Erotic Energy, Simplified

This contemplation arose after realizing how differently we can understand the words Eros, erotic and desire.

For some people, eroticism seems almost synonymous with displaying sexuality, sexual attraction, or directing desire toward another person. I realized that when I use the same words, I am speaking about something quite different.

So I wanted to clarify what Eros means to me.

Eros is my capacity to love.

My capacity to receive love, to be touched by life, and to fall deeply in love with being alive.

There is an ancient understanding of Eros that I find beautiful: a movement of longing toward beauty and the good. Something encounters beauty and moves toward it. Something recognizes what it loves and comes alive in response.

This is very close to how I experience erotic energy.

Eros → Longing → Beauty → Love → Aliveness → Movement toward Life

It is not static. It moves.

I feel it when something touches me deeply enough that my whole being responds. A landscape. Music. Words arriving while I write. My hands in the earth. Beauty. Tenderness. Another human being. The simple pleasure of inhabiting my body.

Eros is life in me recognizing what it loves.

And longing, to me, does not automatically mean I need to have that.

Sometimes longing simply says:

Something here has revealed what I love.

This distinction has become incredibly important to me.

Another person can awaken an enormous movement of Eros within me. I can feel attraction, tenderness, desire and extraordinary aliveness in their presence. The encounter is real. The beauty I perceive is real. The person matters.

But they are not the source of my capacity to love.

They may simply have walked close enough to a forgotten chamber that something inside me heard their footsteps and woke up.

And then what has awakened is mine to meet.

This is also where I distinguish desire from projection.

Desire can move toward something outside of me without requiring me to place the source of my life force there. I can desire a person, a home, touch, beauty, the sea, intimacy, creation, and remain rooted within myself.

Beauty is allowed to call me.

Longing is allowed to move me.

Love is allowed to have direction.

What matters is that I remember where the capacity to experience all of this lives.

Eros can move into relationship with another human being, but it can just as naturally become a poem, a garden, a meal, movement, creativity, service, devotion, intimacy with the earth, or a deeper willingness to participate in my own existence.

This is why erotic energy, in my inner language, is something much larger than sexuality.

It is aliveness moving toward life.

Reclaiming Eros therefore means reclaiming my capacity to be deeply affected by existence. To let myself be moved by beauty. To recognize what I love and allow that recognition to deepen my participation in the world.

I can remain the source of my own loving awareness while letting the world touch me profoundly.

Maybe that is the simplest way I can describe it:

Eros is life in me recognizing what it loves, and moving closer to life because of it.