Dear Polyamory Community,
It is with a heavy heart that I bring the sad news that Deborah “Taj” Anapol has passed away. She was a major trailblazer for the modern polyamory movement, a sacred sex teacher, a spokesperson for polyamory, the author of one of the first public hed books on polyamory,Love Without Limits and one of the founders of Loving More® Magazine (along with Ryam Nearing) in 1994. Apparently she died in her sleep in Ireland, where she was getting ready to host an intensive workshop this weekend.
Deborah/Taj was outspoken and rocked the boat on monogamy before many of our current polyamory activists were even born. She was a pioneer in use of the internet to bring people together through IntiNet Resource Center (IRC) which published a long-running newsletter named Floodtide.
Love Without Limits was the first book on polyamory I ever read (it was all that was available at the time) and gave me tremendous hope. My personal favorite book she authored was Seven Spiritual Laws of Love.
For me, personally, Taj was someone I admired for her tenacity, a trait we share, and her willingness to keep going despite the hardship financially and personally that being a polyamory activist can bring. I have always felt a great deal of respect for her and gratitude for her part in founding Loving More. Without the work she, Ryam and others gave from their heart, most of us wouldn’t be experiencing polyamory as it is today!
I often feel that many younger polyamorists have no idea of the amazing people like Taj who blazed a trail for us to be pioneers in relationships. Taj was a spiritual person and I truly hope that, wherever she is, she knows how much her works and writings have helped so many and that the love she gave to so many through her writing and teaching are greatly appreciated. She will be greatly missed, always remembered for her amazing work and the legacy that she left behind.
If I get permission, I will share the letter I received about her passing.
Love & Light,
Robyn Trask
Loving More
Deborah Taj Anapol (1951-2015) was an American clinical psychologist and one of the founders of the polyamory movement,[1] which started in the 1980s.[2] Known for her work in erotic spirituality, ecosex,[3] neotantra and Pelvic Heart Integration,[4][better source needed] she was an advocate for multiple love and sacred sexuality. Her work made early use of the Internet to gather and organize like-minded people. She was also the co-founder of the magazine, Loving More[5] and its conferences. She wrote one of the first books on polyamory, Love Without Limits (1992); which was expanded and reissued as Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits, in 1997. An expert columnist for Psychology Today,[6] she blogged at “Love Without Limits, Reports from the relationship frontier.”[7]
Anapol was a pioneer in opening the way for a diversity of form in healthy relationships,[8] and received the “Vicki” Award from the Woodhull Freedom Foundation for her work affirming sexual freedom as a fundamental human right.[9]
Appearances[edit]
Anapol appeared on radio and television shows, such as Donahue, Leeza, Real Personal, Jerry Springer, and Sally Jesse Raphael.[10] She taught workshops internationally in subjects such as Pelvic Heart Integration and Polyamory.
Pelvic Heart Integration[edit]
Pelvic Heart Integration[11] is a synthesis of neo-Reichian breathwork, body work, energy work, psychodrama, trauma work, body reading and neotantra and was developed by bodyworker Dr. Jack Painter.[12]
Deborah Anapol died suddenly in England on 18 August, 2015.[13]
Works[edit]
- Books
 |
This article lacks ISBNs for the books listed in it. (January 2015) |
Anapol is the author of several books:
- Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits. 1997. ISBN 978-1-880-78908-7. OCLC 37969216.
- Love Without Limits. 1992. ISBN 978-1-880-78906-3. OCLC 25575629.
- Compersion: Meditations on Using Jealousy as a Path to Unconditional Love. 2004. (eBook)
- The Seven Natural Laws of Love. 2005. ISBN 978-0-971-08887-0. OCLC 59712222.
- Polyamory in the 21st Century. 2010. ISBN 978-1-442-20023-4. OCLC 694791334.
- Video
Anapol has created a 3-part DVD video entitled, “Pelvic Heart Integration.”[14]
References[edit]
- Jump up^ “Deborah Anapol’s Return”. Polyamorous Percolations: Polyamory in the News!. Retrieved May 8, 2010.
