Explore your sensual connection to life

The urge to take your clothes off in the mountains or at a river. The way the sun on bare skin, or moving water, or warm stone can feel like absolute bliss. The softness of a petal against your lips. There are moments where we feel the sensual pull. There is something in our contact with the living world that is, plainly, erotic, and most people notice it and quietly decide not to mention it. The feeling is there, and you're not the only one to have felt it. Here is one way to understand it, and it is a way many traditions arrive at on their own. The living world turns on a single charged cycle, creation, death, renewal, with no pause between them, and the force that drives it is generative: the same force the body knows as desire. Eros, in this older and larger sense, is bigger than sex: the pull of life toward more life. The Greeks made Eros a primordial god, present at the making of the world. Tantric and Taoist traditions built whole cosmologies on it. Audre Lorde named it the life force itself, and a political power. This is one of the oldest ideas in the human record, and the voices that carried it were reporting from inside the experience. The Sufi poets, Rumi and Hafiz among them, addressed the divine as the Beloved, in the unmistakable language of longing and union. The Song of Songs sits inside the Bible as unembarrassed erotic poetry, read for centuries as the soul meeting God. Teresa of Ávila described that meeting in terms so bodily that her most famous statue is regularly mistaken for rapture of another kind. The bhakti poets of India sang to their gods as lovers. Across traditions that never met, the ones who travelled furthest into union came back speaking of eros. So eros is not only private and personal. The shamanic path works with it directly, through the elements, the body, and the living world around us. The same desire that moves through you moves through stone, water, and weather. This is what eco-erotic means. Followed consciously and safely, it returns you to a sense of oneness, where the separation you assumed between yourself and everything else turns out not to be real. That is the non-dual ground underneath. That return is what the shamanic temple is for.