“But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted.”

I learned a lot about love and erotica from Anaïs Nin.

Having been brought up as a Catholic, I was taught that it was a sin to think, talk of and freely express my sexuality as though it was not only wrong in itself, but also something that was entirely separate from love.

It is not.

Love and sexuality combine beautifully—in my world.

I would never and could never be creatively sexual with my love if I were not also connected emotionally.

When I first stumbled upon Anaïs Nin in my late teenage years, I remember the feeling well. It was one of liberation. Here was a woman who was not afraid of her feminism, not afraid to be explosive with it and also, she was not afraid to purge her soul and share her inner most desires. However shocking these things may have been to others, I adored her raw and brutal honesty. Her truth.

I learned through Anaïs and through my own experiences that sex meant nothing, certainly not something that was pleasurable for me, if it were not marinated with love.

To fully exploit my desires, my passions, my eroticism, I had only to tap into my heart. Skin to skin felt like skin to cold steel when it was not fused with feelings.

So, through finding that affinity, I explored my own sexuality, and I used love as the benchmark. I made a decision that I would never absorb myself in the cells of another unless there was a mutual flow of love binding our bodies together.

And with that, my mind, my body and my voice were all free to begin the greatest adventure I was ever to embark upon.

I will be forever grateful to Anais for the following words, as she helped me to find the most exquisite, deeply intimate and intense way to erotic love.

“I want my eroticism mixed with love. And deep love one does not often experience.”

 “Only the united beat of sex and the heart can create ecstasy.”

“Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul—you create suffering.”

“I with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me innocent or naïve, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”

“Passion gives me moments of wholeness.”

“When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He’s a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me.”

“He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.”

“To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break myself. I want to live only for ecstasy. I’m neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous – lama, inflammable, unrestrained.”

“We efface an hour by passionate love, without twists, without aftertaste. When it is finished, it is not finished, we lie still in each other’s arms lulled by our love, by tenderness – sensuality in which the whole being can participate.”

“I am caught. And he? What does he feel? I am invaded, I lose everything, my mind vacillates, I am only aware of sensation.”

“I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.”

“There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.”

“Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is such a moment that my true body lives.”

“I am a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough.”

And the final words are those that resonate with me the most.

“I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women, To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic—in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.”

And somewhere within reading her words, her thoughts, her mind, I lost who I had learned to be, little by little. I unlearned what felt so cold and unfamiliar and I relearned a whole new intensity surrounding love. And I have never, ever recovered.

“Had I not created my whole world. I would certainly have died in other people’s.”

Relephant Read: 

Fifty Shades of Anaïs Nin.

Author: Alex Sandra Myles

Editor: Emily Bartran

Photo: Soffie Hicks/Flickr