Tag Archives: sexuality

Surrendering My Silence

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On this, the longest night of the year, it is helpful to remember that we too are being called into our deepest dark. Down into the places we hide from view; where we store our grief, where we brace and hold, where we are ashamed and unforgiving too.

When we speak of the ‘returning of the light’ it isn’t just a grace that this threshold season provides, but the call to our own revealing. We are being asked to acknowledge our untruths, to surrender our silence, to bare our fragile stories in the open. These are the acts which connect the fabric of our lives to the whole of truthfulness.

Without proof, we trust that a way will be born then in the dark, out of nothing, by this braving forward. And we are rewarded with the dignity of a life which emboldens the poetry trapped in the silence of others, and tenderises us for a more articulated quality of love. — Toko-pa

What does it mean for me to have intentional sex?

To acknowledge and feel into my body’s authentic desire; I feel Her thrum deep beneath my skin, like a vibration coming up from the ground, an echo of things remembered.

To acknowledge that I’m bleeding; the fourth day, after the transition, when cramping discomfort and fluctuating emotions have given way to want, need, and heat. I can feel that Her fire is kindled, can hear its crackle.

To acknowledge it is the darkest day; the day when the veil is thinnest and the spirits are close, desirous of experience; my ancestral and child parts looking for release. It has been a year since he and I began this work of physical sovereignty.

I trust that I am a goddess of the Earth; my grounded trance experiences over the last year confirm it, my double Virgo-ness adds delightful corroboration, and my ever-developing masculine simply nods Hir head, gazing deeply into my third eye.

And so with this awareness, I stand in front of him and begin to breathe, planting my feet and feeling them slowly merge with the imagined soil beneath me as I open a channel. A channel that runs from my sacrum and yoni and womb; the combined energies of red goddess seeking connection with her sister, her lover and consort, her center.

We breathe together, he and I, as we sway from our centers and slowly writhe; hips forming an infinite cradle, noses inhaling one another’s breath, lips brushing one another’s face. Grounding down, opening out, connecting through his cock; bringing him with me to mingle in molten lava before coming back up and into Us.

Building desire building erotic building heat. And then I need his face in Her; now. Need and want his deep devoted attention to awaken Her fully, to call Her forth. His exquisite tongue and lips; they speak to and see Her in ways like no other, honor Her, coax Her, sing to Her.

Then begins my focused breath work. His face buried, my right hand on second chakra, my left hand on third, lovingly pressing; deep breath down and into my pelvic bowl, my awareness following. Breathing slowly breathing deeply breathing intentionally. Over and over and over.

I become aware that my third, second, and first chakras are now connected, aligned, an extension of one another forming the backbone of my psychic cock. I breathe into and hold gently tense the muscles surrounding that sinuous ridge. An inch underneath my skin I can feel Hir arise; the sacred androgyne.

From my gut through my womb down into my clit and out into the cosmos, Hir cock extends and unfurls, a flower, a sword, a tongue. Caressing his face and throat and lips, adoring his touch and devotion, penetrating flesh and seeking his deepest tender, raw place. Feeding and being fed.

I ask him, Does She feel like She’s ready for Him to fuck Her? Yes. Gooood; whenever you’re ready. Slowly slowly slowly he enters me, on top of me, bringing his bloody beard and mouth to press against mine. Yes; this is good; there is power in the blood, to kiss the blood acknowledges I accept its sacred power. That I’m not afraid.

More urgently, faster, harder. Surges of energy now coming up through Hir cock, filling my fourth chakra, bursting through the fifth. My pleasure requires a voice, demands a voice, it will not and cannot be silenced; She will be heard.

The Hitachi gives Her waves to ride; deep vibrations that pull Her up and out, they help me process what She has to say. The vibrations are the closest thing I have to match Her intensity; I intuitively match and mimic them, humming and growling and babbling, keeping pace. These are the scales and arpeggios that will allow me to sing Her song.

