Sales and Ecoerotics, Pt. I: Orienting from Radical, Inherent Belonging
Note: The following content was first delivered as an asynchronous audio teaching in the first iteration of The Vision Society, recorded and delivered by Daje Aloh. Enjoy.
This is part one of a three-part series on Sales and Ecoerotics, an Entrepreneurial Philosophy series for reframing our thinking about how we approach sales. In this audio we explore how the “sense” of radical, inherent belonging is a key part of being able to successfully and congruently share and sell our offerings. This is an ecosystemic approach that centers how the body feels, is rooted, and negotiates reciprocity inside of a living ecosystem.
"The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.
We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society...But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the one who does not fear its revelation, nor subcumb to the belief that sensation is enough."
— Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde
"If we are grasping for creative energy; if we have trouble pulling down the fertile, the imaginative, the ideational; if we have difficulty focusing on our personal vision, acting on it, or following through with it, then something has gone wrong at the waterspill juncture between the headwaters and the tributary.
Or the creative waters are flowing through a polluting environment wherein the life forms of imagination are killed off before they can grow to maturity. More often than not, when a woman is bereft of her creative life, all these circumstances are at the root of the issue.”
— Chapter 10 of Women Who Run with Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I believe there is a direct correlation between our ability to generate sales, our relationship with our bodies, and our sense of radical, inherent belonging to the Earth. These three elements are rarely discussed together in conversations about sales, but they should be.
The shift began for me back in early 2020, when I was transitioning out of local, in-person client work and into the digital landscape. I had spent years doing creative direction, marketing, and human-centered design for local businesses and organizations. But when the pandemic forced everything online, I had to reorient how I created sales. And in that reorientation, all I wanted was to tune into the conversation my body was actually trying to have with me about my work life and my relationship with “sales.”
So, I began laying my body on the Earth and listening. This wasn’t about getting more clients or trying to make cash. I asked to be met by something deeper, something real. I came to understand that my rage, my pleasure, my grief—they were all portals into a deeper intimacy with my sense of belonging. That belonging, paired with self-honesty, became the foundation of my capacity and courage to make sales from integrity.
Confidence Isn’t Enough: Sales and the Nervous System
Western business logic taught me that sales were about confidence and a good framework. Plug in the steps, follow the system, and you'll succeed. But that framework never truly worked. Sales, I’ve come to realize, is far more relational, nuanced, and somatic.
People don’t buy because you followed a formula. They buy because of how they feel in their bodies when they encounter you. Sales happen through resonance. A nervous system conversation is always unfolding under the surface—beneath the branding, beyond the strategy.
When I studied the people who had truly mastered sales, what I found was not just a system, they held presence. They carried congruence. Blair Enns, author of The Win Without Pitching Manifesto, talks about having the same capacity for $0 as you do for $10,000. That stunned me. Because it’s not about performing confidence. It’s about embodied congruence. Presence. A kind of unshakeable neutrality that invites others into trust.
Why Sales Without Sensation Falls Flat
To me, that level of congruence is what creates a clean energetic environment for sales to happen. It invites relationality. It creates resonance. And it teaches us that sales is not performance—it’s not an act of perfection. For those of us with sensitive systems, sales can’t be rooted in separation. That means no dissociation, no masking, no forcing.
Sustainable sales—the kind that nourishes rather than depletes—come from a body that is online, alive, and attuned to what’s real. When our capacity to feel is turned off, so is our ability to be felt. And if every time we enter a sales exchange we freeze, fawn, disappear, or run, our offering won’t land. And this is not because it’s not good, but because we’re not embodied in the relational process that underpins it.
Introducing Eco-Erotics: Belonging as Sales Strategy
Eco-erotics offers a lens that goes deeper than regulating your nervous system to death and learning tepid sales tactics. It explores how our access to sensation, aliveness, and erotic presence while rooted in place shapes the way we sell. It asks: Do you feel you belong in your work? In your body? In the industry? In the room you’re trying to sell inside of?
If there’s a fracture, a freeze, or a sense of not-belonging, that energy shows up in your sales. It creates dissonance. But dissonance is not a problem, it’s a signal. An invitation to simplify. To return to what the body already knows. That the real currency of sales is felt-sense of resonance.
“Erotics” refers to our capacity for experiencing sensation and lifeforce. “Eco-erotics” expands this into our relationship with Earth as a living system and asks us to feel our place in it. It’s not just about regulating your nervous system. It’s about reawakening your sense of rooted aliveness, of irrevocable belonging. That’s what creates sustainable resource exchange.
Shakti and the Return of Resonance
This kind of rootedness creates a tether between your body, your sense of self, and the Earth. When you enter a sales process from this place, you’re not flailing. You’re not chasing metrics. You’re tracking sensation. You’re moving from an unshakable eros.
And in that state, sales becomes what it always was: a natural evolutionary flow of cultural and economic exchange. A reciprocal process rooted in lifeforce. One that’s been distorted by patriarchal business logic, but not lost forever.
The Indian mystic Rabindranath Tagore once said: “If Shakti disappears, the creative force in society is inhibited. The men lose their virility and become mechanical in their habits.”
If Shakti disappears, so too does our felt-sense of creative capacity and access to real, living resource flow. Eco-erotics reminds us that to sell well, we must have access to authentic feeling. And to have access to authentic feeling, we must know that we belong. And to feel that felt-sense of belonging, we must come home in our bodies and in our consciousness to the Earth that already holds us.
And this is how we sell from a place of embodiment, belonging, and unshakeable congruence, no matter the dollar amount.
