Global Revolution & the Healing of Love | Free Udemy Course

Thank you for registering for this course. We are happy to have you with us in our global learning community!  Tamera is a peace community and education center based in Portugal, with over 40 years of experience in community building. Healing love and sexuality has been one of the main research areas of the community. This short course consists of 5 study units, which are each a taster for our longer course: "Global Revolution & the Healing of Love" offered by Tamera. You can find details about this longer course directly on the Tamera website. The study units in this short course will be:

• Welcome

• Community Building: A Necessary Basis for Healing Love

• Collective Trauma

• Free Sexuality and Partnership: Complementary Not Contradictory

• Reuniting Religion and Eros

  
  

We will begin with a welcoming video with Dara Silverman, who is one of the carriers of Tamera’s Love School and your guide throughout this learning journey. Here Dara presents our motivation for offering this course, giving an insight into some of the experience and research that lies behind what we will share with you.

Here are some of the main points that Dara makes:

• A humane future depends on a revolution in love – but how can this happen?

• Love is the greatest dream in the heart of humanity – it holds the biggest promise for fulfilment, unification and beauty.

• It also has become the source of immense suffering all over the world. The collective despair in love fuels the destructive cycles of consumption, addiction, violence and war.

• We often believe that failure in love is personal failure but it is actually a systemic error rooted in patriarchy, imperialism and capitalism.

• Tamera has dedicated over 40 years of research to this issue as the founders of the project realized that the healing of love requires entirely new forms of human coexistence.

• Trust is a key element in the new social paradigm which is needed.

• We invite you to an insightful period of study about ending war – both in the world and in love.

This video shows Martin Winiecki interviewing Sabine Lichtenfels and Benjamin von Mendelssohn about the importance of community for the healing of love.

You can follow Martin’s questions and the main lines of Sabine’s and Benjamin’s answers here:

Why do you consider love and sexuality to be political issues – what is their political relevance? How do they move the world?

• A lot of sickness and cruelty arises when Eros is suppressed.

• Eros is not really embedded in our societal structures in a way that promotes trust.

• It is a political act to liberate and heal ourselves by changing our internal structures of fear, shame and guilt relating to love and sexuality.

• Politics rarely addresses the primal forces that steer our lives. If we don’t talk about them they will "run the show from behind the scenes," leading to a system of suppression, avoidance and discrimination.

What is the difference between the practice of polyamory without a social support network and the approach of Tamera’s Love School? What is the importance of the social context?

• What we usually take to be personal flaws are actually the flaws of a patriarchal system; they are cultural flaws.

• We cannot resolve our collective shadows individually.

• The Love School researches the creation of cultural structures to heal love on a collective level.

• Ways of living that serve free sexual expression need social vessels that can appropriately hold the high energy that arises.

• We need spaces in which we can learn to speak and live truthfully.

What is community for you?

• Community wisdom is a treasure that humanity has lost.

• All of life is organized in community, including my body. It’s the principle of cooperation instead of competition.

• Community can be built when we start understanding the universal laws of life.

• One of our primal needs is to belong to a tribe or community on the basis of truth and transparency.

• Without this embedment we look to one love partner for everything that we need.

• Community wisdom can be learned and could help a lot with the arising of peace on Earth.

Assignment: "All life is organized in community." If you can, go out for a walk and look for examples of where this principle is at work in nature.

In this video, Martin describes Tamera’s attempt to create a model of an alternative, sustainable way of living. He refers to the Arab Spring and Occupy movements as examples of strong enthusiasm which need a foundational concept in order to be resilient. Other movements like Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter are examples of brilliant sparks which demand continuation and a positive perspective beyond the energy of resistance against the dominant culture.

Follow Martin's thoughts:

• Tamera was founded for social research into community and the healing of love. Its purpose was to understand what is at the heart of a culture of peace.

• In order to find a way out of the "dead-end" of today's capitalist society, we need an alternative which is more comprehensive, more profound, more beautiful and more compatible with the truth and longings of humankind.

• A humane revolution requires a shift in the most intimate issues of Eros and love and a whole new relation to nature and technology. A whole new model is needed.

