As practitioners, we are taught that there is a right way and a wrong way to behave with our clients, students, employees, parishioners (and others). There is good behavior and there is bad behavior. In fact, we are taught there are good people and there are bad people. In this model we’re expected to behave, which requires that we simply follow a set of clearly specified rules created by someone else. 

If this sounds similar to what you experienced growing up, you’re on to something. In Western Industrial Culture, most of what we have been taught about ethics falls more appropriately within the category of our conduct. Very little of our own judgement, contemplation or contextual wisdom is required. We either follow the rules or we break them. And, very much like the relationships many of us had with our parents, teachers, and clergy as children, this model supports a power over, top-down, outside-in model of relationship navigation. It supports the atrophy of our muscles of embedded, erotically intelligent and contextual discernment, while over-developing our willingness and propensity to follow the rules without questioning. 

And it sets us up to cause harm, rather than prevent it. 

It seems straightforward: Just obey. 

And yet, many practitioners – across cultures – break the rules. Routinely. 

Yet, if we do not simply subordinate ourselves to the dominant culture’s top-down rules, where do we turn to find our ecologically-embedded, Ethical Self? 

Ethics are not simply a matter of doing the right thing or not doing the wrong thing. Ethics are a way of being that emerges organically from within us when we understand that we belong in, and to, the myriad systems within which we are embedded, to which we are indebted (which includes but far transcends our consumer-conformist culture, extending to the ecological world and all Life and the Universe itself). Ethics is a byproduct of an ecologically embedded, erotically embodied experience of being.

Amidst the unraveling of our culture’s structures and principles, with unethical behavior rampant at every layer of society, this is arguably the most important focus for practitioners at this time.

In order to chart the terrain of erotically embodied ethics, we must:

• Come to terms with the current and historical context for our human behavior; seeing imperialism, capitalism, colonization, and the carceral model as fundamentally antithetical to authentically ethical conduct

• Begin to identify the many ways we are each infused with and informed by these structures of violence and of power-over which obfuscate our innate capacity to behave according to our unique and intimate code of ethics

• Explore our understanding and experience of community, and intimacy – the very intimate experiences that nourish our ecological embedment 

• Confront and examine our intimate relationships and experiences with power and value 

• Question our experience of belonging – what it means to belong and what happens to us and for us when we acknowledge our belonging; conversely, we must acknowledge how vulnerable we are when we perceive our belonging to be under threat

• Be guided by, and learn from, the system of restorative, transformative justice to begin to create a foundation of wellness within which we can explore this new form of ethics within our relationships and communities

The Institute for Erotic Intelligence is offering this 12-week exploration and training for practitioners who feel the urgent call to cultivate an intimate relationship with their Ethical Self and to stand as pioneering practitioners working to lay the foundation for a different system of accountability.