By Mel Moseley
It’s the last day of 2020. On December 31, 2019, one year ago, Empowered Pleasure hosted our inaugural event and we celebrated the new decade with excitement and hope. We approached the coming year with enthusiasm, hoping to develop and launch multi-day retreats, parties, and workshops facilitating the deepening of conscious connection in all forms. Instead, the Tree House ground floor, which for 5 years had regularly seen well-oiled bodies, 10+ massage tables, a cage, and blissed out faces instead became our new Zoom studio and my home office.
Our triad, as many of you know, prizes each other’s personal sovereignty over our bodies as the primary aspect of our love. We love one another deeply, and love to see one another love deeply even when relationships may not include us. COVID-19 has resulted in difficult decisions for poly and ENM folx, and many if not most of us have settled into a form of temporary monogamy or polyfidelity. Those in varying stages of their ENM journeys have developed new agreements, whether consciously or unconsciously.
I heard one community member describe their dates with lovers as “Victorian” in nature, including weekly socially distanced walks in place of hot and sexy encounters. Our 7-person “quaranteam” has developed and massaged an ongoing set of agreements to allow for intermittent sexy connection with others, including 12 days of quarantine prior to such dates among other things. Some who entered the COVID-19 saga as solo-poly have been completely isolated and touch deprived. Loving connections have been strained by diverse levels of risk tolerance. Some relationships have ended. Other new ones have begun.
As we see the sun rise with upcoming vaccinations and new at-home COVID-19 tests available without a prescription, freedom to connect in the upcoming months (optimistically, late summer) will begin. For every person involved in ENM, whether solo or in current relationships, freedom of movement will result in a re-opening. Join us in the coming months as we discuss the excitement and potential pitfalls that may come as the sun rises and the shackles loosen.
Let us all take this time in these dark hours to deepen our relationships with self and others, revisit our relationship desires and boundaries, and clarify our personal ethics in Ethical Non-Monogamy. Empowered Pleasure will offer a number of workshops during this first quarter of 2021 to help us all prepare for the new day.
Explore your personal needs, wants, desires, and boundaries and gain intimacy with yourself at Mel’s Write Your Own User Manual starting January 10.
Explore the layers of relationship disclosure agreements with Evita “Lavitaloca” Sawyers on January 15.
Learn effective ways to build friendship and lovingly process conflict using the 7 Principles of Making Relationships Work, a five-session workshop offered weekly staring January 21.
Learn to tell your sexy stories in Mel’s Sexy Storytelling (date TBD).
Learn about the potential beauty and magic of Psychedelics & Tantric Sex on February 6 and how to integrate these powerful paths to transcendence safely and consensually and how to create the ideal set and setting.
Increase your pleasure by Integrating Toys into Your Sex Life on February 27, which will also include time for sexy practice for E3/E4 members!
Learn about how to create, or re-create ethical agreements that simultaneously affirm personal sovereignty and personal boundaries in “Intentional Agreements in Ethical Non Monogamy”, a new workshop in our ENM 101 series (date TBD).
And because we want you to hear voices other than our own, watch for additional guest workshops on Jealousy from the Inside and Jealousy from the Outside (presenter TBA) and a series on Sex to Save the World presented by Mojo Mustafa.
**We are looking for additional presenters so that you all can enjoy seeing faces and hearing opinions other than our own! We are prioritizing BIPOC voices, and all BIPOC presenters will receive 100% of the proceeds from their events. Send us a private message with suggestions, please.