This is an arrestingly composed essay, Tamara, articulate, precise, and charged with a kind of restrained voltage that’s rare. I admire you chose not to write about the erotic in its classical sense; you chose to reframe it as a principle of orientation — toward vitality, not indulgence, instead. That distinction alone gives this piece real weight.
What resonates most, from a masculine perspective, is the framing of erotic decision-making not as indulgence but as risk-laden agency—the inner authority men are rarely taught to trust. We’re conditioned to optimize, not feel; to achieve, not be moved. The erotic, in this sense, threatens the scaffolding of identity built on control and predictability. And yet, as you argue, it is exactly this unruly pull—to act without guarantees, to desire without justification—that distinguishes a life lived from one endured.
A nuance to add, for men especially, the erotic decision is often buried beneath functionality. We confuse decisiveness with clarity, performance with purpose. But the erotic isn't reactive, it's intuitive, directional. It says, “not this, maybe that, even if it breaks you.” And when a man listens to that, in work, in art, in love, he reclaims freedom and authorship.
So yes, I agree with you, Tamara, life begins in desire. But it matures in the discipline of listening to what desire dares to ask of us.
This is one of the most intelligent and necessary expansions, thank you! Your articulation of how the erotic collides with masculinity is essential, and frankly, overdue in the wider conversation. Yes, men are often permitted desire only when it’s packaged as conquest, never as communion. And so the erotic, in its deeper, directional form, becomes threatening, and almost illegible. As you said so perfectly, it gets buried beneath functionality.
The distinction you make, between decisiveness and clarity, between performance and purpose, is crucial. We often applaud a man who moves swiftly, but not the one who moves vulnerably. Yet the erotic decision, especially for men, is not related domination or abandon, its attunement. To something within that doesn’t shout, but hums. That doesn’t promise victory, but insists on truth.
Desire is only the beginning. What follows is the discipline of staying close to it, listening even when it asks for sacrifice, for change, for unbecoming. That is not weakness. That is authorship, as you so rightly said.
Your comment supports my views and completes a layer I could only imply. Thank you for bringing the masculine soul into the frame with such grace and force!
It is an honour to be able to expand your amazingly written essays. Few people on Substack have your depth and the capacity to write so lucidity and nuanced about all kinds of topics.
both wonderful writing and seeing.. I love this sentence btw. "scaffolding of identity built on control and predictability" .. Yang / Mind / Fear / need to Control, versus Yin / Heart / Fear / need to be validated and loved .. but thats just a personal interpretation .. in the context of follwing the natural flow, desire and breaking these chains or virtual cage we (body Mind Emotion construct) built, its seems to be the same.. do not deny desire, or be governed by fear.. we are sovereign beings, and each experience is there to bring us closer to that self realisation.. the minds biggest program is resistance.. and as someone said recently, we resist even that.. allow the pendulum of our life experiences guide us in to rest in the void.. through the experience paths of sensations, Perceptions and beauty (Physical), Inquiry understanding and wisdom (Mental), and Feeling love, devotion and surrender ((Emotional).. the body mind heart then seem to merge and allow to pass through the energy, frequency, vibtaion and intention of Pure Love (Spiritual)
Thank you, there’s an intuitive elegance in how you’ve woven this together. What you’re describing is, in many ways, a tantric map of erotic integration: not in the limited sense of sexuality, but as the full-spectrum harmonisation of body, mind, heart, and spirit. And yes, “scaffolding of identity built on control and predictability” was meant to evoke precisely that brittle architecture the mind clings to in its fear of dissolution.
Your personal interpretation of the Yang/Mind and Yin/Heart dynamic adds a powerful frame. I might only nuance it slightly…. it’s not just that the mind fears — it fears surrender. And yet surrender isn’t passivity, as many think. It’s participation without illusion of control. That’s what the erotic asks of us: not indulgence, but alignment.
Your phrasing, “do not deny desire, or be governed by fear”, beautifully captures the crux. Not a binary of repression or chaos, but a sovereign way of riding the pulse of aliveness without being thrown by it. That’s the middle path of eros-as-compass.
In reality, submission to the needs of my partner, found at 55 years old, knowing it was out there, but never before experiencing it fully, was exquisite. My pleasure was to pleasure her, and hers, me. Sublime.
Your essay is a slow, elegant detonation, it begins in the soft language of philosophy and ends in fire. From the very first line “Life starts with erotic decisions” it invites, almost provocatively, a discussion of sex or sensuality. But what unfolds instead is an incredible manifesto on aliveness, certainly not in the biological sense, but in the soul-stirring, pulse-quickening sense. That shift is what stunned me. It’s like walking into a room expecting a candle and finding a bonfire. Tamara, no one can write the way you do!
What I admire most is how you restore dignity to desire as sacred intelligence. You portray the “want” as a compass. It challenges the spreadsheet life we’re taught to build and instead insists that tremors of longing are not distractions from life but its actual starting points. That’s a shift in worldview, a tectonic movement.
Personally, I’ve felt those erotic decisions, the ones that make no sense on paper but crack you open from the inside. A sentence I couldn’t unread. A person I shouldn’t have called. A creative project that came uninvited but refused to leave. And yes, they brought risk, even ruin. But they also brought pulse. And once you’ve felt that, the idea of living without it feels like death by small degrees.
Tamara, you don’t write about Eros as force, you enact it in the writing itself. Your prose seduces, with risk. And I think that’s the heart of it, eroticism, as you present it, isn’t decoration. It’s danger. And it’s the only danger worth walking into with your eyes open.
“Death by small degrees”…. yes. That is the silent catastrophe so few name. Not a dramatic collapse, but a slow erosion of pulse, choice, desire… all in the name of safety. And you captured with aching precision the truth at the heart of it all: erotic decisions aren’t detours. They are the ROAD. Even if they lead through fire.
I’m especially moved by your insight that the writing doesn’t describe Eros but enacts it. That was the hope. That the form would echo the force. That the essay wouldn’t preach aliveness but embody it. Language, after all, isn’t neutral, it either seduces or it sedates.
And you’re right, eroticism is not aesthetic frosting. It is a beautiful danger… the kind that doesn’t flatter the ego but threatens its architecture. It won’t coddle you. But it might just awaken you.
Wow! The essay and so many of these exchanges, so incredibly powerful & inspiring!✨💫🤍 Your words, phrases & message — They are the ROAD. Even if they lead through fire 🔥
I have nothing to add to these comments. It is so refreshing to read a post that explains something that I have known all my life, and followed through thick and thin, ecstasy and object failure, but always following the adventure. Thank you so much x
I’m blown away. Where was this essay when I needed it many years ago. In one sudden instant, inexplicably, something descended and I felt it in my bones, my soul. Suddenly a simple conversation became an unrestrained passion. When people asked, “Why did you have this relationship?” I simply answered, “It was the thing I could not NOT do.” I loved the exhilaration of being pulled, finally, by my soul even though that pull caused countless heartbreaks and later nearly killed me. Would I do it again? I wouldn’t be able not to. Thank you so much for putting words to a life changing experience that I have not yet been fully able to explain. I’m in my late 50s now. Please tell me that this type of erotic decision isn’t only made once, that it can come around again…
Ohhhh, Julie, it absolutely can! And not only can it come again, I’d argue it must. Not always with the same intensity, perhaps, but with the same irrepressible hum beneath the skin. Erotic decisions are not one-time lightning strikes, they are a rhythm we can relearn, a pulse that never disappears, only quiets when ignored too long. What you felt, that “thing you could not NOT do”, was not a deviation from life. It was life, breaking through the crust of expectation.
That kind of soul-alignment isn’t tied to youth or novelty. It’s tied to courage. And you still have that, or you wouldn’t be here, naming it… Desire does not age. It just sheds layers of pretence.
