Where it Started
I used to be a low key love addict. Being in love was an obsession. I constantly needed someone to chase or crush on to be emotionally okay. I chalked it up to being a brooding artist with a naturally desperate need to have a muse.
Heartbreak and longing is excellent fodder for art, but it isn’t that great for the soul. A huge chasm had formed between the intimacy I said I wanted, and the intimacy I allowed myself to have. To be honest, I was fucking miserable.
Believe it to See it
It’s unfortunately true that this reality is a mirror. You see what you believe. Not the other way around. I believed that I could not have the connection I wanted without being in connection with another. This belief only left me feeling powerless and at the mercy of the fickle whims of unsuitable lovers.
I thought that I needed someone else to want me first. To love the parts I deemed unlovable, for me to feel okay loving myself too. As it happens, this life doesn’t work that way. You can’t get there from there. After many years of unrequited love and loneliness, I was sure I was broken. Maybe I wasn’t destined to have the love I really wanted. Maybe heartache and separation were all that this life would be for me.
My Healing Journey
Thankfully, I wasn’t okay with living the rest of my life like that. So, I dove head first into a rabbit hole of spiritual healing and personal growth. I was a maniac, I’m not gonna lie. I went to tons of classes and intensive workshops. Spent thousands on private sessions and shamanic ceremonies. Went to healing arts school and got certified in several modalities. Started a business working in the field. In my business, I taught classes and workshops and held shamanic ceremonies of my own. I wrote several books and courses, got my yoga teacher certification and regularly read tarot and astrology charts. When I tell you I was obsessed, I mean it. I did it all.
After almost two decades of that madness, I wasn’t actually any closer to the feeling I was looking for. Thank god for the infamous Taurean stubbornness. I used it to persist and ask different questions. I looked in different places. Eventually, I began to realize that the connection I was looking for, was connection with myself. The very notion that I needed to be “fixed”, kept me from having it. And if I couldn’t have intimacy with myself, then I damn sure wasn’t going to have it outside of me with another.
Flipping the Script
Focusing on everything that’s “wrong” with us isn’t an easy thing to unravel. It’s a program that’s deeply ingrained in the collective human psyche. In a primal sense, it’s safer to have an external orientation. To constantly be scanning for the approval of others, so we don’t get outcast from the tribe and left to die. This program has long expired in its usefulness for survival in the modern age, but it persists none the less.
Writing is by far one of the best tools that I have found to move my attention from the futile attempt to source love and connection from outside to within. Journaling and self-inquiry writing is helpful yes, but more specifically, I’m speaking of erotic writing.
Permission to Feel
We so often feel like we require another human being to touch and be touched by in order to feel the fullness of the bliss available to us in these bodies. The truth is, that bliss is available at all times. It’s the very fabric that we are made out of.
I have learned that delicious erotic flow is not at all dependent on permission given by someone else’s presence or desire for it. You don’t need permission from anyone but yourself. You need nothing at all except to breathe and tune in to it. It is always waiting, and never leaves you. Because, it is you. We think we want to feel the other, but we are really craving feeling ourselves. In doing so, we are also feeling and honoring that which made us; God, Goddess, Allah, Jehovah, Creator, Universe, Source, the All That Is…etc.
The Erotic isn’t Only About Sex
Erotic writing, contrary to popular belief, isn’t only about sex. It’s about feeling the fullness of life through the erotic power of our sensuality. In fact, the thing that makes sex worth having is the erotic and the sensual. Sensuality is that which relates to the five senses, the sensations that you feel in your body, life force energy coursing through you in its many forms.
What makes something erotic is not sexual content, but the presence and focused attention on the sensations that arise from the object observed or the act performed. It is the tension and arousal that ensues, the turn-on of plugging in to the source of true power. One can certainly have sex without eroticism. The opposite is also true.
Sure, eroticism can take the form of a scrumptious pair of abs, or a rock hard cock, or a dripping wet pussy. But, it can also be the air you are breathing right now. Feeling the sensation of the pull of life moving into your lungs, and filling your cells with vitality. It can be swirling steam, rising up from a fresh and fragrant cup of tea, warming your hands on a cold winter’s night. Or perhaps, the tangy sweetness of a juicy, ripe strawberry, spilling onto your tongue. It can be literally anything, anything at all.
Eroticism Powers Life
The basis of all of creation is desire itself. Life is erotic in nature as so are we. We are made of sex, born of sex, nourished and powered by erotic and sexual energy. Life was created to be a vast and constant sea of delicious and sensuous delights. The ups and downs of our experience, are simply the endless flow of the sumptuous tension and delectable release, inherent in the cycles of living.
Every nerve and cell in your body can experience pleasure. So it must be that we are meant to feel that pleasure, not deny it. Even negative manifestations can feel good, if reduced to the basic building blocks of sensation. Sensation at its core is simply life force in motion, filtered through your senses. You only have to let go of your value judgements, and slow down enough to allow the bliss of it to unfold.
Life Was Made to Feel Good
Life was made to feel good, period. Not just the parts that you approve of, but all of it. Eros is everywhere and in everything. The practice of erotic writing connects you to this unseen world within and without. In order to write about the essence of something, to describe it in detail, you must have experienced that thing intimately.
While most other written word is about what something is from a mental perspective, erotic writing is centered around sensations and emotions. Instead of telling us what something it, it draws us into the thing, so we can know it for ourselves. To effectively accomplish this feat, you must first feel it yourself.
An Unexpected Gift
When I decided to push my writing into a more erotic direction, I did it for the excitement and the thrill of it. What I got was something so much more profound. It immediately gave me a sense of an undeniable and deep presence. The kind of presence promised in all my spiritual seeking, that was never quite found. It was a presence that was much more tangible, rooted, and real. It was not at odds with my sex or sensuality, but thrived in it.
Needing to find words to describe beauty, sex, and pleasure, I had to start paying more attention to everything around me. Suddenly, the whole world came alive for me. Each drop of water falling out of the shower head, now sparkles and lands in warm splashes against thirsty skin. A bird’s wings ruffling in the wind, a reverent homage to liberation. The air rushing into my lungs a revelation, awakening tingling electricity up and down my spine. My pussy warm and wet, pulsing with desire to be penetrated by my lovers, and by all of life. Everything around me became magic again.
An Invitation
So dear reader, I invite you, if you are feeling so inspired, to delve into the wonder and awe of your own erotic writing practice. The quality of the writing is not so important as is the noticing and attention to what you want to write about. For it is in that, where the treasure lies. And if you do end up with a creation that is sexy and tantalizing and/or beautiful to behold, then all the sweeter.
PHOTO BY MIA HARVEY