I want to talk about something that might sound strange at first.
I want to talk about how being well loved, well fed, and well satisfied makes you a more dangerous person.
Not dangerous in the way the system means it. Dangerous in the way the system fears. Because a person who is fully resourced, fully in their body, fully alive to their own experience... that person is very, very hard to control.
Venus just moved into Pisces, where she'll be for the next six weeks. And I think this transit is handing us something we desperately need right now. Not another productivity hack. Not another healing modality. Something older and more fundamental than that.
A remembering of what Eros actually is. And why they had to make you forget.
Eros Before They Broke It
So let's start with Eros. Because the culture did something very specific to this word, and we need to undo it before we can go any further.
When most people hear "eros" or "erotic," they hear "sexual." And then they hear the whole freight train of judgment that comes with that. The word has been compressed into something small and then shamed. That compression is not accidental.
The Greeks understood Eros as something completely different. In Hesiod's Theogony, one of the oldest Greek texts we have, Eros is one of the first forces to emerge from Chaos. Before the gods. Before order. Before anything had a name. There was Chaos, there was Gaia, the earth, and there was Eros. The force that draws things together.
Not sexual attraction. Attraction itself. The fundamental pull that makes anything relate to anything else. The reason atoms bond. The reason you turn your head when something catches your eye. The reason a melody can make you cry before your mind has any idea why.
Plato explores this in the Symposium, and it's worth noting that the deepest teaching on Eros in Western philosophy comes through a woman's voice: Diotima. She describes what's sometimes called the Ladder of Eros. You start with desire for a beautiful body. But you don't stop there. You move to love of a beautiful soul. Then beautiful ideas. Then beautiful systems. Until you arrive at Beauty itself — the animating principle behind all of it.
The erotic is the engine of that entire ascent. You don't transcend it. It's what moves you.
So Eros is the spark when you read a sentence that rearranges something in your understanding. It's the moment your dog puts her head on your knee and something in your chest unlocks. It's the pull toward a Black Madonna statue in a village church in southern France. It's what makes you get into cold water on a February morning in Greece.
What the system did was take this enormous, cosmological force and compress it down to the sexual — and then it pathologized even that. Which accomplishes two things at once: it cuts you off from your primary navigational instrument, and it makes you ashamed of the one fragment you're still allowed to access.
Audre Lorde and the Erotic as Power
Nobody understood this better than Audre Lorde.
In 1978, she published an essay called "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power." If you haven't read it, it's maybe ten pages long and it will rearrange your furniture. I'll link it below.
Lorde makes a distinction most people skip right past: the erotic is not the pornographic. The pornographic is sensation without feeling. Stimulation without connection. Consumption without aliveness. And that, she argues, is exactly what the system offers as a substitute. It gives you the shadow of Eros and calls it the real thing. So you keep consuming without ever being nourished.
She defines the erotic as "a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings." Read that again. It's an internal compass. Not an external experience. It's the capacity to feel so fully that your own experience becomes a source of knowledge.
And then she goes further. She says that when women — and I'd extend this to anyone who has been systematically cut off from their own authority — when they begin to live from the erotic, they become less willing to accept powerlessness, resignation, and despair as natural conditions of life.
This is not motivational language. This is Audre Lorde describing a political technology. A way of knowing that the dominant system genuinely cannot afford for you to access. Because a person who knows what it feels like to be fully alive becomes very difficult to redirect toward things that deaden them. They stop tolerating the job that numbs them. The relationship that diminishes them. The belief system that requires them to abandon their own knowing.
She writes: "Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within."
That's the key. Protest that comes only from outrage burns out. Always. We're watching it happen everywhere right now. People burning hot and then crashing because the fuel source is external. But protest that comes from Eros — from a deep, lived contact with your own aliveness and a refusal to abandon it — that sustains. Because you're not fighting against something. You're refusing to leave yourself.
The Neuroscience of Aliveness
Now, I know some of you need the science. I do too. So let's go there.
Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory maps this beautifully. Your autonomic nervous system has three primary states: dorsal vagal, which is shutdown, freeze, collapse. Sympathetic, which is fight or flight. And ventral vagal, which is safety, connection, social engagement.
The ventral vagal state — the one where you feel safe and connected — is the same state that supports creative insight, pattern recognition, and what we call intuition. You literally cannot access your full perceptual capacity from a threat state. When you're in sympathetic activation, your visual field narrows, your hearing changes, your cognitive processing prioritizes speed over nuance. You're designed to survive, not to perceive subtlety.
Antonio Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis builds on this. In his book Descartes' Error, he demonstrates that the body tags experiences with feeling-states that guide decision-making below conscious awareness. Your "gut feeling" is not a metaphor. It is Eros functioning as intelligence. The body knows before the mind names.
So when I say that being well loved, well fed, and well satisfied makes you a better thinker, a better creator, a more perceptive human — I'm not speaking poetically. I'm describing a neurological fact.
The act of feeding yourself well. Sleeping. Moving your body in ways that feel good rather than punishing. Allowing yourself to be held, touched, nourished. These are not luxuries you earn after the work is done. They are the infrastructure that makes the work possible. They are what moves your nervous system into the state where you can actually see clearly.
