Elemental Arcs of Arousal.

I often think about eroticism using the elements - it helps me steer clear of gendered or cultural expectations of how sexuality or eroticism is meant to look, and offers a greater capacity to understand the profundity and power of my experiences beyond modern limiting belief systems. If it’s helpful to hear, I’ve shared a little about how I notice the elements in my arc of arousal - and, I would love to hear how you notice the elements in yours, if you wish to share!

For me, I begin with earth: I connect with this element by honouring my boundaries, needs, and desires - tending the soil before planting begins. I ensure that I can feel myself - the earthy culture of who I am - at the onset of my journey. If I wish to explore the other elements of my arousal, my Virgo self needs to have a relationship with my parasympathetic state: feelings of slowness, rest, and digest interwoven with self intimacy and integrity.

Often next I unwind into air. My Gemini soul feeling gusts of desire, the heady and breathy intoxication of adventure and possibility. I connect with air by circulating my breath and movement, and by honouring the complex dance of my nervous system - the sympathetic arousal of excitement woven in with familiar feelings of fight and flight responses. I find beauty and movement in feeling the ‘both/and’ of my joyful activation.

My experiences of air often combust into feelings of fire. The power & energy of my Leo sun - contracting muscles and the brew of excitement and sympathetic ‘fight’ responses deepening me into an otherworldly land of fire and strength. Growling, mane-shaking, and grappling with myself or others - feeling the primal truth of being an animal, living in a blissful moment of time away from time in the erotic realm.

Sometimes this slow deepening - moving at the speed of trust from earth to air to fire offers the deepest gift of arriving to water. Arriving to an ocean of feeling. Arriving to an endless well of intimacy, love, grief, wisdom, and tears. When I arrive to water, I arrive to a primordial and uterine-like experience of existence. I feel deep truths of me, my wounds, my fundamental worthiness, and that of those I may be in an erotic weave with. 

And, slowly, I surface, and climb back onto land.

Learning how to come into mindful presence with, and build an empowering and value-neutral way to celebrate my arousal has been such a gift within my training as a Somatic Sex Educator that I’m deeply grateful for. And it is such an honour supporting clients in reclaiming and rewriting their own erotic truths in creative defiance of the disempowering sex negative culture we live within.