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“For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing”.1
Audre Lorde, a powerful Black poet-warrior, is speaking about the notion of The Erotic.
No, she is not talking about pornography or even sex.
To the contrary, The Erotic is that deeply spiritual realm within each human. It is a power that rises from an innate, deep, and non-rational well inside each of us. It is not about calculating, about planning, about plotting strategic routes to happiness.
Instead, The Erotic is about feeling Life deeply.2
“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves”.3
We have been taught to suppress our responses to the world, to tame our emotions, to quickly scuffle beyond our psychological hurt, to place our focus on the external world rather than our internal universe.
Instead of saying “yes” to the window of experience from which we are currently viewing the world, we keep our joy wedded too much to an illusory future that often never comes.
I remember once, as a university professor, I asked students to simply remember a time in life when they felt loved.
I wanted students to share these stories with others in the class so that they could get practice with authentic listening skills.
To my amazement, many students struggled. One student even cried when he couldn’t stretch his memory to recover an experience of love, of the divine wisdom.
Later, the young man told me that he had felt emotions for the first time in a long time as a result of the simple exercise.
He called these emotions “Bad. Very Bad.”
How many of us are like this young one? Separated from The Erotic.
The great sage, Audre Lorde, teaches us that if we can be honest with ourselves, if we can face our mental and emotional demons, we can reconcile them.
“To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd…For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of”.4
When the Erotic is released, it colors our life with a divine-charge that “heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience”.5
The Erotic connects us with a profound joy that is always-already within us.
Most of us, though, have forgotten that The Erotic lies within us.
In order to achieve the joy Lorde archives, we seek “objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying”.6 We try to find our happiness in that new promotion at work, in our bank account, in that new guy that works over in “Billing”, or in our children’s accomplishments.
Imagine what it would be like to live everyday with this power, to be fully connected with our bodies, our emotions and the force of life itself: “when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense”.7
The Erotic is how we birth transformation in the world and within each other. In order to do this, we must become present.
James Baldwin called the engagement with the “present”, The Sensual.
Does all this sound too sex-related? Let’s look again:
“The word ‘sensual’ is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread”.8
Maybe you’re saying, “I’m good with being in the moment, but I don’t know about all of that emotional stuff.” Fair enough.
But remember, “Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here [in America]”.
Baldwin continues, “The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality- for this touchstone can be only oneself”.
Most people, have lost the capacity for the Erotic and The Sensual because we live in a society that is more focused on taking rather than giving, on thinking rather than feeling, on selling rather than enjoying.
“It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion [on racism]…so supremely difficult”.9
What we end up using instead of our deeply felt intuition and natural intelligence to basic encounters, are a set of societal beliefs that none of us created.
We rely on stereotypes instead of our basic awareness of what is happening in the moment.
Is it any surprise, then, when police destroy another unarmed Black body?
They are merely following the insane practice of disconnection and inattention that we have all been taught to understand. In other words: “They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person”.10
The Erotic and The Sensual are intimately connected. Feeling deeply and Living in the Present moment. They are deathly important for our lives and our health.
“How can I live in the present moment, I’ve got stuff to plan, things to do?”
There are human societies that already know the game:
In Brazil, there are a group of people called the Piraha.
The Piraha Live The Erotic and The Sensual.
This indigenous group have no word for Time, they have no nouns in their language, they have no “creation-story” and they have no numbers.
After months of trying to teach these people how to count, no one could.
Without a concept of Time, for the Piraha, Time does not exist.
Things and objects in the world simply always are present.
Very few Piraha can remember the names of all four of their grandparents.
With no creation-story, Piraha have no need for a God that can “save” them from a future damnation.11
This is not an indictment on religion, only a precursor to a thought experiment:
Imagine how difficult it is for members of this group of people to constantly beat themselves up over what their mother said to them when they were three. If there is no “time’, then there is no need to place constant attention on what-is-not present.
Imagine how difficult it would be to not believe in anything called, The Future, To see our world with fresh eyes.
Oh, The details we miss
What would it be like NOT to imagine that that new promotion is what’s going to “turn it all around” for you?
