Month: June 2017

Anyone Want To Cuddle?

jimmysintension 10 Comments

When I first heard the title, “Cuddle Party,” my mind went to the place that your mind is probably going to now; a very weird, new age-y, ultra L.A. fluff, moderately obscene group of people engaging in a type of pre-orgy, foreplay ritual. Ok, maybe your mind is not as perverted as my own, yet I would wager whatever it is you might think these parties might be, you are not even close to what they indeed really are.

And, yes, they really do exist. I “touched” on them in a blog I wrote several years ago. However, when I first heard about such gatherings, I absolutely abhorred the thought of it, let alone imagined going to one.

Why? Frankly, I was never a big “toucher” in my life. I did have a father who was extremely physically affectionate (for which I am very thankful) yet a mother who was exceedingly non-tactile. As a result, I would never consider myself weird and dysfunctional when it came to touch, yet I was very uncomfortable with it -sans those closest to me.

For example, for my 25th birthday my father gave me a gift certificate for a massage –I said thank you and then promptly gave it away as I was not about to have a stranger touch me.

I came to learn that such parties are not about cuddling per se, rather they are groups where individuals can practice asking for what they want, setting boundaries for those things they do not want, while learning the joy of acceptance and the impersonal nature of rejection. Touch is simply the currency used to practice and learn such skills. Hell, they could use dollar bills, food or just about anything else to learn these same concepts. In addition, and perhaps ironically, we all have a surplus of touch at our disposal in society, yet, for a variety of reasons, many still are starving for it as it is a practice we do not engage in nearly enough.

Not me. I’m good. Or am I?

Fast forward to circa 2011. As I shuttered at the thought of such parties, I have this weird chip deep inside of me that is programmed to try things that are WAY outside my comfort zone.

So I made the trek down to a Santa Monica 3rd Street Promenade yoga studio. I sat in a circle with strangers and a cuddle guru, who spent the better part of an hour instructing us on the boundaries, rules, purpose and objectives of our soon to be cuddle experience.

Long story short: I hated it…beyond hate, it truly hurt. I was neither the recipient nor provider of touch that entire long evening.

It was the long trip back over the 405 that I knew I needed to go back and revisit the touch demons inside of me; tactile apparitions that needed either some desperate attention or a flat out exorcism.

I went to few more, another in Santa Monica, a couple in the Bay Area and one in Santa Cruz. It was after this last Santa Cruz experience, circa 2012, was when I concluded my Cuddle Party experiment was over and my demons were at long last retreated. Me and my cuddles were set to retire.

Make no mistake, I still did not like Cuddle Parties, yet I least mustered the competency to not vomit at the thought of going to one.

Fast forward to 2017.

I have the wonderful opportunity to have good chunks of time off in both the winter and summer, while giving me ample time to experience life outside of my teaching. It was during this season when I once again stumbled into the cuddle world.

For a variety of reasons, I found myself at an outdoor Cuddle “Sanctuary” this past Sunday afternoon on the beach in Santa Monica. I really do not know the history, though somewhere in this 5-year period, “parties” morphed into “sanctuaries” and I must say that I am down with the reverent feel of the latter moniker. After all, in spite of the fact I am not terribly comfortable with it, at some level I do believe touch is sacred as we depend on it for survival. I did commit to going on Friday morning, then promptly spent the next 40 hours or so trying to think of excuses why I should back out.

I couldn’t. It was that damn uncomfortable chip gnawing away at my soul again.

The sanctuary was really no different than the party. We spent the first hour doing exercises and going over the ground rules. One of the things I love about the experience is that no touch is required at all. People attend these events to practice setting boundaries in their lives, learning how to say no. I have really never had a problem setting boundaries in life, yet I have had issues asking for what I want and being cool with the consequent response.

I was in the right place.

So with my slight nervous shake and rapid heartbeat, I engaged once again, now a few years older and, ideally, a wee bit wiser.

I hugged numerous people. Held hands with someone as we talked about our families, used one’s thigh as a pillow, even had a thumb war or two with some folk. Every act of touch needs to be mutually agreed upon and any touch whatsoever requires permission. It is expressly non-sexual, while even the issue of, “What if something suddenly pops up?” is addressed and the best ways to appropriately deal with any “rising” concerns.

