Episode Summary
So it’s the big day. The day of the Techno Cosmic Wedding. With your virtual invitation in hand, you walk into the venue. Prayer flags hang from the ceiling above you. A set of handmade neon signs rests neatly in the window ledge, spelling out “Marry Me Colleen” The neon question mark at the end is no longer working, but that’s okay because she said yes.
Episode Resources
→ Techno Cosmic Wedding (Pt 1 - The Plan): https://ever-changing.net/episodes/s5-e1-techno-cosmic-wedding-1
→ Matthew Fox: https://www.matthewfox.org/
→ Michelle Jordan: https://www.facebook.com/michelle.jordan.9461
→ "I Am Not Afraid" Song: https://www.daraackerman.com/new-album-skyland
→ A Joyful Wedding Can Still Make Room for Grief: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/07/31/joyful-wedding-can-still-make-room-grief/
→ “We Have Come to be Danced” Poem: https://alicewalkersgarden.com/2019/10/hard-times-require-furious-dancing-we-have-come-to-be-danced-jewel-mathieson/
Episodes by Topic
→ Episodes on Rites of Passage: https://ever-changing.net/rites-of-passage
→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings
→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss
→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times
Support the Show
→ Subscribe In Your Favorite Player: https://kite.link/shamepinata
→ Rate & Review: https://ever-changing.net/rate-sp
About the Show
Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.
Listen If
→ You’re feeling stuck
→ You’re going through a tough time
→ Something significant has happened and no one gets it
Full Transcript
Thomas: Keep an eye out for trains.
Torres: Oh. Really?
Thomas: Yes.
Torres: Okay. Why? What are you gonna do…
Thomas: Stop.
Torres: …have them stop them?
Thomas: No. We stop and we wait.
Torres: Oh, we stop.
Thomas: We wait for trains to go by. It's part of the process.
Torres: Oh. I see. Okay. [LAUGHS] Choo-choo.
Thomas: Shhhh. Not now. [LAUGHES]
So it’s the big day. The day of the Techno Cosmic Wedding. With your virtual invitation in hand, you walk into the venue. Prayer flags hang from the ceiling above you. A set of handmade neon signs rests neatly in the window ledge, spelling out “Marry Me Colleen” The neon question mark at the end is no longer working, but that’s okay because she said yes.
This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. So welcome back to our discussion about the Techno Cosmic Wedding. On last month’s episode, we told you about how this unusual ceremony came to be, why it was modeled on an event called the Techno Cosmic Mass, and how it welcomed something you don’t normally see at a wedding - grief. Today my husband Rodrigo and I are going to walk you through the day itself, starting a few weeks before the day itself when things started to go off the rails.
Torres: So a couple things that happened before the actual wedding day were that couple of unexpected events happened. One was that… you were in a car accident. And you're healthy and whole.
Thomas: Yes. But I was a little bit sore.
Torres: But you were, yes. Very sore.
Thomas: And I couldn’t dance. Which was terrible, because I was having a dancing wedding and I couldn't dance.
Torres: So sorry.
Thomas: And what was much bigger than that was a week later… was that your father passed away very suddenly.
Torres: Right. Yeah, it was a big deal and he was in Mexico City. So it meant a trip down right before our wedding basically and with my mom who was also an officiant at our wedding. So we basically, just a few days before the wedding… so I ended up going down and coming back and then having a wedding. So it was… it was a lot.
Thomas: Yeah. You had a friend who said that he would fill in for you if you didn't get back. [LAUGHS] That was funny.
Torres: That was funny.
Thomas: Yeah, but that was such a really bumpy ride into the day. Yeah, it was like so much confusion and heartbreak going into... I feel like we kind of went into the day, the transition, the wedding, the ceremony - we went into a kind of broken wide open in different ways, you know? And I think more than we even expected to, we had to give in and give over and trust our team. And then, on the wedding day itself the house was… our house which is normally so quiet was full of family and… We had grandchildren on the back porch making signs and people were cooking… Your daughter was making the wedding cake, and you guys are all in the front room doing the tech. And I was probably lying down for my back.
