Sacred Sexuality: Sex, Trauma and the Sacred Wound.
How free do you feel sexually?
How in tune are you with your erotic, sensual self?
It’s can be a fun, juicy, and expansive exploration, and it ought to be.
Yet it can often feel anything but. The playfulness, intrigue, and excitement can be there, but other times its thwarted, perhaps through conditioning of what you ‘should’ or ‘should not do’, perhaps by feelings of inadequacy as you compare yourself to the movies that portray the seductive, bombshells exuding their sexual prowess and you think that that is what the erotic is. Or perhaps its deeply hidden trauma and shame that dull the light on what is yours to claim.
We are supposedly living in a sexually liberated era, one where womxn can sleep with who they like, attend sex to dinner-party’s for fun, and easily part with some cash for a course on how to have multiple orgasms to neo-pop-faux-tantra.
I’m not entirely dismissing these things, but I think we’ve been largely misguided if we believe that vending-machine sexuality with a red lip and devil may care attitude is sexual freedom.
I think this is more like sexual bypassing.
The bypassing of the shame, pain, and conditioning that we hold in our shadow, the refusal to see the performative tendencies for what they really are; masks and armour that protect our hearts and our sacredness, lodged there out of fear, wanting, and disconnect.
To me sexual freedom means connecting to the divine within unhindered. To engage in life in a way that fills me up, that feels soft yet powerful, expansive and radiant, not exhausting, not performative, not flat or used. It is to feel acute aliveness in the present moment, and to receive it, to allow life to penetrate me. To me the erotic IS life. It’s everywhere, the earth, the bees, a lovers gaze, a baby’s breath, a flower blooming, all wanting to have it’s way with us, if only we’d soften, surrender and receive it.
It is to dance with the feminine.
And in our dogged search for liberation I think we’ve neglected her. We’ve striven for independence, demanded our power back, and in all the doing our divine feminine, sexual, erotic, life force energy has been dulled into a place of superficiality, and for some further shame and suffering as there body falls short of the demands placed on it.
Rather than liberation what we’re experiencing is the continued objectification of womxn, the commodification of sex, the pornography of the erotic. The desensitisation of ourselves to the world we live in.
Our sexual energy is sacred and desiring of devotion. Yet it is treated as anything but.
Sex still happens to please, placate, favour, or serve a man
- but what she wants is to serve you.
The binaries of the Whore and the Madonna keep us, consciously or not, ‘in our place’,
- when in reality their are 7 billion sexualities and preferences. The ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ serve no one but the oppressive structures that put them there in the first place.
Performative, shallow, and largely harmful remedies and teachers and courses abound, deluding us into believing that this it what it takes to become an orgasmic womxn, but fail to contact the heart of it.
- What we really need, that is to inhabit our bodies, to create the safety, vulnerability, and connection to surrender and open.
The sacred is made into sport
- when all really all she wants is for you to slow down, release the expectations, and immerse yourself in focused, present, awareness in life.
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”
- Audre Lorde
Sacred Sexuality
Our sexual and erotic energies are powerful. This is the life-force energy that is manifest in everything around us. This is at the throbbing heart of our Mother Earth, at the core of her wildness, and of ours.
A woman connected to her eros is connected to her divinity and her radiance. She is lit up. And she is no one but hers.
As detailed in the phenomenal writings of Audre Lorde the erotic is a profound feminine resource that has us feel the acute aliveness in everything we do, and is a deeply replenishing, creative, gateway to confidence and joy.
A womxn empowered by her sexual, erotic, life force energy is dangerous.
“A turned on woman is difficult to push around. She speaks up and speaks out. Obstacles tend to dissolve in her presence. She aligns herself with the power of love and the potency of pleasure. She is Shatki”
- Lisa Schrader, Awakening Shakti
A womxn empowered by her sexual, erotic, life force energy is dangerous to the patriarchy and the systems of oppression that abound.
She is dangerous because she is powerful. She is dangerous because she is fuelled by wild, non-rational and provocative energy, that arises from the dark, deep places within. She is not linear, or rational, or easily caged - and because of this, in this world we live in, she is feared.
In fear of her power she, and we, have been tamed, shackled, and spat out as a distorted version that looks and sounds like something that it is not.
Womxn became something to be had, virginity a prize to be won, and sex was commodified. Nothing has changed.
The ever-growing porn industry contributes the erroneous belief that good sex and an erotic life is lingerie-clad performances culminating in an earth shattering climaxes. The sensationalism grows more and more, and only serves to desensitise us, leading to increasing violence in our homes and streets, and decreasing self worth. We are now convinced that we should be turned on in a second, be dripping with desire 24/7, that a sexy body only looks a certain way, what is natural is ugly, what is normal is not enough, and that who we are is not enough. And what was powerful is now empty, confused, and rife with shame.
None of this happened by mistake. A womxn connected to the seat of her power, fuelled by her pleasure and awake with the aliveness of the erotic is a womxn alive, unforgettable and sovereign.
To disempower a womxn is to cut her off at the waist. And so rose the Patriarchy.
