A house is nothing without a solid foundation. Try to build on a shaky one and you’ll have a disaster on your hands. People are similar in that unless our vital basics are attended to—food, shelter, hygiene—it will be more difficult to accomplish higher-order tasks like creativity or regular job attendance. Eros is interested in excellence and it doesn’t care much for showboats, even (or perhaps especially) if that excellence is in dishwashing, trash collecting, or bed making.
Eros wants our offering and it wants to know we will stick it out through the discomfort of being new and unwieldy out of love for ourselves and for the love of the process, not for our vanity. It wants to know we will stay with ourselves through what we’re taught is mundane, electrifying it with our gusto. When we pour our whole heart into something, no matter if it's plain or fancy, we elevate it to the level of art. The way we do anything is the way we do everything. We would do well to master the simplest, most menial tasks thoroughly before trying to do it in a handstand.
In OM, we practice a simple, medium pressure, medium stroke, taking care to track the motion up down, up down, up down, feeling every molecule of the stroke before trying to blow our partners fuses. We place our hands on our partners thighs with exquisitely neutral pressure and placement.
We take care to do a towel stroke that feels like a towel stroke, neither tentatively hesitant or rushed through. We ask for simple adjustments and make basic offers to dial in our intuition and sense of direction. We stay present for each step, keeping our inner ear open for whatever the stroker says during the noticing step. We go through the motions until we fully inhabit them.