Torres: Yeah. The speakers and the…
Thomas: And then at some point we sent them all away. Everybody was gone and we got the afternoon or a few hours before the wedding to just be alone and we sent them all… They all were done at the facility, the site getting ready and that's when I handed out drawings of the altars, like sketches. You know, “This is what I want it to look like and here's all the material you need for it.” They took, like all the stuff and the plans and they went and we just were like, “Well we're going to put it together and…” We had our time to connect and, you know, prepare.
After spending our time together, we went to the venue with our open hearts and my healing body. We were excited to see what our team had built.
Torres: For me, walking in was really cool because we hadn’t been there for it all being set up. We were kind of like guests walking in because it was like, “Oh, that's really cool. That's really cool.” And yeah, and kind of seeing how, like… the care that our friends had put into setting everything up how we wanted it, and how… To me it just felt like everything was right on. Like the altars and the Moon Tent and the… you know, having the screens and the and the videos, it just felt, like, really immersive and it felt really good.
So we spent those initial few minutes looking around, kind of in awe really, at what a year of living and breathing the Techno Cosmic Mass had helped us manifest: The world’s first Techno Cosmic Wedding. There were five big altars, dedicated to the relationship in all its forms, relationship with self, friendships, romance, family and the Earth. There were two huge video screens, a sound system, and lighting.
It was important for us to attend the event as bride and groom and leave the work of holding the space and moving everyone through the event to our event managers, our officiants, and our Weaver of Context Michelle Jordan. Michelle had worked for many years with the Mass team, so we knew she would do a great job and she was awesome.
Torres: There was the calling of the directions, which I thought was really cool. And then somewhere between there and the next thing, there was this sort of tech problem.
Thomas: Oh, yeah.
Torres: That was also really interesting, because I'm usually the tech guy, and usually my instinct is to go fix it. And so I was like, “Okay, I'm not gonna go fix it.” You know, I think it was like, a couple of minutes that it took to resolve but those minutes seemed like really long. So it's just like, “Okay, I'm just gonna just kind of let it be.” But then it was resolved and people were… responded well to it being resolved, and everybody's happy that it was resolved and then we didn't have any problem, any tech problems after that. So that was really nice.
Thomas: I think our Weaver of Context made a little song up about it because she was wonderful in the moment. She did a really good job of explaining what was happening and really holding everybody's like, you know, hands and hearts throughout the whole day.
[MUSIC]
If you joined us for last month’s episode, you learned a lot about The Techno Cosmic Mass, which is the event we based our wedding on. Here’s the Cliff Notes version: The spiritual tradition underlying the Techno Cosmic Mass is called Creation Spirituality. It was started by Theologian Matthew Fox. The Mass is built on the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality which are the Via Positiva, celebrating joy, awe, and wonder; the Via Negativa, honoring darkness, loss, and grief; the Via Creativa, celebrating ourselves as divinely creative beings, and lastly the Via Transformativa, honoring our role as spiritual warriors. Like the Mass, the wedding had four distinct parts, beginning with the Via Positiva.
Thomas: Like we had mentioned before, our friend Dara sang often throughout the ceremony. And one of the first things we did during the Via Positiva section was we did a circle dance. [MUSIC] It was a very simple dance, we had everybody in a big circle and it really loosened everybody up, got everybody singing, got everybody… got their bodies more present in the space, which was part of that, you know, “Come join us. We're here together in this community event. You know, you're not just going to be sitting in a chair watching a wedding.”
Torres: …watching what’s happening. Yeah.
Thomas: And then after that, our wonderful friend Shanti read the “We Have Come To Be Danced” poem and then we segued into the trance dance.
Poem Being Read at Event: (We Have Come to Be Danced by Jewel Mathieson)
The mother may I?
Yes you may take 10 giant leaps dance
The olly olly oxen free free free dance
The everyone can come to our heaven dance.
We have come to be danced
Where the kingdoms collide
In the cathedral of flesh
To burn back into the light
To unravel, to play, to fly, to pray
To root in skin sanctuary
We have come to be danced.