- Jump up^ Anapol, Deborah. “Why Do People Choose Polyamory?”. Psychology Today. Retrieved August 23, 2010.
- Jump up^ “Ecosex Summit”.
- Jump up^ “Postural Integration”. Wikipedia.
- Jump up^ “Loving More”. Loving More Non-profit.
- Jump up^ “Psychology Today: Experts- Deborah Anapol, Ph. D”. Psychology Today.
- Jump up^ “Love Without Limits: Reports from the relationship frontier”. Psychology Today.
- Jump up^ Anapol, Deborah (Summer 1985). “Polygamy: Another Lovestyle”. Context Institute: Friends and Lovers.
- Jump up^ “Only One Week Till Sexual Freedom Day in D.C.”. AVN Media Network. September 16, 2010.
- Jump up^ “Promoting Intimacy and Other-Centered Sexuality”. Liberated Christians. 1997.
- Jump up^ “Love Without Limits”.
- Jump up^ “Jack Painter- Obituary” (PDF).
- Jump up^ “Poly In The Media”.
- Jump up^ “Faculty”. International University of Professional Studies.
External links[edit]
AUGUST 19, 2015
Deborah Taj Anapol, 1951 – 2015
Deborah Anapol, known as Taj. (Photo courtesy Becca Tzigany) News comes that a founding mother of the modern polyamory movement,Deborah Taj Anapol, unexpectedly died in her sleep in England last night. She was staying with friends about to host a workshop retreat where she was a presenter.
Robert and Marta of the U.K. Pelvic Heart Integration group post this:
Dear friends, I have some very sad news to share with you. After two wonderful days staying with us in our old Devon house, Taj died suddenly in her bed last night. It was totally unexpected – she went to bed well and happy, and looking forward to her work and travels. Taj spent her last day with us walking and meditating in what she felt was one of the very oldest of the Dartmoor stone circles, having lunch in a lovely café in Totnes, and a candlelit dinner in our dinner in our farmhouse kitchen. She was very happy feasting on local lamb and home grown vegetables while we all chattered about the workshop to come, and how Marta and I would be running it. It was an extraordinary evening. Before she went to bed, Taj wanted to show us a short film about ecstatic death. We watched this together in front of the wood fire, and afterwards she spoke a little more about death, and the possibility of letting go into it. “If you live your life orgasmicly, your death will also be orgasmic,” is what she said. She went off to bed later with a warm hug. In the morning, we found that she must have died shortly after she went to bed. In the light of the extraordinary quality of this last day, the joy she took in it, and the things she spoke of as the day ended, I cannot but feel that Taj at some level knew and embraced the point she had arrived at, even so wonderfully in love with life as she was.
Adds Rebecca Tzigany,
She leaves a legacy of liberation in Tantra, Pelvic Heart Integration, polyamory, juicy cronedom, and conscious death. She was a good friend, and we will miss her. …. Travel well, Taj. We hold you forever in our hearts.
Taj and Ryam.
Courtesy Loving More.Taj is often credited with setting the modern polyamory movement in motion, along with her fellow wonder woman Ryam Nearing, by their vigorous activism in the 1980s and 1990s. This included the founding of Loving More magazine (now a poly-education nonprofit). The movement’s deep feminism today, in both its ideology and its predominantly female leadership, may be partly a founder effect originating from these two. Anapol’s book Love Without Limits, published in 1992 (expanded and reissued in 1997 asPolyamory: The New Love Without Limits), was practically the first book on polyamory and was often called its bible.
At one of her last events: New
Culture Summer Camp East, July 2015.
With Monique Darling (left) and Sarah Taub.In her later years she shifted focus to neo-tantra and to training practitioners of Pelvic Heart Integration. In 2010 she publishedPolyamory in the 21st Century, a more analytical, retrospective work.