Imagine what it would be like to be joyous right where you are.
I am not suggesting that the Piraha are without problems.
I am, however, suggesting that Time is a useful tool, but when it removes us from the Present moment and ourselves, from The Sensual and The Erotic, Time becomes a cancer.
Very bad for your health.
I want to describe a way that we can reconnect with our inner world and remain rooted in the only experience of life we ever have, The Present-moment.
When we are finished, we will still be able to utilize Time as a tool, go to work, prepare dinners for our families, and build empires, but we will do so consciously.
Fully. And joyously.
One way to reconnect with our bodies and live more presently is to practice meditation. Meditation can do wonders for our health and for our mental and physical healing.
Meditation is the way we reach The Erotic and The Sensual state of Living.
Meditation is also good for your health.
Allow me to explain.
MEDITATION: GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH
Research on Meditation demonstrates that it has tremendous benefits for health-outcomes for Black people.
Think about this, our lives are spent in the pursuit of reducing stress.
We work really hard in school to get “good jobs” so we don’t have to deal with the perceived stress of being homeless. Then we start businesses to work 80 hours a week to stop the demeaning feeling we get when our ideas are silenced in our corporate offices…an attempt to avoid the stress of corporate slavery.
We avoid going to certain parts of town because we don’t want to run into anybody “we know”. We do this to avoid the stress of having to drum up artificial, dry conversation.
Some of us spend too much time at the Barber/Salon to avoid the stigma and associated stress of “nappy hair”. Some of us make sure our kids have designer outfits to avoid the gossip of other parents, which causes stress.
Meditation helps reduce anxiety.
A study completed with highly stressed health-care professionals adapting to ever increasing quotas found that mindfulness meditation can help develop mental resources that not only help us deal with stress, but that these mental resources can produce physical benefits as well.12
Keep in mind, that when we are under stress, our bodies produce a hormone from our adrenal cortex called Cortisol. Cortisol is designed to help the body, in stressful situations, break down fat and protein for energy and save glucose (sugar) in order to energize the brain.
However, when we are constantly stressed, Cortisol does something else. As protein stores are depleted for energy, muscles breakdown. When we lose muscle, we also lose some of our metabolic power or our capacity to burn fat at rest.
This leads to increased fat stores on the body.
Increased stress and Cortisol levels will increase blood-pressure.
At consistently elevated levels, high-blood pressure can destroy the vessels through which blood travels, increasing the chance for heart attacks.
Naturally, chronically raised Cortisol levels reduce the body’s ability to regenerate cells, leading to unhealthy cells and accelerated aging.
All bad.
Job insecurity, food insecurity, financial insecurity, racial profiling, and reduced access to helpful institutions disproportionately affect the Black community.
The chances for chronically high cortisol levels for Black people are tremendously high.
In fact, research indicates that compared with European Americans, Black Americans babies experience disproportionately low birth weights and low preterm delivery rates.
African American babies are twice as likely to die in their first year of life. What caused this? Stress in Black mothers due to health care access and (c)overt racial discrimination among others.13
AND
We know Black people are more likely to die from stress related, cardiovascular diseases like Atherosclerosis (big word for clogged arteries).
Research indicates that stress influences the development of atherosclerosis.
There is, however, good news:
A study investigating the role of atherosclerosis, stress and Transcendental meditation found a significant, but preliminary association between the practice of transcendental meditation(TM), stress reduction, and carotid atherosclerosis reduction.14
This means there is a way to reverse carotid atherosclerosis by cutting down daily anxiety.
Later research indicates that Transcendental meditation can even help regain physical motor skills after chronic heart failure by helping patients reduce depression and cortisol levels.15
Chronic heart disease and hypertension go together. That’s why meditation has also been found to decrease high blood pressure.16
In short, meditation has been shown to DECREASE BLACK MORTALITY RATES.17
Even brief meditation training has been demonstrated to reduce stress levels and maintain mental clarity in the face of difficult circumstances.