I’m scared and thrilled and filled with scalding waves of intense pleasure pain. I’m fighting to hold balance of attention with her song; the release that’s coming is ancestral and dark, unbridled and powerful, filled with rage and grief and elation. It burns and encompasses me.

I scream, Coming She’s Coming, and then I’m wailing sobbing gnashing laughing undulating. I’m channeling bloody anger and generations of grief, mixed with elated embodiment; She’s here I’m here She’s here I’m here! This body right now here in this moment. She’s here. I’m here. Tears of relief and gratitude and joy.

All the way up, all the way down; I am the Hierophant Reversed and all the Goddesses Elemental, and this pleasure is my right. I claim it with my sovereign authority and with my voice. The fifth chakra has awakened and I have surrendered my silence.

Tapping My Intuition

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The last couple of weeks I’ve been having powerfully synchronous experiences with the women in my communities and it’s not coincidence. I’m sensing a convergence of divine feminine energy growing and coalescing not only in the women I speak with, but also inside my own body. It’s actually there that I’m feeling it the most intensely and I gotta say, it’s throwing me for a loop. Shaking me up. Blowing me open.

I knew that was the point when I started seriously investigating Stuff About Women Living Under Patriarchy about 18 months ago. Actually, I think it started four years ago when I gave birth, but I wasn’t really present to what had been seeded by that experience. That a key had been turned deep inside my pelvis. I hadn’t really grokked that the women who prepared me for and were present at Avery’s birth—all of them healers, activists, lovers, and teachers—were helping me set my feet on a path to Self/Goddess discovery.

The thing about getting blown open, shaken up, and grounded down is that all those things require a vast amount of personal surrender and trust. Two things I had literally zero experience with before that 14-inch head opened up my center and really began the process of identity dissolution.

Because there’s nothing like being a new mother to get a taste of surrender.

A little context before proceeding: I was born in 1971 America to an emotionally unprepared mother, raised by a fundamentally Christian family, and was thoroughly indoctrinated by our public schools/religious institutions. I have been thoroughly steeped in patriarchy. As a consequence of that and early-childhood family trauma/violence, by the time I reached my mid 30s and began psychotherapy, I had no idea what the Divine Feminine was. I’d been taught to believe God was a man with a lot of unfair rules and stipulations about achieving, well, anything of real value.

My Divine Feminine had no voice and I sought no female voices to encourage me. In fact, I actively avoided women because I’d never gotten along with them, didn’t trust them, didn’t want to deal with them. They were illogical, manipulative bitches and I had better ways to spend my time.

I had stopped listening to and trusting my intuition around the age of 5 because God and Men told me she wasn’t worth heeding; that she was a liar and a danger to my spiritual safety. I derided witches and crones and healers with a vigor that would have made the patriarchy proud. I laughed at the notion of stones vibrating or plants communicating or people living peacefully. All my therapy to date had been conducted through an inherited lens of dismissing and minimizing feminine power, intuition, feelings, and strength.

I was an excellent student.

So, in the context of that—and with enough exposure to powerful women/witches under my belt I began to think they might be Onto Something—I started by reading Clarissa Pinkola Estés and Riane Eisler. I deepened my commitment to and practice of Holistic Peer Counseling (HPC) and started counseling with more people; women, to be precise. I continued my focused psychotherapy work around my mother and the maternal ancestral patterns I’d been handed unconsciously. Things continued to shift and unfold; snarls were being picked apart, hurtful patterns received the loving attention they needed to integrate, and my ability to stay present with difficult feelings (mine and others’) continued to grow.

And then Shit Got Real.

My husband and I brought HPC into the bedroom after having avoided it on numerous levels for a couple years. Primarily because of my wounds and their armoring. Because of my inability to trust that any man truly wanted to love and see Me. That any man could want to go slowly and carefully and give me the space I needed to feel safe before having sex. That I had actually married that man and he was standing in front of me, begging me to let him in so that he could help give Her (that terrified little girl/woman who felt like a non-consensual whore) the loving attention and care she needed to Be Seen.

