When Sex is More Than Sex

How Erotic Practice Helped me Embody my Purpose

The core of me yearns endlessly. Yearns to be seen, to share, to express, to connect, to love, and to be loved. Very human stuff. 

Sometimes I feel like I don’t have an outlet for all that yearning. Some of it is just for me to hold. Some of it is just for Luke (the man formerly known as “C.” And also… I have access to 1,257 different platforms on the internet. It’s an interesting landscape. The need to create, the desire to pour out, to offer gifts to the world. And the desire for an audience. It feels horrible to write that. “I want an audience.” But it’s true. I do. Not in an overtly selfish way, though maybe part of it is a little selfish. A little bit of the attention whore in me. 

But really, the desire for an audience, and not just an audience, but a connection - a community - is a desire to help. To give what I’ve learned. Some moments, it’s frustrating to not be one of those people who has 100,000 followers to deliver bold messages and love letters to whenever I have something to say. But would they talk back? Or would my words echo into the wiggly abyss?

Ultimately, the question I wrestle with is, “how do I connect better?” The eternal challenge. “Well done, but not complete. Though the goal is never to be complete,” Luke said to me once. It’s nice to know I’ll always be exploring this.

And what a messy process of exploration it is. The creative process. Unfurling a lifetime of resistance to my authentic expression. Overwhelming. Joyful. Terrifying. Hot. If the erotic lives in the space of tension  between things, the tension between me and my dreams is one of  the most erotic things about me. 

Every so often in my quest to answer that question, “how do I connect better?” I get caught in the social media echo chamber. “Here’s how to hack your stories for 100x growth!” “Use this trending audio or else you’re going to fall into a well and die a terrible death.”

Yuck. 

It’s hard to avoid stuff like that when you’re learning how to build an audience. It just… shows up. Now, my bullshit filter has become exponentially stronger over the years, but still, sometimes, the desire for speed gets me. 

I told Luke I was struggling a bit. He told me to zoom out. Think of what I’m doing now as idea creation for the big picture. I’ve always been good at holding the big picture in mind… but I’d get overwhelmed when it came to the more challenging task of laying out the steps to get there. I wanted to do it perfectly, which as you might know, is a recipe for emotional turmoil.

In the realm of the erotic, I can see the big picture, and I know how to create a journey to get there. 

In other things… I’m not as skilled. I didn’t devote my time to learning business, or networking, or social media. Mostly, I avoided it because I just couldn’t handle the stress of the perfection I thought I had to achieve before I felt safe being seen. Everywhere I turned, there was a program, a course, a coach with the secret recipe for success. A right way, and a wrong way. And I was definitely doing it the wrong way. I thought.

In the erotic realm, everything is different. Why? Because it’s not formulaic. I never bought into the idea that someone could sell me the right way to fuck. Sure there are basic mechanics - breath, sound, movement, knowing your anatomical structure. But for me, even when everything else became a formula, my erotic self could never fit into a box. It could never be perfect. I had to let go of perfect to experience the erotic depth I craved. And believe me when I say my yearning for erotic depth is far greater than anything I have ever experienced. 

Now, having touched this depth of yearning day after day after day - and learning to open to it, to invite myself deeper into the ocean of my eroticism - something within me has changed. The way I confront challenge. The way I want to meet it.

An important lesson: even when you do meet the man of your dreams, your yearning does not go away. In fact, as your heart opens to pour out more love, the yearning gets bigger. The yearning not just to love romantically and to be in connection with him in the erotic realm (though I never don’t want that), but to be in connection with all of life. To feel everything. To pour it out. To share.

In the past, I just wanted to lie, unbothered, in a field of flowers for all of eternity. Now I’ve got stuff to say. Things to accomplish in this world. Purpose.

 I still want to lie in a field of flowers sometimes, but I don’t need to be in total recess all day, every day. With purpose comes discipline. I need discipline. I want discipline. Queue fantasies of being thrown over Luke’s lap and spanked with a hairbrush.

It’s clear that my erotic practice has everything to do with my desire for MORE. More freedom. More love. More devotion. More expression. More softness. More fierceness. More truth.

More living. 

My erotic practice has everything to do not only with my yearning to pour out, but my confidence in doing so. It’s become a part of me. Embodied. It’s the practice of dancing with, and as, Eros - the force of desire itself - that has propelled me into this process and given rise to an entirely new set of creative longings. 

Before I go, here’s one last bit of food for thought. There’s this phrase, “the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.” 

I do things curiously. 

I yearn and I create and I dance and I fuck and I cry and I laugh and I feel absolutely insane…  and I get curiouser and curioser about all of it by the day. And then, every so often, I have clarity, for a moment, until another curiosity arises. 

An erotic life is a curious life. It just can’t be avoided with Eros. She reaches out to touch everything. Connects this moment to the next to the next. She asks you to follow the sensations. Breathe deeper. Stay here, in this moment. Feel, and keep feeling. She asks questions. “Do you like this? What’s true right now? What brings you alive? What do you feel? Do you want more of that?” When you want to shut down, she demands, “Stay here. Stay open. Show me.” Eros at once grounds us and sets us free. Eros is the intuition of presence. The spark of light set into motion. The impulse to touch that which cannot be touched. Speak that which cannot be spoken. See that which cannot be seen. To become something never before witnessed. 

If we'll have her, Eros is our greatest vehicle for expansion.