And maybe now, wiser, less interested in approval, more fluent in your own frequencies, the next erotic decision won’t nearly kill you, but remake you more gently. Not with the desperation of needing to become, but with the authority of someone who already is. Keep listening for the murmur. It never really left! Trust yourself!
I will tell you “that this type of erotic decision isn’t only made once, that it come around again…”. For me it came around at the age of 81 and is here for both of us, now for me at the age of 83. To feel alive, to desire and long for, to be loved and desired, is ageless. To face the probability that our lives together may be few in number. No matter. It is worth the risk, never felt it was all that risky. The alternative was to be a part of the living dead.
Okay WOW to this piece Tamara! It really moved me and I could feel the movement of mysticism in your words. Eroticism is the lifeblood of evolution, living, discovery and life itself. The opposite is stagnation, frustration, unfulfillment. The suggestion that we could be asleep within our own stories is a profound one. We live in the age of micro and macro programming without the expression of what it’s for and for who. Going to Greece on an intuitive whim because you felt called to go holds more meaning than the transactional “we’re going to Greece because it’s the most popular European destination of 2025”. Where is the stirring of soul in such decision making?
It’s the still small voice within which is the loudest and clearest voice of instruction we can hear and align with. I can think of many times I’ve made a decision to do something/go somewhere and later discover that the whisper instructing me led me to where my soul needed to be — my evolution.
Erotic decisions are expanders — they are a dance with the Divine, a surrender to moment and a movement towards our soul’s evolution.
Thank you for sharing! I enjoy all of your writing but this one was particularly moving.
Thank you, Joanna! What you’ve written here feels like the liturgy for the life fully lived. Yes, erotic decisions are expanders. Not necessarily because they inflate our ego or guarantee outcomes, but because they stretch the boundaries of who we think we are, gently, irreversibly. Your example of the Greece trip captures the heart of it, one is a performance of desire, the other a submission to it. And that distinction, between choosing from the soul versus choosing for social coherence, is the invisible fulcrum of so many lives.
I also like that you named mysticism. The erotic, in its most sacred expression, is mystical, pleasure or even connection, but mostly communion. It is being led beyond the known, not by force, but by fascination. And that small voice you mention? I think it’s not small at all, it’s just that the world has grown so loud we’ve forgotten how to hear it.
Thank you for this reflection! You’ve honoured my essay with your own deep seeing, and I’m very grateful!
I love the framing of this as "erotic decisions", even though I suspect you will lose a few people. It's exactly the type of risk-taking, creative decision that you're writing about. This is the most liberally-spirited piece I've ever read, and I mean that in a primordial sense of the world "liberal", free from any political connotation. It's the spirit of divergence; of the desire to go outside the box, not for the sake of contrarianism or as some narcissistic ploy to be unique, but for true expansion, both of the self and of our conceptions of what is possible.
It's the one bird who strays west from the rest of the flock flying south, in order to scout new territory; it's the spirit of the heretic; it's the creative impulse, driven by the instinctual understanding that stagnation is the figurative death that gets us long before the literal one.
Conservatism is essential, but the difference is that it's life-affirming, but not living. It's the crucial order that is a necessary condition to the erotic, but not sufficient because too much conservation suppresses it. In that sense, I agree, eroticism is the beginning of life. At the very least, it's the moment of conception where we begin searching for the things that make life worth living. And it's fraught, of course, but that's inevitable. All roads leading to expansion are necessarily dangerous, which is the reason they've been left untraveled, and why they should never be left unexplored.
As usual, you can’t just read my essays, you ride them, like that westward bird you so aptly described. And yes, the term “erotic” will likely lose some readers, but it was precisely the risk I felt compelled to take. Not for shock, but for precision. Because no other word captures that holy intersection between desire and transformation quite as fully.
Your point about liberalism in its primordial sense is vital. Not the corrupted, politicised shell we often see today, but the deeper, mythic spirit of expansion, of the heretic who walks out of the village to see what else might exist beyond the ridge, not to burn it down. That impulse is older than politics. It’s what made the first fire, the first poem, the first revolution against silence.
And I love your framing of conservatism as necessary but incomplete, the skeleton, perhaps, that allows for the dance. Eros needs friction, after all. It needs something to push against. But when order forgets its role as midwife and starts playing warden, that’s when the soul atrophies.
You articulated the anatomy of eroticism with stunning clarity, just like I imagine it too. Thank you, Andrew, for expanding the conversation so beautifully! You have made me think harder…. and that, too, is erotic.
I've been feeling the pull of something more alive, more truthful and real for the longest time and while I've been following it a lot of the time, I'm totally guilty of slipping into the comfort of previously established patterns that no longer serve me.
I wish I had the words to say more of what I'm thinking and feeling — you wrote yet another stunning journey through the woven ins and outs of an unjustifiably taboo topic that bleeds into seemingly unrelated areas of life; quite the meta-exemplification of eroticism in the structure of the essay itself and of the way life and its components overlap in intricate and inextricable ways — but I do not. I like to think it's because I'm going through a necessary side effect of me following the erotic metamorphosis and its disruptive force.
Thank you for reminding us to follow the murmur of our hearts or of whatever else lies beyond it!
What a beautiful and brave response, thank you for meeting the essay with intellectual presence. That feeling of homecoming you describe… yes. That’s exactly the terrain of Eros: recognition. A flicker of “this is it,” even if it dismantles everything you thought you were building. And slipping back into patterns? Of course. That’s part of the dance. Even Psyche had to wander, stumble, repeat. The point isn’t to be perfectly aligned, but to keep listening for the thread, even in the noise.
And I like what you said about the structure itself being erotic, that’s deeply perceptive. The form wanted to echo the very thing it described: fluid, layered, unapologetically entangled. Just like life.
Your silence is gestational. Trust that! Often, the words we miss become us.
So true! I love this Tamara! The erotic decision is not about recklessness, it’s about remembering who you are underneath all the roles you’ve been told to play. To choose the erotic is to risk the vulnerability of truly being seen by one’s self and others. Really beautiful.
Yes, exactly, Katie! It’s not recklessness, it’s revelation. The erotic decision doesn’t destroy who you are, it just strips away who you are not. All those roles we rehearsed for the sake of approval or belonging (professionalism, politeness, perfection) Eros isn’t interested in any of them. It wants what’s alive underneath.
And you’ve pointed to something crucial, the risk is in the exposure. To want deeply is to stand naked before yourself, before the world, and say, “This is what stirs me”. There’s no hiding in that. But oh, the freedom that follows…..
Thank you for naming the heart of it so clearly!Remembering who we are is not the return to the past, but the return to pulse.
This is exquisite, thank you for sharing it. There’s a raw, pulse-lit beauty in your poem that feels like it was pulled from the same current as the essay. It responds to the words, it mirrors their source. “And what if you were fed? Already holy, whole, re-membered” — stopped me cold. Because that’s the revolution: not striving, but remembering. Not proving our worth, but inhabiting it.
Get Naked is a call to strip the performance, the posturing, the programmed fear. And the fact that this came before you read the essay tells me we were both tapping into something collective, something ancient resurfacing through many voices at once.
I feel it so deeply, that collective remembering. And every time I forget a little, something sweet - like coming across your essay minutes after writing that poem - happens to remind me that there are many of us, getting naked, one by one and all together.
There is an honesty in your voice that is certified to resurrect the damned. It disintegrates the duplicitous, the equivocal, all layers of self deception. It washes the soul in the river Styx and pulls it out purified and renewed. It releases this revivified distillation to confront his living corpse. It empowers an abashed humanity.
Your work makes me remember a man in me I'd forgotten was there, buried in tortured trappings. You reduce me to mist but unleash galactic dimensions within me. You terrify as you emancipate. In your hands, I am unflinchingly free to cry out: I am Khan; I am Ahab; I am Ramses. Here me roar, I am Pandora; I am Prometheus; I am Sybil.
