As I was growing up in the urban area of Chicago and coming into myself as a sexual being there was little opportunity for me to consciously learn how to accept myself as an erotic creature. As an adolescent teenager, there were lots of confusing and beautiful sexual desires in my body and I was feeling the peer pressure to not be left behind in sexual experimentation. I realized at a very young age that I possessed a high sex drive which I had no idea how to contain, express or own as my own life force. It took a destroyed marriage in order for me to look closer and unpack the meaning of my own erotic embodiment and how I can own it as mine and be able to express myself as an erotic creature on this planet. I’ve come to believe that how I’ve been able to express my erotic self, my sexuality and my embodied vitality has directly effected how I can live into the uniqueness that I call my own unique self. Until I was able to really own my erotic nature I was not truly able to live into the truest gifts I have to offer the world.
embodiment from an integral perspective in this diagram.
Finding our erotic embodiment means to be living into our fullest expressive capacity. Without owning our unique nature of ourselves, which includes our thoughts, desires, patterns/habits, stories of origin, life’s experiences, we will have a tendency to fall into using masking behaviors which keep us from serving the world in which we were meant to serve. In order to offer our truest gifts to the world we need to find and express our own erotic embodiment by transcending and including our entire past and not get caught up suppressing our desires of how we want to live. By working with our life’s experiences and woundings we can find a new relationship with them and not have them run the show anymore. I don’t believe we will ever leave our past behind and be able to say “I’ve worked through that stuff, why does it keep showing up again and again?”, we will only find a new way to relate to those stories moving forward.
As we embrace “The Great Mystery” and our life’s old experiences and stores we can create the lives we want to create for ourselves. By looking at our lives from an insider perspective it can help give us a clearer picture of the direction we want to go. It’s important to remember “we are not our thoughts”; so being able to observe ourselves from an outside perspective is another important aspect of embracing our most unique self. Creating a sacred autobiography has a profound effect in accomplishing both dimensions of the inside/outside. Once we can be able to look at ourselves from these two perspectives, we can start leaning into the changes we want to put into our lives. We’ve now looked at our patterns/habits and love ourselves for them, as they have served us well in many ways, and begin to lean into new behaviors where we have been fearful experiencing in the past. We’ve gotten comfortable in these old patterns, found a sense of safety in them because we know how the story will eventually play out and then we realize they have run their course and it’s time for something new. Establishing our new behaviors are part of “The Great Mystery” because we do not know how these new behaviors will turn out. It’s a beautiful and scary place to be for the first time and a necessary step to find the most unique expression of who we are in this world in order to find the gifts to offer into the world.
Bodily, mental and emotional movement cannot be left out. We find people in our lives to learn from who are farther along on “the path” we want to take than we are who will help us grow…all we can do is grow, and it will be beautiful. I searched for the best erotic embodiment educator I could find, Joseph Kramer and learned as much as I could from him. While I was going through this erotic embodiment process, I needed Stephen Andrew to teach me the art of being compassionate and accepting of myself as I worked through old paradigms of how I viewed myself and created a new way of living. Yoga and meditation was and still is such an important part of my embodiment practice and I have amazing teachers to thank. This was the only way I could stretch out of my comfort zone and still love myself for my mistakes and successes.
I’ve been gifted the honor and privilege to teach and guide many individuals that their erotic embodiment is theirs to own, to understand, to live into and to express into this world. This is something I do not take for granted. I really appreciate the courage it takes for someone to want to make the shift from their old erotic/sexual patterns into something more reflective of their truest selves. Shifting personal perspective and practices in our eroticism and embodiment is incredibly powerful and will not only benefit us as individuals, but, everyone in relationship with us…including the planet. By changing our perspective and creating a new version of our unique erotic expression allows us to open up to outrageous loving in the fullest expression we can find.
Blessings to your mysterious journey.