Welcome to Erotic Living
Learn to Become an Erotic Catalyst
At Erotic Living we believe that the most efficient way to evolve your erotic life is to take ownership of what turns you on and then share it with others.
An Invitation To Explore Without A Goal
Touching your body, reawakening your senses and your breath.
This is not to achieve any result. It will, of course, reawaken your senses. But the purpose is not necessarily to do so. It’s just an invitation to explore, to do it without a goal. You can always do this - at any time, anywhere - your whole life long. In a certain way, it’s not even about doing. You can rest and still be doing it. It can keep doing itself inside of you and you keep listening.
It’s a profound and simple practice.
It’s listening and feeling being sensate.
We always functionalize our bodies in Western culture. Eroticism is not a function. Sexuality is not a function. It’s something more poetic, more beautiful, much more interesting that that. Eroticism is not productive, as Georges Bataille has argued or Esther Perel following him. “It is a radiant state. It is a moment of interlude in between all our productive life,” she says. It is that which gives birth in us, as philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has said. This includes, but goes well beyond, giving birth to an other living being.
Connecting the Senses to the Imagination
If you keep listening and remain curious, there is a moment when the senses, the trajectory of your hands, will perhaps start to make a story. This does not mean you are going into your head and no longer in your body. You’re still in your body but another part of your brain will start to become active, the creative, literary or poetic part. I see the colour brown as I move my hand across my eyes. It might be a brown wall or a brown piece of wood. Or I might feel my lover touching my forehead as I take my fingers across my forehead.
This is not a duty. It is not a must. But know that it can happen, if you allow it to, and that is maybe the very beginning of art, i.e., the linking of the body to the imagination.
It’s enough just to feel, to listen, in the most elementary sense to feel that one is alive. The imagination doesn’t have to get involved for it to be exactly as it should be.
You might say this is the beginning of eroticism or the beginning of self-love. I don’t know. One can be in great pain and still do this - and it will likely change something. It may not remove the pain, but it will open or re-open another channel(s). It’s not self-comfort, it’s just exploration.
Peter Banki, Ph.D.
Founder, Erotic Living
References (Recommended Reading and Listening)
Bataille, Georges (1986) Eroticism: Death and Sensuality. Translated by Mary Dalwood. San Francisco City Lights Books
Cohen, Bonnie Bainbridge (2012) Sensing Feeling and Action: the Experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind Centring. Contact Editions.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. (2016) Coming, Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York, Fordham University Press.
Perell, Esther (2014) Sexuality Eroticism and Creativity bigthink.com.
“This is the first time I have made a teaching video like this. And I noticed that the self-touch changed my speech and my relationship with space.” - Peter Banki (Founder, Erotic Living)
"The intimacy and safety of the space created at Erotic Living is at once hypnotic, enticing, energizing and relaxing. It has provided me with a safe haven to learn about, grow into and feel comfortable with my own sexuality...I feel I learn something new about who I am every time I come back." - Alex Rossiter (Sydney, Australia)
"Eroticism need not be beautiful and perfect for it to feel alive and to give pleasure. For it to go deep, it is not necessary that you get turned on. When touching and being touched, you feel your pleasure/displeasure, fear, anger and all the nuances of the whole rich pallet of human feelings...and you take to heart what is there. And naturally this has a healing aspect." -Matthias Grimmme (Hamburg, Germany)
