Eros, Sex, Love, Pleasure? What will it be for you on Valentine’s Day?
Eros, Sex, Love, Pleasure? What will it be for you on Valentine’s Day?
Category | Pleasure & Love, Pleasure & Sexuality, Pleasure Practices,Valentines Day is the celebration of love. Mostly this is focused on romantic love. Cupid with his arrow of Eros aims to pierce your heart. It conjures up a day full of pleasure – chocolate, flowers, candlelight dinners in fancy restaurants, and if all goes well, an intimate, sensuous interlude follows. All sounds good, right?
But will there be true pleasure?
As I wade deeper into the heart of Unlock Pleasure, I see that pleasure is only truly possible when there’s real love.
No matter how long you’ve been in an intimate relationship, you’ve probably noticed how your connection circles round three elements on a fairly regular basis. First, the erotic charge fills you with passion and inspiration. Usually, this is the connection that draws you to another in the first place, you find the person so entrancing and irresistible. Then, sex follows and that erotic attraction is consummated. If there’s a true willingness to be with another, love follows.
But while the first two states are almost instinctually driven, love requires something more. At the beginning, we say, “I’m in love”. But as time passes, to sustain that spirit of love, and grow it from the “in-love state” to real love requires more.
You have to grow and stretch. You commit to being open, to risk, daring to be honest and real. It asks you for a capacity to love another as that person really is, not for what you want or need them to be.
As time goes on it can be hard to sustain the erotic charge and when that wanes sometimes the sexual attraction goes too. Real love keeping the link to the erotic and sexual attraction going for the long haul. Real love has a delicate, delicious edge that can trigger deep fears and resistance, but ultimately is so enlivening and deeply engaging.
So how will Valentine’s Day will be for you? Is there authentic pleasure with your partner? Dig deeper and draw up your capacity for real love. Surprise yourself and your lover with the power of love to renew your connection and bring back the passion of Eros. Cupid will be pleased!
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“I had signed up for the workshop with a vague idea of validating whether or not beekeeping was something I wanted to get back into, so wanted the real experience and ‘instruction’ around hive life. But I also wanted to spend time in the imaginative life of beekeeping – so the poetry, and your story of bees as a significant part of your healing journey was really important. Sensing into your relationship with them - the calm, the respect, the love – was an important part of witnessing how a relationship with bees teaches those very things. I loved how the different activities dove-tailed so well into one another. The ‘energy meditation’ of approaching the hive taught me well about respect for boundaries, and the deep purposefulness of their lives. We can co-exist beautifully as long as I ‘let them bee.’ “