Returning to Aliveness: A Case Study of Eros, Grief, and the Will to Live.

There are moments in life when survival looks deceptively functional from the outside — you work, relate, move forward — while inside, something essential has quietly switched off.

This is a story of one such moment in my life. I share it not as a prescription, but as lived evidence of how embodied work, emotional truth, and Eros as an intelligence can restore contact with life when meaning has thinned to a thread.

This is for those who are high-functioning, capable — and secretly tired of carrying everything alone.

The Question That Changed Everything

At 32, I overheard a conversation that cut through me with unexpected precision.

Bruce Lyon, one of the founders of the International School of Temple Arts, asked someone a simple question:

“Do you want to be here?”

The question landed at a time when my external life appeared intact, but internally I was standing at the edge of a quiet collapse. I had recently come out of an eight-year relationship. What I didn’t yet understand was that the breakup had removed the last structure holding a much older wound in place.

When I let the question land fully, the answer startled me:

I had never consciously chosen life.

Not dramatically. Not philosophically. Just somatically — there had been no deep yes in my system.

What the Body Was Carrying

As the weeks unfolded, a deeper truth surfaced: a childhood experience of emotional absence from my father had shaped my inner landscape far more than I realised.

The relationship ending didn’t cause the depression — it revealed it.

Without the relationship buffering my nervous system, grief moved in with full force. My inner world became heavy, slow, and increasingly dark. Suicidal thoughts appeared — not as an impulse to die, but as an exhaustion with living in disconnection.

This distinction matters.

Emotional Processing as a Way Back

What supported me through that period was not positive thinking or cognitive reframing, but emotional processing through the body.

I moved grief through:

• unstructured dancing,

• sound and voice,

• physical discharge (hitting pillows, shaking, crying),

• self-touch and self-pleasure without performance or fantasy.

These were not aesthetic practices. They were acts of honesty.

I also began cultivating inner relational support — consciously meeting myself from what I call the inner masculine, the inner father, and a transpersonal sense of being held by something larger than my personal story.

Journaling became a stabilising mirror — not to analyse, but to witness.

This way of working with emotions is foundational in my practice today. I teach it because I have lived its necessity.

Meeting the Edge Without Crossing It

During this time, I spoke openly with a close friend about suicidal thoughts. Naming them removed their power.

What became clear was this: beneath the despair, there was a strong survival intelligence. My system was not trying to end life — it was trying to end unbearable disconnection.

Recognising this changed everything.

Reclaiming Self-Love — Not as an Idea.

As emotions moved, something softened. The inner weight began to lift.

Self-love didn’t arrive as an affirmation. It emerged as a capacity to stay with myself — especially when I felt rejected, unseen, or alone.

This marked a turning point: love stopped being something I waited to receive correctly from others. It became a relational field I could generate internally.

Eros as Intelligence, Not Performance.

From here, my exploration naturally expanded into Eros — not as sexuality in the narrow sense, but as life-force, curiosity, and creative impulse.

Eros taught me how to feel again without drowning. How to open sensation without losing agency. How to bring aliveness into everyday life — work, relationships, rest.

Later, teaching conscious sexuality became a way to transmit this intelligence to others: not techniques, but orientation — toward pleasure that is rooted, regulated, and real.

Living With the Full Range

Today, I don’t aim to bypass life’s emotional spectrum.

I still meet grief, fear, and uncertainty — but I meet them from inside my body, with tools, support, and choice. The difference is not the absence of darkness, but the presence of contact.

Closing

This journey did not “fix” me.

It reconnected me.

If there is one thing I know with certainty, it is this:

When we are willing to meet our inner world honestly — through the body, not despite it — life responds.

Aliveness is not something we earn.

It is something we allow back in.