These expressions are felt sensations every time I engage with your work. The false always falls away. The real, the otherwise neglected real, rises. Truly, Tamara, you give me hope in myself when I am tempted to capitulate to convenience. Discipline demands endurance. You help me to endure. You consecrate the effort and make it worthwhile.
This is staggering, in language — though your words reverberate like myth — but in soul. I read this and thought: a resurrection, as you say, of something more ancient than persona, more courageous than performance.
That you see Khan and Ahab and Ramses, and then Pandora, Prometheus, Sybil, tells me you understand exactly what I hoped the essay would stir: an elemental reckoning, not an argument. The erotic is the tectonic shift that calls back the parts of us exiled by convenience, domesticated by duty. You write as someone who has felt that shift, not in metaphor, but in marrow.
And yes…. endurance. You name it so perfectly. Desire is not indulgence. It is discipline, sacred and brutal. To stay faithful to the pulse in a world built to numb it takes more than will, it takes devotion. And if anything I’ve written helps you hold the line when comfort tempts collapse, then I have done what I came here to do.
Your words are a gift, they mirror back the depth I try to write from. And that is the greatest kind of hope…. the kind that echoes. Thank you, Andrew!
Warm greetings. My name is Swami Padmanabha, a Hindu monk in the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition—rooted in the ancient bhakti teachings of devotional love. I was deeply moved by your essay, which was brought to my attention by my dear friend and elder, Fr. Richard Rohr. I had the blessing of visiting him in his New Mexico hermitage just today, and in our time together—exchanging gifts, reflections, and prayers—he mentioned how your piece had stirred him so deeply that he wove it into a marriage sermon for one of his closest friends some weeks ago.
I now understand why.
Your meditation on the “erotic decision” echoes truths we have carried in our sacred texts for millennia. The Rig Veda, one of Hinduism’s oldest scriptures, begins not with a commandment or dogma, but with, as you declare, a "tremble": kamas tad agre sam avartatadhi manaso retah—“In the beginning, there was desire, the first seed in the mind [of the Divine].” In our understanding, this primal yearning—kama—is not lust, nor lack, but sacred restlessness, a holy longing within the heart of God. It is this divine desire that births the cosmos. Creation itself, in our understanding, is an erotic decision: a courageous choosing-toward-connection, toward becoming, toward the beloved.
As a monk, I’ve not renounced eros—I’ve simply learned to court it differently. In our path, sexual energy is transmuted, not suppressed—revered as a current of intimacy, creativity, and communion. What you name as erotic decision, we may call madhurya-rasa—the sweetest flavor of divine love, a love that is unruly, ecstatic, and perpetually reaching beyond itself. We are taught that the soul’s highest longing is not for safety, but for loving union that breaks us open and makes us whole.
In my own practice, I’ve come to recognize that what our tradition calls rasa—the essence of relational sacredness—is precisely what your words evoke. The pull toward what undoes us, remakes us, and calls us to inhabit our life more deeply. It is not the pursuit of gratification, but of intimacy with what matters most. Like you so beautifully write, the erotic is not a moment of indulgence, but of authorship—of reclaiming our capacity to be moved, to risk, to respond.
Thank you for giving such reverent, daring language to this mystery. I see your work as a sacred mirror, and I hope it reaches many more souls yearning to remember that life truly begins—again and again—when we choose to feel, to want, and to be undone.
Your words arrived like a prayer in motion, rooted, reverent, and alive. I read them slowly, more than once, letting them echo through me like the Vedic verse you quoted, which gave me chills: “In the beginning, there was desire…” What a staggering alignment, that the world begins not with law, but with longing.
Your tradition’s understanding of kama as sacred restlessness, as the trembling seed within the Divine, touches something so deep it leaves no room for cynicism. That we are desired into being, not just created but courted by the cosmos, rewrites so many inherited stories of shame, separation, and spiritual sterility.
I am particularly moved by your framing of your monastic life, not as a renunciation of eros, but as a deeper courting of it. That is precisely the nuance I hoped to breathe into this essay: not a call to libertine excess, nor to moralist suppression, but to the wild art of intimacy with what calls us to life. The erotic not as “pleasure-as-product”, but as sacred participation. Madhurya-rasa, as you describe, feels like the spiritual twin of what I was reaching for, the sweetness that arises not from conquest, but from surrender.
And what a lineage to feel reflected in: the Rig Veda, the wisdom of your bhakti path, and the gorgeous paradox that the holiest love is often the most unruly. We have spent centuries trying to housebreak divinity, to discipline longing. But your letter reminds me that divinity prefers the dance.
Thank you for your generosity, for the beauty of your own articulation, and for tethering my words to something ancient and transcendent. I’m honoured beyond measure that Fr. Rohr shared this with you, and that it became part of a wedding homily… what more sacred threshold for this kind of language to inhabit?
With reverence and gratitude from one trembling author to another.
Tamara, your reply was a gift. Thank you. It read like a benediction, affirming that words can still tremble, still carry spirit.
What especially resonated with me was your insight that the world begins not with law, but with longing. In the bhakti tradition I belong to—Gaudiya Vaishnavism—this longing is not something to suppress, but the very pulse of divinity. Romantic love (eros) is not exiled from the sacred; it becomes its most intimate expression.
In fact, our tradition holds a daring theological vision: that the highest form of divine love is known as parakiya-bhava, the love between secret lovers. The great heroines of this tradition are the gopis—married village women who leave everything behind (reputation, family, even dharma) to meet Krishna, their playful and all-attractive Beloved, in the forest. Not as an endorsement of adultery, of course, but as a metaphor for the soul's ultimate risk—giving up everything for the sake of divine intimacy.
This isn’t love for the sake of stability or virtue, but the trembling, transgressive yearning that cracks open the world we've been handed and whispers: There is more. There is mystery. There is uncertainty. There is paradox. But, above (and inside them) all, there is love in its most dignifying expression.
Thank you again for writing something that allowed so many of us—across traditions—to feel seen in our sacred longing.
Also, I host a podcast where I invite voices from many walks of life—scholars, mystics, artists, contemplatives—to explore the edges where love, longing, and spirit meet. Past guests have included Richard Rohr, Francis X. Clooney, rabbis, priests, monks, scientists, psychologists, etc.. If you ever feel drawn, I’d be honored to explore this theme further with you in conversation.
Your reply left me quiet for a moment, in that particular stillness that only comes when something ancient and intimate has been spoken aloud. Words can still tremble, still carry spirit, yes. Yours did.
This vision of parakiya-bhava took my breath away. What a stunning theological metaphor, that the soul’s most sacred gesture is to leave behind the sanctioned, the stable, the socially approved path… and walk into the forest for love. Not because it is easy. Not because it is safe. But because the heart knows when it is being called. And what you’ve described, the gopis’ willingness to forsake everything for the sake of communion, feels like the very embodiment of what I tried to call an erotic decision: not sex, not revolt for its own sake, but the act of risking self-definition for the sake of what animates you most.
That your tradition holds space for this, not as moral failure, but as mystical fidelity, feels deeply healing. And it underscores something I’ve always believed: that the erotic is not a threat to the sacred, but its most intimate language.
Thank you for this bridge between traditions. For allowing eros to be not only a biological urge or poetic trope, but a spiritual current that winds through devotion, defiance, and divine play. I’m honoured and humbled that these words resonated so deeply across such different but mirroring paths.
And should the stars align, I would be glad to continue this conversation when the time is right. The intersections you explore are ones I care about fiercely, and it would be a joy to wander those edges together.
Sometimes love asks us to leave behind even what named us—role, duty, certainty—just to follow the hush of a deeper call. In our tradition, this is parakiya-bhava: the soul as a lover who risks it all for one trembling moment of union. Self-forgetfulness in love divine.
Not rebellion, but radical fidelity.
Not moral failure, but love in its wildest, most sacred form.
