Erotic Ecology: Awakening the Senses and Returning to Nature

Love is an ecological process.  — Andreas Weber 

Our sensual connection to our bodies and the living world is under threat. We have become numb to the Earth’s touch. 

But the Earth is calling us home.

Are you yearning for the analog, messy, and real? Do you desire to return to your body and shed the phantasms of the overculture? This week-long workshop offers an immersive, slow, and sensual experience in the erotic ecology pathway — a space to reawaken our sensory, pleasurable, and nourishing connection to two landscapes: our bodies and nature. Erotic ecology is a life philosophy that honors aliveness as the compass. Vitality for self, other and the Earth. If the living world is a tapestry of intimacy, then life is only possible through honoring the desire, pleasure, and sensuous experience of life itself. 

From this shared ground grows flourishing relationships. From eros blooms aliveness for all.

Through embodied exploration, contemplative practice, and nature rituals, you can rediscover your birthright: an intimate relationship with the natural world. This kinship reminds us that, at our essence, we are not separate from the Earth — we are the Earth.

Set amongst Esalen’s sacred landscape, where redwood forest meets the Pacific Ocean, we’ll engage in practices designed to open you to ecological eros: the ever-living and abundant source of pleasure, aliveness, and vitality.

During our time together, you are invited to:

• Learn and practice the eight stages of interoceptive awareness, our body’s portal to sensing the Earth.
• Attune to the pace of nature and move at the rhythm of our surroundings.
• Practice attuned and consensual touch.
• Remember, feel, and embody your own aliveness.
• Awaken a felt sense of kinship with the natural world. 
• Reconnect with your body’s innate wisdom and capacity for vitality.
• Expand in playful connection to nature through art, poetry, mandala-making, ritual, and dance.
• Savor the nourishment of surrendering to the Earth’s embrace and seduction.
• Taste the deepest wellspring of rest and nourishment that is nature’s baseline.
• Learn how to speak the language of the Earth.
• Connect your own erotic vitality to collective liberation and ecological justice.

You’ll be guided to return home with the kindled flame of a love affair with the Earth — an enduring resource in an increasingly disconnected world.

Recommended Reading: Heartwood: The Wisdom and Healing Kinship of Trees by Lindsay Branham and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer