The Sacred Body Project:     Eros and the Sacred Body

by  J. Carlo, M.A., C.S.S.E.

In last month’s Hedra, I invited you to ponder your relationship to your body by becoming aware of your feelings about your body.     I invited you to introspectively reflect upon the messages you may have received from the culture, from your family of origin, from your religious authorities, from your teachers, about your body, all parts of your magnificent body and about touching, honoring and adorning your body.      I then invited you to ask yourself if you were taught the magnificence of the body and, if you were taught, that the body is a gift that allows you to sensually experience and enjoy all of the pleasures that life has to offer.    I     

Sadly, the answer, more often than not, is, “No.    No, I was not taught that.”    Sadly, regretfully, many of us were taught that the body, our beautiful body, the vessel we walk through life with, is something to be despised, not touched, ignored, neglected, etc.    How sad is that?    How regretfully horrible to be taught such a lie.   To be taught that the thing that allows us to live, our body, is despicable?    I am shocked that so many fall into this belief and accept the lie.  The body is the gateway to your experiences in this life, to your experiences as a physical AND spiritual being.    The body is the gateway to your connection with spirit, with yourself, and with the divine.  

Somatic Sex Education is a form of adult sexuality education that seeks to reconnect human beings with their physical bodies by eradicating the shame associated in this culture with the body.   Somatic Sex Education is an educational process that seeks to reverse the trauma done to our bodies and sexual

selves by living in such a sex-negative culture.   It takes clients through

a process of reintegrating and reweaving their sexual selves

into the fabric of their entire being.  The somatic sex educator understands the absolute necessity that the reintegration process of our sexual self into the fabric of our being must come from and through the body. 

“Somatic” simply means of the body, or pertaining to the body.    So, why somatic “sex” education, and not just somatic education?     Because sexuality is what fuels our passions, ignites our life force and increases our vitality.    Because we are sexual beings.    Because our physical bodies were made for enjoyment and pleasure and our sexuality is not distinct from our bodies.   Human sexuality is how we experience the erotic and express ourselves as sexual beings.  It is an increased awareness of self as male or female and it is the capacity for erotic experience. The word “erotic” comes from the Greek word eros.  Eros means “caused by love” and is also associated with Cupid, the god of love.  According to the famous psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, eros is so powerful, sexual eros,  that he, and the Greeks, referred to it as the “life instinct” and as that which “governs acts of self-preservation and uninhibited enjoyment of life”.       Uninhibited enjoyment of life and self-preservation.       Whoa.      Uninhibited enjoyment of life AND self-preservation.      Sounds pretty powerful.   

 If our sexual, erotic centers are shut down, and we believe the lie that these parts of our body and our experience are despicable or “bad”, then we, in turn, are shut down and we do not experience  uninhibited enjoyment of life.    In addition, since this is our life force and our vitality, our self-preservation instinctual drive is also shut down.    We make bad choices.   We begin to deteriorate.  We begin to waste away, like in the T.S. Elliot poem, “Wasteland.”           What a waste.     What an utter waste of life.   

 Sex, eroticism, the sexual instinct, passion, love, ecstasy, “life instinct”,  and the experience of joy and bliss  are all a result of opening these closed sexual channels,  increasing one’s capacity for erotic experience  within the body and releasing sexual repression and shame.

 It is my intention, as a somatic sex educator, tantra practioner, intimacy coach, sexologist and philosophy professor, to re-educate people about the magnificence of the body, to open people up to this life instinct and increase each individual’s capacity for the erotic experience so that they may experience their lives as an uninhibited expression of joy:    living their lives erotically or “caused by love”. 

For more information about the work that I do, please email:   sacredbodyproject@gmail.com, phone (208) 761-6266, visit my website at www.sacredbodyproject.com, or follow my blog at www.sacredbodyrpoject.blogspot.com