I certainly cannot speak for everyone, yet for me, these events are very strange and highly unusual –kinda like me.

I left the event relatively unscathed and realized that I am certainly cementing myself as the “older guy” at many gatherings in my life. I suppose that being the older gent does have its perks…such as really not giving a shit about saving face and caring what others might think. TOFTS (Too Old For This Shit).

However, what did not strike me that day hit me like a sledge hammer later that same evening.

We had a small gathering of people over to watch my son’s film, “Going To Nepal With A Camera On My Forehead.” In this moving documentary about people, cultures and countries coming together in love, in times of both peace and crisis, the film struck me in a way it has never struck me in the half a dozen or so times I have viewed it. My son just happened to be in Nepal and filming when the April 2015, 7.9 earthquake hit the country, and is all documented in this film.

Perhaps it was the intimacy of touch and human connection I experienced that day on the beach that put me in a connected place of insight and vulnerability that evening. I literally reached out and touched others as we expressed our lives, frailties and general bullshit we humans tend to carry with us on a daily basis.

As I watched humanity connect with each other on the screen that evening- people helping people, the healthy helping the sick, the “haves” pouring out their resources on the “have nots,” the resonance of my own day came into focus.

I was connected.

And I felt it.

I cried over the beauty of humanity reaching out and touching each other in love during a time of great need.

And it felt really good to understand the power of both literal and figurative touch.

I knew there was a reason that gnawing chip inside of me would not let me sit this one out.

We all have a surplus of touch currency and what a shame to let it go to waste.

And, on this day, I felt to be a richer man for it.

 

Reflections On The Human-Animal Relationship, Part I

jimmysintension 8 Comments

Full disclosure: I began writing this blog well over a year ago and have sat on it all this time. Why? A couple of reasons: First, it is a very sensitive and controversial issue for many, in particular for some that I love and cherish dearly, while having no desire to offend these loved one as I deeply respect their values. Secondly, my thoughts on this issue have been in such a constant state of flux and change over the past year that I wanted to have some level of cognitive consonance on the issue before I posit any opinion -even if it is only a tentative position in my evolving thought process.

I also decided that this blog post needed desperately to be divided into two separate entries as I have so many thoughts on this issue.

In summary, I have, in recent years, reopened my personal inquiry into the nature of the human-animal relationship. I was brought up with the belief that animals were, well, just lowly animals, and humans were a superior breed of species. We always had pets as I was growing up, treated them well, yet, to be sure, our dogs or cats never deserved the types of amenities reserved for humans -and I was fairly “dog”matic on these ideas (sorry).

Yet how we were brought up, while most certainly having an effect on our initial orientation towards any given matter, should have absolutely no bearing on making rational, autonomous decisions as an adult. Overcoming “the way I was raised” argument may be difficult yet certainly attainable.

Consider that many people may have been brought up terribly wrong, perhaps myself included. Blindly following customs simply because they were your customs can be “cat”astrophic (ugh, I can’t help myself). I would now like to offer my thoughts as a free thinking adult.

So allow me to first address the idea of human and animal equality; a sense of equality that a growing amount of people are starting to adopt. Of course this is not a new idea. Many years ago Leonardo Da Vinci is quoted to have said, “The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.”

If that is not argument for human and animal equality I can think of no other.

To begin, please allow me to tell you what I am NOT saying: If one makes the claim that humans are in some ways superior to other species, it does NOT infer a reckless abandonment of a code of morality toward all other species. In fact, as I will argue in part II of this series, it implies an even greater sense of responsibility and benevolence towards outgroup species. I encourage you to read to the end of this blog to gain a clear sense of my position.

With this understanding, let’s begin.

Self-Preservation, The Animal Kingdom and Survival of The Fittest

At some very rudimentary level, I believe in the human as the more advanced species as evidenced by our reaching the top of the food chain. I believe in this human “superiority” for reasons to be explained in this blog: First, the instinctual act of species self-preservation; second, the realities of the animal kingdom; and, finally, the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest and our accompanying moral conscience.

