The Four No-Bull Truths
All of us have had fun playing games. At the foundation of all games are rules that everyone follows. Rules create the structure that make a game work. They also create the unique challenges and shared container for safe fun. It’s no fun to play a game if someone breaks the rules. And it’s pretty hard to play together if there are no rules or we don’t know them. Rules, though they get a lot of “bad press,” are actually very effective at supporting fun, connection, and joy.
What most people don’t realize (and I, Ano, didn’t either) is that similarly there are rules for our engagement around intimacy, family, sexuality, growing community, expanding intimacy to include more than two adults, and also diminishing intimacy consciously. There are actually lots of rules, and they aren’t some moral structure, super-imposed from above, or crafted by the mind. The rules are written within the human heart and our aboriginal biology. And tragically, most people playing the relationship, family, and community games are quite ignorant to these rules. Therefore, they break them consistently, hurt others, and generate results they don’t want nor realize they’re producing. This often leads people to choose to stop playing with each other. -- Does this sound familiar? Well, this tragedy might be your past, but it doesn’t need to be your future!
So, what are the rules? How flexible are they? What happens if we play by the rules? Is it more fun? What happens if we break the rules? Can we transcend the rules? Can we surrender to the rules? Can we master the rules and create the self, life, relationships, and family of our dreams? What prevents us from playing by the rules? Can we learn how to play by these rules and exit our dysfunctional patterns together?
These questions are the heart and soul of The Four No-Bull Truths Of Clan And Heart Based Group Intimacy: A Guidebook to Healing, Activating, And Living Our Holistic Hearts In Multi-Generational Bonded Community. I’m convinced that there are a lot of well-meaning people creating results they don’t like in their lives, relationships, and families, because they are innocently and zealously following poorly designed guidance. Change the guidance system and the ship can change course and go where we truly want it to. I invite you to consider the hard-earned wisdom I’ve gained thru 30+ years of pioneering.
My name is, Ano Tarletz Hanamana. I’m a sustainable-and-holistic culture pioneer. From 1969-1990 I lived as a typical, domesticated, suburban American: public school, TV, supermarkets, malls, cars, fantasy, and then off to college. But something happened to me near the end of college, and just after I graduated, that sent me in a radically different direction. I walked away from my birth culture and moved to rural East Hawaii, in Pele’s realm, where I began a thorough and holistic death/rebirth process that transformed most everything about how I lived and what I was creating. This was a massive undertaking to say the least!
Eventually, in 2002, with my then-partner, I bought the 18-acres that’s now GaiaYoga Gardens (GYG.) GYG is a sanctuary and research station for pioneering sustainable-and-holistic culture. It’s also a home to me, my biological family, and an intentional community. Now, GYG is densely planted with fruiting trees, and around 1000 people have lived here for days to years. The community and vision continue to evolve and refine. We’ve celebrated and mourned, grown and shrunk, and throughout it all I’ve been “in the trenches,” learning what supports and undermines holistic community and human connection. My life’s devoted to incarnating GaiaYoga Consciousness and Culture using all the resources I can muster.
The Four No-Bull Truths is my 5th book. I also published Instinctive Eating, 1996; An Introduction To GaiaYoga, 2001; True Human Freedom, 2016; and The Dharma In Song: The Complete Lyrics Of Nagdeo (1987-2022). Nagdeo is my band - www.nagdeo.org. We’ve made three albums and are working on a 4th.
I thought I was done writing books, but in 2021 my intimate sphere and GYG’s community dissolved and I found myself very confused and grief-stricken. Many people would have just collapsed and quit, but I picked myself back up and started a two-year-long meditation on why these unwanted events occurred. I trust that “Designs reveal themselves accurately in life.” So, I knew that if I tore apart the engine and inspected it thoroughly, I could figure out why it seized up, and then redesign and repair it and put it back on the road. So that’s what I did, and the main fruit of that process is the book, The Four No-Bull Truths.
I’ll tell you what The Four No-Bull Truths are shortly, but simply reading the four short statements will not transmit the profoundness of what I’ve unearthed in my two-year re-evaluation of my life, the lives of those I’ve been in relationship with, and how to create community. I think telling you “why” is more important and inspiring… As I said above, people make choices based on their best consciousness - yet often don’t produce their desired results. Most people I know are just resigned to there being a huge gap between the beautiful world they know could be true and the world they inherited and recreate. I’m not content to have that gap be the limit of my life, or the life I pass down to the coming generations of humans. I know in my heart that if we get our designs in alignment with our nature, and learn to execute our designs well, that we can produce the results we truly want. E.g. If we want to play an exquisite piece of classical music as an orchestra, we need a design (the musical composition) and we need to execute it well - quality instruments, and people who can read music, learn their parts well, work together with other musicians, etc.
We can have a composition (a vision or goal) but if we don’t make the choices that actually lead that way it won’t manifest. Or we can work diligently, but have a poor composition or ineffective technique, and still not manifest what we want. We need an effective structure to grow and sustained effective action to grow that structure. I can’t force other musicians to practice, respond to honest feedback, or be accountable to the composition we all said we wanted to play together. But I can commit myself to that song, do what I need to play my part, and only participate with people who will show up similarly. While this might mean playing alone, it ensures that the composition won’t get corrupted and co-opted by other people on the same stage playing something else. I’m devoted to this composition and playing it exquisitely.
Below are The Four No-Bull Truths. If you’re curious, I wrote a 362-page book, to unpack and clarify the details and obstacles to healing, activating, and living our Holistic Hearts in multi-generational bonded community. There’s much more to birthing and sustaining clan-and-heart-based group intimacy than these four truths, but they are the foundation. Indeed, if it was that simple, we’d all be doing it already!
1) Intimacy and sexuality with others - to be sustainable and healthy - must be balanced and integrated with connection to self, nature, family/community, and Spirit/God.
2) A human being can only stably and holistically engage in one intimate sphere at a time.
3) One cannot expand their intimate sphere effectively if one undermines their pre-existing intimate relationships and family while doing it.
4) True Holistic Love is not nice.