I’d be honored to keep exploring these edges with you whenever it feels alive. The invitation to the podcast remains open—just a continued conversation under a different sky.
Indeed! And the best ones don’t ask for the key, they pick the lock with a line from Sappho, rearrange the furniture of his convictions, leave a quote on the mirror in red lipstick, and vanish before he realises he’s hosting a revolution in his own head.
Because true seduction is epistemology in stilettos, not the cliché lace and perfume.
‘… the furniture of his convictions …’ so he is absolutely convinced that this is the good, right, natural and necessary order of things.
‘… before he realizes …’ so he perceives the adjustment of his understanding as his ‘OWN’ doing.
‘… a revolution in his own head …’ in which values, perspective, the conceptual framework from which he sees and interprets the world and his place in it are at last … correctly aligned …
‘Because true seduction is …’ and this is what is SUPPOSED to be, and what NATURE intends … and what millions of years of evolutionary biology require.
Ohhhh, you caught me mid-seduction, diagramming your resistance like a sentence in Latin.
But yes, precisely: he thinks he rearranged the furniture. He even congratulates himself on the feng shui. Meanwhile, she’s already sold the house, moved to the coast, and written a bestseller about it under a pseudonym.
And “epistemology”? Darling, that’s just pillow talk for philosophers. Evolution may have handed us instincts, but it’s the reinterpretation of them that makes the real sparks fly.
Now hush! You start to sound like foreplay in footnotes.
I needed a moment to sit in silence with this astounding essay on Erotic Decisions. You astound with the proximity of, "When something stirs beneath reason. When you want something - or someone - without being able to explain why, and you choose to move toward it. That is the erotic decision," love and power. And that is just your opening. Framing eroticism as you have is the transcendence to invite all of the wisdom voices inside of us. These questions have arisen for me in re-reading your piece for the third time. It's impossible to get enough.
What wisdom do I hold that must not be forgotten?
What has life taught me the hard way that might guide others?
What knowing lives in my body that words alone cannot carry?
This robust circle of connection that you have created through your imaginative, brilliant mind, heart and soul is a gift that helps support the many beginnings and endings we hold. The other question I'm wondering through this erotic journey, is how do I hold my own endings? Am I alive and participating in the ecstasy of life? Thank you, endlessly.
Your reflection, Susan, reads like a benediction, thank you! The very questions that surfaced for you as you re-read the piece are, in themselves, erotic in the highest sense: not titillating, but trembling with consequence. They come from that liminal place where truth isn’t argued but remembered. And I’m in awe that my essay made room for those voices to rise within you.
“What wisdom must not be forgotten?” — that question alone could govern a lifetime. And I like how you wove endings into the erotic because yes, the erotic is not only the ecstasy of beginnings, but the dignity of completions. To hold an ending with presence, not numbness, is to affirm that this mattered. That you mattered. That whatever was risked was not wasted, even if it broke you open.
Your phrase, “the ecstasy of life”, is exactly the point. Not the ecstasy of indulgence, but of participation. Of showing up, breathless and real, again and again, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.
Thank you for holding the piece so reverently. And for reminding me that the real gift of writing is when it catalyses other wisdom to surface. You’ve gifted that back tenfold.
I wrote a lengthy response, but it is totally eclipsed by this poem, The Rose, sung with such moving power, by Bette Midler. Your message is its message, put so movingly, so powerfully, that I cannot read, let alone listen to it, with dry eyes.
I quote the second stanza and the final line, below:
“It’s the heart, afraid of breaking, that never learns to dance;
It’s the dream, afraid of waking, that never takes the chance;
It’s the one who won’t be taken, who cannot seem to give;
AND THE SOUL, AFRAID OF DYING, THAT NEVER LEARNS TO LIVE.
Far beneath the bitter snow, lies the seed, that with the sun’s love,
And yet, you did, simply by choosing that poem, that voice, those lines. The Rose is one of those rare cultural artefacts that speaks to the wound, and to the will to bloom anyway. And yes, it sings the same message in another key: that to shield ourselves from pain is also to exile ourselves from aliveness.
The soul, afraid of dying, that never learns to live… it’s the exact tragedy I hoped to speak to in this essay. That too many lives are structured around avoidance, not awakening. Around safety, not surrender. And as you so poignantly point out, the seed doesn’t survive the winter by hardening, it survives by becoming something else entirely.
Thank you for sharing this echo, Russell! It’s a perfect harmony, a tender reminder that our best thinking often arrives with melody, not argument.
I’ve had to pause and reflect on every sentence. And just like you said, I was pulled in like gravity. I will be reading this over and over until it sinks in my bones- because I know it’s all true.
I’ve said it before and repeat it, this is the greatest compliment a writer can receive, not just to be read, but re-read, reflected upon, let in. You’ve done exactly what my essay invites: not to skim it as content, but to feel it as a current.
Truth, especially erotic truth, doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It arrives like gravity, inevitable, invisible, and utterly rearranging. Let it sink in as slowly as it needs to. Bone-deep knowing takes time. And once it’s there, it doesn’t leave.
Thank you, Christine, for meeting my thoughts with your full presence. That’s the kind of reading that makes the writing matter!
||And yet, despite its radical charge, the erotic often hides in plain sight. In the way we choose a poem over a PowerPoint, a walk over a workout, a silence over a speech. In the subtle, almost imperceptible moments where we veer off-script, cancel a meeting, stay a little longer, speak a little truer. These are micro-erotic decisions: not overtly dramatic, but deeply subversive. They signal to the self that aliveness matters more than efficiency, that presence outweighs performance.||
Too good. And true. Thank you for penning this down.
I loved this essay. It's so fascinating that we use the term erotic to describe the quality of vibrant aliveness that makes people, activities, and situations desirable, and that same word has become synonymous with one particular kind of desire - a sexual one.
This essay is a welcome reminder that the feeling of aliveness we experience when we pursue our heart's desires is something far more profound and pleasurable than sex.
Exactly, you’ve named the paradox beautifully. “Erotic” was never meant to be confined to sex, it originally spoke to the force that animates, awakens, and draws us toward the depths of being. The fact that it’s been reduced to one narrow form of desire is a cultural loss, one I hoped to help repair.
I’m glad it landed as a reminder. Because yes, the pleasure of pursuing what stirs your soul, even when it’s terrifying, is one of the most profound forms of ecstasy there is. Thank you for reading with such clarity and resonance!
This is an arrestingly composed essay, Tamara, articulate, precise, and charged with a kind of restrained voltage that’s rare. I admire you chose not to write about the erotic in its classical sense; you chose to reframe it as a principle of orientation — toward vitality, not indulgence, instead. That distinction alone gives this piece real weight.
What resonates most, from a masculine perspective, is the framing of erotic decision-making not as indulgence but as risk-laden agency—the inner authority men are rarely taught to trust. We’re conditioned to optimize, not feel; to achieve, not be moved. The erotic, in this sense, threatens the scaffolding of identity built on control and predictability. And yet, as you argue, it is exactly this unruly pull—to act without guarantees, to desire without justification—that distinguishes a life lived from one endured.
A nuance to add, for men especially, the erotic decision is often buried beneath functionality. We confuse decisiveness with clarity, performance with purpose. But the erotic isn't reactive, it's intuitive, directional. It says, “not this, maybe that, even if it breaks you.” And when a man listens to that, in work, in art, in love, he reclaims freedom and authorship.
So yes, I agree with you, Tamara, life begins in desire. But it matures in the discipline of listening to what desire dares to ask of us.
This is one of the most intelligent and necessary expansions, thank you! Your articulation of how the erotic collides with masculinity is essential, and frankly, overdue in the wider conversation. Yes, men are often permitted desire only when it’s packaged as conquest, never as communion. And so the erotic, in its deeper, directional form, becomes threatening, and almost illegible. As you said so perfectly, it gets buried beneath functionality.
