"...placid pond reflecting pink fluffs and solemn pine trunks. I took my glasses off to let my eyes touch you without seeing you clearly. My lover knows my heart, because we whisper like this so often, we reveal who we are, or the emptiness behind it all."
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"Imagine you are a seed swallowed by a bird, being digested in the birds gizzard... your outer shell being softened, so that you are better able to bond with the earth...a place where you may then grow for a hundred years or more..."
-a moment from a movement prompt from a workshop by Cynthia Stevens, a Body Mind Centering practitioner
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I have been drawn for some time now to explore the realm of ecosexuality, or maybe more aptly ecosensuality. In experiencing the dynamism of the interacting elements of this planet, I find myself awakening more and more to the dynamism of pleasure, pain, and play. I sense that desire and longing are both sacred and casual when in their right alignment, yet so much of our culture relegates these things to either taboo or fantastical/obsessive. I am in the early stages of creating a book centered on these themes, which will combine poems, stories, and experiential prompts.
Here are a couple of explorations you might try:
1. DRAWING AROUSAL
Get paper and something to draw with. Close your eyes and do a body scan. Draw how your body is feeling today; you can be as abstract as you like. Then gaze at your drawing, and look at it as if it were a score for choreography. Dance the score for a few minutes.
Now get another piece of paper. Close your eyes and imagine the last time you felt really turned on. Visualize as much as you need to, to really connect with the memory. Do a body scan to track how being "aroused" or turned on shows up in your body. Draw your body now. Just as before, dance the drawing as if it were choreography. Let your voice be involved in the dance if it wants to be. Could you see yourself tapping back into this state of body even in non-sexual scenarios?
2. MACRO AND MICRO
View your own body or a lover's body with the same sense of wonder you might experience when gazing at a beautiful view of a landscape, from a lookout point for example. Take in the larger sense of this ecosystem. Then zoom in; let your fingers explore this landscape in a more detailed way. Wander through the hilly meadow, for example. Explore the firmness of the stones near the brook. Notice minutiae, letting your skin receive information. Does this body landscape you are exploring receive you? How can you love this land, understand this land, ask this land what it wants?
3. THE 4 ELEMENTS
Gather paper, pen, and 4 objects or found parts of nature that can represent the 4 elements: earth, air, fire and water.
For each of the 4 objects, you will write a paragraph that starts with the phrase, "Pleasure is like this ____" (fill in the blank with the name of the object). Start by writing down that first phrase, then spend a few minutes physically interacting with your object. Touch it, be touched by it, move it, be moved by it, smell it, understand it, etc. Then finish writing your paragraph in a free-flowing stream-of-consciousness way.
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