Mother Whale and Calf: Harbin women, Groups at Harbin, Drumming in the Conference Center

It's the Harbin women ... who make Harbin Hot Springs exceptional, in so many ways. The women I've met and seen there since 1994-ish are easy taking off their clothes in public, in a situation where clothing-optionalness has been normalized for both genders. (For millions of years, I suspect our ancestors didn't wear clothes in Africa. By contrast, the clothing meme affects a lot of people now in modernity 2010). This clothing-optionalness adds an element of attraction and openness to Harbin's milieu, which may influence how people think there. {Do forms of what I might call improvisational opera then emerge?} Women (like men, too) who seek freedom - especially informed by the 1960s and 1970s - come to Harbin.

This morning when I was observing a man give a woman a Watsu (water shiatsu) in the warm pool, I thought that I was watching a whale surface and dive, in a very graceful way. As this woman's breasts emerged again and again so beautifully, her chest open in this water dance, I thought of breaching whales.

Women and men seem to enjoy seeing each other naked.


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People form groups a lot, and especially at Harbin. 'Subcultures,' or little networks, abound there. I postulate that this is a development on 'troopbonding' in ancestral environments (Money 1988: 114).


How have residents and long term visitors come to deal with the flux of Harbin and life? I wonder if Harbin as a kind of tribe is one way, and if the many subgroups that have also formed there, since 1972, are another. For example, there are an amazing number of spiritual teachers - very colorful ones - and others, who have come through Harbin's gates since 1972. {Harbin has so many teachers!}


How does Harbin respond to these groups in all their uniquenesses? Harbin experiments, in part, - it tries things. Some groups (workshops) are laughter-oriented, many are New Age, some are sexually oriented groups. A kind of culture emerges around these gatherings in Harbin's Heart Consciousness Church's fluidness.

Harbin's founder has some say in what workshops happen at Harbin, as do the Managing Directors. And Harbin as a kind of family, and culture, gives a kind of form to these groups as a whole.

In many ways, Harbin is an ongoing exploration of, and return to, hippiness, as I see it.


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Drumming last night in the conference center, we generated the big beat - that synchronicity that happens on the beat - the one - through music, particularly drumming.
















(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/02/mother-whale-and-calf-harbin-women.html - February 3, 2010)