The distinction you make, between decisiveness and clarity, between performance and purpose, is crucial. We often applaud a man who moves swiftly, but not the one who moves vulnerably. Yet the erotic decision, especially for men, is not related domination or abandon, its attunement. To something within that doesn’t shout, but hums. That doesn’t promise victory, but insists on truth.
Desire is only the beginning. What follows is the discipline of staying close to it, listening even when it asks for sacrifice, for change, for unbecoming. That is not weakness. That is authorship, as you so rightly said.
Your comment supports my views and completes a layer I could only imply. Thank you for bringing the masculine soul into the frame with such grace and force!
It is an honour to be able to expand your amazingly written essays. Few people on Substack have your depth and the capacity to write so lucidity and nuanced about all kinds of topics.
both wonderful writing and seeing.. I love this sentence btw. "scaffolding of identity built on control and predictability" .. Yang / Mind / Fear / need to Control, versus Yin / Heart / Fear / need to be validated and loved .. but thats just a personal interpretation .. in the context of follwing the natural flow, desire and breaking these chains or virtual cage we (body Mind Emotion construct) built, its seems to be the same.. do not deny desire, or be governed by fear.. we are sovereign beings, and each experience is there to bring us closer to that self realisation.. the minds biggest program is resistance.. and as someone said recently, we resist even that.. allow the pendulum of our life experiences guide us in to rest in the void.. through the experience paths of sensations, Perceptions and beauty (Physical), Inquiry understanding and wisdom (Mental), and Feeling love, devotion and surrender ((Emotional).. the body mind heart then seem to merge and allow to pass through the energy, frequency, vibtaion and intention of Pure Love (Spiritual)
Thank you, there’s an intuitive elegance in how you’ve woven this together. What you’re describing is, in many ways, a tantric map of erotic integration: not in the limited sense of sexuality, but as the full-spectrum harmonisation of body, mind, heart, and spirit. And yes, “scaffolding of identity built on control and predictability” was meant to evoke precisely that brittle architecture the mind clings to in its fear of dissolution.
Your personal interpretation of the Yang/Mind and Yin/Heart dynamic adds a powerful frame. I might only nuance it slightly…. it’s not just that the mind fears — it fears surrender. And yet surrender isn’t passivity, as many think. It’s participation without illusion of control. That’s what the erotic asks of us: not indulgence, but alignment.
Your phrasing, “do not deny desire, or be governed by fear”, beautifully captures the crux. Not a binary of repression or chaos, but a sovereign way of riding the pulse of aliveness without being thrown by it. That’s the middle path of eros-as-compass.
"surrender isn’t passivity, as many think. It’s participation without illusion of control."
Whew. I'm just over here, being slayed again and again, even in the comments.
My comment sections are memorable in general :) Enjoy!
In reality, submission to the needs of my partner, found at 55 years old, knowing it was out there, but never before experiencing it fully, was exquisite. My pleasure was to pleasure her, and hers, me. Sublime.
Wonderful!
"restrained voltage" yes. this is truly the perfect way to describe this essay.
Your essay is a slow, elegant detonation, it begins in the soft language of philosophy and ends in fire. From the very first line “Life starts with erotic decisions” it invites, almost provocatively, a discussion of sex or sensuality. But what unfolds instead is an incredible manifesto on aliveness, certainly not in the biological sense, but in the soul-stirring, pulse-quickening sense. That shift is what stunned me. It’s like walking into a room expecting a candle and finding a bonfire. Tamara, no one can write the way you do!
What I admire most is how you restore dignity to desire as sacred intelligence. You portray the “want” as a compass. It challenges the spreadsheet life we’re taught to build and instead insists that tremors of longing are not distractions from life but its actual starting points. That’s a shift in worldview, a tectonic movement.
Personally, I’ve felt those erotic decisions, the ones that make no sense on paper but crack you open from the inside. A sentence I couldn’t unread. A person I shouldn’t have called. A creative project that came uninvited but refused to leave. And yes, they brought risk, even ruin. But they also brought pulse. And once you’ve felt that, the idea of living without it feels like death by small degrees.
Tamara, you don’t write about Eros as force, you enact it in the writing itself. Your prose seduces, with risk. And I think that’s the heart of it, eroticism, as you present it, isn’t decoration. It’s danger. And it’s the only danger worth walking into with your eyes open.
Thank you so much for having written this.
The resonance of your comments Céline, thank you!
“Death by small degrees”…. yes. That is the silent catastrophe so few name. Not a dramatic collapse, but a slow erosion of pulse, choice, desire… all in the name of safety. And you captured with aching precision the truth at the heart of it all: erotic decisions aren’t detours. They are the ROAD. Even if they lead through fire.
I’m especially moved by your insight that the writing doesn’t describe Eros but enacts it. That was the hope. That the form would echo the force. That the essay wouldn’t preach aliveness but embody it. Language, after all, isn’t neutral, it either seduces or it sedates.
And you’re right, eroticism is not aesthetic frosting. It is a beautiful danger… the kind that doesn’t flatter the ego but threatens its architecture. It won’t coddle you. But it might just awaken you.
I’m grateful, deeply, for your words.
Wow! The essay and so many of these exchanges, so incredibly powerful & inspiring!✨💫🤍 Your words, phrases & message — They are the ROAD. Even if they lead through fire 🔥
Thank you so much, David!
"tremors of longing are not distractions from life but its actual starting points."
mmm. this.
I have nothing to add to these comments. It is so refreshing to read a post that explains something that I have known all my life, and followed through thick and thin, ecstasy and object failure, but always following the adventure. Thank you so much x
You are most welcome, Tom!
And thank you too.
this is terrific 🙏🏼
Thank you, Tom!
I’m blown away. Where was this essay when I needed it many years ago. In one sudden instant, inexplicably, something descended and I felt it in my bones, my soul. Suddenly a simple conversation became an unrestrained passion. When people asked, “Why did you have this relationship?” I simply answered, “It was the thing I could not NOT do.” I loved the exhilaration of being pulled, finally, by my soul even though that pull caused countless heartbreaks and later nearly killed me. Would I do it again? I wouldn’t be able not to. Thank you so much for putting words to a life changing experience that I have not yet been fully able to explain. I’m in my late 50s now. Please tell me that this type of erotic decision isn’t only made once, that it can come around again…
Ohhhh, Julie, it absolutely can! And not only can it come again, I’d argue it must. Not always with the same intensity, perhaps, but with the same irrepressible hum beneath the skin. Erotic decisions are not one-time lightning strikes, they are a rhythm we can relearn, a pulse that never disappears, only quiets when ignored too long. What you felt, that “thing you could not NOT do”, was not a deviation from life. It was life, breaking through the crust of expectation.
That kind of soul-alignment isn’t tied to youth or novelty. It’s tied to courage. And you still have that, or you wouldn’t be here, naming it… Desire does not age. It just sheds layers of pretence.
And maybe now, wiser, less interested in approval, more fluent in your own frequencies, the next erotic decision won’t nearly kill you, but remake you more gently. Not with the desperation of needing to become, but with the authority of someone who already is. Keep listening for the murmur. It never really left! Trust yourself!
Thank you for her courage to write about this!
I will tell you “that this type of erotic decision isn’t only made once, that it come around again…”. For me it came around at the age of 81 and is here for both of us, now for me at the age of 83. To feel alive, to desire and long for, to be loved and desired, is ageless. To face the probability that our lives together may be few in number. No matter. It is worth the risk, never felt it was all that risky. The alternative was to be a part of the living dead.
How wonderful!
One million thank yous! You are now my new best friend 😀😂
You can count on me!
Vice versa!
