R.I.P.: Steve Schwartzberg

Beloved friend, teacher, and colleague Steve Schwartzberg returned to spirit yesterday, December 10. He slipped away peacefully at his home in Massachusetts, surrounded by close friends. He was 67 years old.

When he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in May 2021, the prognosis looked grim. But an experimental medication worked for him, and he was blessed with four more years of remarkably good health, allowing him to do the thing he liked the best, which was to teach. He conducted three iterations of a year-long course called “Unmasking Mortality,” and he led a week-long Body Electric workshop at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center in New Mexico called “Touching the Heart of Stillness,” combining Buddhist meditation and erotic massage.

These were crowning achievements in a rich full life. Steve was a renowned psychotherapist and academic in Boston for more than 20 years. In 1996 he published A Crisis of Meaning: How Gay Men Are Making Sense of AIDS. Around the turn of the century, he gave up his therapy practice and became an itinerant monk, traveling around the world, taking part in lengthy meditation retreats (three to six months), and regaling his friends with smart, funny missives about his psychospiritual adventures on the road. (Many of these writings are available to read on his website.) He began teaching classes for the Body Electric School and committed himself to a deep exploration of shamanic practices with sacred medicines.

He was an extraordinary person, Steve Schwartzberg. It was an honor and a pleasure to be his friend, colleague, student, and correspondent for 23 years -- a lifetime of rich shared experience. We met in the context of Body Electric – as assistants to Don Clark and John Ballew for “Healing the Wounded Healer” in 2002 – and bonded immediately as therapists and Bostonians and meditators and ex-partners of prominent gay attorneys.

Collin Brown and Steve Schwartzberg

We crossed paths hither and yon, but our connection deepened considerably when he welcomed me into his sacred medicine study group. And I was delighted when he asked me to assist him for “Touching the Heart of Stillness,” which I insisted on calling “Touching the Tuchus of Stillness.”

Team THOS 2023: Martin Moran, Steve Schwartzberg, Stephen Powell, Sequoia Thom Lundy, and Don Shewey

We did that three years in a row, even though this year he was too ill to travel and gave his teaching via Zoom from home.

What an exercise of intimacy in action! It was a rare gift for me to support his vision and to witness up close his supreme intellect, his compassion, his discernment, and his mastery without ever losing track of fun.

I signed up for the “Unmasking Mortality” course this year, with a sneaking suspicion that it would be my last chance to absorb the deep teachings he was bringing from his front-row seat. What strength and courage it takes to surrender to the reality on the ground and to face “the final curtain” with open eyes and calm heart. I learned a lot from the class about staying present for each moment, making space for lightheartedness and jokes and pop songs and show tunes while also knowing there’s a time to set aside chitchatting a la social media and speak of essential truths.

In the classes that he taught, Steve often shared poems, quotations, and wisdom stories, as dharma teachers tend to do. He ended several classes reading this poem aloud, which I will always associate with him – a poem that ran in The New Yorker in 2021, two years after its author, Jane Mead, died at the age of 61.

I wonder if I will miss the moss

after I fly off as much as I miss it now

just thinking about leaving.

There were stones of many colors.

There were sticks holding both

lichen and moss.

There were red gates with old

hand-forged hardware.

There were fields of dry grass

smelling of first rain

then of new mud. There was mud,

and there was the walking,

all the beautiful walking,

and it alone filled me—

the smells, the scratchy grass heads.

All the sleeping under bushes,

once waking to vultures above, peering down

with their bent heads the way they do,

caricatures of interest and curiosity.

Once too a lizard.

Once too a kangaroo rat.

Once too a rat.

They did not say I belonged to them,

but I did.

Whenever the experiment on and of

my life begins to draw to a close

I’ll go back to the place that held me

and be held. It’s O.K. I think

I did what I could. I think

I sang some, I think I held my hand out.

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