My Sexual Healing Journey Part II
Written Journey Below….
Trigger Warning: Sexual Abuse + Sexual Assault are mentioned in this article.
I’ve written some things so spicy lately that it’s forced me to go back to the beginning and figure out how this happened and why I might share it. In this article I share some of the story of how my relationship to my sexuality has evolved.
My boundaries were crossed when I was three years old. On the edge of memory. This of course colours everything and I can never know how much.
Sex was always important to me. I fantasized and masturbated early.
I was raised fundamentalist christian - sex was for marriage only. I remember my mother saying “it’s harder for men to control themselves - we have to help them.”
Any fleeting opening to my sexuality despite this repression was crushed by random indecent exposure, cat calling, harassment and assault. I learned that sex was dangerous and that I was prey. There was no option not to play - every day was a battlefield.
Entering the work world I became conscious of the double standard. I must be hot but not too hot. Smart but not ambitious. Etc etc.
Beneath all of this I mostly lost my connection to my own attractions and desires. And when they did surface they were chaotic and terrifying.
There were moments of fun. Travelling Europe I enjoyed the passport game - kissing men from as many countries as possible. The USA took a long time to “conquer” and that tickled me.
In Chicago my girlfriends and I unpacked our sexual adventures Sex in the City style. The conversations and female bonding were far more enjoyable than the actual male encounters.
Serial monogamy was inbred. Conditioning to create a stable family life was far stronger than my sexual drive. I married twice with the voices I had been raised with playing in my head alongside severe attachment anxiety and low self esteem. I had no idea what relationship was or could be. I had no idea who I was.
Eventually I fell in love for real and we had a magical six months of sex and love. This was the man I chose. Who I still love as family. When the honeymoon phase ended and sex died off our bond was too strong to consider leaving. Then we tried to have a baby and almost a decade of trying and losing killed my sense of myself as a sexual being and our relationship. In July of 2017 I said “that part of my life [the sexual part] is done.”
In August 2017 I met Grandmother Ayahuasca. I was broken. My intention was to have a baby. I also hoped for some spiritual understanding that would change it all. Knowing Grandmother now as I do I shiver at my boldness. I had not yet had the experience of being given what you want when you ask.
The first ceremony was kind of ridiculous. I did purge. And I saw candy. I thought the songs were strange. None of it was like I expected and it felt outside the realm of my experience in a way that was not helpful. I did, however, feel great the next morning as I got up and drove back to the cottage.
The night after ceremony I had a sexual dream. In the morning, feeling desire, I reached for my partner. He stiffened. And in that moment I saw the whole unconscious contract between us. That I would desperately try to juice up my ovaries by any means necessary and do everything to create a child while he did not want to create with me.
A week later I went on a Radical Aliveness retreat and met a man I felt attracted to. As part of the workshop I was able to express that attraction. Feeling my sexuality flowing live in spoken word with another person confirmed that it was out of the box now and nothing was going to put it back in. I came home, booked a trip to Peru for December, and told my partner I could not be monogamous if we weren’t having sex. Grandmother had stirred me and my life force had taken priority with astonishing speed.
Over the next year and a half I participated in thirty ayahuasca ceremonies alongside continued emotional release. I worked with many intentions in ceremony and time and again Grandmother brought me back to sex. She showed me what it was like to feel out of control desire. She rebirthed me as an Eagle. And men came out of the woodwork in response. My partner and I separated nine months after my declaration. The ceremonies turned to grief - I was devastated. I saw all the ways I had hurt him. The reasons for his withdrawal. I mourned the beautiful life we had built.
The separation freed me to have new sexual experiences and what I discovered was life-changing. The medicine had opened my body and intercourse felt amazing. I couldn’t get enough.
Just as we were separating, my therapist, seeing me coming alive, suggested a ceremony called Shamanic De-Armoring. As she spoke I felt electricity head to toe. I had to do it - yesterday. In August I flew to Australia and spent 13 days breaking through a lifetime of repression. There is nothing like hearing a room of 25 people let loose in their natural life force energy.
Between grandmother and the de-armorning my life force energy was a raging river. Sex was all I wanted to do. It became essential, like food. Which of course brought up all the things around relationship. Conventional relationship seemed impossible. The slow courting rituals. The expectations.
I started loving casual sex. And then discovering that with certain people casual sex wasn’t casual at all. I learned how to protect my heart and my body.
This was all a glorious exploration that hit some wild highs and lows.
My refrain for a long time was - I just want five days. Five uninterrupted days with a safe partner. I wanted to go deep and see what happened on the other side of sustained presence and love making.
One of the first men I met turned into a long time love. And it was devastating. We had the most beautiful connection and also a hot cold dynamic where he would to shock me with something devastating every couple of weeks. I tolerated it far too long and finally broke it off when it became clear he was cheating on me with his best friend. I lost a lot of my newly gained confidence in this encounter. Without safety in the relationship I didn’t have access to what I wanted - I tried to create a monogamous continuer for us so that the safety was there and in the process convinced myself I wanted this kind of relationship.
Sex as a priority again fell away. I grounded more deeply in the Christian wisdom tradition and this also supported an unconscious assumption that I could not have both sex and God.
Then in spring 2023 through a couple seemingly random and relatively chaste encounters I came alive again. This time with the ground and space to write about it and explore at a whole other level. Instead of being swept away on the raging river I had the presence to witness the river. I was both exploring and watching the exploration. My life purpose now was clear - devotion to life itself. And so I threw myself into aliveness including sexuality through the Venus Retrograde of June through October 2023. It was a mess and it was beautiful. It brought me to my knees and I returned to Grandmother for healing at the end of the retrograde cycle in October.
What you see now in my work is the result of these explorations, ceremonies and of my ongoing thinking and metabolizing with trusted mentors and with myself the importance of these experiences and their relevance to our world.
I know my stories and thoughts resonate - you tell me this. What I hope to convey is how important this material is for all of us. I am not ’just’ talking about dating. I am talking about life. And how we live life in the context of our culture - the inner conflicts and external demands that we encounter when we set upon the path of aliveness.
I counsel my client to go for their desires. This me going for mine. I trust our desires. They might seem like they make no sense. Certainly for long periods this one did not. But I’m here now and the threads are coming together and I know it is important. Each step on the journey has been essential in forming this evolving world view.
Similar to my fertility journey, which was not about the ultimate outcome of having a human baby but about me surrendering and opening into mothering change, my longing for sex is calling me to be a lover of the world. This isn’t about having a baby or getting a man. This is about expansion into love.
When I search for the best most serious thing I can do for the world it’s this self expression of my inner journey alongside holding space for the inner journeys of those clients who are called to trust me with their intimate selves.
For it is our untapped energy that is both causing pain in the world and which offers the potential to heal this world that so desperately needs our love. But first - you need love. The richest deepest most natural kind that exists within you as a cool pool that is everlasting. That this has anything to do with sex may surprise you. But stay with me and let’s look together at what treasures lie in your desire.