Okay WOW to this piece Tamara! It really moved me and I could feel the movement of mysticism in your words. Eroticism is the lifeblood of evolution, living, discovery and life itself. The opposite is stagnation, frustration, unfulfillment. The suggestion that we could be asleep within our own stories is a profound one. We live in the age of micro and macro programming without the expression of what it’s for and for who. Going to Greece on an intuitive whim because you felt called to go holds more meaning than the transactional “we’re going to Greece because it’s the most popular European destination of 2025”. Where is the stirring of soul in such decision making?
It’s the still small voice within which is the loudest and clearest voice of instruction we can hear and align with. I can think of many times I’ve made a decision to do something/go somewhere and later discover that the whisper instructing me led me to where my soul needed to be — my evolution.
Erotic decisions are expanders — they are a dance with the Divine, a surrender to moment and a movement towards our soul’s evolution.
Thank you for sharing! I enjoy all of your writing but this one was particularly moving.
Thank you, Joanna! What you’ve written here feels like the liturgy for the life fully lived. Yes, erotic decisions are expanders. Not necessarily because they inflate our ego or guarantee outcomes, but because they stretch the boundaries of who we think we are, gently, irreversibly. Your example of the Greece trip captures the heart of it, one is a performance of desire, the other a submission to it. And that distinction, between choosing from the soul versus choosing for social coherence, is the invisible fulcrum of so many lives.
I also like that you named mysticism. The erotic, in its most sacred expression, is mystical, pleasure or even connection, but mostly communion. It is being led beyond the known, not by force, but by fascination. And that small voice you mention? I think it’s not small at all, it’s just that the world has grown so loud we’ve forgotten how to hear it.
Thank you for this reflection! You’ve honoured my essay with your own deep seeing, and I’m very grateful!
It's a divine grace. No doubt about it.
I love the framing of this as "erotic decisions", even though I suspect you will lose a few people. It's exactly the type of risk-taking, creative decision that you're writing about. This is the most liberally-spirited piece I've ever read, and I mean that in a primordial sense of the world "liberal", free from any political connotation. It's the spirit of divergence; of the desire to go outside the box, not for the sake of contrarianism or as some narcissistic ploy to be unique, but for true expansion, both of the self and of our conceptions of what is possible.
It's the one bird who strays west from the rest of the flock flying south, in order to scout new territory; it's the spirit of the heretic; it's the creative impulse, driven by the instinctual understanding that stagnation is the figurative death that gets us long before the literal one.
Conservatism is essential, but the difference is that it's life-affirming, but not living. It's the crucial order that is a necessary condition to the erotic, but not sufficient because too much conservation suppresses it. In that sense, I agree, eroticism is the beginning of life. At the very least, it's the moment of conception where we begin searching for the things that make life worth living. And it's fraught, of course, but that's inevitable. All roads leading to expansion are necessarily dangerous, which is the reason they've been left untraveled, and why they should never be left unexplored.
A stunning and stirring piece, Tamara.
As usual, you can’t just read my essays, you ride them, like that westward bird you so aptly described. And yes, the term “erotic” will likely lose some readers, but it was precisely the risk I felt compelled to take. Not for shock, but for precision. Because no other word captures that holy intersection between desire and transformation quite as fully.
Your point about liberalism in its primordial sense is vital. Not the corrupted, politicised shell we often see today, but the deeper, mythic spirit of expansion, of the heretic who walks out of the village to see what else might exist beyond the ridge, not to burn it down. That impulse is older than politics. It’s what made the first fire, the first poem, the first revolution against silence.
And I love your framing of conservatism as necessary but incomplete, the skeleton, perhaps, that allows for the dance. Eros needs friction, after all. It needs something to push against. But when order forgets its role as midwife and starts playing warden, that’s when the soul atrophies.
You articulated the anatomy of eroticism with stunning clarity, just like I imagine it too. Thank you, Andrew, for expanding the conversation so beautifully! You have made me think harder…. and that, too, is erotic.
This essay sounds like a homecoming to me.
I've been feeling the pull of something more alive, more truthful and real for the longest time and while I've been following it a lot of the time, I'm totally guilty of slipping into the comfort of previously established patterns that no longer serve me.
I wish I had the words to say more of what I'm thinking and feeling — you wrote yet another stunning journey through the woven ins and outs of an unjustifiably taboo topic that bleeds into seemingly unrelated areas of life; quite the meta-exemplification of eroticism in the structure of the essay itself and of the way life and its components overlap in intricate and inextricable ways — but I do not. I like to think it's because I'm going through a necessary side effect of me following the erotic metamorphosis and its disruptive force.
Thank you for reminding us to follow the murmur of our hearts or of whatever else lies beyond it!
What a beautiful and brave response, thank you for meeting the essay with intellectual presence. That feeling of homecoming you describe… yes. That’s exactly the terrain of Eros: recognition. A flicker of “this is it,” even if it dismantles everything you thought you were building. And slipping back into patterns? Of course. That’s part of the dance. Even Psyche had to wander, stumble, repeat. The point isn’t to be perfectly aligned, but to keep listening for the thread, even in the noise.
And I like what you said about the structure itself being erotic, that’s deeply perceptive. The form wanted to echo the very thing it described: fluid, layered, unapologetically entangled. Just like life.
Your silence is gestational. Trust that! Often, the words we miss become us.
So true! I love this Tamara! The erotic decision is not about recklessness, it’s about remembering who you are underneath all the roles you’ve been told to play. To choose the erotic is to risk the vulnerability of truly being seen by one’s self and others. Really beautiful.
Yes, exactly, Katie! It’s not recklessness, it’s revelation. The erotic decision doesn’t destroy who you are, it just strips away who you are not. All those roles we rehearsed for the sake of approval or belonging (professionalism, politeness, perfection) Eros isn’t interested in any of them. It wants what’s alive underneath.
And you’ve pointed to something crucial, the risk is in the exposure. To want deeply is to stand naked before yourself, before the world, and say, “This is what stirs me”. There’s no hiding in that. But oh, the freedom that follows…..
Thank you for naming the heart of it so clearly!Remembering who we are is not the return to the past, but the return to pulse.
Thank you for writing this, Tamara. This put words to that which so often feels beyond them.
This poem came out of me a few moments ago. It wanted to be shared, so I shared it. Then I read your essay. ❤️🔥
GET NAKED
And what if you were fed?
Already holy,
whole,
re-membered.
Your voice carrying notes
most true.
Most you.
Most pulsing,
ancient heartbeat, aching.
What would you say?
What would you do?
And what would come
after the cracking,
and the waking?
Who would you be?
You would be YOU.
Finally free.
Finally here.
Alive. Untamed.
Naked.
This is exquisite, thank you for sharing it. There’s a raw, pulse-lit beauty in your poem that feels like it was pulled from the same current as the essay. It responds to the words, it mirrors their source. “And what if you were fed? Already holy, whole, re-membered” — stopped me cold. Because that’s the revolution: not striving, but remembering. Not proving our worth, but inhabiting it.
Get Naked is a call to strip the performance, the posturing, the programmed fear. And the fact that this came before you read the essay tells me we were both tapping into something collective, something ancient resurfacing through many voices at once.
Thank you for sharing!
Thanks Tamara for this beautiful reflection.
I feel it so deeply, that collective remembering. And every time I forget a little, something sweet - like coming across your essay minutes after writing that poem - happens to remind me that there are many of us, getting naked, one by one and all together.
Priceless, indeed.
There is an honesty in your voice that is certified to resurrect the damned. It disintegrates the duplicitous, the equivocal, all layers of self deception. It washes the soul in the river Styx and pulls it out purified and renewed. It releases this revivified distillation to confront his living corpse. It empowers an abashed humanity.
Your work makes me remember a man in me I'd forgotten was there, buried in tortured trappings. You reduce me to mist but unleash galactic dimensions within me. You terrify as you emancipate. In your hands, I am unflinchingly free to cry out: I am Khan; I am Ahab; I am Ramses. Here me roar, I am Pandora; I am Prometheus; I am Sybil.
