What is Eros in Relationships About?

    Eroticism is something overpowering that, like nature, can be overwhelmed, exploited or betrayed. Our understanding of Eros has to do with this primal experience of the inescapable, the power of Eros, which can become our salvation or our disaster. Eros strives beyond the narrowness and confinement of our ego-ness towards a You.

     "Where love awoke, the ego dies, the dark despot" says Rumi, the Iranian mystic. Love and death appear as siblings, Eros and Thanatos, for there is no unity without the death of duality. Every erotic striving bears witness to the cosmic law of dying and becoming, which binds us into the eternal cycle of life.Eros evokes excitement, attraction, drive, desire, and longing for union, a tension between instinctive, biological sexual desire and transcendent longings for connection with that which transcends me. Eros is the life principle of relationship-creating, it has to do with connection. Eros is not only to be understood in a concretely sexual way, but also symbolically and transpersonally.

     In eroticism, the numinosity of transcendence, the primal shudder, the fateful and creative nature of desire is revealed. But Eros is also shadowy, as the love dramas of world history show. Eros can seduce us into love madness, drive us into madness and bring to life not only the most beautiful, but also the lowest in us. Eros has transformative potency, it can transform or destroy us.

     In this four week series of workshops created by Ursula Wirtz, Ph.D., you will be introduced to the many faces of ‘bittersweet’ Eros, his wings spreading from heaven to hell, bringing love and lust, torturous enchantments, heartbreaks, power struggles and betrayal. As much as this transient, irresponsible God can drive us mad, he also can become a catalyst for our individuation process, transforming the inflicted wounds into wisdom. On the collective level, when desire is infused with awareness, he can become a healing force for a culture devoid of relational and holistic attitudes that are Eros based.

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