One study with 200 participants, instructed pupils to practice a simple-mantra meditation for 15-20 minutes twice a day. Baseline levels in anxiety, neuroticism, and quantity of negative emotions were all reduced. People who practiced for longer experienced greater drops in anxiety, neuroticism, and negative emotions.18
So far, I’ve been discussing the benefits of transcendental meditation. But you’ve probably also heard of mindfulness meditation.
Mindfulness meditation has been demonstrated in empirical studies to have positive psychological effects including an increase in one’s personal sense of well-being, greater ability to discharge emotional negativity, and an increased ability to keep one’s “cool” in heated situations.19
One study focusing on African American women found that mindfulness meditation can lead to the cultivation of inner resources like self-awareness, a renewed capacity to deal with others and decrease responses to stressful stimuli.20
The researchers note that African American women are more likely to sacrifice their own health for the health of others while contending in a highly racist world.
For these women, stress is multifaceted.
Mindfulness meditation has been found to help participants place themselves first and to focus on living in the current moment, rather than fighting with what-might-be.
For these researchers, mindfulness meditation is about self-care and self-love.
Mindfulness meditation has also been demonstrated to lower not just stress, but can also teach people the art of “letting go”.
One study including 44 participants taught a basic meditation practice to college students. Over an 8 week program, those students subjected to basic meditation practices showed significant decreases in stress, increases in the ability to forgive and slight decreases in the capacity for rumination.21
Since meditation helps deliver the human being from chronic stress levels, there is data to suggest an inverse relationship with mindfulness practice and the aging process.
Since the mind is not constantly reacting to external stimuli, the body can rest even while it is in action. Thus, the body’s resources can be used for rejuvenation rather than as fuel for the “fight or flight” response.
Researchers in this study, examined telomere lengths (telomeres are structures on the end of our chromosomes) for signs of deterioration due to anxiety.
Telomere lengths seem to respond to changes in our thoughts, such that reduced psychological anxiety helps reduce the damage done to our bodies at the cellular and DNA levels.
The end result is that mindfulness meditation can reduce anxiety which allows our bodies to remain exuberant for longer.22
THE MECHANICS OF STRESS…
Straight up, it comes down to stress and anxiety.
When we get stressed in life, outside events affect our thoughts.
TO BE CLEAR: Just having outside events is not a real problem.
Just seeing a burning building is no real issue.
It becomes an issue, however, when you THINK your children are inside.
The stress is experienced as a hormonal, psychological and emotional response to our PERCEPTIONS of reality, not necessarily to actual reality.
This is the reason why someone can come into a room of otherwise rational human beings and tell them stories of imminent danger. “Someone is coming to saw our bodies in half, we’ll never see the beauty of the stars again, it’s all over”…
If these people believe danger is on the way, soon their heart rates will speed up, perspiration will kiss their eyebrows and palms, the tightness of stress will seep into their muscles. Anxiety is here.
Again, no real danger has occurred.
They have only been convinced that something might be coming.
However, stress caused from a story is only possible if people are awake enough to hear it.
Now imagine if I told this same story to a room full of slumbering folks… It is near impossible for these same people to experience anxiety.
Why?
Because what ultimately causes our stress is not the event (in this case, the story), but our thoughts in reaction to the event.
If we are asleep and cannot perceive the event, we cannot experience the stress associated with our perceptions of an imaginary killer.
Our thoughts simply never conjure the idea that danger might be on the horizon.
What this means is that when we can learn to step back from our own thoughts, from our perceptions of events, we can learn to step back from stress.
We can then think more clearly and take better action or we can drop our tension all together.
Whether we use mantra-based transcendental meditation or object-based mindfulness meditation is of little consequence because our goal is to see what is happening when our thoughts die down.
Researchers focused on common meditation practices but ANY meditation can do this.
What is life when there is no more mental noise?
Maybe you know someone who has a tendency to SNAP on people at the grocery store.
They just can’t seem to control their emotions when someone pushes them past a certain point.
So they explode and find themselves time and time again fired from another job, seated in another jail cell, or crying in the lap of someone they deeply love.
Maybe each one of us could do with a little more peace.
