I’m just back from my second Buddhafield festival. Buddhafield is an orgy of the alternative and this year I taught embodied peacebuilding, aikido and a workshop on business as a spiritual practice. The latter was advertised as “What hippies can learn from business” – on the surface like leading a workshop on cross dressing at a Klu Klux Clan rally; however it was well attended and well received. As one participant put it, “This workshop has balanced my Buddhafield experience” – referring to the fact that there was little else on offer there in regards to money and the business aspects of getting things done.
For me the festival was about reintegrating my relaxed, pluralistic, being in the moment inner-hippie. In order to establish my business over the last two years I have focused on discipline, results, organisation and focus. This was what I was offering in my workshops and it was well received. I have however repressed my inner hippie in the process so it was good to reconnect with this part of myself. I spent a lot of time, dancing, mooching around having coffees and saunas – not trying to get things done for a change, sans watch and phone. I guess this is how we grow – through differentiation and reintegration. In integral terms, as we move from one level of development to another.
Part of my process in doing this was struggling with loneliness and belonging much of the festival – though in Jayaraja’s Skillful Flirting workshop this was hardly a hardship J I also enjoyed associate Adrian Harris’s work on Ecopaganism, the anarchic Lost Horizons Cafe (gold painted nipples, mock funerals, tantric sisters licking departed friends – pictured) and a little contact improvisation.
Where you’re at might be different of course. Do you need?
– to distance yourself from achievist and materialist values to develop a more sensitive hippies self?
– to reintegrate achievist values to get something done in the world?
– something I have no idea about that’s way beyond me?
It’s all a (beautiful, terrible) game so hi-ho 🙂
Mark