Eros: The Missing Link

Eros: The Missing Link

A few years ago, I had a profound dream. Not only was the content profound , but the depth of feeling was as well. It was one of those dreams that stays with you and that continues to teach you because of its depth and clear symbology. It was so real that it felt like an experience rather than a dream.

I listened to what this dream was telling me, and over time it continues to tell me more and more. Just lately, I’ve been able to tie it to a calling I’ve felt for my own life and the work I do — that of awakening Eros in myself and in the women I work with.

Awakening Eros — the powerful force that is life’s own will to live the whole of what one is and to live it in service to life itself.

Eros — the love that life has for itself. Eros connects. Eros informs us through feeling. Eros enlivens and directs our action.

Here’s what I see: the missing link we are looking for to bring us humans back into harmony with our beautiful Earth (and her many creatures) is Eros because Eros is this love for life, a love for being alive, the bliss of embracing and expressing the fullness of who we are — and this includes our humanity. And it is our humanity that takes us back to an alive relationship with Mother Earth.

Here’s the dream…

I’m standing at the front of a large cut in the Earth, the kind a gigantic bulldozer makes. Stretching out in front of me, t’s a gradual cut in the Earth that goes deep, very deep.

To my right, a young girl about four or five is walking up out of the Earth at the far right of this cut; walking out of the deep soil of the Earth and into the sunlight of day.

To my left is a tall, strong, young man standing at the left edge of the cut. He has a clearly powerful and capable body.

As the girl walks out, the man turns to look at me and says, “I am so sorry. We don’t know what to do to heal this destruction. As a woman, I sense you do. “

I stand there in front of this massive destruction to Mother Earth and I weep. And I know he is right.

There are a lot of levels to this dream. Dreams are symbolic. They show us what is happening within our inner world, the world of the unconscious. In the dream, all three characters are me…my feminine, my masculine, and my child.

The man is a symbol for our yang/masculine nature that continues to be out of touch with the planet because we are out of touch with our yin/feminine nature, which keeps us, women and men, out of balance. Our yin/feminine nature also is that part of us that relates. Without it we are disembodied and believe we are separate from each other and from life.

When the man indicates that the yang/masculine doesn’t know how to heal the damage, he isn’t speaking about a knowing of information. He is speaking to the understanding that healing of the pain of the Earth will happen through the yin/feminine deep wisdom and creativity that is directly connected to the Earth and to life. The feminine energy in all of life is what nourishes, nurtures, and heals. And, because women’s bodies are a physical representation and manifestation of the feminine principle, it is of utmost importance for women to become embodied and come into direct relationship with the Earth through the body. I’ll write more about this below.

I’m especially interested in symbolism of the child — not from a personal perspective (although that is of course interesting to me personally) — but for the sake of my work from the transpersonal. The young girl reminds me of the Persephone and Demeter story. In the myth, Persephone is abducted by Hades and taken to the underworld. Her Mother, Demeter, eventually finds her and brings her back to the outer world after a long and difficult journey to find and free her.

In my dream, the girl returns by herself. She walks out of the underworld on her own. There is a magic in being alive that we’ve forgotten and this magic is symbolized by the child. The magic of aliveness is beautiful and pure, and it is powerful. In a culture that has separated itself from joy and play and awe, as well as devalued.

In our adult ways, we think we know everything. We’ve lost our humility. We’ve lost our ability to see that we truly don’t know and that it is in the ‘not-knowing’ that what we do not know can reveal itself. Children see this, but we as adults so often refuse to admit we don’t know — and I will tell you that not many adults (especially those in positions of power) have a clue about what to do now to right this situation we find ourselves in…except for the indigenous who’ve never lost their connection to this Earth.

In the unconscious way we relate to the Earth (and Nature) as an object and as resources for our use, we have cut ourselves off from the magical, awe-inducing experience of being alive here on Earth. We have cut ourselves off from the pleasure and joy of being alive, the kind of joy young children know. We’ve cut ourselves off from knowing the love of and connection to life that we long for and must have to be healthy human beings. This love and connection to life is Eros.

Awakening Eros awakens us to our humanity, to our instincts, and to the beautiful connection we could have (some do) to our planet and all beings who exist along with us.

The Animal of Your Body

We’ve made our humanness something we fear and look down upon. But when we embrace our humanity, we lose the kind of self-consciousness that keeps us from feeling and knowing that joy and awe that children know because by embracing our humanity, we embrace our foibles and flaws, our instincts and pleasures.

Even more importantly, when we embrace our humanity we come home to our bodies, which are the only way we can experience the true and very real interconnectedness that exists to the whole of life. It is by way of our bodies that we experience true aliveness, that which Joseph Campbell so astutely named as what human beings most long for.

Think of Mary Oliver and ‘the soft animal body’. How can you let your soft animal body love what it loves if you won’t admit you are one?

We were gifted with this planet as home and she has always been a fruitful garden. But a garden needs to be appreciated and cared for.

It is time we come back to the garden. And I sense that it is women who will return us by way of Eros, by way of rediscovering the joy, sensuousness, instinct, aliveness, and deep-feeling nature that it is to be alive in a human body that is female.

This is the important opportunity we have…to reawaken to the fullness of what Eros is within ourselves and our human experience on Earth; to more broadly realize what Eros really is rather than the sliver we have to come think of it as — the erotic; and to embrace our humanity so we engage fully in our lives and in the world, and choose to be here without equivocation.

When we come to realize this full sense of Eros, both as experience and as wisdom, we will be living the love that is so sorely missing in our world today.

My new intimate group coaching program for women called Awakening Eros begin this coming week. It’s for 12 women only because I want it to be a wonderful exploration into the depth of what is possible. This is new territory for me and my clients — territory I am excited to discover and share. Take a look to see if you might be right for the journey and the journey might be right for you. Be sure to get in touch with me if you have questions. I’m happy to schedule a call with you to see if it’s a fit.