The Power of a Woman in Her Pleasure

***Trigger Warning this content will contain references to childhood sexual assault***

To be honest I am a little surprised at myself that I am sitting down to share this portion of my journey. Like many women, the experience of my sexual development has been cast in the haze of trauma, shame, self criticism, and fragmentation. On this writing path I am trying to observe when the call to share comes, and so far it seems to happen the week right before my moon cycle is set to phase into bleeding. This is the time period that I open up more to the cosmos and close out more to the mundane of life. While driving into work was when I felt the same push that lead me to launching this website last month, I was very firmly informed that I needed to share my healing journey around my sexuality.

So, my loves, here I am preparing to share my soft white underbelly, my most vulnerable of truths. When I was 4 years old I was molested, how many times I cannot be sure. When I was around 11 or 12 that was when grown men started to yell at me on the street or making me uncomfortable in other ways and settings. I never had a boyfriend in school partly because of my devastatingly low self esteem, partly because the idea of it terrified-me knowing what would be 'expected of me', and partly because I saw a grand life that a man may happen the be in, but was not the main character. The reality of my molestation didn't resurface until I was 19 and in a very serious relationship with my body awakened. It wasn't until I was 20 that I finally had the courage to tell a parent, I had to drink almost a whole bottle of wine to yank the words from my throat. They denied the memory and the slightest possibility of who I had named. When I was 33 I finally got to tell the police about it when the abuser died and they were asking family for character profiling.

Me at a year and a half old

My family has never appropriately acknowledged the wound and now that almost 100% of my family is now on the other side of the veil, it will remain that way. But, an interesting observation came to me while in the car this morning, it's that through my matrilineal lineage, only one story has been shared about a relative being a survivor. They are near my generation though, there are no stories of ancestors being survivors of sexual assault. I know their miscarriages and I know of their mental health, but nothing of this nature-like it magically never happened. It leaves me between 2 polars of feeling-like I am standing alone acknowledging what society would like kept quiet and on the other side, I am seeing how continually I am the one to chose the braking of patterns. To do that which the women before me were not afforded to do.

I was 18 here, my 1st semester at culinary school. This semester I would have someone in my dorm and cohort put their tongue in my mouth even though I said no is several different occasions. That was my 1st adult kiss.

My sexuality through early adulthood was obviously twisted because of all that I had learned, thinking that men wanting my body was where value came from and that my pleasure was a performance for said men's gratification. All of it for me was a cultivated projection outward that left me hollow inside. In this last year of self healing I have learned SO MUCH about my primal feminine sexuality. She is not passive or self conscious-she is a huntress prowling around her prey, demanding what she deserves, and languishes in the lusciousness of pleasure. I began to pay respect to her when in November I told my mate that I could no longer bare to be touched, sharing my feelings around how my sexuality has never been for me and I needed to find the pleasure that existed for me simply because I was a woman alive and deserved such. To be honest I didn't know if I would ever want to be touched by a man again, my body's ache was so profound. When I went on my grief retreat with TwoCan retreats, I learned I was there not just to grieve my mother, but to grieve what had been taken from my body. I had the divine experience of meeting Jenn Parma who skillfully facilitated my 1st experiences with somatic healing. This is some POTENT work!

Returning back to the states where I had severed connection with my mate I was actually able to hear my body speaking to me in a way I never had before, which ultimately lead to one of the most connected sessions of intimacy we had had at that time. Every single step of the way I kept asking her, do you want this, do you want that, what would feel good to you. Never before in my life had I done that with my body, let alone while engaging with a partner. (In another article I can share how we are evolving our union based on these learned experiences- to make something new. He so accurately pointed out that neither one of us has ever seen an example of what a healthy marriage looks like and we need to define it for ourselves.)

I would like to share with you some of the practices I engage in to foster the return to the temple of my body incase there is something that may help you on your journey as well. I keep reminding myself that if just one person finds my writings and receives a medicine they need, then the vulnerability after pain is well worth it. We are not alone. One tool for me is yoga, it was one of the very first way I began to move my body several years ago that was not tainted by my exercising anorexia days. Particularly I find I love kundalini! While doing my sadhana at home, I practice with a yoni egg from the beginning of breathwork, through asana, and only remove it when I have closed my meditation and done my tarot pull. This can feel very overwhelming at first if like me you have not spent at a lot of time focused on the pelvic bowl. Start with whatever feels safest to you but also allows you to caress the edge of your comfort zone. We are aiming for positive growth not more trauma! In another article I will share my terrifying journey with the mirror, but recently I have taken to doing tree pose in the nude in front of a mirror, looking at how sacred the pose is and the brilliance of our bodies mechanics as I see my fine muscles twitch to keep balance. Taking long tubbies in nice bath salts followed by a lovely oiling, saying things to myself that acknowledge my femininity. The final offering is self pleasure with prayer. I learned this from Hitomi Mochizuki, we create allllll of this energy as we build to a climax then we are releasing into the world-what if we acknowledged the power of the yoni and sent a prayer out with our release. I have begun doing that and let me tell you my darlings-it changed everything for me!

I feel like this is enough offerings for now, I don't want to overwhelm you and this won't be my last article on the topic. Feel free to send message through the website of on Insta if you want to discuss in a more private manner any ideas you would like to flush out into a practice for yourself. I dream of a world where women every where are walking the land in full possession of their primal power. Thank you to the women who have helped me, to my unofficial coven who are on this journey with me, and thank you dear reader for sitting in this with me. Until the next time.