The Age of Eros

I learned I am more powerful than any man on earth. The only difference between another woman and me is that I know it.

I have stood in front of twenty thousand women and said plainly, clearly, and without hesitation, "You hold the power." And I have been met with slack jaws, glazed eyes. So I repeated it. Again. Again. With each declaration a clear remembrance would rise to the surface and animate a face — a deep, forgotten memory of power whose potential needed only reawakening.

Women are the manifestation of every creative force in nature. This generative power is the strongest on the planet. We summon a power to draw and hold attention, to move people to action — to light up what we want, or send the "go away" signal to what must be repelled. When we stand in our true selves, completely turned on, vibrating, resonating with life force, everyone falls in line.

Energy and presence are a stronger suit for women than language. The notion that some force can subordinate woman is exposed, in those moments, as a comfortable lie — a blanket of false security, false protection, and dependency. But weak is not who woman is.

Call is likely the strongest force on planet earth. It is the female power to light up others — a primary driver of innovation and progress throughout history, hard-wired into the biology of our species and visible everywhere in nature. Call is the limbic signal beneath the words; it is how one nervous system reaches another and reorders it.

More than seventy-five percent of human communication is nonverbal. Psychiatrist Thomas Lewis named the deeper register through which we share emotional states "limbic resonance." Call is perhaps the most powerful limbic signal of all. It can be learned, summoned, and directed at will, at any age.

Long ago, people identified a power of creativity, genius, and connection the ancients named Eros. Its roots stretch into the chaos from which all creative expression and embodied wisdom issues. Eros is a magnetic force of attraction that saturates experience with meaning, drawing us into engagement with the natural mystery and innate playfulness of life.

To feel is the essence of life. Feeling is the means by which we experience a fulfilling life; feeling is what drives thinking. Eros, desire, and love drive flourishing — not cold reason, which is what drives all psychopathy. When we withdraw from life we feel numbness. Self-denial puts us into a pitched battle against our desires; it is a form of sensory anorexia, dimming the very light that illumines our way.

Equal rights, equal pay, equal treatment are fine. But our inheritance is a vast, open space of love. In that space, the chronic buzz of mosquito thoughts doing perpetual accounting on whether we are getting ours is zapped. We realize we are healed, our vision is restored, and we can see how to restore the world.

This is where feminism must begin — not as a system that accommodates for weakness, but as the unflinching experience of your own power. Anything that requires the world to change around you chains you to weakness forever. You must become the force of that change.

I was thirty-one when I was struck by a lightning bolt so powerful it knocked me out of my better-minded spiritual bent and landed me in the middle of a bed, legs butterflied open, a light illuminating my genitals. I began a glorious descent through the strata of my consciousness — memories, ruminations, yearnings, struggles — until there came a horizon, vast and endless, marked only by a light that was neither bright nor pale.

I returned to the congested theater of my mind with one crystal-clear thought: this is what the energy of sex was meant to be. The distance between how I had understood sex and this experience was the distance between a very large number and infinity.

I would spend the rest of my life studying, practicing, and teaching what I came to call OM — Orgasmic Meditation. A consciousness practice that combines mindfulness with the power of the deeply human, deeply felt experience of orgasm. Not the sexual sneeze of climax, but the sustained, ecstatic moment before — the release from the tyranny of self-concern.

Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg of the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health has observed brain changes in both stroker and strokee that occur in minutes rather than years — changes that rival those of decades of meditation or strong doses of psychedelics. The practice is proving highly effective in studies of participants ranging from healthy to depressed, from chronic anxiety to PTSD.

OM optimizes our own biology to disable the sense of wounding, the neurotic storytelling, the operatic internal arias around our personal tragedies. By combining sexual arousal with a mindful turn toward what we have been trying to keep locked up, we release the body's energy that fuels the great states of joy and well-being that are the birthright of being human.

Tumescence is a phenomenon that haunts us. The joy that ought to be flooding our lives turns toxic. Our raw energy is restricted. We become critical, bitter, overly sensitive, angry, controlling, agitated. We pick fights instead of allowing the energy of Eros to power a couple's creative bond.

Tumescence plays its pervasive muzak, making us feel stuck — as if holding our breath — turning up the steady hum of anxiety, neurosis, despair, hopelessness. It blocks passion, leaving us with the experience of dissatisfaction, emptiness, and a vague hunger. It's an epidemic least identified by those suffering most from it. Separation feels like immutable reality.

We live in a world obsessed with climax, but climax is a one on a scale of ten — a sneeze between the legs. Think of climax as a movie trailer for what is possible when a woman turns on in a way she cannot be turned off again: a gentle but ferocious force that remains and sustains. It is the kind of abandon we are looking for in intoxication, obsession, yearning, grasping, chasing. But it is an abandon into your own erotic self. It is endless. And it is yours.

The Age of Eros begins with love. With loving the unlovable. With jettisoning notions of who is marginal. With those once considered marginal now in charge.

There is a central question to be asked of everyone and everything in our environment: What do you want to be? Upon hearing the answer, we tune our eyes, our hands, our creativity, our genius over to the work. It is the labor of love, and the making of love that brings out the desire to be.

If you have good soil, you get good food. Good food means nourished bodies, and a nourished body means a relaxed mind. When the mind relaxes, you can move from survival to creativity. When you have moved to creativity, you can become a contributor. And when a person contributes, human thriving is unleashed.