I am writing this entry on the plane.
I’m in 39K, by the right-hand side window and in the emergency row.
In the middle beside me sits a woman. She wears a light-blue denim jacket, worn-in and cozy; her long black hair is soft and falls down to the curve in her back. I can only catch her from the side, but she keeps applying that lip gloss. And every now and then, I guess to fend off any airborne virus, she looks up at the cabin ceiling, and gargles.
She is traveling with her partner. His eyes are closed and he too looks up to the ceiling, smiling. Out of the air-hostesses he has wrangled a second lunch.
I drift in and out of rest.
At one point I seem to be distracted up by this jammering and stammering of the woman’s right arm, and it’s jogging my airplane table. Her body’s turned away from me, her right hand strains back and forth, and her partner’s eyes are still closed; he’s smiling more than ever. And it looks like, by the way she’s forcing her arm back-and-forth ever faster, she’s doing exactly what I might like her to do to me: I burn to catch a glimpse!
But in a second she’s done. She stretches. She preens. She rolls her neck and waves her long black hair so that it flecks her soft blue denim coat right in the small of her back. Like nothing ever happened.
At times, it seems the whole universe is having sex. But maybe it’s all in my mind…
—
Back to what I was trying to write:
There was a phrase in the last entry I somehow cut, that I want to bring back and explore:
Over the years, what men in this community have shown me is that male desire, male sexual longing and expression, is vast, includes many persuasions, particularities and needs, and that we really don’t fit that binary YES-NO archetype.
Many of us are aching to know ourselves sexually, and don’t know ourselves much at all. There’s just this grating sense we’re a little outside of some norm, a little too outside that norm to properly express ourselves.
Do you fit the stereotype: I’d fuck anything that moves?
Have men and women tried to press that assumption on you—that, as a man, you should be horny for anything?
It’s amazing how this assumption lingers.
If you are not, dare I say, a binary male, it begs the following questions:
— To what depth do you know yourself, sexually?
— What secret keywords do you punch into the porn browser? Why do you click this thumbnail, and not that?
— In those between-world moments on a subway, or on a warm afternoon in the office where you fade out of the ‘real world’ and into some fantasy, who do you currently think of? And what are you doing to each other?
— Have you ever contemplated the psychological root of your turn-ons?
— Have you noticed that your ‘psycho-erotic wiring’ is laid in your body, that you can explode like a wild volcano if just the right things happen in sex?
— Do you ever ask, or command, these right things during sex?
[Touch me under the fold-down table: no-one will ever know.]
I think all men would like more meaningful sex. But few of us truly venture into the dark.
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Our upcoming April Intensive centres around four terms. I’d like to define them here, in my own practical but psycho-spiritual way:
Libido. Noun.
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In Freud, this is the psychosexual energy underlying all instinctual life: a cellular longing to survive, propagate, expand.
For Jung, libido is not primarily sexual but psychic energy — the total quantity of vitality available to the whole person at any moment. It flows toward whatever has meaning; it withdraws from whatever has become deadened. What fires our libido reveals the direction the psyche is genuinely living toward.
In depression, our libido goes underground—smothered by our fears and our mind’s best laid plans.
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Taboo. Noun, adjective.
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The taboo marks the boundary of the collective shadow. This is what the culture (even your family or friend-group culture) has decided it cannot hold, and locks away in the chamber of the forbidden.
To behold the taboo means to look beyond that cultural boundary, and experience the simultaneous dread and fascination amplified by the very forbiddenness of the thing. Amazing how much of our psychic energy can pool in themes and acts we’ve concluded are out of bounds.
While the safety-seeking parts of ourselves are convinced that taboo acts will have us thrown out or ridiculed by the tribe, our taboo attractions carry an outsized energetic charge that can, if touched, cure depression, and ignite the full vitality of our libido.
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Passion. Noun.
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The etymology of passion suggests suffering, enduring. Uncontrollable emotions or desires, that do not constitute virtue.
But I redefine passion as a state where the ego is overcome by a sublime quality or an archetypal energy that moves through the personality. In Jungian terms, it marks the ego’s subordination to the greater Self, which can be both destructive (possession by a complex) and initiatory (an encounter with a numinous archetype).
Passion as a spiritual event is the temporary dissolution of the defended self into something greater: the ecstatic oneness of a couple, at the height of making love.
—
Aliveness. Noun.
