Desire as Life Force: Reclaiming Eros and Embodied Aliveness

When people think of eros and desire, they most readily equate it with sexuality. While sexuality is certainly an expression of eros, when I talk about eros, I am talking about something more broad than sexuality — eros is a creative life force energy that signals what is important to you; what is life-giving; what nourishes your spirit, soul, and heart and pulls you into wanting more of life.

Eros is the life force energy that propels us forward. That moves us toward our dreams, that allows us to dream, that allows us to vision more.

When something lights up your soul, you have eros for it.

It could be a creative or spiritual practice, it could be nature, it could be your garden, it could be a relationship, it could be cooking.

Buddhism and Suffering & the Difference Between Desire and Clinging

Many religious and spiritual traditions often have an ascetic component—one that denies the body, denies the senses, denies desire. Ascetic tradition attempts to transcend the body, the human experience, in pursuit of something more “pure.”

In Buddhism, it is said that desire is the root cause of suffering. However, many traditions embrace the realm of desire and see desire itself as a way toward spiritual awakening.

It is not desire that is the root of suffering—it is the attachment, the clinging, the craving, or the aversion that comes along with desire that causes us suffering.

If we feel a desire for something, it can be easily coupled with the feeling of needing it go a certain way, to have a certain outcome. Desire can provoke the fear that the thing we desire will not last, that we might not get it, that it might not turn out the way we want it to. It might even be paired with aversion— the feeling of repulsion towards the desire because of cultural or familial conditioning.

When we are in a state of clinging, craving, or aversion, our Soma— our physical and energetic body— shrinks, tightens, or constricts around the sensation.

What if we could hold our desire, our longing, our eros not with tightness, but with a sense of spaciousness?

What if we allowed our desire and eros to take up more space in our bodies, in our lives?

When we tighten toward something out of clinging, craving, or aversion, we lose relationality with it. We lose a sense of aliveness, of curiosity.

What would it be like to contact and make room for the sensation of desire without clinging, without attachment to outcome?

I once had a client who was struggling with what she named as unfulfilled desire - a desire for more intimacy with her partner. She would feel her desire arise, and her partner wouldn’t be available for it. In her energy body, her desire was very tightly constricted and controlled. When it came out, it would come out a little like a wildfire, and then quickly be ushered back into its little somatic box in the center of her belly.

Raised in a religious way, she had been brought up to believe this kind of sexual desire was only appropriate to share within a marriage. In her adult life, she no longer had these beliefs, but they had still conditioned many of her parts.

When her desire arose, she was instantly struck with clinging - I need my partner to meet this. And then quickly, when it was not met, aversion - this feeling is terrible and I want it to go away, I’m bad for having this feeling.

I invited her through a somatic meditation to contact the desire and to get curious about it. To invite in the idea that it didn’t need to go anywhere, didn’t need to do anything. To just allow it to be, to make space around it, and to give it more space to live in her body.

Through this, she was able to unblock the creative life force energy of the desire. As she learned more about it, it seemed this desire went way beyond just intimacy with her partner - it was a desire for creativity, making art, and learning new things.

She was able to reclaim desire as her own, building a relationship to it without clinging, craving, or projecting it outwards onto her partner.

What Blocks Desire?

So, if eros is such a life-giving force, why do so many of us feel cut off from it?

The impacts of traumatic and stressful experiences in life can take away our capacity to feel the full extent of aliveness.

Why?

Because aliveness is happening in the body and in the here and now. Trauma and stress can cut us off from our bodies and from being in the here and now.

We might have received cultural or familial conditioning that wanting is bad, that desire is bad, that it is not safe to want. Maybe it feels shameful, or embarrassing, or even a little sad. Perhaps we might have given up on desire because our needs were continually unmet as children.

Nervous System Capacity and Opening to Desire

Our nervous systems might not yet have the capacity to tolerate the big feelings and sensations of aliveness.

What do I mean when I say aliveness?

All emotions are an expression of aliveness—the full range.

Joy, grief, anger, excitement, anxiety, fear, love — all of these emotions are an expression of aliveness and send waves of sensation through the whole body.

A healthy nervous system is not one that is calm all the time, but one that is adaptable—that is able to move between different states of sympathetic and parasympathetic expression and back again.

If our nervous system has lost its capacity to be flexible and adaptable, these sensations of aliveness can feel scary or overwhelming.

Last summer, I was meditating on desire. Something I discovered was that I cut myself off from feeling and naming my desires because parts of me were terrified of feeling embarrassed.

Feeling embarrassed felt like too big a risk in my nervous system—a sensation that I often felt overwhelmed by as a young person that would overload my system and send me into a freeze state.

It was not enough to try to welcome desire—I also had to make space to welcome the full extent of my aliveness, including the sensations of embarrassment.

I had to welcome my sympathetic nervous system getting activated and re-learn that those are not dangerous sensations.

I had to allow the desire to move me, rather than contract against it out of fear of what I might feel next.

Holding Desire with Spaciousness

Desire asks us to listen to its erotic pull. It shows us what’s important to us in this life. It asks us to come closer, to pay attention. It’s the voice that says, I want more of this.

If desire is life force, it is a living, breathing thing.

When we contract around a feeling or sensation, we limit its aliveness, and we limit our ability to remain curious and open toward it.

Giving the desire space allows it to breathe, and allows us to stay in a somewhat buoyant and listening relationship to it.

Holding the desire with spaciousness is another way of saying - can you allow your desire to take up more space without worrying about the outcome of it? Can you release the attachment to it needing to be or look a certain way?

Desire: A Practice

Take some time to settle into your seat and take a couple of breaths.

Feel into your own desire, your own eros. Notice what you are longing for in your life.

Notice what happens in your body.

Notice where in your body lights up, what kind of sensations emerge.

Notice what kind of reactions you have to the idea of desire.

Do you like it? Do you dislike it?

Do you feel like you can’t access it?

Does it feel muted? Does it feel loud?

Do you feel overwhelmed by the force of it?

Do you feel comfortable with it?

Notice the sensations that come in with these reactions.

Now, whatever you are noticing around desire, see if you can make space around it.

Imagine surrounding it with literal space—maybe just a couple of inches of space, or expanding infinite space around it.

What would it be like to make space for whatever it is that you’re feeling?

If you have access to the sensation of desire, invite that sensation to get bigger, to take up more space in your body.

Invite it to get as big as it would like, all the while maintaining a sense of space around it.

If the mind comes in with questions or plans, ask the mind to step away again.

Just focus on the sensation.

No outcome.
No plan.
No need for it to go a certain way.

Just getting to know the sensation and making space for the sensation to exist within your body.

After you’ve done this little somatic exploration, you might take some time to write about how desire showed up in your body—any sensations, images, or places in the body where it showed up, as well as any feelings or thoughts you had toward or about the desire.

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