Imagine remaining calm in the face of demeaning circumstances, experiencing the joy of stress rinsing off your body easy as water.
Can you imagine holding the calm of God as life’s whirlwinds try to conquer your spirit?
You laugh to yourself… They have no power.
What if we gave meditation a chance?
Here’s 10 steps to reach The Erotic/ The Sensual Thru Meditation:
- If you’re new to meditation, set a timer for 4, 8, 10, 12, or 15 minutes. Take a seat in a chair or on the floor, whatever is most comfortable. Close your eyes.
- Feel your body deeply– what is happening at the soles of your feet? Can you feel your heart beat? Your lungs expand and contract? Your blood flowing through your veins? Do not force yourself to feel if it is at first difficult. Allow the sensations to reveal themselves.
- Scan your entire body with your mind’s eye. Move from the top of your head down through your lower abdomen, into your legs, down to your feet, then back up your legs, stomach, back, neck, and the crown of your head.
- Now place your attention on your belly button. Hold your attention here.
- Move your attention to just 3 inches below your belly button to the lowest point of your abdomen. Hold your attention here.
- Breathe into this space. Imagine that there is an extra lung in your lower abdomen expanding and contracting with every breath you take. Can you feel something there?
- Notice how thoughts bubble up and claim your attention. They have no power over you, return to breathing into your belly.
- Sometimes emotions will bubble up that are painful or joyful. Not a problem either way, just return to the breath in your belly.
- When it is time to finish your practice, take a deep breath, slowly exhale thru the nose.
- However Life is moving for you- Good or Bad- mean it and say “Thank you, I have no complaints”.
{To do this same meditation in a transcendental meditative way, instead of focusing on the breath, focus on the sound of “OM”. Feel this sound reverberate throughout your body, and when your mind wanders, return it back to the sound of “OM”.}
The meditation presented above gives us time to practice letting go of thoughts and emotions by asking us to return again and again to the immediate experience of breathing into the belly.
With daily practice, we kill the power stress and anxiety have over our lives.
Notice how the meditation asks you to feel deeply into yourself, to understand your emotions/thoughts but not get swept away by them.
THE CALL for TRUE Living
This is what it means to engage with The Erotic and The Sensual. There is nothing pornographic about it at all.
The Erotic and The Sensual, Feeling deeply and living in the moment, are the pathway to health and healing for a Black people who have been called to be a Light in the world.
Notice, I am not calling for us to run away or suppress our emotions and thoughts.
I am calling for us to feel them deeply, realize where they come from, take action, and then let go them.
Thoughts and Emotions are powerful forces in our lives, they can help us move vigorously toward our goals, or they can trap us in a prison of depression.
We must be able to use them as friends.
Emotions and Thoughts must not rule our lives nor should they be mere slaves for our wielding.
Thoughts and Emotions can tell us how we are viewing the world, they can provoke us to respond aptly to injustice, they can cause us to intervene in situations of abuse, and they can help us build new technologies and businesses.
However, when we never allow space for quiet, when our friends never go home, we invite tragedy as soon we become too cluttered to feel and think clearly.
We lose our ability to be present with the current moment and forget the lessons learned from the Piraha of the Amazon.
How we feel when we Lose our minds to “Time”
This is called losing The Sensual. We also lose our ability to live organically with the Joy deep within us. This is called losing The Erotic.
And most importantly, The Erotic and The Sensual point us back to ourselves away from the learned beliefs and behaviors society taught us.
We come to interact with others, not with immediate unconscious reactions or with fakeness, but with the joy that comes from living a life relieved of tremendous anxiety.
We return to a child-like exuberance.
We no longer spread our stress and anxiety to our spouses, our children, our parents, our friends, our students, our co-workers, or our employees.
Instead, we can give more of ourselves when we take time and care for ourselves.
Who are we when our minds go quiet?
It is an utter heart break if we never know.
Audre and James would be pissed.
