Author Topic: Info required on Mark Josephs-Serra (‘Joseph’)-"Culture of Honouring"  (Read 8316 times)

Offline UKBloke44

  • Posts: 3
Hi,
I am looking for info on (and hopefully people who
have had any experience with this) organization:
http://www.cultureofhonouring.com
-run by Mark Josephs-Serra (‘Joseph’) originally from the UK but now about to
be (or possibly currently) in Spain, and Elisabeth Josephs-Serra, born in Spain

Thanks

UKBloke44



Offline nemesis

  • Posts: 526
I have serious concerns about these people

Firstly Elisabeth Josephs-Serra is lying about being a UKCP accredited psychotherapist so you have to wonder what else she is lying about.

Secondly the various men's and women's training workshops and retreats look very similar to those run by people who are knowingly or naively running grooming and recruitment events in order to brainwash young men and women into enslavement by criminal networks, usually networks involved in trafficking in human beings. 

an example (emphasis mine)

Quote
With ElisabethJosephs-Serra and friends
In January 2013 I am going to be gathering a group of women to walk together a journey of recovering the dismembered sacred feminine mandala. This Initiatory Journey will be a re-membering of the different faces of the divine feminine that have lain dormant for millennia.

In these times of change
and crisis we are invited more than ever to hear Her calling,
and to gracefully move through the onslaught of
conditioning that paralyses our radiant hearts.


As women we have an affinity with the feminine universal principal, and we are invited to listen and be guided by Her fierce tender message of the heart. This journey will guide women as to how to keep choosing and embracing the ancient-future empowered sacred feminine.

The journey will consist of a series of 6 weekends and one five day retreat, stretching over 9 months. We will be creating individual and personal initiations into maintaining the choice to live as empowered feminine women in the world. The journey will be associated with a Men’s Initiatory Journey, and at some point we will be joining with them.

Through each weekend we will explore specific personal and archetypal themes – Mother (‘The Ground’, Self-Love, relationship with body as woman), The Warrior (anger, power, boundaries, fear), The Lover (sensuality, sexuality, love, vulnerability, feeling textures and how we conduct energy), The Shaman / Priestess (intuition, the empowered feminine and relationship with the sacred). We will be looking into the mirrors of both the pure and distorted archetypes we have inherited through the feminine line. We will learn to see the journey of the feminine from both the individual and the collective perspective. In other words, the enquiry into the personal will be embedded in the collective. We will learn tools and practices to develop choice, to stand in the centre, and to embody the Whole Woman who is able to express and feel all the faces of the feminine that we have been cut off from.

In this time together we will enter our enquiry through tantric dance, creativity and dialogue. Alongside the weekends there will also be experiential ‘home tasks’, and throughout you will be supported by the community of self-initiating women – weaving each other into wholeness once again. If you feel moved to join us, please contact me. There will be places for twenty women (so with me, and four assistants who have travelled this journey in depth, we will be twenty four).

source:
http://www.cultureofhonouring.com/womens-initiatory-journey

This format of workshops and retreats is typical of THB recruiters. Women and men are trained separately and then join together for final events.  The bit about the different female archetypes is almost identical to workshops run by the Russian OC network Ashram Shambala.  Basically women are told that they are too identified with the motherly, caring aspects of the Goddess and that they have blocked the priestess and the sexual aspects.  Women are encouraged to break down their sexual inhibitions and to become a sexy "authentic" woman (usually ending up working as a temple prostitute). 

on her FB wall Elisabeth Josephs-Serra has shared a video titled "Things We Don't Talk About: Healing Narratives from the Red Tent" (Official Trailer)

This is alarming IMO.  We really need a separate thread on the Red Tent movement as it is an extremely scary and disturbing thing.  Basically it consists of various females involved in the notorious DTMMS and other sex cults (some linked to THB) promoting workshops for women and even little girls, in belly dance, ecstatic dance, discovering your inner goddess, and getting rid of guilt and shame around menstruation and sexuality.  All of these things could possibly be wonderful if the ceremonies did not involve appropriated ceremonies and if the people running them were not connected to predatory criminal organisations involved in the sexual and labour exploitation of their followers.  If you look at the very end of the video you will see that it is a video soliciting donations and there are a number of extremely dodgy links and organisations at the end including links to
Alisa Starkweather and the Red Tent Temple Movement (a woman with many FB friends involved in the neo-pagan and Goddess movement but also many friends involved in the sex industry and in THB)
Centre for the Intimate Arts http://intimateartscenter.com  a kind of online sexual training school.
The school of Shamanic Midwifery - another dodgy cult linked to the Red Tent Temple movement
No time to check out the others now but it does not look good

