“Eros is not something you get from another person. It’s the aliveness that rises when you are fully in your body.” - Victor Warring

My guest today is Victor Warring, a somatic educator and founder of Rewilding Eros - a body-centered path to reclaiming our natural erotic intelligence.

In our conversation today, Victor invites us to look deeply at the condition of modern men: domesticated human animals, cut off from the wild currents that once shaped our bodies, relationships, and souls. He names how much of our struggle with intimacy, desire, and disconnection is not personal failure, but the inheritance of a culture that has forgotten the way of village.

Together we explore the meaning of Rewilding Eros - how centuries of colonization and conditioning have constricted men’s vitality, and how we might return to a more embodied, enlivened masculinity. We speak of civilization and desire, patriarchy and the loss of community, the tyranny of the dyad, and the hunger for wholeness that haunts the modern man.

Victor reminds us that Eros is not merely sex, but the living current of aliveness itself - an invitation for men to reclaim their erotic sovereignty and rejoin the flow of life.

LINKS

* Rewilding Eros - Victor’s Office Website

* Rewilding Eros on IG

* Book - Monogamous Mind, Polyamorous Terror

SHOW NOTES

* 00:55 — Opening with embodied presence to reveal the importance of grounding in sensation before exploring sexuality and intimacy.

* 02:50 — Rewilding Eros framed as reconnecting to the deep, natural erotic intelligence that lives in the flesh, not the mind.

* 04:45 — Men’s struggles around desire and intimacy understood as symptoms of domestication, not evidence of personal failure or inadequacy.

* 06:20 — Patriarchal systems teach men to control themselves and others, while simultaneously cutting them off from their own vitality.

* 08:55 — A wider historical and evolutionary view shows our current way of living is the anomaly, not the baseline of human experience.

* 10:53 — Cultural norms become invisible, shaping what we think is normal in relationships, sex, and masculinity itself.

* 12:55 — Wildness reframed as authentic human expression that is often more attuned and less harmful than “civilized” behavior.

* 16:00 — Sexual disconnection emerges in captivity; when context limits freedom, erotic life withers — just like animals in a zoo.

* 19:20 — The drop in desire inside long-term relationships is tied to isolation and stress, not a lack of attraction or compatibility.

* 20:00 — The nuclear couple becomes overburdened when expected to meet every relational and erotic need without communal support.

* 23:10 — Secure attachment has roots in village life where many caregivers hold the child — not a single partner doing it all.

* 27:15 — When relationships are held in a wider web of kinship, Eros can breathe again and love becomes less pressured and more alive.

* 32:40 — Erotic sovereignty arises from within; Eros is not something we get from others but something we generate by being fully alive.

* 36:55 — Eros includes sex but extends far beyond it into movement, creativity, and the embodied flow of everyday life.

* 39:20 — Pornography becomes a substitute when men lose access to their own erotic source; healing means coming home to the body’s desire.

An audio version of my long-form essay that explores my encounter at the 40th Anniversary of the Minnesota Men's Conference in 2024. For the full references and links to supporting interviews, check out the essay on Substack.

My guest today is Jonathan Stensland, a poet and long-time collaborator and friend of Robert Bly.

This conversation was recorded in 2024 at the 40th anniversary of the Minnesota Men's Conference. Speaking from the banks of the Saint Croix River, Jonathan offers a unique insider's perspective on four decades of men's work.

In his early 20s, Jonathan was involved with Bly as he worked on his seminal book ‘Iron John’, through typing-up handwritten pages, revisions, and countless conversations- a process he describes as practically like quilt making. His relationship was deeper than professional collaboration, as akin to a godson to Bly and his wife Ruth.

In our conversation today, we explore the origins and evolution of the mythopoetic men's movement, from its roots in Robert Bly's poetry about fathers and grief. We delve into the power of men gathering around the goodness that exists in the marrow of masculinity.

He speaks to the movement's influence on broader culture, and the morphogenetic field that made new ways of being available to men everywhere.

We ask: What does it mean for a 40-year tradition to cross from the wilderness into culture? How can we broaden the spaces where men can do the necessary soul work of maturation?

And what mythic stories might guide the next chapter of this work?

You’re invited to join the 41st Fall Conference Oct 7-12, 2025 “Men Who Stand Atop the Old Mound of Miracles”

Catch the companion conversations to this episode: