This conversation with Zhen Dao, creator of the Mogadao Institute tradition, is a mythopoetic, down-to-earth, and sensuous contemplation on rediscovering the true erotic nature of being as a return to our vulnerability and our need for each other. We speak about Eros beyond the impoverished cultural perceptions and modern exploits, and bring the erotic back  into the context of making full-body contact with one another and the living world, taking the great risk of  becoming spiritually naked in our mutual need for “other”, and letting ourselves be found and touched in our deepest longing.   ABOUT ZHEN DAO  Zhen Dao is the founder of the Daoist–based practice tradition of MogaDao, and the MogaDao Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a transgender embodiment master, poet, novelist, and writer on a variety of philosophical, and cultural subjects, and her teachings come in one of the most unique, spellbinding, and truth-telling voices of our times. Zhen is  also the director of the theater company SACRA: Immanence Theater in Santa Fe.  More about Zhen and the Mogadao Institute: https://www.mogadaoinstitute.com     THIS EPISODE's QUOTES “Eros is the enfleshing, the making flesh, of the longing for an extraordinary life. And what that means is the spiritual nudity to come out of your protective place and to expose the mutuality of need and long and desire that characterize the truth of existence.” “We no longer have faith that touching other people, either literally or emotionally or intellectually,  is an end in and of itself. When we lose that faith in contact as a reason to live, not as way to get some place else, but as an essential purpose of life– to be in contact, to bleed back and forth on each other emotionally, spiritually , sexually, sensually, intellectually, and to color our worlds and each other through our need– when we lose that faith we get relegated to performing, to being objects of entertainment, and relationships become about what they can produce.” “The soul colors itself in eros, and it cannot reveal itself without eros. The soul is frigid without eros.”