First, the bottom line is if I or a loved one were starving to death, I would have no qualms about killing an animal in order to survive, as I am quite certain said animal would eat my ass if it were dying as well. I am also quite certain most of us would pull a person out of a burning building over the building rats or cockroaches. There is something intuitive about preserving one’s own species -seemingly much more pronounced in the human species- at the expense of others. This is a necessary component in the propagation of a species. If a species is naturally inclined to protect its own, this would infer inequality as each species judges it as more valuable than the others.

I am reluctant to use the word “superior” to describe the human orientation towards animals as this is far too general a term and it is not meant in the universal sense. Many animals have superior skill sets to humans –many run faster, have superior audio/visual skills, can fly all on their own, perhaps even possess far more advanced interspecies communication systems; yet, when it comes to possessing the overall skill set to sit atop the food chain and essentially control the animal kingdom, humans are clearly the unanimous winner through following this self-preservation instinct.

Second, in contemporary society, it would seem many of us have been sequestered and sheltered from the harsh realities of the animal kingdom. Death for the purpose of nourishment is as basic to the narrative of both animal/human existence as breathing –and one species eating another certainly infers a harsh lack of equality as the eaten creature is inferior to the eating creature -in terms of its survival capabilities. The animal kingdom, of which we are very much a part of, is absolutely no theater of morality when it comes to issues of killing and death. Perhaps perceptions that have contributed to the notion of equality have been greatly influenced by the Disney-induced anthropomorphic deification of animals -but I digress.

Take for example in a grassland ecosystem, a grasshopper might eat grass, a producer. The grasshopper might get eaten by a rat, which in turn is consumed by a snake. Finally, a hawk—an apex predator—swoops down and snatches up the snake. We then can either kill the hawk and eat it, or, as the lead proprietors of the animal kingdom, go to great lengths and protect it, which we failed to do for the grasshopper, rat and poor snake -thus pointing to the routinely accepted act of imposing hierarchies of importance toward certain animal species…which goes largely unnoticed and is an accepted practice for many (hence the irony of dog on your dinner plate); yet perhaps this horrid inconsistency is a different blog for a different day. I do believe it does point to a hierarchy in nature that cannot be dismissed: Nature operates most efficiently with a chain of command as the idea of equality in the animal kingdom simply does not exist.

Thirdly, whether we like to acknowledge it or not, it is still very much a dog eat dog world at its core. The animal kingdom already imposes this aforementioned hierarchy of superiority -we are simply following suit. Many animal species even eat their own young pointing to the common practice of death as nourishment in the evolutionary sweepstakes.

Now I have heard it argued that just because a species can or cannot do something, this in no way implies superiority nor gives a species the right to impose its will on another species.  Then why can the rat, snake and hawk impose its will -yet the human cannot? What gives us the right to think we are above these other species and that we have to abide by an altogether different moral code? Ironically, such a position proves the moral superiority of the human being as we quite “humancentrically” project our values onto other species, assuming because they are superior values.

If we claim humans do possess a moral conscience most other species do not possess, there most certainly is no equality. If you are claiming we do not, then it is clearly natural and fine to eat other species.

I contend that in the evolutionary stakes, human beings are the clear winner and have managed to rest atop the food chain rung. In the Darwinian sense, humankind is “superior” (again, I use the term loosely) because it managed to prove being the fittest in the game of survival. I believe if any other species managed to pull this off -be it cows, gorillas, fish, whales, alligators or lions, they would have gladly assumed the top position and I might be an appetizer on some animals prepared dish. Yet, as an Irish-Hungarian, and with any luck, I might be found on some weird European protected species list.

That said, our evolution in contemporary western society has negated the need to enslave animals and use them as our only form of sustenance. One can survive and thrive on a plant-based diet in 2017. Therefore to use the argument that humankind needs to eat animals in order to survive is just not true. Might that change? Of course it could…yet, for now, it is not necessary. Yet, keep in mind the aforementioned rat, snake and hawk, like most animals, have no such conscience. Such consciousness and a distinct moral compass, which at least questions and examines ethics even if they are not universally agreed upon, are other critical factors in separating humans from other species.

Next up: My thoughts on “Speciesism,” factory farming, and my slow transition toward vegan principles.

And I hope my loved ones still love me 🙂