Page 26 - Zone Magazine Issue 007

feature
erotic eire - bliss festival report
Summer 2014
“I’m in the celibate zone at the mo. I need to get my shit together, starting with defuzzing myself and having a wish-wash. You going to this sex festival?”
This was my introduction, from a female friend, to Bliss - an Irish festival set up by Beth Wallace to create a space to discuss and explore sexuality. My friend must have scrubbed up good because, not long after, she had hooked up with a guy who was a sex festival unto himself (but that’s a whole other story). So I headed out to Claregalway on my own, not knowing what to expect.
If you’re looking for an orgy at the Bliss Festival, you’re going to be very disappointed. The atmosphere is like a country fair with a few hundred open-hearted people. That said, it’s not like any place I’ve ever been to...
At one workshop, I witnessed two different couples having sex. As the rest of the group formed a circle to conclude the workshop, and the facilitator continued to talk over their orgasmic reverberations, something inside me was triggered. I tried to make light of the situation by cracking a joke, all the while considering how these couples had connected, negotiated their desire, and then given themselves to each other with such seeming abandon. Was I a prude? Was I jealous?
I left the workshop with my troubled thoughts. Fortunately, present at the Bliss Festival were a number of counsellors that festival-goers can talk to. It was with these gorgeous people that I learned to examine the expectations and boundaries I - via culture and society - had imposed on myself. I was then able to explore these more consciously moving forward.
Over the course of the weekend, I enjoyed yoga, tantra, dance and a play party. What all these activities had in common was that they allowed me to get out of my head and into my body. When I say ‘out of my head’, I don’t mean using intoxicants. Bliss events have a ‘no drink or drugs’ policy, so people have to deal with real
issues and intimacy without a crutch. It also means that people in recovery can attend and that there is less possibility of confusion around consent.
Warrenpoint, Summer 2015
It’s Sunday night, the Festival has been a huge success on many levels. I sit in a huge hot tub with four other people, the moonlight streaming down through the tall trees. I’m absolutely worn out from running around all weekend. The conversation flows in the hot tub and one woman guides my foot between their thighs. My other foot is being massaged by another beauty. It is here, that I process the events of the last 72 hours, whilst also considering new relationship paradigms...
Beth Wallace’s vision, one that she had undertaken alone until the organising of this year’s Festival, was to bring Bliss to each of Ireland’s provinces. The first two Bliss events were in Dublin hotels - a one-day event in February and two-day event in August 2012. The third was in Ballydehob, Co. Cork, and the fourth (my first), was just outside of Galway in Claregalway. The fifth was in Ulster’s Warrenpoint. Beth explains why this particular Bliss meant a lot to her: “There has been a considerable amount of damage, grief and anger in that part of the country. Also you have religious extremism there that hasn’t been as apparent in the Republic since the 1970s.”
In the year after my first Bliss Festival, I had become part of a small core team that had planned to make this summer’s Festival, in the beautiful surrounds of Narrow Water Castle, the biggest and best Bliss Festival so far. The custodian of the castle, Marcus Hall, was very willing to hold the event there.
One of the healing strategies that Bliss tries to achieve is to close the gap between consciousness/mindfulness and the body. If you can't embody things there will be a backlash. And there was! The trustees of the castle, including Sir William Hall, along with UKIP councillor Henry Reilly said “NO!” and opposed the festival, branding it debauched.
In his book ‘The Erotic Mind’ Jack Morin
states: “The erotic mind conjures up images of debauchery as well as delights.” These moral- mongers had conjured up, in their own minds, images of drug-fuelled orgies and satanic rituals. Reilly decried Bliss as a “major promotion of debauchery”. He went on to tell Ireland AM: “I’m not a moral guardian... I’m not prudish. I can party as good as the next guy, I really can.” Reilly, who grew up on a farm, where I presume he witnessed the milking of cows and not prostate milking, contradicts himself by acting as a moral guardian saying: “There are boundaries and limitations in what we do in life.”
What makes people like Henry Reilly think they are the barometer of what is morally acceptable? It is at events like the Bliss Festival that people can learn how to turn thoughts of sex as debased into healthier and far more pleasurable ways of being. Pleasure and fun are human rights.
Sir William’s solicitor Diane Coulter, tried to take these rights away by first going after Beth, but because there was nothing illegal about the Festival, the Trustees turned their attention to their own nephew.
As the gates to the Festival were being opened to the public, Marcus and Beth were in the High Court in Belfast. The opposition managed to find a sentence in the insurance policy showing that one particular part of the castle wasn’t covered for fire. So, on this technicality, all the workshops, dance space and the café that had been planned for inside the castle had to be pulled. The core team had to run around changing schedules and calling food providers, all while trying to keep the Festival going.
The Bliss Festival hit the news, with features on the BBC and UTV, and in the Belfast Telegraph, Irish Examiner, Independent and Mirror. Sir William Hall wrote to Northern Ireland’s attorney general stating that: “Sex toys will be on sale, talks will be given which may purport to be serious but the real object is the giving of sexual titillation and gratification to the participants in the festival.”
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