I started to feel safe during sex. Like I could ask for what I wanted and it wouldn’t be laughed at or put down as “romance” or “lame cuddling” or “girl stuff” or whatever the patriarchy likes to label things that aren’t penis-centered and hard-hitting. My husband spent time worshiping my body, honoring my courage, and chose to put himself in a position to wait for my consent, my desire, my demands. He showed me that I was worth waiting for, that who I was mattered, that I was a person of value.

I am blessed and he is amazing, and I can’t emphasize enough how critical this stage was for me. How it was required before I could truly begin to listen and heed Her words.

Because once I felt safe, began to build confidence, and increasingly let Her come out during sex, I felt a powerful shift in my pelvis. She demanded that we get fucked harder and harder, and his fucking me unlocked something primal and deep; a wound so old and so buried that it could only be massaged from the inside. Could only be reached by someone wholly committed to tracking it down and pummeling it. The lock that childbirth began to open was blown apart by his loving attention; the strikeplate thrown across the room, the doorjam exploded, the lock mechanism tangled and impotent.

She had awoken and there was no going back. How could I want to go back when, for the first time in my life, I truly believed I was powerful, trustworthy, beautiful, desirable, intelligent, and INTUITIVE. I was grounded in my root chakra and it was AWESOME. Literally and truly awesome.

The difficulty arose when I would leave the house every day to go to work. I work in tech, which as most of you know is a heavily male-dominated culture, and I was having a hard time staying aware of my intuition while swimming in ManTown. (Disclaimer: I love my job and many of my coworkers; they are truly wonderful and socially/politically active. And most of them are still men. Not their fault.) I started to get worried, to feel off balance, to wonder if I could lose my connection to intuition. How was I supposed to balance The Logic and The Woo? How could I stay true to my chosen path?

The answer came from a woman in my HPC community; a woman I consider to be a powerful witch and seer, someone more spiritually aware in the Ways of Women than I. She and a couple other HPC ladies had begun doing yoni steams, which totally triggered and squicked me for some reason. However, something else she offered completely resonated with me almost like I heard a deep GONG in my core.

Yoni eggs.

*Note on the word yoni; I am not a student of Hinduism and so, being sensitive to appropriation, I balked at using the term. However, when reviewing the words we typically apply to the female genitals, none of them felt respectful/beautiful in the way I was coming to consider my genitals/pelvic parts, and they also weren’t sufficiently comprehensive. I didn’t want to address JUST my labia or JUST my vagina; I wanted to address the WHOLE AREA. So, yoni. And pussy. I like pussy.

A yoni egg is, as you might expect, an egg-shaped stone/mineral, usually 1–2 inches long that’s inserted into the vagina and left there for some amount of time that’s determined by the wearer, her Intuition, or her body’s willingness to hold it. There’s a lot of them on Etsy; you can even get them from Amazon.

I have two: a 2-inch model made of mahogany obsidian and a 3-inch model made of selenite. Every material is purported to have its own healing or meditation properties. I phrase it like that to cover my ass and because I’m not psychically sensitive enough to pick up on the vibrations or properties. This is one of those cases where I’m choosing to surrender and trust that regardless of what they’re supposed to do, they are more than ably providing me with what I needed them to do, which is help me focus. If they also increase my sexual power (mahogany obsidian) or mental clarity/psychic ability (selenite), all the better.

*Practical note: Yes, they can slip out into the toilet, especially if you’re bearing down/pooping. The first time I wore it to work, I dropped it in the toilet and it made a very audible CLANK when it hit the porcelain. I hope the other woman in the bathroom was confused and/or titillated. It’s important to get your Order of Operations right or you’re gonna be fishing.

