|
|
My |
|
|
|
At first, I meant
to write today on sensuality. Then I came across a quote by the great
Carl Jung that made me fully realize sensuality is a combination -- a
mixture -- of three kinds of love. Jung said,
"People think that Eros is sex but not at all. Eros is
relatedness." The more I thought about it, the more I could see
that "attentiveness" came closer than "relatedness"
to being the right word for it is only when we are attentive to someone
in a total way that we relate to them fully. There are three
words we use for love. One is "philios," or brotherly/sisterly
love as in Philadelphia, "the city of brotherly love. Another is
"agape," or divine love, as in "God is agape" or
Paul's great chapter on love in Corinthians. The other is
"Eros," which we have mistakenly come to view as sexual love.
Eros was the son of Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, in Greek mythology.
It meant more than sex. It was spiritual sexual yearning. None of this is
intended to take away from the physical aspects of eroticism. Nothing is
wrong with physical pleasure or the release of sexual tension. But if
that is all there is in a relationship, it will become unfulfilling and
die a natural death. A thought keeps
coming on strong to me. That thought is that even erotic love, to be
good, must be a mixture of all three loves. Without relating to a person
as a spiritual being, even sex is not whole and good. Without relating
to them as a good friend, or "philios," sex will be robotic
and unfulfilling. It is when we fuse the three kinds of love that we
discover that magical "Wow!" of real eroticism. Once I wrote that
the divorce rate and the need for sexual counseling would drop fifty
percent if all married couples would give each other a full body massage
at least once a week, not to speak of the health benefits and pleasures
of having aches and pains rubbed away. At the time I
wrote those words, I had not come to see that the magic in a massage is
"attentiveness." In massage, we become attentive to areas of
the body that are taut and tense, we tune into a person's pleasure
zones, we are expressing our heart's intention to please, we heal
them and ourself with the flow of our caring for them. Love is a two way
healer: it heals the person loved and the person giving the love. A female friend
once told me, "My husband didn't really become a lover until he
passed through the 'urgent stage' where sex was almost entirely
physical, more like a driven activity. When he passed through that
stage, he began to tune into me and I became much more fulfilled. I felt
we had become soul to soul as well as body to body." No better way to
say it than that! Check out Dalton's
website at www.daltonroberts.com
and his gathered writings at www.ipsfeatures.com.
|