These expressions are felt sensations every time I engage with your work. The false always falls away. The real, the otherwise neglected real, rises. Truly, Tamara, you give me hope in myself when I am tempted to capitulate to convenience. Discipline demands endurance. You help me to endure. You consecrate the effort and make it worthwhile.
My gratitude is wholly yours at those times.
This is staggering, in language — though your words reverberate like myth — but in soul. I read this and thought: a resurrection, as you say, of something more ancient than persona, more courageous than performance.
That you see Khan and Ahab and Ramses, and then Pandora, Prometheus, Sybil, tells me you understand exactly what I hoped the essay would stir: an elemental reckoning, not an argument. The erotic is the tectonic shift that calls back the parts of us exiled by convenience, domesticated by duty. You write as someone who has felt that shift, not in metaphor, but in marrow.
And yes…. endurance. You name it so perfectly. Desire is not indulgence. It is discipline, sacred and brutal. To stay faithful to the pulse in a world built to numb it takes more than will, it takes devotion. And if anything I’ve written helps you hold the line when comfort tempts collapse, then I have done what I came here to do.
Your words are a gift, they mirror back the depth I try to write from. And that is the greatest kind of hope…. the kind that echoes. Thank you, Andrew!
Dear Tamara,
Warm greetings. My name is Swami Padmanabha, a Hindu monk in the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition—rooted in the ancient bhakti teachings of devotional love. I was deeply moved by your essay, which was brought to my attention by my dear friend and elder, Fr. Richard Rohr. I had the blessing of visiting him in his New Mexico hermitage just today, and in our time together—exchanging gifts, reflections, and prayers—he mentioned how your piece had stirred him so deeply that he wove it into a marriage sermon for one of his closest friends some weeks ago.
I now understand why.
Your meditation on the “erotic decision” echoes truths we have carried in our sacred texts for millennia. The Rig Veda, one of Hinduism’s oldest scriptures, begins not with a commandment or dogma, but with, as you declare, a "tremble": kamas tad agre sam avartatadhi manaso retah—“In the beginning, there was desire, the first seed in the mind [of the Divine].” In our understanding, this primal yearning—kama—is not lust, nor lack, but sacred restlessness, a holy longing within the heart of God. It is this divine desire that births the cosmos. Creation itself, in our understanding, is an erotic decision: a courageous choosing-toward-connection, toward becoming, toward the beloved.
As a monk, I’ve not renounced eros—I’ve simply learned to court it differently. In our path, sexual energy is transmuted, not suppressed—revered as a current of intimacy, creativity, and communion. What you name as erotic decision, we may call madhurya-rasa—the sweetest flavor of divine love, a love that is unruly, ecstatic, and perpetually reaching beyond itself. We are taught that the soul’s highest longing is not for safety, but for loving union that breaks us open and makes us whole.
In my own practice, I’ve come to recognize that what our tradition calls rasa—the essence of relational sacredness—is precisely what your words evoke. The pull toward what undoes us, remakes us, and calls us to inhabit our life more deeply. It is not the pursuit of gratification, but of intimacy with what matters most. Like you so beautifully write, the erotic is not a moment of indulgence, but of authorship—of reclaiming our capacity to be moved, to risk, to respond.
Thank you for giving such reverent, daring language to this mystery. I see your work as a sacred mirror, and I hope it reaches many more souls yearning to remember that life truly begins—again and again—when we choose to feel, to want, and to be undone.
In sacred longing,
Swami Padmanabha
Dear Swami,
Your words arrived like a prayer in motion, rooted, reverent, and alive. I read them slowly, more than once, letting them echo through me like the Vedic verse you quoted, which gave me chills: “In the beginning, there was desire…” What a staggering alignment, that the world begins not with law, but with longing.
Your tradition’s understanding of kama as sacred restlessness, as the trembling seed within the Divine, touches something so deep it leaves no room for cynicism. That we are desired into being, not just created but courted by the cosmos, rewrites so many inherited stories of shame, separation, and spiritual sterility.
I am particularly moved by your framing of your monastic life, not as a renunciation of eros, but as a deeper courting of it. That is precisely the nuance I hoped to breathe into this essay: not a call to libertine excess, nor to moralist suppression, but to the wild art of intimacy with what calls us to life. The erotic not as “pleasure-as-product”, but as sacred participation. Madhurya-rasa, as you describe, feels like the spiritual twin of what I was reaching for, the sweetness that arises not from conquest, but from surrender.
And what a lineage to feel reflected in: the Rig Veda, the wisdom of your bhakti path, and the gorgeous paradox that the holiest love is often the most unruly. We have spent centuries trying to housebreak divinity, to discipline longing. But your letter reminds me that divinity prefers the dance.
Thank you for your generosity, for the beauty of your own articulation, and for tethering my words to something ancient and transcendent. I’m honoured beyond measure that Fr. Rohr shared this with you, and that it became part of a wedding homily… what more sacred threshold for this kind of language to inhabit?
With reverence and gratitude from one trembling author to another.
Tamara, your reply was a gift. Thank you. It read like a benediction, affirming that words can still tremble, still carry spirit.
What especially resonated with me was your insight that the world begins not with law, but with longing. In the bhakti tradition I belong to—Gaudiya Vaishnavism—this longing is not something to suppress, but the very pulse of divinity. Romantic love (eros) is not exiled from the sacred; it becomes its most intimate expression.
In fact, our tradition holds a daring theological vision: that the highest form of divine love is known as parakiya-bhava, the love between secret lovers. The great heroines of this tradition are the gopis—married village women who leave everything behind (reputation, family, even dharma) to meet Krishna, their playful and all-attractive Beloved, in the forest. Not as an endorsement of adultery, of course, but as a metaphor for the soul's ultimate risk—giving up everything for the sake of divine intimacy.
This isn’t love for the sake of stability or virtue, but the trembling, transgressive yearning that cracks open the world we've been handed and whispers: There is more. There is mystery. There is uncertainty. There is paradox. But, above (and inside them) all, there is love in its most dignifying expression.
Thank you again for writing something that allowed so many of us—across traditions—to feel seen in our sacred longing.
Also, I host a podcast where I invite voices from many walks of life—scholars, mystics, artists, contemplatives—to explore the edges where love, longing, and spirit meet. Past guests have included Richard Rohr, Francis X. Clooney, rabbis, priests, monks, scientists, psychologists, etc.. If you ever feel drawn, I’d be honored to explore this theme further with you in conversation.
With gratitude,
Swami Padmanabha
📩 padmanabhaswami@gmail.com
Your reply left me quiet for a moment, in that particular stillness that only comes when something ancient and intimate has been spoken aloud. Words can still tremble, still carry spirit, yes. Yours did.
This vision of parakiya-bhava took my breath away. What a stunning theological metaphor, that the soul’s most sacred gesture is to leave behind the sanctioned, the stable, the socially approved path… and walk into the forest for love. Not because it is easy. Not because it is safe. But because the heart knows when it is being called. And what you’ve described, the gopis’ willingness to forsake everything for the sake of communion, feels like the very embodiment of what I tried to call an erotic decision: not sex, not revolt for its own sake, but the act of risking self-definition for the sake of what animates you most.
That your tradition holds space for this, not as moral failure, but as mystical fidelity, feels deeply healing. And it underscores something I’ve always believed: that the erotic is not a threat to the sacred, but its most intimate language.
Thank you for this bridge between traditions. For allowing eros to be not only a biological urge or poetic trope, but a spiritual current that winds through devotion, defiance, and divine play. I’m honoured and humbled that these words resonated so deeply across such different but mirroring paths.
And should the stars align, I would be glad to continue this conversation when the time is right. The intersections you explore are ones I care about fiercely, and it would be a joy to wander those edges together.
