Divine Eros — From Seduction to Surrender

I have been contemplating the second gateway of the Venusian descent, Divine Eros, the sacral, and through it I am beginning to understand one of the most visceral initiations of my own journey.

When my sexual energy began to awaken with enormous force, I knew that I was being asked to consecrate it. The energy itself was never the problem. It was alive, magnetic, creative and powerful, but I could feel that the way I related to it was distorted. I was still directing this force outward, searching for its expression and fulfilment through the world around me, while at the same time being called in the opposite direction: deeper into myself.

Apparently I needed a rather dramatic interruption to understand this.

I was asked to cut my hair.

I remember screaming as it was cut away. There was nothing graceful about the experience. It was visceral, painful and strangely humiliating. My hair had carried so much of my feminine identity, beauty and seductive power, and losing it felt like being stripped of a language through which I had learned to meet the world. Still, underneath the resistance there was a knowing that I could not explain. Some wisdom was operating here, even if I just wanted to yell f*ck!.

I did not understand why this was being asked of me, but I knew that the force guiding my life was taking me somewhere I could not yet see. These are the moments where my trust has been built, unseemingly strange, yet so fitting.

So I surrendered.

Looking back, the words that arise for this initiation are from seduction to surrender. Not because seduction is inherently wrong or that sexuality needed to be rejected, but because I had to discover what remained when I stopped directing this immense life force toward an external object.

Most of my deepest and most beautiful experiences of sexual energy had happened through another person, through attraction, longing and the meeting of bodies and energies. I also had a personal relationship with my own sexuality, but even there the current never felt entirely clear. There was an underlying distortion, a sense that this force had become entangled with energies and meanings that did not belong to its deepest nature. I had never fully learned to inhabit my sexual energy simply as the movement of life within my own body.

And this reflects a much larger pattern in my life. For a long time I experienced life primarily in relationship to what was outside of me: people, places, lovers, interests, experiences and worlds that fascinated me. Even after years of travelling inward, a layer of me remained under the enchantment of the external world. The doorway still seemed to exist somewhere out there. Another person could awaken the deepest Eros. Another place could awaken belonging. Another relationship could make home possible.

This is where Dissolution enters the story.

The second alchemical operation belongs to water: the loosening and dissolving of what has become fixed. In my own life there was an extraordinary amount of water. I spent years inside an ocean of feeling, crying until tears became another language. What I could not understand or think my way through had to move through the body. Structures that had become too solid to even recognize as structures began to dissolve through feeling.

The sexual initiation and the emotional dissolution now seem intimately connected. I had to become fluid enough to discover what Eros was underneath everything I had attached to it. Instead of asking where the sexual energy wanted to go, I had to learn to remain with the energy itself. What is this force when I do not seduce with it, pursue through it, suppress it, discharge it or immediately give it an object?

What is Eros when I simply stay?

This is where Divine Eros and the Underworld begin to reveal themselves as an axis.

The sacral invites me to feel Life moving through me. The Underworld strips away everything I have mistaken for the source of that Life.

My awakening sexual energy therefore did not lead me outward into greater sexual expression. It led me downward. I entered a long Underworld journey of locating what stood between me and the direct experience of this force: shame, projection, the need to be desired, the need to be met, and all the places where sexuality had become entangled with love, worth, power, belonging and fantasy. It also brought me into direct confrontation with forces that, in my own experience, had distorted my relationship with sexual energy and made parts of it feel fundamentally different from its sacred nature.

The work was never to purify sexuality because sexuality itself was impure. It was to distinguish the original current from everything that had accumulated around it.

The Underworld became an uncompromising place of discernment. Layer after layer could be felt and examined against one simple question: Is this Eros itself, or is this what I have learned to attach to Eros?

What remained underneath became increasingly simple.

Life moving inside a body.

Seen from here, cutting my hair carries a different meaning. My erotic power was not taken from me. I was separated from one of the places where I had learned to locate and express that power. The symbol disappeared, but the force remained, and when I could no longer reach for it through the same external language, I had to follow it inward.

From seduction to surrender. From surrender to inhabitation.

This is also touching another realization moving through me now. I recently found an old belief that I need another person to make certain parts of my life possible: a home, land, rootedness, the life I deeply long for. The belief surprised me because I realized that I no longer actually believe it, yet parts of my life may still have been organized around it.

The structure underneath it is strikingly similar. Another person becomes the gateway to an experience I have not fully recognized my own capacity to enter.

This does not mean that I am meant to do everything alone. Radical responsibility is not hyper-independence. I want relationship, collaboration, intimacy and the mystery that can only arise between beings. The difference is that another person does not need to be the one who grants me access to my own life.

Another person can awaken Eros with me without being the source of it. Another person can build a home with me without being the one who makes home possible. Another person can meet me deeply without becoming the keeper of the parts of myself I have placed outside of me.

This changes relationship rather than diminishing its importance. When another human being no longer has to carry my own life force, home, destiny or sense of existence for me, I become more capable of meeting them as they actually are.

And this brings me back to the relationship between the sacral and the Underworld. The sacral awakens the current. The Underworld removes what obstructs direct contact with it. One teaches me to receive Life; the other takes away the structures through which I believed Life had to arrive.

The first movement of incarnation is:

I give Life permission to enter me.

The second becomes:

I allow myself to feel Life moving within me.

And then the Underworld asks the question that has followed me through years of descent:

Can I bear the intensity of being alive without placing the source of that aliveness outside myself?

I could not have understood any of this when those scissors cut through my hair. At the time I could only scream, grieve and feel the strange shame of being stripped of a part of my feminine identity while trusting that the force carrying me knew where it was taking me.

Now I can see the direction more clearly.

I was not being asked to give away my Eros.

I needed to stop giving it away.

The journey was taking me toward a place where Eros no longer needs to seduce Life into coming closer, because Life is already here, moving within my own body.

And I am learning to stay with Her.

(Maya Luna has been a great inspiration to my contemplations, I have deep appreciation to her wisdom and work)