The Sacred Wound
We live today in a sex-negative culture, an era of pseudo-sexual liberation, where we remain severed from the sensual and the sacred. The sexual and the erotic are not worshipped or honoured but hidden, feared, shamed. And it is in those shadows that violence grows.
In Australia conservative estimates indicate 1 in 4 womxn have experienced sexual abuse, and 1 in 2 womxn have experienced sexual harassment. If you haven’t experienced it yourself then your sister, your friend, your mother, or your grandmother did.
The ever-growing porn industry contributes the erroneous belief that good sex and an erotic life is lingerie-clad performances culminating in an earth shattering climaxes. The sensationalism grows more and more, and only serves to desensitise us, leading to increasing violence in our homes and streets, and decreasing self worth. We are now convinced that we should be turned on in a second, be dripping with desire 24/7, that a sexy body only looks a certain way, what is natural is ugly, what is normal is not enough, and that who we are is not enough. And what was powerful is now empty, confused, and rife with shame.
Sexual trauma harms our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual bodies, it is termed by Peter Levine, a renowned somatic trauma therapist, as the Sacred Wound.
Sexual shaming, abuse, and trauma is a sacred wound because it violates our most personal and divine of boundaries. In the violation of our sacred boundary, the the membrane that embodies our selves, we lose the sense of who we are. A womxn violated is a woman who loses connection to the seat of her power, and to herself. We may continue to function, for the head will carry on, but we are not fully connected to the divine, radiant, self-expressive power within.
Every unsatisfactory or dishonouring union serves to reinforce this felt lack or disconnect within. It’s painful, this severing from ourselves. And we have a natural tendency to protect ourselves from hurt. So we contract, we place armour over our hearts and our yoni’s. We may try to fill the hungry void by going from one hook-up to another, stronger and stronger vibrators, bingeing on chocolate, or shopping, anything to numb the pain. And in a cruel and ironic twist, as we search for sensation, sweetness, and love in the wrong places we desensitise ourselves even further - we are losing touch with that ‘acute aliveness’. And in the search for something to ‘fix us’, we reinforce the myth that we are broken.
None of this happened by mistake. A womxn connected to the seat of her power, fuelled by her pleasure and awake with the aliveness of the erotic is a womxn alive, unforgettable and sovereign.
To disempower a womxn is to cut her off at the waist. And so rose the Patriarchy.
Healing the Sacred Wound
Healing the Sacred Wound takes courage, and devotion. It requires us to turn and face the parts that hold shame, and pain, and trauma. It requires us to claim that which has never been claimed, that may never have been claimed by generations of womxn that came before us.
This kind of healing, and reconnection with the self is not achieved through traditional talk therapy, but in sensuality, in embodiment, and in engaging the sacredness that lies in the every day.
Healing the Sacred Wound involves:
To cultivate sensual sensitivity and to feel our acute aliveness, as Lorde wrote. Not through flashy vibrators, but in the subtle. Attuning our bodies and nervous systems to greater sensitivity, bringing the background noise to the foreground.
It is to engage fully, focused, and aware with the life that is around you. To cultivate our capacity to feel pleasure in the ordinary, such that it becomes extraordinary.
To move the body in non habitual and fluid ways. Take a mental note of how much of your daily activity is habitual, angular or choreographed, and then invite in the opposite. This might mean making snakelike movements through your spine, tiny circles with your hips, and soft non-linear movement in small moments throughout the day to drop you out of your head and into your body - into your hips, pelvis and genitals.
Indulge in art, movies, books or poetry that excite and arouse you. Research what you do and do not like. Watch how another woman enjoys pleasure as it allows your mirror neurons to inform your own body.
Engaging in a daily ritual that gives undivided, gentle attention to your body. Perhaps its soft touch and massage, baths, a mirror practice, lighting a candle and dancing slowly with the flame.
This may also involve working with a trauma informed therapist to:
Tend to your nervous systems and release tension to create safety, and relaxed and open states so to receive pleasure;
Meet trauma and release it’s hold on you;
Release the felt sense of shame that closes us off to life, so to move forward with greater presence, aliveness, and passion;
Create new embodied boundaries, which were either ruptured in our dishonouring of ourselves, or violated by the dishonouring of our bodies by another.
Having been on the steep paths of pain, reintegration, healing and growth myself, I can affirm that it is the above which has had me finally reconnect with the intimate, the pleasurable, the sexual and the erotic.
The reclaiming of a womxn’s sacred sexual and erotic sovereignty is fundamental to our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing. But it goes beyond that too. In healing ourselves we also heal ancestral wounds, and clear the way for the generations that will come after us. Honouring the divine feminine sexual, erotic energy means to honour life. To honour nature, to honour the earth. To live a life in sacred union, in balance and harmony. It is to merge with love.
You are at a pivotal time in history, you are instrumental in the change that is currently afoot, sending its ripples everywhere.
You reconnected to the seat of your sacred power will bring us all into a new and more harmonious world.
I currently work in a one to one capacity with womxn who wish to reclaim their divinity, radiance, and power, using a gentle trauma-informed approach founded in the arts of the feminine and embodiment. If you’re interested in receiving support you’re welcome to contact me here.
If you wish to stay abreast of services focused on healing the Sacred Wound drop your email in below.
xo
Jess