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Hi, I’m Shawn, a Health researcher and writer deeply dedicated to the personal enhancement of Black Bodies, Black Minds, and Black Bank Accounts. I’m also the Founder of Black Health HQ. I created Black Health HQ to be a research driven platform for the development of Black physical, mental and financial health. Black Health HQ works toward the extreme well-being of Black people, offering free content along with services and products to assist you on your journey to maximum Black Living. Together, I believe we can build a vibrant and thriving Black community by strengthening what is most precious: our health and wealth.
References
- Audre Lorde. “Sister Outsider. 1984.”Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference 2007, p.54.
- Ibid, p.53-54.
- Ibid, p.57
- Ibid, p.59
- Ibid, p.57
- Ibid, p.59
- Ibid, p.58
- James Baldwin. “The Fire Next Time.”New York: Vintage 1993, p.43
- Ibid.,
- Ibid., p.43-44
- Rafaela Von Bredow. “Brazil’s Pirahã Tribe Living without Numbers or Time.”Spiegel Online, May 3, 2006 http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/brazil-s-piraha-tribe-living-without-numbers-or-time-a-414291.html.
- Julie Anne Irving, Patricia L. Dobkin, and Jeeseon Park. “Cultivating mindfulness in health care professionals: A review of empirical studies of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR).”Complementary therapies in clinical practice 15, no. 2, 2009, 61-66.
- Cheryl L. Giscombé and Marci Lobel. “Explaining disproportionately high rates of adverse birth outcomes among African Americans: the impact of stress, racism, and related factors in pregnancy.”Psychological bulletin 131, no. 5, 2005, p. 662.
- Amparo Castillo-Richmond, Robert H. Schneider, Charles N. Alexander, Robert Cook, Hector Myers, Sanford Nidich, Chinelo Haney, Maxwell Rainforth, and John Salerno. “Effects of stress reduction on carotid atherosclerosis in hypertensive African Americans.”Stroke 31, no. 3. 2000, p. 568-573.
- Ravishankar Jayadevappa, Jerry C. Johnson, Bernard S. Bloom, Sanford Nidich, Shashank Desai, Sumedha Chhatre, Donna B. Raziano, and Robert H. Schneider. “Effectiveness of transcendental meditation on functional capacity and quality of life of African Americans with congestive heart failure: a randomized control study.”Ethnicity & disease 17, no. 1, 2007, 72.
- Vernon Barnes, Robert Schneider, Charles Alexander, and Frank Staggers. “Stress, stress reduction, and hypertension in African Americans: an updated review.”Journal of the National Medical Association 89, no. 7, 1997, p. 464.
- Ravishankar Jayadevappa, Jerry C. Johnson, Bernard S. Bloom, Sanford Nidich, Shashank Desai, Sumedha Chhatre, Donna B. Raziano, and Robert H. Schneider. “Effectiveness of transcendental meditation on functional capacity and quality of life of African Americans with congestive heart failure: a randomized control study.”Ethnicity & disease 17, no. 1, 2007, p. 72.
- James D. Lane, Jon E. Seskevich, and Carl F. Pieper. “Brief meditation training can improve perceived stress and negative mood.”Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 13, no. 1, 2007, p. 38.
- Shian-Ling Keng, Moria J. Smoski, and Clive J. Robins. “Effects of mindfulness on psychological health: A review of empirical studies.”Clinical psychology review 31, no. 6, 2011, p.1041-1056.
- Cheryl L. Woods-Giscombé and Angela R. Black. “Mind-body interventions to reduce risk for health disparities related to stress and strength among African American women: The potential of mindfulness-based stress reduction, loving-kindness, and the NTU therapeutic framework.”Complementary health practice review15, no. 3, 2010, p.115-131.
- Doug Oman, Shauna L. Shapiro, Carl E. Thoresen, Thomas G. Plante, and Tim Flinders. “Meditation lowers stress and supports forgiveness among college students: A randomized controlled trial.”Journal of American College Health 56, no. 5, 2008, p.569-578.
- Elissa Epel, Jennifer Daubenmier, Judith Tedlie Moskowitz, Susan Folkman, and Elizabeth Blackburn. “Can meditation slow rate of cellular aging? Cognitive stress, mindfulness, and telomeres.”Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1172, no. 1, 2009, p. 34-53.