For most of my life, I resisted all emotions. I was so chronically afraid/anxious, and I hated that I was chronically afraid/anxious. I resisted sadness and heartbreak so much that I closed my heart to love. I repressed anger so thoroughly that I naively thought I just wasn’t angry about anything. And joy… it was like “404 Page Not Found” — I had no clue about joy.
And all of this resistance came with lots of judgments of emotions as pesky, uncomfortable, and inconvenient. They were constantly undermining me. I felt so embarrassed and ashamed to feel them, and no part of me felt that it was okay to express them. If I did express them, then I’d be weak, incompetent, pathetic, selfish, immature, unattractive, unprofessional, etc.
And my sex life — well, I’ll just say that I’d given up on thinking I’d ever get to experience an orgasm. Pleasure and arousal simply seemed beyond what my body was capable of experiencing. I wasn’t getting off on anything.
Until, at the age of 28, I had the shocking and life-changing experience of my very first orgasm. A persevering partner patiently and persistently learned to play the instrument of my pleasure body.
And just a few years later, I found myself sitting quietly in silence and stillness, meditating on a prayer, and suddenly I felt a surprising build up of energy in my sex center. The arousal mounted and erupted in an orgasmic burst of pleasure up my spine.
I was shocked! It hadn’t even occurred to me that it was possible to experience orgasm without touch or stimulation! I had absolutely no frame of reference for what had happened.
And then a couple of weeks later, it happened again! But this time, the orgasmic current was bursting through me for 3 full hours! And a couple of weeks later, another explosion of ecstatic energy that had me pulsing in an altered state for 5 hours. Again, no external touch or stimulation at all!
Somehow in just a few years time, I’d gone from complete anhedonia, unable to experience any pleasure in my body… to having energetic orgasms lasting hours on end.
How???
Well, let me fill in a bit more of the story.
That first energetic orgasm happened at the end of my very first transformational retreat experience. I’d spent a week with a dozen strangers, guided into INTENSE emotional release processes. For the first time in my life, I let rage ravage through me. I let myself be gutted by grief. I let terror tear me to death. In this exquisitely and expertly held container, I had my first intimate encounters with these emotions that I had been resisting my entire life.
Through the releases, I moved A TON of emotional energy through my system. Energy that had been stuck for years, even decades.
I came to understand that emotions are meant to move. After all, e-motion is energy in motion.
Furthermore, I saw that our emotional energy is our life force energy. When we stifle our emotions, we stifle our life force. We are living, but not ALIVE.
And when we allow our life force energy to run through us, we can feel pleasure. The divine instrument of our body sings, like a majestic flute.
Imagine a flute with a bunch of crap stuck inside of it, clogging its orifices. How does that impact the instrument, and its ability to sing? This is what stuck emotions do to us. They hinder the song of our eros, our life force, our enjoyment of life, our orgasmic experience of life.
The thing is – we are all naturally bursting with life force energy. It’s not something we need to cultivate or gain. We simply need to clear our channels so that it has space to flow. Clear our channels of old, stuck, stale emotions.
How? By feeling them instead of suppressing them. By welcoming and allowing them instead of resisting them. And what I discovered is that, in doing so, we can even find whiffs of pleasure in our difficult emotions… Ever feel turned on by the fire of anger? What about the thrill of fear? How about the sweet yearning of grief?
After all, we evolved to have these emotions for a reason. Each serves an evolutionary purpose. Each carries an intelligence, a wisdom, a signal that helps us navigate our lives.
Emotions moving Eros:
“Eros is the life instinct, which manifests itself in love, sexuality, and the creative urge.” – Sigmund Freud
In essence, Eros is our life force and the source of our creativity.
When we resist our emotions, we make ourselves deaf to their signals, and we block ourselves from the pleasure and life force that comes through them. We block our very own Eros. We block our very own sexual energy, our creative energy.
Each of our emotions, even the unpleasant ones, can be felt in us as a swelling of life force that holds a certain aroma of pleasure in it:
The burn of anger clarifies our values, it tells us that something we care deeply about needs to be fought for and protected. If we can embrace our anger, we can feel within it the immense Pleasure of our Power.