I currently wear the smaller one all the time because doing so provides me with an ongoing psychic and felt connection to my Intuition/root chakra. It helps me stay focused on who I am while moving through the world getting blasted by violent and abusive messages. It’s also giving me something to share with the other powerful and emerging women I interact with; in one particular case, the woman in question had already received the message from a third party that she needed to begin putting crystals in her vagina.

So, like I said at the start, synchronous things are happening. The women are converging and finding our voices and accessing our power. It feels really big and part of me is so excited to be on what feels like a leading edge of discovery and healing; an edge where regular women from everyday places are tapping their Intuition and speaking their truth.

A Child of Sexual Shame

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All my formative sexual lessons were steeped in shame, secrecy, and fear. And it’s precisely for that reason I refuse to engender sexual ignorance and shame in my son.

Daddy taught 5-year-old me that touching naked bodies (mine or anyone else’s) was something secretive, something so shameful that no one else was supposed to know about it. Not even my mother. But if this was something loving (like he said), something that felt good (like my body said), what was there to hide? So, confused, but still trusting the wisdom of adults, I kept the secret until my lack of guile brought the situation to light. At which point there was much yelling and fighting and crying that brought about my father’s eventual banishment from our lives. Because he touched me. How awful I must be to cause such a thing.

Mommy taught 9-year-old me that masturbation was shameful because when she caught me for the first time, exclaiming “WHAT are you DOING?!”, the horror and disgust and fear in her voice were palpable. My heart jumped into my throat, my gut clenched in fear, and a wave of red-hot shame flushed my chest and face. The takeaway I remember from that conversation was essentially “Think how disappointed Jesus would be in you if he caught you masturbating upon his return.” How awful I must be if touching my clitoris would be noticed by the Son of God himself.

Steve, the adult male who called our house one day and captivated 12-year-old me into chatting with him taught me that sexy talk was also a secret. I still don’t know who he was or how he found me, or the exact way the situation came about, but it lasted for weeks. He grooming me, sexy talking me, telling me all sorts of naughty stories while I masturbated under a blanket in the basement, terrified my mother or step-father would find me. Terrified that Jesus could see me. And then it just stopped. I don’t remember why, but I remember the distinct sensation that it was because I wasn’t sexy enough, wasn’t grown up enough to warrant his “attentions” any longer. How awful I must be to not only enjoy the attention, but to hide it from my parents.

Ernie, the short, aggressive, high school senior I met as a freshman taught me about the realities of sexual pressure. I was 6 feet tall, awkward, socially clueless, and not considered dating material among my peers. So when Ernie ran his full-court press, I was initially flattered and then anxious as I began to sense the heavy reality of what he expected from me as his “girlfriend.” I knew about sex from reading (LOL) and I really wanted to be “popular,” so I arrived at his house one afternoon, allegedly prepared to “make out.” It was just dumb luck that he was a terrible kisser, smelled awful, and completely grossed me out. I made hurried excuses and ran home, terrified and ashamed. I know now it was further dumb luck that I wasn’t raped. How awful I must be if these were the kind of boys I attracted.

Darren, the older, white trash, high school dropout with the pockmarked face and the stained sweatpants taught 18-year-old me about rape. Our relationship was basically Ernie 2.0, but with bonus features like alcohol and the illusion of “adult consent” on my part. He disgusted me from the moment I met him, but he showered me with compliments and gave me a lot of attention, so I swallowed my distaste and told myself it was worth it for the experience. I was a virgin. After a few weeks, when he invited his friend to come get some, too, it didn’t occur to me that I could refuse or run away. I had completely bought and accepted the notion that my experience didn’t matter and my body was a commodity. How awful I must be to not stand up for myself.

Of course, there were many more painful sexual lessons to come; lessons about objectification, performance, compliance, appeasement, competition, insecurity, power, STIs, remorse, abortion, and silence. Always the silence.

Oh, there was plenty of talking about the performance of sex: tools and toys, positions and kinks, lingerie and platform heels. You know: how sex looks. All dissociated, all done unconsciously. Because how could I possibly be conscious to the painful and embarrassing reality that was my nonexistent sexual identity?

