In a world where we think we always want to be the one on top—the predator—we forget we have a need to be warm and held inside the belly of the beast. We want to be possessed. There is an impersonal longing that has zero rational discrimination. It can present as addiction, yearning, obsession—something activated within us that calls to be taken. We hunger for a loss of control.
We veer toward acceptable versions of this; we cloak it in love or spirituality, but this acts only to distort love and spirituality and drain desire of its potency. Without permission to let go, our lives grow heavy and overburdened with responsibility.
The rational mind gets evermore demanding and keeps us in a chronic battle against desire. It is one of the great paradoxes of Eros that to surrender we need to take responsibility.
Eros points us toward the discarded parts of ourselves that signify what we too often see as weakness; the part that caves, the doormat, the desperate one. By lifting our shame, inferiority, and self-betrayal, Eros unleashes tremendous stuck energy and makes it available to us. We only need to know how to use it.
Only then do we realize nothing we do can make us wrong. Only then can we step into a seamless reality where we can love ourselves with the heart of compassion and allow the armoring to come off all of our ideas in response to what our deeper selves have been asking.
Eros develops in us the capacity to listen and respond to a deeper voice. We discard the scripts that are based on ideas rather than felt truth.
Our sense of “good” and “bad” is dynamic and fluid, driven by the question: Does who we are and what we do lead us to greater intimacy with whatever it is we are attending to? Eros is based on our capacity to hear and respond rather than read, execute, and accept responsibility by becoming perfectly responsive.