This piece was originally published on Substack and is shared here as part of the Sensual Institute’s body of work.
It explores the Sensual Hero’s Journey™ through mythic storytelling, using the figures of Eros and Ananke to speak to embodied longing, necessity, and the human process of leaving and return.
Today I want to share something different.
A story.
A story for adults.
In many traditions around the world, wisdom wasn’t passed down through concepts or instructions.
It was passed through stories.
People sat close to each other.
By firelight.
Bodies warm.
Listening together.
Stories were how we learned what couldn’t be taught directly.
How we remembered things the nervous system understands long before the mind does.
This is one of those stories.
It’s a creation myth I wrote, drawing on the ancient names Eros and Ananke.
They appear in old mythologies, but this is my telling.
Not a reconstruction of the past,
but a story shaped for the modern body.
Because we need new stories that can speak to the way we actually live now.
To our pace.
Our hunger.
Our exhaustion.
Our longing to feel whole without burning out or going numb.
I wrote this story because myth makes us larger.
It connects our everyday drives, our bodies, our relationships, to something older, deeper, and more spacious than personal psychology alone.
Not to escape reality, but to inhabit it more fully.
This story doesn’t try to teach you anything.
It doesn’t tell you what to do.
It simply remembers.
I invite you to listen the way people used to listen.
Not to understand.
But to let your body recognize something it already knows.
You don’t need to concentrate.
You don’t need to analyze.
Just listen.
Some stories aren’t meant to be consumed.
They’re meant to sit beside you for a while.
This is one of those.
If something in you stirred while listening, if you felt the pull between wanting and holding, beginning and staying, then you’ve already touched the threshold what I call the Sensual Hero’s Journey.
It’s the larger map this story belongs to.
A way of understanding how we leave ourselves, and how we return, through the body, the nervous system, and lived experience.
You can listen to it here
It’s an invitation to reclaim your status as a Hero in Your myth…
Want to know more about the Sensual hero’s journey™?
You can start walking it by crossing the first threshold through the sensual 7 day journal The soft return.
Find it on Amazon, Adlibris och buy it from us and get it signed and dedicated by me: Find it here
With love,
Camilla