Last month she presented at the Network for a New Culture’s Summer Camp East at the Abrams Creek Retreat Center in West Virginia, where I got to participate in a Pelvic Heart Integration workshop. She was the picture of health and energy.
Loving More’s obituary for her: The Passing of a Polyamory Trailblazer, by Robyn Trask.
Saying Goodbye to the Woman Who Inspired Me to Become a Sexual Healer: RIP Deborah Taj Anapol Ph.D., by Kamala Devi.
posted by Alan | 
This is the conference where Sasha and I got married. This event happened on our wedding night.
Celebration of Sacred Sexality, Harbin 1996
My first experience with Deb Anapol was live on Radio Woodstock in September of 1996. I was the host of an astrology-related discussion program broadcast at 11 pm each Sunday night. She was based in San Francisco, connected by phone. It was very nearly big-time radio, broadcast through a large region of New York City’s northern suburbs known as the Hudson Valley.
I’d heard of Deb a few weeks earlier at my first-ever Loving More conference. There I met a guy named Jerry, one of her boyfriends. He told me about the Celebration of Sacred Sexuality that would be coming up in a few weeks, at Harbin Hot Springs. There would be 40 tantra teachers (as he put it) and lots of other people. He said the word Harbin almost religiously, as if it were the name of a saint.
I said I wanted to be a presenter and he assured me that would not happen; I should just come and feel it out.
After Loving More, I reached out to Deb by the then just catching on new thing, email. I invited her onto Radio Woodstock. That’s my idea of an astrology program. Our first conversation was being broadcast to thousands of people — about sex, polyamory, the upcoming conference, and my reading of the astrology of that conference, that is, the aspects of that weekend and what themes they raised.
The next day she called me and invited me to be her keynote speaker, asking specifically for an astrological theme. I happily accepted, and booked a flight to San Francisco. I don’t remember how I got up to Harbin, but I did indeed arrive, for my initiation experience of that place, and of Taj and of being a keynote speaker and a few other things.
The conference was erotic summer camp with open sleeping arrangements. The various lodges at Harbin have that feeling, though at that moment I just knew anything could happen that weekend. I remember seeing Jerry, who gave me that ‘good going, kid’ look.
It was very early autumn and the weather was fresh and inviting. The conference was just fun — tantra and polyamory in that easygoing California style of the mid-1990s. After a few hours and dinner, the conference gathered in the main lodge for the opening bit, which consisted of Taj welcoming everyone, a kind of puja ritual with some of her goddess girls, and then, inviting me up to the microphone.
There, I basically gave a free-verse channeling of Chiron square Uranus called “Leaping Across the Sky.” The astrology fit the event beautifully — Chiron, the planet of healing, in Scorpio, the sign of sex and death; aspecting Uranus in Aquarius, which felt like some kind of revolutionary gathering.
The talk seemed to take a minute, and can still feel the energy of my presentation. The visuals are a blur. Thankfully I commemorated it in an article, saved for posterity now 19 years later. People loved my talk, I was suddenly friends with everyone, and I plunged into the conference with its many very pretty creatures, who were all emanating a kind of magnetism that I had never felt before. Momentary eye contact with each or any of them was a sexual experience of a different flavor.
The next day were various workshops. I can never stay in one for long, so I roamed around, catching parts of each one. Toward the end of one session I walked into the main lodge, where there was a workshop called Extended Female Orgasm, featuring one woman having the experience, and a dense little bowl-shaped audience of people sitting around her, with Taj and the subject’s partner right there, sitting on the floor holding her.
I watched her experience a seemingly endless state of ecstasy, being guided to maneuver in her body various ways as she swam in a continuous space of release. It was the most attentive audience I’d ever seen or felt. Gradually they brought the demonstration subject back to Earth.
That event set the feeling tone of the evening.