I'm very pushed for time, but UKBloke44 I would suggest that you spend some time reading the the threads here about the DTMMS, Ashram Shambala and the Phoenix and Sedona "temples" as this will help you to educate yourself as to the indicators of criminality that are fairly evident in relation to the Culture of Honouring website.  In order to use the search function correctly you should first go to the main forum index, that way you will get results from the entire forum.

I will take a deeper look at the FB friends lists of the Josephs-Serras when I have a little more time a they will probably reveal some interesting connections.

Offline nemesis

  • Posts: 526
It seems that this pair have a long history of running workshops in Torquay and Totnes at interfaith events

Another website associated with them is here

http://menswork.co.uk/

The links page is very telling as to their influences

http://menswork.co.uk/index.php?pid=9

the links include:
Quote
LINKS...

UNDERSTANDING / AWARENESS...
Hear the single voice emerging from hundreds of the most brilliant hearts and minds of our age, visit Ken Wilber's www.integralnaked.org
For a trans-personal understanding that doesn't minimise or negate the personal dimension of our lives, visit www.eckharttolle.com


MASCULINE & FEMININE...
For an authoritative, traditional tantric perspective on the masculine and feminine visit Daniel Odier's site www.danielodier.com
For a strong, modern, intelligent enquiry into the essence of the feminine and the masculine visit David Deida's www.deida.info
For more on 'the essence' of the masculine and feminine, particulaly in intimate relationship, visit 'Making Love' author and teacher Barry Long's site www.barrylong.org
For a psychologically and spiritually mature perspective on relationships visit 'Love and Awakening' author John Welwood's site www.johnwelwood.com


I know of Ken Wilber re his activities alongside the abusive cult leader Andrew Cohen.  The pair age good friends and work frequently together as a 2 man show. Cohen's EnlightenNext organisation is, surprise surprise, running various "women's empowerment" workshops designed to "awaken the divine feminine".  Along with their promotion of "tantra" it looks depressingly familiar to me as it will do to readers of the boards here. 

You can find out about Eckhart Tolle on various cult awareness websites, but I know about him simply by he fact that all people in the the "tantric" scene like him on FB and appear to be enamoured of him.

The masculine and feminine links are to pseudo-tantric websites, interestingly the work of the late Barry Long is promoted on the EnlightenNext websites. 

I am not in a position to say whether the Josephs-Serras are criminals, but given the lying about the UKCP accreditation, the dodgy training curses and the links to abusive cults I would say that they are definitely at least dodgy. 

Offline UKBloke44

  • Posts: 3
Hi nemeseis,

Thanks for the info.

I decided to check with the UKCP by emailing an enquiry.

This is the reply I got:

"Many thanks for bringing this to our attention.  Elizabeth Josephs-Serra is no longer a member of UKCP and I have asked her to remove this claim from her website immediately.


Best wishes
 
Niamh Dunne
Diversity, Equality and Social Responsibility Administrator
 
UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP)
2nd Floor, Edward House, 2 Wakley Street, London EC1V 7LT

Direct Line:  020 7014 9491
Fax:  020 7014 9977  Website:  www.ukcp.org.uk"

I see that this claim has now been removed by the woman in question, at least from here:
http://www.cultureofhonouring.com/about-us.

Why she is no longer accredited with the UKCP is another matter, and I am not sure how to go
about finding that out. Any suggestions would be welcome.

I have had a bit of a look at the info you suggested but need to spend more time to understand
the links between the "Culture of Honouring" outfit and the others you mentioned.

As far as the Hindu, Tantra and Buddhist backgrounds asserted by these two - there are no teachers or lineages mentioned so nothing to go on there. I am not familiar enough myself with genuine teachers/lineages of Hinduism/Buddhism or Tantra to make any judgements from the info available, but have a friend who is so will run this by them when I see them.

I may be wrong but I would have thought that a genuine practitioner of these paths would have no problem in informing the public where the supposed teachings have come from.

UKBloke44

Offline UKBloke44

  • Posts: 3
the claim hasn't yet been removed from here

http://menswork.co.uk/index.php?pid=8