Kirk Prine and Donny Lobree love each other, truly. It’s easy to see.

I visited the founders of Flesh and Spirit at their luscious house in the Twin Peaks. The 17-year-old homophobe that I once was would have been terrified to knock at their door. The 37-year-old lesbian that I am today was a little intimidated. My poetic flow flirts with risqué and my monogamous relationships tend toward explicit, but in other ways, I’m still a prude.

Once in, the sweet hugs and good vibes won me over. I sat down to commune with them and Barbara Buckley, facilitator of the Flesh and Spirit Women’s Community. This is the type of story that gives away the ending at the beginning. This work, Flesh and Spirit’s work, is about curing the queers: of shame, of fear, of trauma, of separation. This work is not about curing the queers of, well, queerness.

Many years ago, Prine checked into a Christian de-programming camp that promised to cure him of his love for men. Thank goodness that didn’t work. Lobree is a midwife to the dying. Buckley is healing at the speed of light. Here's what they had to say about their work with the Flesh and Spirit Community:

LOBREE: I work in hospice, and I offer Reiki and massage to people. Once, I was assigned a gentleman who had brain cancer. I went to see him for the first time. I had an intuitive feeling that I needed to touch his head, the side with the cancer. I have to tell you, I was a little repelled by that!  I don’t want to do that! There wasn’t an open wound or a disfigurement. There wasn’t anything on the surface, so there was no reason not to touch his head, medically. It was just the idea.

I began to offer him Reiki, and I kept hearing this message: You must touch his head. So I did. I touched his head. I touched the disease, basically.

It was a very emotional moment for both of us. No one had touched his head in such a long time because that’s where the disease was. When I put my hand on the disease, I expected to feel something very harsh, very heavy. And I didn’t.

As a matter of fact, I felt something very light, something filled with light. Being healed and being cured are not the same thing. That’s one way that the Sacred Prostitute can be brought into today’s life.

PRINE: I was a therapist for 17 years so I believe in the process ... I also know that when you involve the body and you bring energy into the process, you can speed things up. We have the physical, the emotional, the spiritual and the intellectual. Many therapies will work on one or two of those things.

What I know, is when you work on all four quadrants together, when you clear “body stories,” you get free and sustain freedom and maintain freedom with more rapidity, more gentleness and more solidarity.

BUCKLEY: The women’s community started two years ago; the men’s community started in 1992. I heard that these guys were having extraordinary experiences, were moving through things and connecting sexuality and spirituality in beautiful ways - and I thought; I want that for women! Eventually the time came right and I was able to make that happen in reality.

Amazing things have happened for people in terms of being able to let go of some old stories and some old shame related to their bodies. A lot of us separate it out. Sex is over here, and spirit, or my spirit, is over there.

With the help of the facilitator - Isa Magdalena - we are bringing more of that together.

LOBREE: There are six archetypes, or steps, on this ecstatic path:

   1) Peaceful Warrior’s job is to drop the fear, to move into compassion. It’s the foundational piece. It’s the Peaceful Warrior that accompanies all the other archetypes. It’s how you move from one archetype to the next, by dropping more fears.
   2) The Lover’s job is to drop the grief, to be more available to intimacy.
   3) The Sacred Prostitute’s work is to drop the shame, to be in service.
   4) The work of the Elder is to drop the feeling of not belonging, to step into community, to take your place, no matter what your age is.
   5) The Mystic’s work is to drop the fear of foolishness, so that you can be connected with the divine.
   6) The Prophet or Prophetess drops the need to be right, in order to speak your prophetic voice.

PRINE: The archetype of the Peaceful Warrior comes out of almost every culture and tradition. Buddhists, though, have defined the Peaceful Warrior in succinct terms, and that’s what we use when we talk about this path: one who is willing to know oneself and one who is willing to face their fears. The path is coming from compassion and personal power, not either or, it’s both of those in combination.

It’s about raising everyone up to be an equal, seeing everyone as the Beloved, the divine expression, with the same rights and opportunities to life and freedom and abundance. All of our work is about embodying the polarities: the masculine, the feminine, that which comes out, that which comes in, and being able to hold those polarities, hold them ecstatically, as Rumi talks about.

Think of all the wars that are going on and how much power over there is. To really come into the awareness that we are all the Beloved ... changes everything.

There have been Sacred Prostitutes throughout time, in the temples of Greece, in the Tantricas of India, in the divine feminine of goddess religions, in the celebrations of witches. We draw from all spiritual traditions.

I had many mystical experiences within Christianity itself. I have reclaimed those parts of that connection, the parts that are life giving and freeing, and I’ve thrown out the stuff that oppresses.

BUCKLEY: Isa has been following a Sufi path. She was kind of in the closet about her Sufism for a while. And I think that’s true for a lot of people doing erotic work. Oh, I better not let people know that I’m also following a spiritual path.

PRINE: We use lots of ways of touching: energetic, intentional, tactile, some erotic, such as tantric massage or ecstatic massage. The journey is experiencing pleasure without any pain, experiencing pleasure without attaching to an outcome.

People change the stories that they’ve been living because they’re having a new experience. Creating safe and sacred space is the first part, setting up guidelines for people, like the right to pass. Healing doesn’t happen by coercion; healing happens when people can say yes to it. When we’re all working, doing our magic and we’re connecting to the divine, or spirit, or the ancestors, or that which is greater than us, or higher power, something bigger than us happens.

The juiciest stuff for me: Things that we’ve been wounded by are actually filled with potential gifts for us to unwrap.

BUCKLEY: We always start in some kind of ritual way. There are different ways to do it, but there’s just an absolute commitment to that. We put that energy out: grounding the space in spirituality, and in ritual, and in absolute commitment to safe and sacred space. That’s how it’s possible to do extraordinary work.

PRINE: For me, touch is going to heal the world. Touch includes tactile touch, but it also means sitting across the room and feeling your energy, and looking into your eyes, and being able to speak tonally in ways that we hear each other. Yummy, huh?

For more information, visit www.fleshandspirit.org.