The Saturday night activity was being called a marimba party. There was a 10-piece band and a lot of people dancing. However, this was not your ordinary dance party, as it had an orgy going on simultaneously. The two events were overlaid by some quantum phenomenon — dancing and music and group sex arranged somewhat randomly in a nice large space. At some point I became friends with a woman who was wearing a sarong and nothing else except a large silver pendant emanating the gaze of Isis. Some time during the day I had given up ordinary clothing for a sarong and tee shirt.
I could tell she liked me, in part by how much I liked her. She had the most easygoing beauty, like afternoon sunlight, a deep tan, beautiful little tits and a delicious mouth, which I was tasting as we knelt in front of one another somewhere on the dance floor as the party swirled around us. She explained that she was bisexual, which she looked in that distinct way that I can sometimes see; a certain way of carrying her gender that was feminine and androgynous and open to experience.
We were soon exploring one another, smelling and tasting and feeling. At some point we paused and she explained that she was married but had a hall pass to come to the conference and do some sexual things within certain boundaries, which included us kneeling facing one another masturbating, in this stunning moment of transcendent freedom — face to face with her in the midst of about 100 people dancing and having sex in various configurations, and the marimba band playing to one side of the room. This was mingled with making out with her some more, hugging, smelling her hair, and her breasts, and licking her sweat, and tasting her mouth again…lots of fun.
At one end of the room was a low platform; like a small, carpeted stage. There were two women and a man up there, giving people pleasure treatments one by one. Anyone could go up there, relax and be treated to whatever fantasy they wanted. We watched this enraptured. Eventually there were no people who wanted a turn — and I knew that was my invitation. Somehow I had been carrying around a dildo, one that Betty Dodson had given me in exchange for an astrology reading a few months earlier. It was one of those heavy clear plastic ones called the Venus. I was very new to astrological work but I seemed to be blending in with the sexpositive movement nicely.
My desire was to be fucked with that dildo on that stage. Which is exactly what happened. The party swirled in the rhythms of music, dancing and sex play. I was shorn of my sarong and tee shirt, and asked to lay back on some pillows. My yummy bisexual lady friend was about to watch me have an experience, and she sat with her feet tucked under her a bit back from the stage. I have no idea who else was watching. My knees were drawn back and apart, and someone, I’m not sure who, slipped the lube-soaked dildo into my body. I relaxed around it, and breathed into the experience. I looked up and my friend was still there watching, feeling, being present and attentive.
A while earlier Jerry had handed me half a hash brownie, the slow acting type, which was now taking effect at full strength. I moaned and melted and received as these three tantrikas worked with me, on me, offering to me, stroking my hair and encouraging me to relax evermore. I was dimly aware of the many people in the room, and of being entirely out in the open. I felt truly naked, stretched wide and gradually fucked more intently, expertly, lovingly, as I moaned out my feelings and experienced the most vivid lack of inhibition I had ever felt. They how to make this feel endless.
My cock was hard and now someone, I don’t know which of the three people with me, was massaging me, fucking my cock with her or was it his hand, drawing me out, as one of the women held me and gazed into my eyes. I was gradually guided, ever so intentionally, to ejaculation. I felt like I was going to orgasm from being fucked, then felt that some more, and then I realized that was what was happening — the bulbs of the dildo were playing against my prostate and I released myself into a gush of submission to my own existence, spouting and vocalizing my dreamlike ecstasy.
My chest was covered in my semen. The woman who was eye-gazing me gathered some on her fingers and put it in my mouth. Then she did it again, and again, until she had fed me most of my ejaculation. I sucked myself in and melted into affirmation of life.
When my awareness came back into the room, the party had settled down some. My bisexual friend had disappeared. My guides on the little stage sat me up, and wrapped me in my sarong, and I stepped back into the party with wet streaks on my belly and chest, and my mouth wet with myself.
I had discovered many things, including Deborah Anapol’s talent for putting on an orgy. She was like Lady Galadriel with her ring, working the elf group sex magic from behind the scenes. Of all her many talents, the Saturday night sex party at any of her workshops was one of her most fun.
I propose a Saturday night orgy in her honor.
4 Comments:
Maria
xxx