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Reclaiming Your Sensual Potential
I am currently taking an online tantra training with Devi Ward, learning some basics of the Tibetan 5 element tantric approach. Part of my “homework” is to do a pleasure ritual for myself, light the candles, play the music, explore the pussy. Not just any ole pussy. But my own pussy. And practice the art of self pleasure that Devi has shared with me, based on breathing, sound, and deeply investigating what it means to open all the parts of my own delicious vagina on my own through conscious touch. And I have to admit…I am struggling with this. I keep putting my homework off.
Now don’t think I am some prude or something, for sure I am NOT, but for all the ways I can hold space for other women to unfold, and absolutely know in my gut this work is needed for the healing of our planet on so many levels, (it would take another article to go into), I still have to face my own resistance to pleasure. I still have to face my own habit of putting my own pleasure on the back burner in favor of what I am comfortable with:: Helping others experience, and sharing the education….keeping the focus off myself. And yet, without making the time for myself and my own pleasure what kind of help can I really provide…? (more on that again, in another post).
So I went to Devi’s blog looking for inspiration when I realized how resistant I was to giving myself this time…and found this timeless article by Ms. Ward, that reminded me why this work is so important….We truly have been conditioned to think of the word pleasure in a way that is counter to what it really is…..we have built up resistances that lodge in our sub-conscious so tightly we can be hardly aware that its there! Here I am an advocate for sensual healing and health and I still come up against resistance…Its normal or rather I should say it is the norm. We have not been gifted this kind of sensual education or awareness from our society, it simply hasn’t been there even as a language, we wouldn’t of even known how to ask the questions for most of us. Many of the things I learned in school and from my friends and family about sex had nothing to do with the reality of sex once I arrived at being sexual active. I was given tampons in junior high, menstral blood was considered gross and all I knew about sex is that if any of the nasty white stuff that came out of the guys penis got inside me, I would become an after school special movie of the week. Good girls didn’t like sex and bad girls definitely got alot of attention. To touch yourself or even talk about it was hidden or giggled about. Boys doing it was “gross”. And yet. There were a whole host of experiences I could never explain, that made me KNOW deep down…..there was something way deeper to this whole sex thing, and for sure, I was going to find out.
Fast forward a few years and here I am. Fascinated by sex, humbled by my work, floored by what people share with me about their experiences. I constantly have to tell people this work goes way beyond a desire for sexual gratification and into areas so tender and true to the soul, one day a book (I pray) hopes to emerge that opens our eyes to what sexuality can really offer us as a humanity, when we bring our hearts and education to it. And still, despite the other tantra trainings I have done, the communities of open minded people I have been blessed with, and my own personal exploration in all sorts of sexual worlds both privately and with friends, still. The self pleasure homework gets put on the back burner….This is not to beat myself up, this is truly to say:: I now realize how much this work is needed….
For more from Devi Ward:
“From Chapter 2. of “Shake Your Soul-Song! A Woman’s Guide To Self-Empowerment Through The Art Of Self-Pleasure”
We are born into this world of sensory experience~ sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.
Each of our 5 senses also relates to the 5 elements ~fire, space, earth, water, and air ~ which make up our relative or “experiential” environment.
As children we delight in our sensual experience.
We want to taste it, touch it, feel it, understand it, know it.”…..
To read more click here:
http://deviward.me/2012/10/06/reclaiming-your-sensual-potentia/
For her website dedicated to the sensual empowerment of women, click here:
For more information about my work:
Blessings to all Ladies Willing to Take That Leap Into the Unknown and Risk What Happens When You Choose to Reclaim Your Sensual Soul. Remember that Love is the best medicine.
Something to consider are the deeply embedded male-centric perceptions surrounding females who ‘took pleasure’ which your mother, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, etc had absorbed and been inhibited by. Look into the history here. The pleasure aspects of female libido was pathologized in earlier centuries, with women being placed in asylums.
A friend of my mother’s had an affair with a married man and her family threw her in a psychiatric hospital to ‘sort her out’. This happened in Australia in 1957!
The ‘block’ with doing your homework could be ancestral patterns – very deep work there.
I quite agree. I have cleared alot of my ancestral patterns in my own life, but am always finding new ones. The trick is to hold compassion for those ancestors who walked before us and simply didn’t have the tools to know or do better. But now we have them! And can actually help release their karma too, thru our own healing….We are all in this together. Thank you for your insights.