Day 1: Welcome
"A society that could heal the dismembered world would recognize the inherent value of each person and of the plant, animal and elemental life that makes up the earth's living body; it would offer real protection, encourage free expression, and reestablish an ecological balance to be biologically and economically sustainable. Its underlying metaphor would be mystery, the sense of wonder at all that is beyond us and around us, at the forces that sustain our lives and the intricate complexity and beauty of their dance."
— Starhawk
Welcome to 13 Days of Erotic Wellness. In this course we invite you to consider a thing most of us are not taught. We invite you to identify, explore and nourish your unique experience of what we have called Erotic Wellness. In order to do that I want to introduce you to a very old creation story that was repackaged by the Greeks in 700 BC. I’ll use the Greek language and names mostly because they are the names we still use and they may be familiar to you. It’s important to remember that so much of the cosmological narratives and traditional wisdom that we attribute to the Greeks, and other modern cultures, originates from soulfully well cultures that predate them – cultures that relied on oral and pictoral narratives. As you imagine this origin story, please substitute any names and words that feel more in personal and ancestral alignment with your experience.
According to very old origin stories, the force of intelligence and purpose we are now calling Eros was the fourth primordial god, born just after Chaos. As its name implies, Chaos is simply raw life force energy without direction, relationship or purpose. Imagine raw unbound infinite space filled with electrical impulse and charge but no impulse toward creation that would bring form or direction. Eros’ task was to bring form to that raw energy of Life. To bring the non-linear, cyclical energy of relationship, of direction, of the curiosity of boundless creativity to the raw electrical possibility that was Chaos. With Eros, out of the soup of raw energy, came Rivers and Forests, Sky and Earth, Sun and Moon, Tadpoles and Crickets. This took millions and millions, in fact billions of years. And it continues to unfold.
Eros includes our sexual energy but it also so much more. Certainly, it is our orgasmic arousal energy in all its states and shapes. And equally important, eros is also our attraction to a new idea, the sound of the wind moving through trees, the smell of our dog’s toes, the breath of a baby on our cheeks, the spontaneous urge to move to music, the impulse and drive to betroth ourselves to a life of gardening, tending soil, listening to the seeds and plants year after year, and so much more. It is raw life force energy moved into relationship, calling to us to engage in ever-shape-shifting, ever-evolving, ever-deepening ways that inspire us – in fact that demand of us – that we are increasingly engaging, embedded, and participatory within the fabric of Life.
As we teach and invite it, our erotic wellness is the measure of our capacity to be found and nourished by the erotic stream. But even more, our erotic wellness is a measure of what we are offering as much as it is a measure of what we are receiving.
Our erotic wellness can only thrive when we acknowledge that we are an intrinsic part of the unfolding of Life over the last 13 billion years. Every individual plays a unique role in this unfolding and it is up to us to listen for and tend to the specific relationship that is each of ours to have with Life. We see our erotic wellness coming from the places where we are embodied and embedded within – therefore belonging to – the Earth and all its layers of intelligent unfolding. 13 Days of Erotic Wellness is specifically crafted to invite you further into your own unique and irreplaceable experience of erotic wellness.
Each practice we offer you comes from one of four categories, designed to help bring attention to our relationship with eros as well as wellness. They are:
Orienting to what is erotically well in the world
Orienting to what is erotically well in ourselves/our bodies
The landscape of our physical bodies, including our arousal/orgasm
Our ecological embedment
Sprinkled within practices from these four categories, we’ve offered a couple of practices designed to support your increasing awareness around, and capacity for identifying and replacing those behaviors that diminish or hijack your access to erotic wellness.
The First Invitation:
The first invitation we want to offer you is simply to spend some time considering your relationship to eros and to wellness. Each of these on their own might be something you have a lot of reaction and response to. So we invite you to begin your journey with us through the terrain of erotic wellness, by acknowledging and honoring your current relationship to eros and to wellness. Spend fifteen minutes writing, quietly contemplating, or in any way exploring, what eros and wellness mean to you.