Sometimes love asks us to leave behind even what named us—role, duty, certainty—just to follow the hush of a deeper call. In our tradition, this is parakiya-bhava: the soul as a lover who risks it all for one trembling moment of union. Self-forgetfulness in love divine.
Not rebellion, but radical fidelity.
Not moral failure, but love in its wildest, most sacred form.
I’d be honored to keep exploring these edges with you whenever it feels alive. The invitation to the podcast remains open—just a continued conversation under a different sky.
Nothing is more sensual than a woman with the intelligence to form thought into a key to open a man’s mind and make it her playground.
Indeed! And the best ones don’t ask for the key, they pick the lock with a line from Sappho, rearrange the furniture of his convictions, leave a quote on the mirror in red lipstick, and vanish before he realises he’s hosting a revolution in his own head.
Because true seduction is epistemology in stilettos, not the cliché lace and perfume.
‘… the furniture of his convictions …’ so he is absolutely convinced that this is the good, right, natural and necessary order of things.
‘… before he realizes …’ so he perceives the adjustment of his understanding as his ‘OWN’ doing.
‘… a revolution in his own head …’ in which values, perspective, the conceptual framework from which he sees and interprets the world and his place in it are at last … correctly aligned …
‘Because true seduction is …’ and this is what is SUPPOSED to be, and what NATURE intends … and what millions of years of evolutionary biology require.
‘… epistemology …’
… helpless when you talk dirty to me.
Ohhhh, you caught me mid-seduction, diagramming your resistance like a sentence in Latin.
But yes, precisely: he thinks he rearranged the furniture. He even congratulates himself on the feng shui. Meanwhile, she’s already sold the house, moved to the coast, and written a bestseller about it under a pseudonym.
And “epistemology”? Darling, that’s just pillow talk for philosophers. Evolution may have handed us instincts, but it’s the reinterpretation of them that makes the real sparks fly.
Now hush! You start to sound like foreplay in footnotes.
‘ … I t’s the reinterpretation of them that makes the real sparks fly.’
Couldn’t agree more! You have a good mind, and I’m glad we met. Wish it happened four decades ago.
… But I’m ‘listening…’
Edit:
And your words to Liliana …
‘The erotic … the unexpected: it slips past defences, unsettles our categories, and invites thought to feel and feeling to think.’
Perhaps that’s its secret weapon, not seduction for its own sake, but disruption in service of awakening.’
Awakening and growth … you do want that … don’t you …’
- - - wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?
P B Shelley, "To ---"
The Moth … an analogy so very suited …
Glad I found this Substack.
Warming my toes by your conversation here. Mmmmmm
You got it 😍😍
I needed a moment to sit in silence with this astounding essay on Erotic Decisions. You astound with the proximity of, "When something stirs beneath reason. When you want something - or someone - without being able to explain why, and you choose to move toward it. That is the erotic decision," love and power. And that is just your opening. Framing eroticism as you have is the transcendence to invite all of the wisdom voices inside of us. These questions have arisen for me in re-reading your piece for the third time. It's impossible to get enough.
What wisdom do I hold that must not be forgotten?
What has life taught me the hard way that might guide others?
What knowing lives in my body that words alone cannot carry?
This robust circle of connection that you have created through your imaginative, brilliant mind, heart and soul is a gift that helps support the many beginnings and endings we hold. The other question I'm wondering through this erotic journey, is how do I hold my own endings? Am I alive and participating in the ecstasy of life? Thank you, endlessly.
Your reflection, Susan, reads like a benediction, thank you! The very questions that surfaced for you as you re-read the piece are, in themselves, erotic in the highest sense: not titillating, but trembling with consequence. They come from that liminal place where truth isn’t argued but remembered. And I’m in awe that my essay made room for those voices to rise within you.
“What wisdom must not be forgotten?” — that question alone could govern a lifetime. And I like how you wove endings into the erotic because yes, the erotic is not only the ecstasy of beginnings, but the dignity of completions. To hold an ending with presence, not numbness, is to affirm that this mattered. That you mattered. That whatever was risked was not wasted, even if it broke you open.
Your phrase, “the ecstasy of life”, is exactly the point. Not the ecstasy of indulgence, but of participation. Of showing up, breathless and real, again and again, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.
Thank you for holding the piece so reverently. And for reminding me that the real gift of writing is when it catalyses other wisdom to surface. You’ve gifted that back tenfold.
I wrote a lengthy response, but it is totally eclipsed by this poem, The Rose, sung with such moving power, by Bette Midler. Your message is its message, put so movingly, so powerfully, that I cannot read, let alone listen to it, with dry eyes.
I quote the second stanza and the final line, below:
“It’s the heart, afraid of breaking, that never learns to dance;
It’s the dream, afraid of waking, that never takes the chance;
It’s the one who won’t be taken, who cannot seem to give;
AND THE SOUL, AFRAID OF DYING, THAT NEVER LEARNS TO LIVE.
Far beneath the bitter snow, lies the seed, that with the sun’s love,
IN THE SPRING, BECOMES THE ROSE.
I cannot possibly add to that.
And yet, you did, simply by choosing that poem, that voice, those lines. The Rose is one of those rare cultural artefacts that speaks to the wound, and to the will to bloom anyway. And yes, it sings the same message in another key: that to shield ourselves from pain is also to exile ourselves from aliveness.
The soul, afraid of dying, that never learns to live… it’s the exact tragedy I hoped to speak to in this essay. That too many lives are structured around avoidance, not awakening. Around safety, not surrender. And as you so poignantly point out, the seed doesn’t survive the winter by hardening, it survives by becoming something else entirely.
Thank you for sharing this echo, Russell! It’s a perfect harmony, a tender reminder that our best thinking often arrives with melody, not argument.
I’ve had to pause and reflect on every sentence. And just like you said, I was pulled in like gravity. I will be reading this over and over until it sinks in my bones- because I know it’s all true.
I’ve said it before and repeat it, this is the greatest compliment a writer can receive, not just to be read, but re-read, reflected upon, let in. You’ve done exactly what my essay invites: not to skim it as content, but to feel it as a current.
Truth, especially erotic truth, doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It arrives like gravity, inevitable, invisible, and utterly rearranging. Let it sink in as slowly as it needs to. Bone-deep knowing takes time. And once it’s there, it doesn’t leave.
Thank you, Christine, for meeting my thoughts with your full presence. That’s the kind of reading that makes the writing matter!
You are welcome! ❤️❤️❤️I woke up thinking about my longing as gravity and i feel like something has freed up in me. What a gift!
I agree. This one’s going to leave a mark.
Damn! This hit hard, Tamara.
||And yet, despite its radical charge, the erotic often hides in plain sight. In the way we choose a poem over a PowerPoint, a walk over a workout, a silence over a speech. In the subtle, almost imperceptible moments where we veer off-script, cancel a meeting, stay a little longer, speak a little truer. These are micro-erotic decisions: not overtly dramatic, but deeply subversive. They signal to the self that aliveness matters more than efficiency, that presence outweighs performance.||
Too good. And true. Thank you for penning this down.
Thank you too, Amit!
I loved this essay. It's so fascinating that we use the term erotic to describe the quality of vibrant aliveness that makes people, activities, and situations desirable, and that same word has become synonymous with one particular kind of desire - a sexual one.
This essay is a welcome reminder that the feeling of aliveness we experience when we pursue our heart's desires is something far more profound and pleasurable than sex.
Exactly, you’ve named the paradox beautifully. “Erotic” was never meant to be confined to sex, it originally spoke to the force that animates, awakens, and draws us toward the depths of being. The fact that it’s been reduced to one narrow form of desire is a cultural loss, one I hoped to help repair.
I’m glad it landed as a reminder. Because yes, the pleasure of pursuing what stirs your soul, even when it’s terrifying, is one of the most profound forms of ecstasy there is. Thank you for reading with such clarity and resonance!