Session 1
Home Invitation | Video Recording | Audio Recording | Uses of the Erotic | Word Cloud
Your home invitation this week is to engage in an erotic pleasure practice. Take into account the redefinitions that we’ve started, and see how you might move into an experience that reconnects you with or reinforces your belonging and your interconnectedness.
This could look like a walk, taking a moment to bask in the sunlight, and getting curious about what the impact on the sun is from your basking? And then noticing that just to your left, there is a tree also basking in the sun. Suddenly, this is not a solo practice, it is communal!
It could also look like making love with your partner or yourself, or softly caressing the inside of your wrist.
Anything that is embodied and that helps you to see/feel/remember/experience embodied relational intimacy is what you are moving towards. You might not hit the nail on the head, and that’s okay! You don’t have to do this perfectly – it is a practice! Hold this intention and see what happens.
A few logistics:
You may want to set a timer so that you can relax around time. Or, you may choose to take little sips of this practice throughout your day. Or, both!
Make sure that your body is included.
Take a few moments at the end of your practice to savor what you just experienced. Revisit it in your mind, taking yourself through the experience again so that your brain has time to lay down memories and new neural pathways.
“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. For the demands of our released expectations lead us inevitably into actions which will help bring our lives into accordance with our needs, our knowledge, our desires. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for or accept many facets of our oppression as women.”
– Audre Lorde
“The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects - born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of ... lifeforce... of that creative energy empowered...”
– Audre Lorde
“The erotic has often been misnamed … and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information…”
– Audre Lorde
To read Audre Lorde’s essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power follow this link or listen to her read it in the video below.
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings…”
— Audre Lorde
Session 2
Your home invitation this week is to bring the Learning Zone into your erotic embodiment practice. This could look like repeating the exercise we did in session, shutting down and amplifying an emotion. You could also move into sexual arousal and play with your learning zone edges there. As always, there are many ways that this could look, so find a way, and see what happens.
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings…”
— Audre Lorde
“Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea…”
— Audre Lorde
“Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea…”
— Audre Lorde
Session 3
Your home invitation this week is a self-sensation practice engaging with your body as if it were a wild landscape. This combines a version of deep imagery journeying with self-pleasure. Over here, the ocean. Down here, mountains, a marsh, a desert, a forest. What happens as you experience your body in this way? Do you approach it differently when it is held as a wild landscape?
Also, see if you can allow the possibility that your body might be speaking to you as you go. What does your hip bone have to say? Is your shoulder speaking in some way?
Click here for a framework, a most basic outline of a self-sensation practice session. Keep in mind, these are all suggestions. You can’t do this wrong! It’s all an experiment, a practice, a place to explore and learn. Perhaps even finding your way to enchantment and delight.
"...when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness or those supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self effacement, depression, self-denial."
— Audre Lorde
Session 4
"...when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness or those supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self effacement, depression, self-denial."
— Audre Lorde