Origins: why this blog
When I turned 35, I had never had an orgasm.
I was on a libido-enhancing drug because I did not feel—had really never felt—a desire for sex. In fact, I felt rage when I had sex with my husband. I did not self-pleasure. For most of my adult life, I tried to ignore this, accept that was just who I was. But inside, I felt disconnected, barren almost, broken. I wanted to be more embodied, more sensual, more connected to self, but didn’t even have those words—a condition of increasing frustration and despair.
I had been seeing a sex therapist for several months. We had inventoried my fears and limiting beliefs around sex, talked about my experiences carrying the secret of my father being gay throughout my adolescence and watching my mother die of breast cancer when I was 22, and practiced the benefits of alternative therapies such as reiki and yoga.
A few months into this work, I took a Tantra “Sacred Sex” meditation course and soon after began to work one-on-one with the teacher. I wanted her sureness about sexuality—her ability to ground in body, weave her feminine and masculine energies, to feel sexual ecstasy. To orgasm. To speak her truth. To be a woman, freely.
Our first session was at the beginning of 2019. January had just risen. I told her my story—about how was a stay-at-home mother of a toddler daughter, a wife, and that I wrote when I could. She listened as I talked about my desire to better understand my sexuality—how I didn’t want to hate sex.
“You need to give your inner woman a microphone,” she said, definitively. “Your voice and your vagina, they are related. And your woman, she wants to be heard.”
A well-spring of recognition rose within me. She was right. For decades I had silenced this femininity, this energy, this voice—this inner larynx of truth.
Understanding my repression through this lens required understanding a basic concept in Tantra: that—much like the Jungian concept of the Anima (the unconscious feminine dimension of the male psyche) and Animus (the unconscious masculine dimension of the female psyche)—all humans have both masculine and feminine energies within us.
I was intrigued by the idea that I was out of touch with my inner feminine, especially because I have spent so much of my life trying to appear womanly. On the outside, I look the way I think of the word feminine: I am short and curvy; have long, wavy, sandy-colored hair; blue eyes; brows that arch like slivers of moon. I have wide hips and a pear-shaped belly and a round chest. But my energy, I am learning, is often stereotypically masculine: cognitive, striving, industrious, strong-willing, agenda-filled, aggressive, doing. This is not to vilify the masculine side of me, as it helped me cope with the secrets of my childhood, my schooling, my alcoholism and bulimia, my grief, my marriage, my labor and delivery and all the unacknowledged moments when I sense threat. But it is also suffocating me like a weed—separating me from the deep knowing of my inner feminine—the softer, more creative, more flowing energy that leads back to source.
My intention for this blog is to hold space for the voice of the emerging woman within me, for my sexuality, my truth. This woman, or feminine expression, has something to say, but she needs safety to say it—anonymity, blank journal pages of non-judgment, permission to speak without editing: a pen-named blog.
Even more simply, she needs
space.
She needs white space because her voice is as skittish as it is sure. It is the tentative stance before a deer-spotted-danger runs.
And so this blog is as much as a summoning of spirit as it is a holding of space. It is a platform, an open-mic, a poetry reading, a howling, a confessional, a song, an essay in the truest form of the word essay: to try. A space? A microphone? An intention?
My woman asks: does it matter?
Instantly, I relax. Instantly, I am relieved by her gentle presence and reminder to be, allow, channel.
What does matter is this, she breathes: that I don’t shame or suffocate or edit her.
So my promise to my inner woman is just that: that I will try not to tame her. Because she wants to write long, windy sentences that are best combed or spoken aloud—that might need to be tamed, but in their un-tamedness, they are alive and pulsing and rhetorical and auditory and ancient. They are a poetic, I had timid woman practicing falsetto. Letting the roses go unpruned. Growing her pubic hair.
They are WOMAN.
“Your creativity is directly linked to your sensual and sexual self,” my sexuality coach reminded me after our first session. I had studied the chakra system, knew that the sacral chakra housed both the creative and sexual energies, but had never considered the connection between a blog and sexual consciousness.
So here, on this blog, I am dedicated to being my creative, sensual self. To exist in the textured, fragrant, rich and flexing flow of my divine feminine—my inner woman—my gentle, knowing, complex, pattern-seeing, intuition-driven and still-somewhat-wobbly female energy. And in this place—this beckoning, yellow-glinting, spark-producing place, I am going to allow myself to write the way I am guided.
My voice, her voice, our voice, is a projection of our reality. And that reality is a mosaic and a woven basket and the ocean. It is a sanctuary and a battlefield. It is flesh and spirit, bone and atmosphere, sex and matriarch, God and universe. It is calm and wild and the splinters of space between eagle calls.
It is loud.
It is soft.
It is punctuated.
It is not
It is spacious and pastoral and sharp all in one.
It is not captive to the concrete. It is not judging. It is not a re-claiming. It is a claiming. It is a claiming of space, of worthiness, of voice.
It is also a coming of age. At 35, it is a coming of age.