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The state or quality of feeling alive; the condition of full responsiveness — as opposed to numb and grey days and mere biological survival. Aliveness is not necessarily happiness or excitement; it’s a quality of contact, of freshness: with the moment, the body, with life itself.
Aliveness diminishes when we believe our real attractions are taboo and cannot be lived out without repercussion. The libido then loses core vitality, and our openness to passion diminishes. Our aliveness is the cost of inauthentic living. Aliveness cannot be performed in compensation: we are all tired of the false extrovert. Only the myth-making work of seeking our real life resuscitates it.
Now feel your feet a moment as they touch the ground. And take a breath into the depths of your belly…
—
It is my thinking that:
Taboo can trigger Libido,
Which causes us to be overwhelmed by a Passion,
Which, done regularly, brings fundamental Aliveness.
And as we practice embodiment, we get to feel this process as it happens. Giving us a sense of choice, mastery, in steering the greatest vitality in our lives as it unfolds. Rather than a sense of accident we cannot revisit or explain.
For me, this is fundamental.
Sex, for so many of us, is such a mixed experience. Full of tightness. Full of hope that we’ll figure out what the other will like, without taking the risk to ask her. A place we get anxious, separate, even more in our heads. The enjoyment we felt with her on the date becomes smothered by our need to escape the sexual encounter without being humiliated. How long will we keep that mask on? For many of us, sex ends up not being that intimate at all.
There is a world of difference between mediocre sex and the thing that really turns you on. But the thing that really turns you on is not always the easiest thing to say.
—
The following takes me back a decade.
I was in a ‘black tantra’ retreat…
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The sort where eighty or so people, mostly strangers, get naked in a workshop room together, and pair up to practice sex. (Yes this exists.)
You might like to take part in such a scenario (you might shudder at the thought), but the overwhelming experience among the men was that they couldn’t sustain their erections in a room where so many people might be looking. The mind got distracted by the orgy; the demands placed on their performance made them limp.
So how do you get a room full of anxious men to sustain their erections?
The organisers had a workaround:
Each of us were to pair up with a woman. It did not really matter who. The woman had to ask us one question: what were all the things you longed to hear as a child, that you didn’t receive (or receive enough of) from your mother? She then wrote all these things down on a sheet of A4 paper.
On finishing the ‘written portion’ of the exercise, the next step was for the men to rest in their female partner’s laps in a sort of fetal position, our heads nestled between her vulva, her thighs, her belly and her breasts. The women might have started the exercise draped in a sort of shawl, but my memory gets hazy here.
Then, our partner began stroking and caressing us, our head, our shoulders and body, all while reading the list of words we longed to hear from the sheet of A4 paper. As things unfolded, us babies were invited—coaxed and corralled over the workshop speaker system, with music—to ‘explore mommy’s body’ as she continued to read the words.
Now I once had a job as a driver and each week I took a delivery from an abattoir, and I confess I’d never heard such wailing, such glass-shattering carnage and screaming—not even on those Thursday mornings when I collected my package at the hour of high slaughter—as I did in that black tantra room. It was a railing of a thousand years, an existential debt paid right up the matriarchal line and ploughed into the soil and back through the rays and into the white heat of the sun. Such that, for the rest of the week (and beyond, I greatly sense) it resolved the whole limp-dick affair.
I’m not a disciple of Freud, so how this all works remains mysterious to me. But from this we might decipher that part of our libido is stuck on some image of a parent, the vibration, the latent promise, of unconditional safety and love. While the exercise was a harrowing success for many, for a few in the room it triggered complications.
What complications? Well, how is your relationship to Vagina? What childhood moments shaped your perception around bodies, touch, genitals, personal space—and how does this shaping continue to affect you today? Sex is a thing that splits many of us in two: we want some parts of our partners, but not all. The tit, but not the tooth, as Deida put it. What arouses desire on Friday night causes disgust on Saturday morning. And the ethical hell we suffer, the torture, because we inwardly know our psyche is torn and we so rarely make love to the entirety of a partner, and we can’t, for the life of us, figure out or explain why.
I have felt such shame, such disability in my intimate life when I could not accept the whole of the very woman I had just spent the night ‘seducing’.
