We drop into the body. It has served us with such devotion, carrying on faithfully with each breath, each heartbeat. It has withstood our wrath when it breaks down or aesthetically disappoints us. Yet it continues, powered by Eros. Our true purpose is not to ascend but to incarnate, to bow down to the body. To treat it with care and devotion.
To offer reverence—the reverence we usually reserve for the exalted—to the loyal friend we perceive as lower than “us” and our high-minded ideals. Whatever we disown but cannot figure out how to dispose of, remains in our bodies.
What we have denied and cut off; what we did not see through to the end; each time we betrayed our true selves; every suppression and deception; each time we wanted something and denied that we wanted it. This kind of behavior becomes deeply ingrained and we become impacted with discards.
Life’s natural imperative is to grow up and out of us.
Our life force will interpret this the only way it can: that it’s unwanted in the world and there is something wrong with us. Despite being due to our own dereliction, the inability to push through our layers of discards will occur in us as shame.
Since we are powerless to express ourselves, we refer to the resulting consciousness as unpowered consciousness. The process of our shame winding deeper and deeper into ourselves, eventually dominating our consciousness as what’s referred to as inwardly collapsed consciousness. Should we discover we can eroticize the experience, shame can instead be experienced as taboo pleasure.
We can learn to allow our shame to nourish and delight us. Taking refuge within, finding reverence for the profane, and honoring shame are all hallmarks of the bridge of shame to freedom. All of this happens in the body, in the embodied sensory world.
Now eroticized, we feel the degradation of complete loss of control, and the pleasure of that loss, and the authority of that pleasure. We long to be stripped of all false pride, every stratagem and artifice. We imagine we are surrendering to something so disgraceful that shame tries to amputate the many parts of us that reach toward life, that seek and desire. But if we go all the way to the bottom, we find ourselves delivered into Eros.
We who have landed at the bottom discover an unanticipated power. We hit a bedrock, and then we no longer have to scramble. Once that bedrock of the bottom is discovered, no matter where we go, we are sure-footed.
We also discover that what is unsavory above is beautiful below. The only thing that is not particularly attractive is control, because it looks and feels fake. There is a feeling of open, undefended resolution at the bottom. The defensiveness is gone—the tension we have held in our breath, in our throats, in our expression. We feel a sense of landing. The bottom is Eros’s dwelling place. Falling is the expression of our secret devotion to Eros.
We cannot earn the love of Eros, and do not have to. We take refuge in what we have been seeking refuge from. We relax into this incarnation. We come home.