The waters of grief show us our deep care, and help us let go of our attachment to an object of our love. Like a river, grief helps us wash away attachments that no longer serve us and move forward with the flow of life. If we can embrace our sadness, we can feel within it the sweet Pleasure of our Love and Surrender.
The electricity of fear calls us to pay attention, alerts us to proceed with caution for the sake of preserving all that we care about. It keeps us grounded and aware as we dare to take risks and live the lives of our souls. After all, we are all the descendants of those ancestors who listened to their fear and thus survived and even thrived. If we can embrace our fear, we can feel within it the thrilling Pleasure of Exhilaration.
The expansion of joy signals our appreciation, it tells us that someone or something needs to be celebrated! If we can embrace our joy, we can feel within it the blissful Pleasure of Ecstasy.
Eros is passion, and each emotion arouses intense passion in us. Anything we do with passion in an unrestricted way is erotic. Hence, when we permit ourselves to fully experience the passion of our emotions, we can ride our emotions straight into orgasmic states. So yes! Our emotions ARE erotic, our emotions are our Eros, and we can learn to experience them as such.
Anger arouses our passion for agency and influence. Our passionate determination to uphold our values.
Grief arouses our passion for love and intimacy. Our passionate longing for connection.
Fear arouses our passion for security and safety. Our passionate will for life.
Joy arouses our passion for celebration and expansion. Our passionate honoring of what’s good in our lives.
When we let the unrestricted passion of our emotions rip through us, we can feel their orgasmic pleasure. And when we recognize that each of these “uncomfortable” emotions can be quite pleasurable, we naturally resist them less. We may even come to welcome them! And when our emotions are welcomed by us, they flow through us with more fluidity and we benefit from more access to their intelligence and guidance.
We can then live more wise, more full, more pleasurable lives!
Amazing, right?!?
Okay, but here’s something EVEN MORE AMAZING…
Eros moving emotions:
This becomes a positive feedback loop. Because, you see, the pleasure and erotic current moving through us can also serve to clear out old stuck emotional gunk in our system. Just like running warm water through the flute can clear out the gunk clogging its orifices.
Perhaps you’ve noticed this during sexual intimacy… suddenly a wave of grief rolls through and your moans of pleasure turn into weeping. Or perhaps a burst of anger inspires the unleashing of a roar. Or maybe you’ve noticed your body start shaking as though it’s releasing some somatic tension that has been held by latent fear or anxiety. I’ve experienced all of the above. And more!
There’s also the aftermath… Perhaps you’ve noticed a refreshing sense of openness, clarity, and increased emotional fluidity after having expressed some sexual energy. Time and time again, I’ve had the experience of feeling stuck, emotionally constipated, and at a loss for what to do about a challenging experience in my life… and then in the wake of a sexual experience (and sometimes even during) I’ve unexpectedly been hit by a brilliant stroke of insight. Suddenly I can see possibilities and connections that I was previously blind to. The path forward simply reveals itself to me. The stuckness and frustration give way to excited determination and a flow of inspiration. Does any of this happen to resonate with you?
There’s a fantastic tale of Hercules that illustrates this power of Eros to clear away stuckness. Hercules was sadistically given the task of cleaning the Aegean Stables, which had not been cleaned for years and thus had enormous piles of revolting bull shit. Hercules was given the impossible task of cleaning the stables in a single day. He relinquished the shovel he had been given, and used his strength and ingenuity to redirect the course of a nearby river, causing it to flow right through the stables. The force of the water cleaned out the stables completely, in a mere matter of moments.
I’ve experienced this with the erotic current flowing through me – stuck old energetic and emotional shit simply liberates and gets cleared out. So much so that my body shape and posture has even changed, as well as my behaviors and belief patterns. I’ve experienced massive healing taking place in a very short amount of time through this. Healing taking place in the most pleasurable of ways.
So, what’s the moral of the story here?
Emotions, life force energy, and erotic energy are all fundamentally one.
Instead of resisting our emotions, we can let them pleasure us. Instead of wanting our emotions to “fuck off”, we can allow them to “fuck us open”. We can fuck ourselves open with our very own emotions.
Comments