And the system knows this. Which is exactly why it teaches you to earn rest, to distrust pleasure, to view desire as a distraction from "real" productivity. A depleted person is a controllable person. A nourished person is a problem.
Creativity as Protest
This is where it all converges.
If Eros is the force of attraction — the fundamental pull toward aliveness — and if the system survives by cutting you off from that force, then every act of genuine creation is an act of resistance.
Not creation as content. Not creation as product. Creation as the act of making something real from a place of deep contact with your own experience.
The French feminist Hélène Cixous wrote about this in "The Laugh of the Medusa" in 1975. She argued that writing from the body — what she called écriture féminine — is inherently subversive. Because the entire Western intellectual tradition is built on the premise that the body is unreliable and the mind is sovereign. To trust the body's knowing. To follow the spark. To let pleasure be a compass rather than a reward you earn through suffering. That overturns a very old hierarchy.
And there's historical precedent everywhere. The Beguines in medieval Europe were communities of women who lived outside marriage and institutional church control. They created textile art. They wrote mystical poetry. They fed the poor. They weren't separating pleasure from devotion from creativity from service. These were one activity. One expression of Eros moving through women who had refused to fragment themselves.
Making something beautiful or true in a system that rewards compliance is a defiant act. It's not the protest sign that threatens the system most. It's the woman who writes the thing she was told not to write, who builds the life she was told she couldn't have, who trusts her body when every authority told her it was lying.
Venus in Pisces — The Next Six Weeks as a Practice
So let's bring this home to right now. Venus is in Pisces for the next six weeks, through late March into early April. And Pisces is where Venus is exalted — meaning this is where the Venus principle operates at its highest expression. Not Venus as transaction or acquisition. Venus as permeability. The capacity to be moved. To dissolve the false boundary between giving and receiving, between inner and outer beauty, between self and the world.
If we take Lorde seriously, these six weeks are an invitation to practice Eros as a discipline. Not discipline as restriction. Discipline as devotion. Returning again and again to the question: where is the aliveness right now?
Weeks one and two (now through late February): Receptivity as practice. Venus is newly in Pisces, still acclimating. The invitation is to slow the input-output cycle. Where have you been producing without being fed? Where have you been consuming without actually tasting? Lorde talks about how we're taught to distrust the erotic and find surrogate satisfaction in external validation. These first two weeks are about catching that pattern. The cold swim. The meal eaten slowly. The page of writing that comes from genuine pull rather than obligation. Notice what you're drawn to before your mind intercepts with "but I should."
Weeks three and four (early to mid-March): Creative honesty. This is where the protest dimension gets personal. Venus deeper in Pisces starts dissolving the false selves — the performances, the ways you've been editing your work or your presence to be palatable. Lorde says living from the erotic means becoming less willing to accept powerlessness. In creative terms: what would you write if you weren't managing anyone's perception of you? What would your work look like if it were organized around genuine desire rather than what the market supposedly wants? This is the period to draft the thing that scares you.
Weeks five and six (mid-March into early April): Integration and overflow. Venus in late Pisces approaches the boundary with Aries. The dissolving, receptive phase starts to gather force and direction. What you've been absorbing and allowing and softening into begins to want expression — outward movement. This is where Lorde's framework becomes fully realized: the person who has reconnected with their erotic knowing becomes an agent of change not through effort but through refusal to abandon themselves. The writing, the offers, the way you show up in your world starts to carry a different frequency. Not louder. More coherent.
The Invitation
The throughline for the whole transit is what Lorde said plainly: the erotic is not a luxury. It is a source of power and information.
Venus in Pisces makes this experiential rather than theoretical. You don't have to understand it intellectually. You have to be willing to feel it.
And the connection to intuition stays live the entire time. Pisces is the sign most associated with psychic permeability, with knowing that arrives through channels the rational mind can't map. If Eros is the force of attraction and intuition is Eros functioning as perception, then these six weeks are a period where your perceptual field is wider open than usual. The hits, the nudges, the quiet knowing that arrives when you're nourished and present and not performing — those get louder during this transit. The practice is learning to trust them without needing to justify them first.
So here's what I want to leave you with.
The most radical thing you can do right now is not burn out trying to fix everything that's broken. It's to refuse to break yourself in the process. To eat the meal. To take the swim. To write the honest thing. To let yourself be moved by beauty without immediately monetizing the experience.
That is Eros. That is protest. That is Venus in Pisces asking you to remember what you knew before they taught you to forget.
If this resonated, I'd love to hear what came up for you. And if you want to go deeper into the source material, here are the references:
- Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" (1978)
- Plato, Symposium — Diotima's Speech
- Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error (1994)
- Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1975)
- Stephen Porges, The Polyvagal Theory (2011)
- Hesiod, Theogony
About Megan Riley — Astrologer, archetype guide, and facilitator of transformative retreats for women at life's thresholds. Megan offers donation-based astrology readings for anyone navigating a crossing. Book a reading or explore more at meganriley.eu
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