Sustaining contact with the primordial pulse of desire

This month on Mukta Reveal, we focus our artistic energy on the primordial pulse of desire

Within the art form of Mukta Reveal, the primordial pulse of desire is the all pervasive force that moves reality into existence, and pulls it back into formlessness again. It is another way of talking about the movements of Snake Mother and the intelligence of Nature.

Don’t know what I mean by Snake Mother? Get a glimpse here or listen to the podcast interview on Kinward

During my early years in art making and relationships with other humans I had very little finesse with erotic energy. I was a clumsy but eager passenger on waves of inspiration, passion, despair, love, hate. There were studio all-nighters listening to the same haunting Silver Mt. Zion album over and over and over again while writing scraggly “poetry” in my sketchbook about PAIN and BEAUTY, screamy quick exits from romantic entanglements and subsequent clingy breathy reunions, dancing at the bar and telling someone they were beautiful and then utterly freezing right after when it got too real and I realized I had no follow up. How wonderful. How cringe.

Without much sane worldview around me this experimental eros phase was sometimes health-bringing, and often disastrous. No one had taught me how to be responsible for my life force, the hormonal-energetic-spiritual matrix of impulses/desires/needs that jiggled through every single interaction I had with the world. No one had even come close to naming it in this way. It’s taken me a master’s degree, spiritual apprenticeships, and however many thousands of hours helping people cultivate embodied spiritual intimacy for me to even be able to pierce through the clutter of colonial abstraction of the most basic shit to name it now.

Eventually through contemplative practice and the fierce guidance of wisdom beings (before I had language for any of these things) I began to recognize a clearer, all-pervasive undercurrent that sizzles within everything. All those erratic impulses, those waves of romantic drama, the scraggly poetry, the emotions themselves, the air molecules, the light, the elements, and everything in between was emanating from a primordial pulse. I experienced this pulse as an inherently erotic and unconditionally loving desire-intelligence. It was palpable, immediately available, and had beneficial impact when in conscious relationship with it.

You’ll notice that I have used several different words and phrases to describe this intelligence. I understand this presence to ultimately be unnameable, and accessible through so many different pathways. Really, everything is a way in, so there is no avoiding it, just like there is no pinning it down with a name. Personally I think it’s useful and in the spirit of praise to go with whatever naming feels poetically salient in the moment, as long as those of us who are in this process together know what we’re pointing to.

The Pulse/The Sacred Tremor/the primordial pulse of desire/the erotic pulse/ShivaShakti/absolute nature/...

Why study how to sustain contact with the primordial pulse of desire?

When I recognized that the pulse of life, the drive of existence is inherently erotic and fiercely loving, despair shrank in my life by about 80%. OK it wasn’t BOOM-DONE, despair down 80%! Because coming into this recognition required many, many rounds and repetitions of remembering that this was true, and making adjustments to my life and my practice that helped me remember more often.

When I recognized that the erotic pulse was always and immediately available, I finally had something real to land in inside of my greatest moments of panic and disconnection. It was really there, and through terror-surrender many many times I let it in. Eventually my worst stress responses and meltdowns went away. Although contact with the primordial pulse did sometimes lead to “big experiences,” it also allowed for much more stability in the day to day. The yo-yo of emotional experience balanced out into something more subtle, lush, and able to be savored instead of coped-with. I believe this was both a result of a nervous system baseline shift, where my threat response changed on a neuro-biological level, but also because I was relating to my various states with the *embodied * knowing that they all came from this primordial eros.

As I developed my relationship to this presence I remembered what art was for, where art making came from originally (spoiler, it’s erotic praise). Or at least a good portion of it. And I lost interest in any art practice that didn’t allow this intelligence to work through it.

It is in this spirit that for the month of August those of us in the artist’s boudoir (via Mukta Reveal on Circle) will be focusing on the question: how do we sustain contact with the primordial pulse of desire? Through live meditations, contemplative expression, arts curriculum and choose your own adventure arts projects we will dabble, train, listen, play, and probably fester and confront what rises to meet us in this question.

Podcast interview on Kinward Moves

If you want a deeper foray into related musings then be sure to check out the new podcast interview on Kinward

Some words from founder and creator CdV:

“In the ritual theatre and “Embodied Dreaming” spaces that Larissa Kaul facilitates—spaces I’ve been dipping into when I can over the last couple of years—I’ve learned and felt things far more subtle and interesting than what I’ve been able to access inside of more static practice structures. I think this is because I feel an integrity in Larissa’s work that does not demand conformity to the structure—but instead invites integrity in response.

Sessions slither. The space is alive.

Larissa’s invitations may take the form of a trickster challenge, an artmaking gesture, an embodied (literal) shaking loose of stuck structures, a seduction. The key, I think, is not the form of the invitation per se—Larissa knows that different people respond to different invitations in different ways at different times—but the motion, the dance.

Larissa acts and responds themself as they hold (unscripted flexible well-boundaried) space for the other artist-practitioners in the circle, modeling presence inside the web of relationships they tend, turning and turning again into and toward the “high-integrity play” they practice as a “liberatory animist art.”

Um, feeling flattered and seen CdV! Thank you!

Blessed pulse-ing

xoxo

Larissa

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