• Setting the foundations for a post-patriarchal culture based on decentralized communities, on the ethics of truth and solidarity and on fulfillment in love is not the work of a single community. This is a project of global transformation.

• If social movements are to avoid falling apart they need a methodology based on a positive perspective and energy to not only speak about a post-capitalist world but to build it.

• A new story is coming which originates in these communities and in the reconnection with nature; this is the story we have to tell.

The systems of patriarchy, capitalism and fascism – or “power-over paradigms” – endure by perpetuating fear within individuals and the collective. Another way of understanding this fear is to see it as a historical collective trauma. As Sabine Lichtenfels says, “where there is consciousness there can be no war,” and so we want to bring more consciousness into this trauma.

Below, you will find an excerpt from the chapter: “The Collective Trauma,” from the book: “Terra Nova: Global Revolution and the Healing of Love,” by Dieter Duhm.

“Fear is the result of the last millennia. Walter Schubart, in his book ‘Religion and Eros,’ wrote that there is an original fear at the base of all psychological suffering – the fear of separation. It is the fear of separation that prompts us toward the most insane acts. Separation from our home, family, love partner, group – is there not something that is the same in all these fears, a primal fear of separation? It is difficult to convey the deepest, most primal layers of the soul in words.

Time and again, generation after generation, the human being has been separated from that which their original nature most loves, what they love like a child, simply because they are human, breathing, sensual, living beings. We have fallen away from oneness and are not finding our way back. (...) Healing would thus mean reconnecting humanity with its actual home.

Fear is not a private problem; it is the psychological consequence of a civilization gone awry. It arose in the collective cruelties of humanity. The task of global peace work entails the dissolution of collective trauma, which accumulated in the collective subconscious of humanity throughout thousands of years of war and expulsion, treachery and betrayal.”

The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle refers to collective trauma as the “pain-body.” He writes:

“This energy field of old but still very much alive emotion that lives in almost every human being is the pain-body. The pain-body, however, is not just individual in nature. It also partakes of the pain suffered by countless humans throughout the history of humanity, which is a history of continuous tribal warfare, of enslavement, pillage, rape, torture, and other forms of violence. This pain still lives in the collective psyche of humanity and is being added to on a daily basis, as you can verify when you watch the news tonight or look at the drama in people's relationships.”

In this video, Martin describes how collective trauma might be healed through collective endeavors in building trust.

Here are the main points Martin makes:

• There is collective trauma in love, a layer in people's souls, where as soon as you touch love, you touch a panic point. If you try to solve this in contact with your lover, you often run crazy because you trigger each other.

• Healing love means finding ways to dissolve this trauma. We have the capacity to be reflexive – for insight into ourselves. This has to be applied also to the place inside human souls in which something happened that was just too terrible to bear.

• For this we need a lot of trust and places where this trust can actually arise, where people can show themselves in all their joys, mistakes and conflicts. The more trust arises between people, the more this trauma can soften up until we actually can understand that underneath this trauma, there is something beautiful.

• Throughout history there were always attempts to create a more beautiful world, a utopia, and they all failed. Humane renewal cannot succeed if this traumatic layer is not resolved.

• Wars, oppression and everything we see in terms of this crisis of humanity in the world is part of a global information field that humanity is in and it's steered by trauma.

• The hope we in Tamera have for healing this planet consists in a transformation of this field by having stations around the world which break this chain – places where enough people give rise to a new information pattern.

• As soon as some groups manage to reconnect with the original matrix of life, to step out of the trauma, we will experience an acceleration in creating a new world.

• Something inside humankind goes in this direction and this is our strongest cooperation partner for healing the world.

Assignment: When you view your experiences through the lens of a historical collective phenomenon do you see them differently? Collect your thoughts in your personal notebook.

So far in this course we have shared a lot of ideas about what creates healing in love, sexuality and partnership. We believe that the ideas are important in giving us reason to change ways of behaving and we know that it can be helpful to hear the experiences of those who are daring to do this work. This lesson contains stories from  couples in Tamera who are walking this path of free love and partnership. They share about their challenges and insights into dealing with jealousy, projections and love itself. First we hear from the co-founders of Tamera: Sabine Lichtenfels & Dieter Duhm.

Dara & Martin speak about their partnership while navigating free love.