamic

Can love exist healthily in a dominant/submissive power dynamic, for an hour or for a lifetime? This intensive explores the spiritual, emotional and practical sides of consensual power exchange in relationships, whether part-time as play or full-time as a way of being in the world. Loving in a consenting, mindful power dynamic can be explosive, showcasing people’s faults and issues; it also can be cathartic, opening them up to levels of trust that they never would have touched otherwise. It can be a spiritual discipline of relationship, using tools of brutal honesty and radical trust, the devotional service of the Bhakti path and the purifying honor of spiritual noblesse oblige. It can create terrifying intimacy and bonding loyalty. It can be cleanly service-oriented or deeply romantic, or both.

It’s also a path with few positive role models, and a lot of negative false ones. In this intensive, we’ll talk about the pitfalls and problems along the way, and how to do this path rightly and ethically. We’ll talk about Love, and keeping it alive and flourishing in such a boundaried land. We’ll delve into the fire of power-exchange ritual and the darkness of using magic to consensually enhance the training of a submissive. We’ll celebrate the many sacred archetypes of dominance and submission and see how they dance together ... Predator and Prey, Master and Servant, Owner and Slave, Magician and Enchanted Object, Priest and Worshipper, Seeker and Psychopomp, Lord and Vassal, Teacher and Padawan, Dark Goddess and John Barleycorn, and many others. We’ll talk about the needs that these roles fulfill in D/s relationships, the Gods that have danced them before us, and how tapping into those divine energies can help us to understand and enact ethical power exchange in a more mindful way. And, of course, there’s the issue of how all these sacred D/s roles have sex, and what does that look like? Bring your stories! And your collars, and chains, and leashes ... both ends.

Switches (and their perspectives) are welcome, but we ask that for the purposes of the intensive you choose one side and stick to it just for the length of the intensive. There will be occasional separate exercises for dominants and submissives, and we haven’t met anyone yet who could bilocate. There’s no need to hide the fact of being a switch, however.

This workshop is primarily for people who are already in relationships and would like to learn more about power exchange or deepen the power exchange they already have, including beginning couples who are just poking a toe into all this and lovers who simply play with D/s as part of their sex life. It is open to all combinations of D/s relationship - couples, triples, polyamorous metamolecules. Not all members of the relationship need to attend, although we expect that it will be more fulfilling if you do. While we will not turn away unpartnered people, we will not be discussing the question of “Where do I get me one?” or addressing the needs of people who might like to be in a D/s relationship someday, if they could only find the right person.

Presenters:
Raven Kaldera is a shaman, diviner, homesteader, transgender activist, prolific pagan author, and founder of the First Kingdom Church of Asphodel. His works include “Dark Moon Rising: Pagan BDSM and the Ordeal Path”; “Hermaphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook”, “MythAstrology”, and "The Ethical Psychic Vampire", "Pagan Polyamory", and the Northern-Tradition Shamanism Series, to name just a few. He lives and works on an organic pagan farm in Hubbardston, Mass., and can be found online at http://www.cauldronfarm.com. 'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.

Joshua Tenpenny is Raven’s Boy, his devoted slave and partner, massage therapist, holistic bodyworker, and sacred whore.