An Erotic Awakening
Erotic : the arousing and experiencing of eros.
Eros is life force, the energy that animates our being. It’s aliveness, spontaneity, turn on and true power. Eros fills our spiritual life with vitality, our minds with creativity, our ideas with embodiment and our relating with rich intimacy. This is the experience of the erotic. Sex, connection, creation, and raw expression open us to its flow.
Awakening : a rousing from sleep, inactivity or indifference; a coming into awareness.
Awakening is seeing and experiencing the true nature of things. Moving us from thinking to knowing, it evokes, reveals, and reorganizes us to be in alignment with reality. Awakening shows us where we’ve been caught in delusion, disconnection, fear and resentment. It gives us access to the truth beneath the surface — the understanding that frees.
To erotically awaken is to open to the power and depth of eros, experiencing its liberating force across our lives. To awaken erotically is to include all that arises on the way as the way — love and light, darkness and desire.
The erotic’s natural intelligence is expressed as desire. When we open our senses and refine our hearing, desire can speak to us clearly. What it says may surprise us. It will definitely destabilize our rigid identities. And while some desires are twisted by our conditioning, even those twisted desires can teach us, if we’re willing to pay attention. Desire is a guide we can come to trust.
Conversely, when desire and eros are obstructed, we are filled with agitation, anxiety, defensiveness and fatigue. Sound familiar? This is tumescence — the experience of blocked eros in our body. Eros is dynamic, it wants to move — and when we clamp it down the results are evident. The good news is that every ounce of tumescence is an ounce of potential turn on just waiting to be released. Learning to convert it from stagnation to flow is key to erotic awakening.
Fear and resistance is a natural part of opening to erotic energy and allowing it to flow. As it begins to move inside us, it shakes up trapped feelings and instincts — sadness, rage, sex, longing. Things we may have long denied or projected onto others. Eros is an inherently disruptive energy, and we want our repressions and projections disrupted. We’re breaking up years, even lifetimes, of habit and conditioning, and replacing them with something better — something deeper, truer and ultimately more reliable.
So rather than transcend, reject, or deny fearful or desirous parts of ourselves, pushing them further into the unconscious, we recognize and open to them, approve, get curious about what they have to teach us, and come to know their nature. We allow them to wake up our bodies and our minds. This leads to wholeness. We open for more of life to come through us, not less. And along with it, more freedom, more wisdom, more intimacy… and more fun!
Instead of managing life, we start to play with it. We sex. We create. We express. We love. All infused with real power and sight.
The practices of meditation, orgasmic meditation, and inquiry cultivate our capacity to do this. A teacher or guide who is unafraid of our fear, undeterred by our intensity, and committed to the deeper intelligence inside walks with us, both challenging and cheering us on. All people in the world become our fellows on the path — provoking and supporting our growth. This is the way of erotic awakening. This is what I offer.
Welcome.
(On the Origins of Eros: For the Greeks of 500 BCE, the void of Chaos gave birth to the creative impulse of Eros, which catalyzed the formation of physical existence. Other legends speak of Eros as the spark of desire that united Heaven and Earth, a union that created the entire material world. For Plato, eros was an intermediary between humans and the divine. Freud called it life instinct. To Jung it was the impetus to connect.)
