When I think about connecting to my own erotic self and giving space to my own fantasies, desires and exploring my own sexuality and intimacy I can’t think of any other metaphor than landscaping a garden. Because for me erotic landscaping is about actively designing the conditions where desire can flourish as we do when we tend to our gardens. It is about acknowledging the time and effort it takes for a garden to bloom and thrive.
We might know we enjoy gardens, but actually planning, planting and tending one is different from just dreaming about having one. We need to examine and eliminate the unfriendly conditions that prevent our garden from thriving, overcome the fear of fatigue or excuse the lack of time that holds us back in actually putting our hands in the soil and start tending.
The precious time of cultivation
Landscaping the erotic is much more than choosing the plants or picking the fruits, it’s about really understanding that tending to a garden takes time. The time between the seeding the seeds, or preparing the soil for the planting and actually seeing the plants grow and/or enjoying the fruits is a precious time, it is not an empty time where nothing happens, it is the precious time of discovering the delicious moments of little discoveries and little joys where tiny little moments of delicious pleasures and glimmers of the heart and body. It is not about waiting for the garden to be ready as we imagine. It is about waking up every day and seeing the new leaf, a new flower that is about to bloom, and really taking time to take in the beauty. It is also about accepting that there are moments where the garden changes its aspect and is less rich, but it doesn’t mean that a different landscape has nothing to offer. It has to offer different qualities.
This understanding didn’t come to me overnight. I have always been deeply curious and fascinated by human sexual expression and imagery. This fascination evolved into a desire to understand more, prompting me to explore the terrain of human sexual experience and desire. I wanted to understand its peaks, valleys, rivers and hidden paths more deeply.
Through these explorations I learned how environments affect intimacy and desire, and how our erotic landscape can easily become contaminated by external forces, such as sexual boundary violations, social conditioning, or shame.
The gardener’s work
Yet how often we leave our erotic landscape untended, believing it will spontaneously take care of itself or that others should tend to it for us. This is, of course, not the case. Unlike a garden where we can hire an external gardener, our erotic garden requires us to put our hands in the soil, remove weeds, fertilize the ground, and water the plants we choose to cultivate. And if we need support or guidance, we can ask for it, but we are still the landscaper.
Yet as I have learned both through exploration and observation, cultivating this garden is far from simple. There are, of course, many challenges we have to deal with when deciding to design our personal erotic life. These challenges need to be taken into account when we decide to cultivate and reclaim our erotic self. We might feel a lot of personal and external resistance and judgment.
Among these challenges, perhaps the most profound occurs when our sexual boundaries have been violated. When this happens, sexual exploration might feel dangerous or inaccessible, or we might act out sexually and keep harming ourselves.
Even for those who haven’t experienced direct violations, many people find that societal messaging about sexuality creates weeds faster than they can remove them.
This becomes particularly evident in how moralism and sexuality creates a lot of anxiety, and we may find ourselves bouncing back and forth between a strong desire to explore and strong inhibition that holds us back from exploring. We deny ourselves sexual pleasure and satisfaction and feel deprived of the delights that sexuality can offer.
We should not be afraid of getting dirty and working up a sweat. And yet how often we try to sanitize and make sexuality sterile. We all want to be accepted and approved, but this need comes up against sexual passion. Here in this tension between authenticity and acceptance, shame takes root like a parasitic weed. We feel ashamed about our choices and preferences and allow strangers to question them.Overcoming shame about our sexual choices requires courage and a sense of self-worth. If we don’t feel worthy, it is easy to conform in order to feel worthy, denying our deep desires and what our soul wants. Like any invasive species, shame spreads quickly through our garden, suffocating the very desires we seek to cultivate. We really need to feel strong about ourselves to reclaim our erotic self.
Because what we are looking for in our erotic explorations is not only sexual gratification, but also confirmation that we are seen and that we matter.
A lifelong practice
Recognizing these obstacles might feel overwhelming, but every gardener faces weeds, pests, and challenging weather. We should not be discouraged if our first attempts at cultivation feel clumsy. The soil(soul) of our sexuality is resilient, and with patient tending, even the most neglected garden can flourish.
The idea is to carefully and mindfully organize and explore the terrain of our sexuality and desire, consciously developing our own relationship with eroticism and sexuality. The more intentional we are in how we approach, understand, and create erotic experiences and expressions, the deeper we can go.
This is a lifelong work, and like any garden worth tending, our erotic landscape will continue to evolve. Because the seasons change, occasional weeds will show up, and we will discover new plants we want to plant in our garden.
The biggest gift of erotic landscaping is not having the most beautiful garden, but the profound act of tending to what we most deeply cherish. Honoring the complexity of our desires without shame and discovering who we become in the process.