Dark Eros: transformation of fear, guilt, shame and anger
Dark Eros is a term to describe sexuality which is connected with our first chakra rather than with the second; that arises from existential issues rather than from pure pleasure, love and contact. The existential themes, whether they are about power (over or under), about anger and revenge, about guilt and shame, or carry issues of self worth and empowerment, colour the sexual energy with this touch of darkness, as the issues are usually unconscious, perhaps obsessive, or have an energy that threatens to break out of our conscious control. This is not the element of ego, of performance or narcissism, but more the dark visceral movements of energy deep in our gut.
This workshop shows how to heal and transform these existential issues through Tantric techniques of consciousness, heartfullness and an affirmation of the life-expressing energy of pleasure.
The existential issues arise out of the repression of our sexual energy during the pre-genital stages, ocular oral and anal, of our sexual development. When rejected, our excitement and pleasure become collapse and resignation, when controlled become guilt, fear and the unconscious linking of excitement with power, suffering and punishment.
John Hawken will introduce a practical and theoretical approach to transform these existential issues back into pure pleasure and life energy with powerful healing and liberating effect.
The steps include:
- Accepting and embracing the dark impulses and energies.
- Stepping deeply into this polarity
- Calling in heart energy to reverse the movement towards contactlessness and violence.
- By choosing the contact and the pleasure creating love and beauty instead of violence and suffering.
- Experiencing the sexual energy as opening the gateway to sacred intimacy
- And finally the feeling of arriving, of coming home.
At first it may seem perverse to take pleasure openly in power or in punishment. But the perversion is in the repression and taboo that leads to the original sublimation of sexual excitement into the more socially acceptable energy forms of power or morality. As the pleasure is admitted, the violence falls away and innocence is regained.
John Hawken has over 30 years’ experience in bodywork and energy work, and leads trainings in bioenergetics and working with sexuality. He trained in tantra with Margot Anand and has 20 years experience of leading tantra trainings in several European countries. He has developed and tested the Dark Eros techniques for transformation in hundreds of group and individual sessions.