All stroking in life is ultimately for the opportunity to lose something. We stroke, do, and act in this life. Then a window opens, and generally the more skillfully we have stroked, the better the window. We cannot control when the window opens, or how we will respond when it does. We can only lose ourselves in the stroking, stroke to the best of our ability, and do our best to prepare our willingness.
When a window opens, it works by making us an offer. The more willingness we have practiced before the offer comes, the more likely it is that the unconscious part of us is habituated to say yes to the offer when the tumescent mind most wants to hold on and say no.
The nature of the offer will be that we’re in the grip of something. We can stop this thing we are gripped by now and forever release it, or we can continue to be gripped. If we choose to continue, we may not know when our next opportunity to release the behavior will arise. Provided we do say yes, our yes will be an improvisational yes; a combination of preparation and grace. Our best preparation is to steep ourselves in a deep understanding that losing is the natural mind’s only way to win. A life well-lived in the natural world is a life where every last ounce of us is spent.
Within the offer we get a flash of all the ways the behavior has caused us pain. This is an incredibly sobering moment of “this has never worked and it will never work.” Still, we will want to hold on to it. There will be some hope we can change it next time. At the same time, we can see that it’s never worked and it’s never caused anything but pain, but the fear of release is so great. We would rather have a known pain than the discomfort of the unknown.
In order to let go, we must free-fall into a new trust. Our capacity to dive into that free fall determines our capacity for a joyful existence. If it were up to the Erotic, our lives would have very little pain. When a behavior or habit no longer serves us, we would see an open window. We would receive the offer to have it removed from us. We would release it to Eros, and experience a life of progressive liberation.
Accordingly, the goal of Erotic practice is to prepare us to say yes to Eros’s first offer, because Eros’s first offer is always its best. It only goes downhill from there, with increased pain and diminishing returns. A trick is to listen for the window when Eros offers to remove the behavior of the grip itself. This is a particularly challenging one, as people often believe their position is who they are. The truth is, who we are is everything but that grip and what has collected around it.
Release of our rigid positioning is what allows us to move into the flow of Eros. A second trick is to know there is always a moment of disorientation when the window opens and we let go. At a certain point, once we’ve experienced enough of the liberation of release, even our interpretation of that disorientation can be released. It can come to be that right when the window opens, where we used to contract and feel pain, we now feel absolutely reinforced to do everything in our power to be available for it.
We come to realize releasing is our only real option. When we simply modify our behaviors, all we are doing is suspending the impulse for them. This fixing ourselves may be entertaining, but the only way to bring about genuine change within ourselves is to offer up any habitual behavior that no longer serves us.