Eros Is Much More Than Sexuality

The lake was an invitation to merge with water — a surrender to the fact that most of my body is water anyway. The stone I was lying on carried the memory of the mother who brought me into the material world, and of the stardust my body is made of. The music drifting across the water became a bridge of synchronicity between my heartbeat and the heartbeat of the musicians playing it.

I became one with the music, the movement, the dance.

Or was it me who changed, and the world stayed the same?… ;-)

This is Eros.

Not the version we've been taught. 

What most people don't understand about Eros is that it is much more than sexuality. 

We've become so used to thinking of it as something tied to sex, desire, attraction, erotic relationships — and yes, sexuality can be an expression of Eros. But Eros is much bigger than that.

Eros is the life force running through your body: an electric current in the nervous system, waves in your emotional body that, when flowing freely, wakes you up to being alive. When you're connected to it, you don't simply live your life. You experience it.

What changes when we are connected to Eros?

Everything.

As within, so without.

Any blockage in our inner system shapes how we experience the world around us — and the same law holds when our channels are open. An Eros-activated life becomes vast, deep, and far more touching. The sky moves you. Music enters your whole body, not just your ears. Conversations reach something deeper inside you. You become sensitive, present, available.

Life stops being something happening out there for you to observe. It's happening inside you. Experience, life, and you become one.

When you are it, and it is you, separation dissolves — between your body and the music, your body and the earth, the water, the air, even the fire, which is the fire of life inside you.

This is what I mean by living an ecstatic life. Ecstasy doesn't necessarily mean being high, euphoric, or in constant pleasure. The word itself points to something more fundamental: a state in which we move beyond our usual, limited sense of ourselves and become deeply present to what's happening now. Eros is the portal to that state — reached from within your own body, rather than opened temporarily by a medicine journey or some other outside door. It awakens your senses, your emotions, your body's capacity to be touched by life.

Perhaps this is one of the great losses of modern life: we get very good at functioning while becoming less and less alive. We work, communicate, consume, plan, scroll, achieve, and move from one thing to the next — while our bodies are quietly asking:

Can you feel me?

Can you feel the air on your skin?

Can you feel the music?

Can you feel the movement?

Can you feel the person standing in front of you?

Can you feel the life moving through you right now?

Reconnecting with Eros is, in many ways, a return to simplicity. Not a spiritual practice to master, not something to achieve. A remembering — that your body is your instrument for experiencing life.

You don't need life to become more extraordinary. You need to become available to the extraordinary nature of life that's already here, already entering you — the way the lake enters the swimmer, the way water finds water.