Eros is a wild card.

An erotic presence ripples between bodies and in the breath, stirring the deepest recesses of ourselves, changing the landscapes it moves in. We recognise its unyielding felt power, ricocheting from one sexually repressed body to another in lightening heat, revealing and alchemising new forms in its wake.

Our world history, our very existence is defined by the erotic. Epochs carved by the sexual encounters that stirred wars and ended them, ‘the destruction of love was a prerequisite for the creation of modern, imperial societies, for loving being cannot be controlled’.

The story of eros is the story of war between the sexes. For centuries humans have suffered the wounds of love and sexuality, jealousy and revenge, unrequited love and murder for loves sake. Power play, patriarchal oppression and porn have carved our unconscious sexual identities. Still, even after all our pain and in all our madness, we crave love. We long for the dissolution of what keeps us apart. To merge in ecstatic union and the warm sensual freedom of loving. But our longings make us vulnerable and our loving makes us lose all illusion of control. We bloom into our adolescent erotic longings and sing our flowering essence out into the world, but the landscapes are barren with sexual violence and disrespect.

The message is that it is not safe to be a sexual being.  

An erotic presence in the complex cultural tapestries of our world stirs up the most hidden recesses of our sexual identities. The sensual, in the face of sexualisation, is not an easy task. As sensitive beings we feel the natural impulse to cover ourselves, hide our beauty and make our self expression a more palpable size for the tight lipped mouth of society.

Our natural desires are not defined by the places we are born or the religion we choose, they as much as part of ourselves as the fingers that reach from our bodies in longing to make contact with the textures of our world. Life itself, is humming with an erotic presence. The fruits, flowers are the most awe inspiring expressions of nature’s sexual self. Yet the myth of eros we have come to embed within our consciousness is that of fear.

Reclaiming our erotic nature is not simply re-awakening the wild force of our power, it is a path of the self love and endurance. To remain seated in truth and endure the hostile, often dangerous, landscapes of misogyny, homophobia, racism, religion… on and on we go. All of these colours that paint our world create unconscious projections and reactions of fear to eros. We are haunted by centuries of sexual violence and those old ideologies and omnipresent realities still inundate our freedom. To re-awaken eros is a truly courageous, rebellious and liberating act. And whilst we must shape ourselves to suit the various cultural customs of our shared world, it is often the various ideologies that were created by men, to serve men, hidden under the expectations and demand for cultural ‘respect’. Yet these are cultural cages. Not just for women but for us all. Religions that are coated in spiritual manipulation, germinating fear, hatred and idolising the separative mentalities that have brought our earth into mass extinction. It is the unity of nature’s intelligence, our own natural selves that will guide us into the abundance that is our birthright. Not in actions that arise out of fear, but out of love. We are not activists because we are afraid but because we are loving and are here to defend what we love.

The story of eros is also a story of the water cycles of our earth. The most feminine expression of water in our earth is that of the river flow, the most masculine expression is the penetrative rain. We have lost one of our greatest sources of fresh water – ground water. The soils of the earth have been damaged by the miscare of our species so much that the earth, our great Mother, can no longer receive the masculine water.

“Soil building in nature is trust building in life”.

We need to heal the trust that was broken between the genders so that nature can balance itself out. For, the masculine and feminine are the essential archetypal expressions of life itself and the world crisis is a mirror of our inner crisis. We are the earth and the earth is us. We are perfect mirrors. What would the Earth look like without flowers, fruits, the nectar of life? If nature itself condemned its sexuality there would be no life. Sexuality, eros, is the creative force that animates every living thing. The erotic is not made for our partners and doesn’t live inside our bedroom walls, it is the presence that takes the living and brings us truly Alive.

The need for love, the desire for love exists beyond the crystallised romantic idealisation of the ‘One’ and into a sovereign seated power source within ourselves which oozes out into our intimate conversation with the world. Our relationship with the erotic self has been severed by one defining wound that keeps the masculine and feminine bound in opposition –

Trust.

A woman’s history gives her little experiential reason to trust men with her whole body, for those who believe in a karmic evolution her story is… well we all know the history of women. That distrust is triggered & played out from father to daughter, lover to brother, partner to husband again and again. The trust between genders & between all humans has been broken. Women don’t trust men & men don’t know what women want, or how to treat them. Our erotic self has become our most hidden aspect of existence. We deny its presence in order to ‘be appropriate’ and conserve the status quo of modernity. In doing so, we disembody and fragment ourselves depending on the places we inhabit each day. Shaping and moulding ourselves for the misguided comforts of conformity. The instability of an unhealed culture creates unsafe landscapes of self expression.

It is not a story of good and evil but of conscious and unconscious, students and teachers and the interplay between those states of being within ourselves. Old wounds and new choices. We know what the suppression of the erotic self looks like, it builds and erupts in volcanic aggressive sexuality. Domestic violence, depression, sexual violence, child molesting, sex trafficking are the realities of our inability to heal the erotic within ourselves and the world. If we are to address any issue it must come down to the wellbeing of our inner worlds.

Suppressing our sensual nature is the most self sabotaging act we can do.

The way we create and eat food is an erotic experience, the way we dance and make music, the way the soft arching sand filters glides over our skin, the way the eyes of a strangers meet in magnetism, salty water caressing our bodies, the wind brushing over our hair; our sensuality is our soul expression.

We breathe, we are breathed by the erotic presence of life. Where there is life, there is the erotic. Yet there is an intrinsic relationship between the erotic and the landscapes through which that power is expressed. We live in a complex modern world and our wounded hearts remember the sufferings of betrayal, mistrust, rejection and all traumas in love strongly. Often our triggers are as sensitive as our skin and in the reality of our unhealed societies we do not find safe containers to express and explore the eros within. To heal the soils of trust in relationships is a raw path of radical transparency we must walk. It may blister our feet and bare open our vulnerable fleshed bodies, yet only Truth will bring us reconciliation and only in Trust will we find peace.

Isabella Gillespie

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