"When we exercise our senses, feeling into the world as we move through it, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing, we awaken the wild inside us."
We are lonely.
We are shut off.
We want to feel alive.
We’ve forgotten how.
Turning ourselves back on has become a national past time. We rely mostly on outside stimuli. Basic cups of coffee became double whipped cappuccinos. Now we gulp energy drinks that can trigger death. Romance novels fly off the shelves as lovers prefer reading and sleep to 9 minutes of fucking. Women yearning to feel sexier, sensuous and desirable take pole or belly dance classes, showing off well-earned hard bodies, armor for aching hearts. Botox that forehead; tuck your chin; lift your breasts and shave that Mons.
Trim those labia.
Mutilate your body to be more desirable, ladies.
Men aren’t immune to the body wars. Give that older man a vitamin V so the old rooster can crow again! All was fine until the commercials started showing younger and younger men, hinting and implying that, go on, what’s the harm. Maybe your prick will be super human hard. Who cares that when some young guy takes that ED drug recreationally and keeps a boner for too long, he might lose his penis for life.
It says so on the pharmaceutical website. Priapism is no laughing matter.
Measure your self-worth, pleasure and performance by the size of your cock, gentlemen.
Anything to turn up the volume against the persistent message that we aren’t pretty enough, young enough, thin enough, sexy enough, firm enough, hard enough.
Enough already.
Pathologize our secret erotic selves, and it’s no surprise so many suffer from sexual or relationship wounds. Got a limp dick? Take a pill. Sex hurts? Numb it with Lidocaine. Vagina on the dry side? Use lubricunt made with petrochemicals.
This epidemic of dissatisfying sex doesn’t have to be. Our yearnings for more meaningful intimacy can be met beyond pills and surgery. That odd emptiness within has simple needs. The most evocative, significant and healing thing we can do to feel more alive is to remove the confines and artificial restrictions upon our natural primal selves.
What does this mean? This is an invitation to lean fully into your sentient nature. Feel. Taste. Breathe. Touch. See. Hear and Smell. Sense beyond your finger tips, your lips, your nose, your eyes, your ears. Use your heart space. Be sensual. Feel beyond what you’ve been socialized to feel. Experience your wildness within.
Get yourself back to your true nature and get yourself into the natural world. “’Being more alive means being more sexual, more sensual. To be more sexual is to broaden one’s range of feeling and expressive action.’ Eros, sexual energy, is life-force energy permeating all of creation and influencing our own creativity and ecstatic experiences,” writes Julie McIntyre in Sex and the Intelligence of the Heart: Nature, Intimacy and Sexual Energy (Destiny Books, 2012).
Her book is a significant advancement into the understanding of the ecology of love, the connection between our species and the glorious green world we live in.
She writes: “Once you truly let yourself feel again after a few meals of the wild and sensuous Earth, a shift in consciousness penetrates the foundations of your beliefs and value systems. An unexpected shift in principles and perceptions is thrust into your mind and all that you were before suddenly becomes pregnant with uncivilized thoughts unlike anything you’ve thought previously.”
I know exactly what she means. In my early thirties, I was diagnosed with vulvar vestibulitis. I’d had the condition for several years before I found the courage to ask my doctor about it. It would be another decade before I could speak of it publically. For years, I searched for an answer, a reason for my pain and shame. That wound and the baggage that came with the inability to enjoy my sexuality in any form was the circuitous route to ecosexuality.
I quite literally had to become broken in order to allow my primordial faculties reawaken my groin, mind, loins and heart and “shake off the stupor induced by the drugs called culture and materialism” as McIntyre wrote, to feel once again.
I had my Ah-ha! Moment. Vexed for years, clarity came when my true nature - to paraphrase the author - my ‘wyldness’ inserted itself into my consciousness, and a part of me that had been asleep suddenly awoke.
The clues had been there for years in the ways I felt truly alive: dancing ecstatically, astride a powerful horse, walking deep into mossy green forests, along a broad expanse of shore mostly devoid of other people. Places where no one was looking or paying attention, or if they were, I didn’t care what they thought, too engrossed in feeling the energy of the earth move through my undressed soles, spiraling into my body, tingling my thighs, groin, belly, breasts, arms and lips.
I finally was seduced by my senses, plunged into the depth of what it means to be alive, if only for that one ride, that one dance, that one kiss, that one amazing fuck with that one amazing man.
To read McIntyre’s book is to know with utter certainty that there is another way to live and love in harmony with nature without and around. She reveals how, ‘by healing our separation from Nature and our sexuality, we can bring the sacred back into our lives, shape our own ecstatic sexual experiences, and move toward healing the whole planet.’
It’s a timely message.
As a mother, I am intuitively seeking how to impart this to my children, the next generation, so they won’t have quite as much baggage to unpack in their own grown-up selves. I’m not sure how I’m doing, but the signs are hopeful. Recently during our regular good night ritual when I was telling her a story, my four year old suddenly said, “Our mouths are special because they makes words come out. And kisses.”
All I could think was, I hope she always feels that way. If she happens to forget under the weight of artificial expectations, I hope I’m prescient enough to remind her: Feel my child. Feel the world with your heart space. Plant your feet firmly on Gaia’s soil, charge your batteries with her sunlight and breezes, bend like the reed when the winds grow fierce, and embrace the rain on the windows of your soul.
Your love and life will be that much richer, as rich as your courage to allow your irrepressible nature to pour forth. Dare to be seduced by your senses, my child. Dare to live and love.