What do desire and passion have to do with our spiritual journey? According to A. H. Almaas and Karen Johnson, they are an essential part of it.

Conventional wisdom cautions that desire and passion are opposed to the spiritual path—that pursuing desire will take you more into the egoic world. And for most people, that is exactly what happens. Wanting is experienced as self-centered. The Power of Divine Eros challenges the view that the erotic and the divine are separate. When we open to the energy, spontaneity, and zest of erotic love, we will find it holy and sacred. Thus desire and passion become a gateway to wholeness.

The authors reveal how our relationships become opportunities on the spiritual journey to express ourselves authentically, to relate with openness, and to discover dynamic inner realms with another person. Through embodying the energy of eros, each of us can learn to be fully real and alive in all of our interactions.

We love our relationships, we love life, we love being in the world. We might not feel it on some days, because living is very frustrating at times, but when push comes to shove, we want to protect our lives, we want to enhance them. We do things to try to nourish ourselves, make ourselves healthy, bring ourselves into greater well-being physically, emotionally, and mentally. And we also want our freedom, our delight, our expansiveness; we want to feel our fullness. We want to be authentic, to live in a way that is real and true, but we often feel that we have to get away from the world in order to do that.

Any spiritual work involves the element of love, whether explicitly or implicitly. What we wanted to explore during these days was how the energy and quality of love explicitly open the door to reality and to our deeper nature. The process of discovery in the group revealed that the portal is there for every human being to open; each of us can be fully real and alive in all our interactions. And the erotic, as it is felt and experienced in the body, is a part of that openness, whether it becomes sexual or not. For many reasons, eros has become separated from the pure and the holy, and as a result, it is usually relegated to the domain of the gross and unrefined. But eros is the energy of the divine. As such, it is always divine and pure.  - A. H. Almaas & Karen Johnson

Available at Shambhala Publications or most book retailers.

"A truly in-depth exploration of an embodied spirituality. We find out how Eros is an energy of love and creativity in all of us—and how we can release it. We come to see how our feelings, without exception, are useful for our personal and collective evolution. I felt continually held by the authors’ compassionate and wise presences. " —David Richo, author of How to Be an Adult in Relationships

Chapters

1. Eros
2. Two Loves
3. Two Worlds
4. One Desire
5. Personal Relationships
6. The Relational Field
7. Sexual Love
8. Desire for Union
9. Magnetic Love
10. Sexy Angel