Loving All of My Wildness
In 5 days, I return for the 3rd immersion for my 9-month sex, relationship, and intimacy coaching training in the Somatica Method.
It’s an experiential training and coaching approach, and as with all things with great power that I’ve been attracted to (like nature connection & wilderness/wildlife, entrepreneurship, ceremony & rites of passage, healing), I love it, it attracts me, it scares the shit out of me, it humbles me, and it grows me into my own power and knowing more fully who I am via alchemical processes.
Along with my 100 amazing classmates and the guidance of our brilliant teachers, Celeste Hirschman & Danielle Harel, I’m learning to use erotic energy, attunement, and touch to help myself and others heal their erotic and emotional selves, enhance their relational health, stoke their aliveness, live their truth, and enjoy life more fully. If ever there were a powerful deepening to the toolkit I have and offer through Wayfinding, this is it.
The experiential aspect and use of touch are the parts that people’s imaginations usually latch onto and want to know more about. So, yes, it’s full of delightful/sexy ways to connect with other people with our clothes on. We practice a lot, it’s fun as fuck, and it constantly takes me to my edge. It is training that has freed and empowered me enormously in my intimate life and my broader life, and has revealed a menu of possibility that’s so much richer and empowering than the shitty, limited sexual and intimate recipes our culture offers as possibilities.
But more importantly, I feel it’s about opening ever more to big feeling and desire, being with intensity, communicating most vulnerable truths, navigating boundaries, standing for desire, dealing with disappointment and rejection, releasing shame, revealing the web of cultural traps we have in the US around desire//gender//sexual orientation//sex//intimacy, and creating healing, understanding, and greater vitality through connection.
The above photo was an inspirational image for me for some time and encapsulated so much of what I wanted to gain and thought impossible the past few years. A woman who is embodied, strong, sexy, physically capable, powerful, true, full of vitality, wild, and connected to life. I dreamt of such realities with deepest longing for many years as I healed from my near-fatal fall feeling diminished, weak, struggling, and impossibly far from experiencing myself as beautiful or desirable. Erotic aliveness seemed like such a luxury that is was laughable. From my perspective then, I barely had the life force to survive — how in the fuck could I have the energy to be attractive or intimate?!? But now I know that this energy is key to healing and health. And in all honesty, it wasn’t until this year in Somatica that I knew in a fully embodied way that I am sexy, as I am, in all of my truth. That the more Me I inhabit, the sexier I am. That the power others can so easily see in me had been something I’d been ashamed of/thought was unattractive/too much/needed to be made small. That I needed to be a delicate flower even though I’m actually a mountain lion. That’s how deeply I’d been imprinted with false cultural narratives about beauty and sexuality.
What a fucking gift to be free.
Now I know that erotic energy and this inhabitation of myself isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. And a core part of the foundation of my stand, my health, my truth, my power, my ability to Wayfind and contribute in the world. Now when I live my sense of purpose of seeing the gifts and beauty in each person and mirroring what I see back to them, so they can shed their smaller selves and more fully inhabit their truth, this includes conveying that truth and beauty and power — especially when aligned — ARE A TURN ON. When someone is lit up/on fire/radiant, it turns others on. It’s energy responding to energy. It’s a magnetic force that we all respond to and can feel, even though we don’t always know that’s what we’re naming. And I love helping people unblock that energy to be more fully vital and cultivate power that serves.
So given all of that, I now understand and embody my wildness as truth, as the bigness of life force that wants to flow through me and connect with all of life. The rivers of light that pour through my body and heart with love and desire for this life — to encounter the light in others even for a moment — are incredible and sometimes convey so much information and feeling that I can’t handle it and my capacity is grown by being pushed to my edge. To seek out and invite the intimate moments of contact ranging from a smile on the bus and swimming in the ocean to sharing such deeply felt union with another because, as the total eclipse taught me, those moments of deepest alignment and contact in whatever form and for whatever duration are holy, joyful, utterly life-giving, and electrically fun.
I’m so grateful to be learning such depth and wisdom about the illuminating powers of erotic and intimate connection. For that is what we are — connected.
How grateful I am to travel this journey with all my classmates, most notably, my dear friend and colleague, Laura Griffiths.
Here’s to the next round of this powerful learning journey, this ceremony.
