— by Emaya (Elfi) Dillon
My personal connection with Body Electric began twenty-five years ago when my heart and body ached under the weight of fractured relationships with sexuality, partners, and community. By then, I had submitted to talk therapy and studied sexuality from a psychological point of view. I wanted and longed for a more satisfying way to learn about embodied human sexuality, and I found it through “Celebrating the Body Erotic.” The experience reoriented me to a deep connection with erotic life and taught me the tools for orgasmic living. My heart opened, and so did my body. I learned to let go of sexual guilt and shame. And I began to ponder the ideas of Erotic Literacy and Sexual Intelligence and how best to share this wisdom with others.
In his essay collection The Double Flame, Octavio Pax writes, “The original, primordial fire of eroticism is sexuality; it raises the red flame of eroticism, which in turn raises and feeds another flame, tremulous and blue. It is the flame of love and eroticism. The double flame of life.”
We can be intelligent about sexuality, and at the same time, learn that sexuality is itself a kind of intelligence.
Sexuality is not only something to be intelligent about–it is also a way of knowing what the world is. Sexual and erotic literacy is the skill to read the language of sexuality, a language written deeply in the cellular structure of our bodies. Though it’s sometimes forgotten, we can discover and relearn our erotic capacity, whether alone or in the excellent company of fellow erotic explorers.
Each one of us begins when egg and sperm meet; the context around this event is unique to each of us. We are essentially life expressing itself, taking on our shape and being. Sexual energy is the potent force that connects us with one another and makes us acutely aware that we live in the body, that we are incarnated – in carne – “in the flesh.” This also means that we will become aware, sooner or later, that this body, “me”, will someday die. Human beings have learned to tighten against the strong forces that brought us here, maybe in the hope that if we don’t fully live, we won’t have to die. That tightening can bring about a profound disconnection from vitality, a retreat into a small part of the mind. It creates a constricted musculature of discomfort to which we adapt so thoroughly that we become unconscious of it.
Every new era of human culture begets its own sexual oppositions of light and shadow, its own signature of morality, and devices to control the expression of erotic desire. Some deem sexual confinement necessary for so-called civilizations to emerge. Against this, we must learn how to navigate our bodies and sexual desire within the great sea of life and of our culture. Fear of repercussions for our sexuality keeps us erotically illiterate, hobbles our creativity, and prevents us from opening fully to pleasure, to ourselves, and to others. The specter of “original sin,” the notion that we are separate from the rest of creation, still haunts us in its many shapes and shows up especially in our sexuality.
Our present time, awash in so-called sexual freedom, is saturated with sexually charged images and messages. Amid this horn of plenty, some people withdraw from erotic life altogether, overwhelmed, shy and frozen, while others are gladly swept away. Some will submit to the power of sexuality in ways that harm the body, the psyche, and relationships. Many of us drift in a sexual paradox, unaware of the unconscious myths that govern our sexual relations. Some of us remain numb to the ecstatic wealth within our own living bodies by swallowing our breath and our words, and we continue to forget our great ancestral source, the natural world, which birthed us; we forget consciousness itself.
Fortunately, deep inside us, there resides a longing that comes from the memory of a time when humans existed deeply connected to nature. Being in our longing, “being-in-the-longing,” belonging, soars on the wings of Eros and opens our senses to the beauty of the world and of each other. The desire to express our sexual nature persists, but we are often stifled by infused shame and guilt. We seek our sexual connections for many reasons: for pleasure and from loneliness, for romance, love, and children, for the desire to feel life itself, and perhaps to taste the ecstasy of consensual play with power and surrender. Secretly and hurriedly sometimes, constricted by conflicting messages within, we remain unaware of the healing potential that sexual energy could bring to us. Instead, we often emerge from sexual encounters confused, scared, and scarred – emotionally, spiritually, and sometimes physically. Many of us suffer from the effects of sexual violation and of trespasses that live on as armored musculature, anxious minds, and stifled breath. These wounds turn what should be a clear river of pleasurable life into a stagnant murk of suffering.
We can’t always know how to unbind these restrictions alone, and so we seek out guidance from teachers, from sexually gifted healers, or spiritual guides who point us back to the source – to our own intrinsic life force. Eventually, many of us found all this in the work of Body Electric.
At the center of Body Electric teaching lies the compassionate heart, whose intelligent counsel promotes an ecstatic life that integrates spirituality with the open-minded and sensuous celebration of our sexual energy. We recover the beautiful tools already implicitly present in each of us: the exquisite power of breath as healer and lover, the art of living in our senses together in community and, with consent, of using eyes and touch to connect with one another.
In sacred space, we can celebrate ecstatic presence with music, humor, and the wild kindness of Eros.
This article was written in partnership with Gary Kekoa Dillon.
Art by Gary Kekoa