How could I talk about the dark shameful hole inside me? How could I give attention to a lost and abused little girl who didn’t believe she mattered at all? Who would stand up for her? Be her ally?

My years of therapy have taught me that *I* had to become her ally; I had to stand up for myself and advocate for the health of my sexuality. And so it’s no surprise to me that I feel passionately about ensuring my son grows up without feeling ashamed of his body or his feelings or his desires. I am doing the work to ensure he grows up with sexual allies, and I intend to lead the way.

Part of that comes through participating in the community and discussions that occur on the Facebook page Raising Kids Without Sexual Shame. An extension of the revolutionary work being done by Nekole Shapiro, this community provides a safe place where we can talk about children, their inevitable sexuality, and our guardianship over that without totally freaking out and falling into our shame spirals. Because in our current world, there’s a lot to freak out and be ashamed about. Case in point, the following quote was recently shared on the page:

“The sexiest thing a woman can bring to the bedroom is her sexual desire and a sense of freedom in her own body.” –Pamela Madsen

In that context, one of the group moderators posed the question “How do you feel about your child’s desire to feel sexy?” *CRICKETS* And so, in that silence (and as one of the group editors), I posted the following:

The part of this quote that resonates for me is “a sense of freedom in her/his/their own body”. Because I’ve been programmed too heavily around what it means to be sexy and how children should never be sexy (because PREDATORS) and we’re stuck in this societal hard spot of having no fucking idea how to talk about children and sex in the same breath without totally vaporizing on the spot.

So, backing it back up. Taking sexy allll the way back to how a child experiences it (which doesn’t have the pornographic, predator, vilification aspects and overtones we, as adults, can’t escape from) – takes me to a place where the child is free to explore and experience their body however feels good for them. For my 4-y-o son, that currently manifests in fondling his penis. Sometimes to erection, usually not. He isn’t goal driven; there’s no point to it except exploration.

In those moments when he’s fondling himself and knows it feels good and he smiles, I know that he is feeling ‘sexy’. Or maybe I could say he’s feeling divine or he’s feeling embodied or he’s feeling blissful – all words that are also connected to feeling sexy. 

A place where a child is free to explore and experience his body in whatever way feels good FOR HIM. To me, that (combined with consent, which is an entirely different and equally important conversation) is the nut of the whole argument. It’s about agency, how you want to feel, and who has a right to your body. I want my son to know that NO ONE has a right to his body; not to touch it or kiss it or push it or anything. His word is law when it comes to his skin.

And, conversely, that this applies to other people. My son can claim no right to another person’s body (not even mine). It’s a critical (and rather revolutionary) distinction, this idea that every human has a right to experience freedom inside their own body. A freedom I am just now beginning to wrap myself around, value, and accept as true.

I get that there’s a LOT of societal programming to slog through on this point and it’s not simply a matter of semantics, although that’s a reasonable place to start. For myself, I’m starting with what I stated in my FB comment: I want to focus on my son’s divine right to feel embodied and blissful (as opposed to ‘sexy’)—whether that takes the form of stroking his genitals, playing naked in the back yard, getting tickles and scritchies while cuddling with me, or lying next to his daddy on the couch. Because sexy is an abstract, subjective, adult concept that’s way overloaded and primed for triggers.

The simple fact is, I want him to know he’s free to touch his body wherever he likes, that he can trust his body’s signals, and that to feel blissful inside his skin is his right as a human. To that end, I answer his questions honestly, I don’t hide my naked body or its functions from him, and I strive to touch his body only with consent (not always successfully because UGH little kids like to run into the road). I trust that this approach is working because when I do touch him roughly, he lets me know immediately and loudly that it’s not okay. He’s awesome.

I have vowed to integrate my own sexual shame so that I don’t pass it down inadvertently to my son. This is no small thing; it’s a lifelong commitment and a scary one at that, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him grow up thinking about how awful he is.