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Dalton
Roberts |
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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.
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