WE HAVE COME
[MUSIC]
Thomas: And the trance dance was wonderful. I remember I fought for it to be 20 minutes. People were like, “That's too long, that’s too long.” And I'm like, “No, no, no! 20 minute dance!” And it was wonderful. I loved it even though I couldn't dance. I loved it. It was a dance to sweat your prayers. It was a dance to wake up your body and, you know…
Torres: And it was… it had techno music and lights, like techno lights so it had that rave sort of feature of the Techno Cosmic Mass. Which was really cool.
Thomas: Yes. That was really good. And then we transitioned into the Via Negativa. What do you remember about that?
Torres: Well, for me personally it was really powerful because my dad had died and so I… that was like a grieving time for me and you… you know, grieving for you not being able to dance. And yeah so it felt good to be able to like be my whole self in the space and not have to kind of set that apart from like, “Oh I'm just supposed to be happy and have a smiley face and not feel my feelings.”
Thomas: Yeah, I really explored on season one of Shame Piñata with a lot of guests about… that a wedding… a wedding is a transition and with every transition, there's loss as well as something new. And we don't usually create room for that loss - for ourselves and then for our loved ones, you know, who maybe like they're losing a sister or they're losing a daughter or son or… With a wedding supposed to be a certain happy way there's not room for those feelings. So it was really special to have… to have room… I feel like the Via Negativa is such a jewel and as a concept and such a wonderful addition to any ceremony to have a time dedicated to whatever's there that’s sad, that wants to be expressed. Because then, in addition to getting to express it and be our whole selves, we can come out with that like you know going through, like after the rain, you know that like fresh feeling after the… Like during the… we did a passing of the peace right after the Via Negativa and most of us had like red noses and we were… our faces were all wet and crying and it was just had a really hard opening very beautiful soft authentic quality.
Torres: Yeah, totally. And like good way to connect with people and that space
Thomas: Yeah, that's very beautiful.
Thomas: And then we went on to the Via Creativa celebrating the cosmos, celebrating our role as creators in creation. And our good friend Sean was our officiant for that section and we actually watched a little bit of a Neil deGrasse Tyson video….
Torres: Right.
Thomas: …which was wonderful.
Torres: About the cosmos, the cosmos in how we're connected to it.
Thomas: And then I believe there was the flower-pelting ceremony which was designed to get everybody back up off the floor and moving, moving, moving again before the actual ceremony where they'd be sitting for a while.
[MUSIC]
So we’ve reached the Via Transformativa, the final path of the four paths. And in our case, the time when the wedding ceremony would be happening. Rodrigo put on his wedding jacket and I grabbed my veil. Our mothers took up their positions and everyone found their chair.
Torres: After having used the room as a dance floor, then it was set up with chairs… several rows of chairs in concentric circles with two aisle ways through.
Thomas: Yeah, I remember we started. Like, if it's a clock, you started at twelve o'clock, and I started at six o'clock. So then you would have walked twelve to six. And I would walk from six to twelve alone around the outside of the circle. And then when we got to the opposite point, the 180 degrees from where we started, we met our mom, our moms. And then we walked in, me with my mom, you with your mom, to the middle. And our moms were holding our rings, like my mom was holding my ring and your mom is holding your ring. And when we got to the center, the moms exchanged rings, as like a token of you know, blending the families.
So we walked in, our mothers exchanged rings, and then our mother sat down leaving us standing alone in the middle of the circle, in the round waiting for what was next. The plan was for our good friend Dara Ackerman to come out and sing a song about honoring fear, like the fear we were swimming in at that moment, and then to get married. But what happened really surprised me.
Thomas: Dara came in singing this beautiful song this “I am not afraid song.” And everybody was so into it. Everybody just loved it. And I remember my mom had been, like so horrified when I told her we wanted to use that song. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're just you're wrong, you're wrong!” But, she was so into it. Everybody was so into it. And much later, I realized that she married us and I hadn't seen that coming. I thought, oh Dara will sing a song and then we will get our blessings and then we will be married. I didn't realize that Dara would be marrying us. It was so beautiful.
Torres: Yeah.
Thomas: All of the heart-opening work we had been doing with everybody who was there throughout the night - that was just so evident, because everybody's hearts were so open during that song and people were so present. And then they were… they were very kind and patient and waited through the three plus… three sets of blessings plus the actual, you know, official wedding ceremony.
