Let’s talk about love

By Raleigh Burleigh Sopris Sun Editor

How do you approach what you love? This question is central to Andrea Villa’s work, which seeks to rescue modernity from oppressive rationalism. How? By reclaiming a medieval romanticism present in the writings of poet Dante Alighieri, “the Shakespeare of Italian,” according to Villa.

This weekend, April 21-22, in partnership with The Center for Human Flourishing, Villa will teach a workshop about erotic love informed by Dante’s “La Vita Nuova.”

Villa was born and raised in Italy. As a young man, he traveled to India and later to the United States. A student of spiritual teachers Malidoma Somé and Martín Prechtel, Villa became particularly interested in West African and Native American traditions of initiation. He now lives in Boulder where he works as a life coach and labors away to complete his first book, "The Erotic Code of Men and the Blessing of Gender."

The book began more than a decade ago, when Villa “fell in love with a woman I knew I shouldn’t have an affair with,” he stated. However shortlived, the romance sent him “down a rabbit hole of deep reflection,” an experience which Villa said, “made me realize that in this day and culture, nobody talks about love.”

By comparison, “if you take the words ‘love’ and ‘god’ out of the Middle Ages, you wouldn’t be able to understand it culturally … that world would probably collapse without those words.” During Dante’s life, “Eros was speaking much louder, and the poets heard him most clearly.”

Villa connects the word “erotic” directly back to Eros, a Greek god more associated with transcendence than sex. He defines it as “the impact of beauty on the mind; the capacity to remain in the sensation of beauty.”

Dante Alighieri, best-known for “The Divine Comedy” and particularly “Inferno,” wrote about his love for Beatrice in “La Vita Nuova,” a book that Andrea Villa has studied. Courtesy graphic

In “La Vita Nuova,” a young Dante is stirred by his love for Beatrice and begins a journey into the origins of beauty. In the Medieval concept, Villa informed, “intimacy is a learning process and women are the teachers.” He continued, “This is sacred work. In the Middle Ages, they knew it and treated it as such.”

Villa admitted that his experience is that of a heterosexual male, and therefore his teachings focus primarily on a man’s relationship with the divine feminine. “We are a beauty-dependent species, and we’ve forgotten this,” he said. “Men and women are utterly necessary for each other's development, and if we don’t understand what we bring to the table, this development doesn’t happen.”

Although he speaks from a heterosexual perspective, “Anybody who wants to engage with the grief of love is welcome,” Villa said. It is necessary, however, for participants to attend Friday’s introduction if they wish to join on Saturday. Or, interested persons can attend only on Friday for a taste of Villa’s teachings.

“A lot of this workshop is about how we have moved away from our erotic intelligence, which is what governs life,” he told The Sopris Sun. His philosophy is that our intimate relationships serve as a gateway to the divine, and through loving one another we feed the beauty that sustains life. “Erotic love is not about pleasure, it is about longing and service,” he said.

“The erotic for me is a way to save our asses from environmental disaster … How we approach what we love relates directly to nature. So how do we approach nature so we get what we need without destroying everything in the process? That’s the issue of modernity.”

Obstacles to love, by Villa’s estimation, are often cultural. He hopes to “rescue a vocabulary of the spiritual possibilities of relationships,” and return “valor” as an evolutionary principle that our relationships offer. “How do I approach you so that we can create something beautiful together, beauty that resonates with life? That’s the non-transactional amor.”

Tickets for the 7-8:30pm introduction on April 21, and the 9:30am to 4:30pm workshop on April 22 are available at www.tcfhf.org

On May 27, Villa will return for a more active workshop, specifically for men, taking place at Sustainable Settings. Tickets are not yet available.

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