All I know is that, during sex, certain words and actions flip a switch inside me and all hesitation is thrown to the background—no longer stuck cherry-picking, I devour. All I know is that, if I browse porn, I see a thousand mediocre thumbnails—pointless, the whole enterprise of it—until something ignites oil on the tarmac and then blows the storage towers apart. And yet, something in me will still trudge through a thousand monotonous images; it keeps looking, keeps seeking, in case I find that Goldilocks image that presses in and lights the spark.
What do we really seek from sex? Can we burn our ambivalence to intimacy through?
—
I would never Fukuoka…
—
Last month we held Salon Amorata for Guild members on the west coast of Japan.
After warming ourselves on ōkonomiyaki in a tucked-away storey of an old city tower, the sort you’d never wander into without a guide, the night *predictably* ended with the four of us rambling through the local red-light zone, to see if the evening would throw any mischief and delicacies our way.
I’ve only been to a few of them, but Japanese cities seem to cater effectively for all that a man needs: in the shadow of the main Shinto shrine lay a maze of alleys a visiting salaryman can lose his whole self in and then beg forgiveness for on the way out. You can’t ask for greater contrast. I’ve been drawn to the Golden Gais of the world since those old Kurosawa films where the straight-laced hero would dissolve, by night, into the street of shame and its jazz and its bedlam and its girls that would envelop you, and its squalor.
What did we hope to find? Octopus in the window? Simulation of a packed subway cart? Someone to talk to? It’s true: the hostesses were glamorous in ways that stole my respect. But as we walked we discovered the cruelty: as foreigners, this whole night-civilisation was off-limits. A thousand delectable images of local girls, and only available to the local mouth. There was only one place us foreigners could legally enter, and it showed no images of its women. I guess we were all visually programmed: none of us fancied the lucky dip.
But this whole night-walk had me ask: why are we drawn to this? We weren’t exactly eighteen and innocent. Why are we drawn? That’s easy, you might think. You’re hentai, for the novelty, for a little tittilation before bed. But that’s surface. There was a strange air of pilgrimage we brought to this sideways little jaunt through the rain. There was yearning, a prickle at the base of the soul, to keep poking at the world’s taboos, to see if we might come more alive.
I don’t know the inner intention of the others. I don’t know if we’ll all keep lurching around the vice districts of the world until we find in some strip-club window something of our own reflection. But I think back to the Goldilocks porn thumbnail: if there were one woman in that drizzly Fukuoka night, what look—what one word would she utter, what sub-communicated latent promise—would it take for you to break off from your friends and enter? Something that, in the rest of the world you might never do, but in the rain of Fukuoka you’d cancel your morning train and return, in the midday light of opening time, and do over and over?
And let’s say you found, in the wild midst of all Japan, the exact, meticulous mirror of your strangest personal perversion, would you cross the threshold and make that taboo real—held hostage and tickled in the maid bar; smothered between the thighs and pecs of the weightlifting girls; the elderly hostess in pearls, instructing you; the whip and the schoolgirl’s bottoms—or would you keep the image of it sacred, unfettered, burning at the bottom of your soul?
The choice is less important than it seems.
Because if you really pay attention,
All the world’s erotic aliveness already lives inside you.
* * *
The entirety of your erotic potential is contained in your body
—
It’s all there…
– the thing that happens when you sit next to a beautiful girl on a flight,
– the ways attraction and revulsion arise in you the morning after,
– the disorienting discoveries you’d find on a tantra retreat,
– what you might do if left alone in a foreign world, where no-one knew your name…
This all exists as a living process, active inside your psyche. This energy is either living—as anticipation, as fuel, as an edge in your eye or a curl in your smile—or it’s muffled.
Members of the Guild are spending April exploring the embodied terrain of their erotic lives. Uncovering yearnings, strengths and truths, letting them out of the forbidden chamber, and into the day-to-day ways they move through their lives.
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The erotic energy intensive, entitled Passion, Libido, Aliveness, Taboo, takes place on April 25th-26th. If this is for you, apply. We’ll have a thorough chat, and you’ll have time to meet the group and familiarise yourself with the exercises before we begin.
Please note that we will not revisit this material anywhere for another 12 months.
All Guild meetings are unrecorded, to ensure the safety to be extra-candid and dive more deeply into the material. This is the healing sexual shame workshop so many of you have asked us for over the years.
Read the full Guild Invitation and Apply here.
When it comes to this topic of desire, a few people have reached out wanting something more intimate before committing to a full year — if that’s you, DM me.
~ Jordan
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