Torres: Yeah, it's interesting, cause, I mean, we weren't planning to have Dara be kind of the officiant, but she kind of became kind of like the emotional sort of officiant with that song. And the way she sort of… like the first verses of it, she kind of gets everybody singing with her. And then she kind of sings the last one on her own, and it was kind of this shift. And it was her singing to us, basically, and singing kind of like words that we would sort of be expressing to each other about like, “I'm not afraid. I'm so afraid.” And it was… was emotional and funny and real.
Thomas: After we had the blessing because we had what we had a Native American blessing and we had a New Age blessing and we had a Christian blessing and then our main officiant our final officiant she said, ‘“You've had the world’s religions to have blessed you. You have been planning this wedding longer than some of the world's religions have been around.”
Torres: Totally.
Thomas: And your wonderful friend made us a beautiful wedding quilt with gifts… panels from all our friends and presented that around us and pronounced us a couple. And somebody dumped a big basket of flowers on top of us and we did a really slow rotation being sort of presented to the community. That was really magical.
Torres: It was.
In producing these two episodes, Rodrigo and I had the chance to relive the day in our own hearts and reflect on some of the moments that have stayed with us over the years.
Torres: A surprising thing for me that I wasn't expecting was the… kind of how big of presence that children that came were. They were very present for the entire thing. They were, you know, in the middle of the room a lot of the time. And we were just like, we didn’t like, shush them out, or, you know, which I thought was really precious: that, you know, we were just like, “Yeah, if you want to be in the middle of the circle, you know, come in and be in the middle of the circle.” And so yeah, that sort of energy of like, their youth, and they're just being themselves. And during the Negativa, there was a girl that like, came up to us… because she could tell that we were like, you know, crying and she wanted to, like comfort us and it was just really sweet to have that sort of... And that was not something, you know, that was planned in any sort of way or anything like that. And even afterwards, I… somebody said that they had asked, “Oh, is this how all the weddings are?” Because that was the first wedding they had been to. And we were like, “Oh my goodness. They’re gonna be in for a surprise when they go to another wedding.”
Thomas: Yeah totally. Yeah, I remember this… when we are getting ready for the trance dance and we were…our friend was reading the poem about “We've Come to Be Danced”, one of the little boys was just running around, just like… he was so exuberant, he was just feeling the energy. He was jumping, and he could just… he was like, he was just totally present with the energy. And like you said, when we were both sitting on the floor, crying, you know, and she came up to us, and she was just kind of like, just watching us like, “Wow. Huh.” You know, they were just like, curious and around and… yeah. They were such a blessing. And we heard from some of their families that they weren't normally like that, and they just felt really free and really able to express themselves and it was really beautiful.
Torres: Yeah. And I liked the idea that, you know, maybe we created something that could shift how they thought of weddings. You know… what the possibility of a wedding can be.
Thomas: Yeah. I think we did that for everybody, including ourselves.
Torres: Yeah.
As you can hear from the way we describe it, Rodrigo and I were successfully able to create a wedding ceremony that expressed the uniqueness of us. It didn’t matter that people were a little unsure of what we were about or what they were expected to do. We took their hands and welcomed them in, encouraging them to participate at whatever level felt right.
If you are in the midst of the wedding planning journey, remember you can do it your way! Don’t be shy. Lean into the things that make your relationship unique and special. Dare to be unconventional. And if you have friends planning a wedding, share these two episodes with them. Thank you so much for coming to my wedding. Don’t forget to grab a piece of cake on the way out.
Learn more about Creation Spirituality at matthewfox.org. Find Michelle Jordan on FB at michelle.jordan.9461. Hear the entire “I Am Not Afraid” song at daraackerman.com.
And get a look into the Via Negativa section of our ceremony in the Washington Post article, “A Joyful Wedding Can Still Make Room for Grief” written by friend of the podcast, Tria Wen. Find links for all of these in the show notes. Special thanks to Carol Ann Fusco who called the directions.
Our music is by Terry Hughes. Find us on YouTube, IG, and X at shamepinata. Reach us through our website, shamepinata.com. And subscribe to the show on your favorite player. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.
P.S. You can get up to 2 months of free podcasting service with Libsyn. Check out the show notes for your promo code to get started podcasting today.