Aging Gracefully Erotically

When I was young, I studied ballet. The leaps and turns were great fun for a young body. I took two classes a day for years until one day something shifted and I never took another ballet class again. Whatever I was meant to learn from ballet felt complete and I turned to something new.

Modern dance. Still physical and technical but softer, more creative. My time in modern dance wandered through 40 dance families, from minimalism to dramatic work. Until one day, I felt complete dancing other peoples dances and knew that I had to create my own.

I created one-man shows combining dance with storytelling, mask work and puppets. Integrating my thirst for spiritual growth with my creative process, until one day my solos began to look alike and I stopped making them.

And now, I write and I walk, often for miles among the old growth trees near my home in the Pacific Northwest. I assume I will continue to do so until my body, mind or spirit says otherwise.

Past 60, I am grateful that my body is healthy, flexible and painfree and flexible. It’s not as toned as it once was when I was leaping across the stages of the world, but that is to be expected. When I look back at my dancing life, I am most grateful that I leapt when it was time to leap and I shifted as my creativity emerge as I matured.

Erotically, I am also thankful that my Life Force Energy has danced and shifted along with me through my life. Life Force Energy is creative energy and perhaps the two working together guided me through these chapters.

As a teenager, I pleasured myself frequently, enjoying the newfound ecstasy in my young, athletic body. In my twenties, I danced my sexuality with lovers, sometimes timeless improvisations, other times empty performances.

When I first encountered the study of Tantra, Native American Sacred Sexuality and Taoism with the BodyElectric School, another shift occurred. I began a new dance with my sexual energy that sustains me erotically and energetically in these later years. Harnessing my sexual energy from performances flowing outward. My erotic focus has shifted into a multi-orgasmic roller coaster that thrills and nourishes me in this chapter.

As a Sacred Intimate, I often work with men who want the erotic dance of their youth well into their senior years. Or feel that they must or risk an erotic oblivion. They try everything they can to recapture the choreography of their youth when that chapter has moved on. As a culture, we lack the value or knowledge of aging sexually gracefully. We get stuck in the leaps and turns of our erotic youth with little help moving on to a version equally as potent, pleasurable and purposeful.

I can imagine the loss of having missed the moment. The sadness of having spent years in the closet when it was time to leap with freedom. The unexpressed fury of wanting a do-over, to live a chapter that has passed. But for many men, the real growth is not in trying to make the body do something out of time, but to accept the time and the dance they are in and the pleasure that is there.