ST Healing Love-IntoBalance October2022 - Flipbook - Page 54
THE EROTIC is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest
knowledge.This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so
often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all.
For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we
begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that
they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves
to be capable of...We have been raised to fear the yes within
ourselves, our deepest cravings.
—Audre Lorde
To embrace the yes within ourselves, we need to increasingly disconnect with the daily trappings and
spend time and energy by being in the universe with people who don’t require the trapping but who
see us for who we really are. We step outside of boxes, roles we have to play and the masks we have to
wear. We’re producing. Not just consuming. Producing in community.
As we shed the layers of the in and out binary, the yes and no, boy and girl and all those insidious
dominant practices, it bodes well to know that the system is in us. We are not always the idea of “purity,”
as with those in our beloved circles. Remember to embrace the abundance, including both ends of our
“good - bad” spectrum. None of it is an enemy that we need to keep out as we endeavor our efforts
to building alternative realities: distributed power sharing systems; consejos del elders y jovenes;
community governance circles for our organizations; parent and family voices to elevate community
wealth, knowledge and practices; restorative circles where more truth is held. Just like we need the four
directions on the Medicine Wheel. Including the ether. The spiritual realm that one can only intuit.
Many species are one being: lichen – fungi, bacteria and plants make up one thing. For those living
organisms, there is no such thing as inside / outside. Humans are also holobionts. We’re more bacterial
cells than human cells with trillions of bacteria living in our digestive tracts. The perceived borders
where I end and you begin are murky. It’s the same culturally. My own self, my coherence, yet we’re
different people and we breathe the same air. We’re actually really intimate with each other’s insides
and outsides. The permeability touches on our longing for separability and coherence.
In a chronic stress state that people of color constantly must navigate and live under,
we rely on our flight or fight, “gotta react ‘’ instincts to keep us safe. We have
had to choose this or that to survive. And, inundated with so much
sexual trauma, of course we have the gender binary. We have not
been taught or supported to hold complexities around eros,
sexuality, sexual traumas.
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