Woman on Fire (23 page)

It is essential for your own sexual empowerment that you absolutely learn to love and accept your body. Your body is the temple you live in every day; it holds your spirit and allows you to experience unbelievable things. Why would you abuse your own temple? Your body is a miraculous system capable of feeling and experiencing immense pleasure. Getting rid of all negativity about your body, remembering to breathe, eating good food, exercising, living in pleasure, and enjoying moving and loving your body every day are keys to becoming more embodied and healthy in your body love. Stand in front of the mirror and appreciate your body. Touch the parts you've been meanest to and apologize—embrace those parts in their seeming imperfections. The reprogramming might be an ongoing activity. Do whatever it takes, for you need this body to feel alive and vibrant. When was the last time you thanked it for all it does for you? It gives you so much every day.

Element 5:
DESIRE

ACTIVATE DESIRE AND CREATE A SEXUAL PRACTICE

Desire is a fundamental part of sexuality, and of life itself. You wouldn't get out of bed each morning without a desire moving inside you. Your desire propels you toward your life, toward living, toward relating, toward creating. Your desire guides you and drives you to grow. It calls you toward action with the promise of being bigger, having more, and experiencing life more fully. Sex can be shockingly transformational when you fully move into desire and see your desire all the way through. That momentous shift is life-altering, as the exchange of life energy is enormous and abundant, whether it is with another person or between you and life itself.

Some spiritual traditions teach that a state of non-desire is what we should strive for, that
detaching from earthly desire is what is most spiritual, most elevated, most desirable. People tend to have a lot of guilt and baggage about desire.
“Should I really want this?” “I don't deserve that.” “If I desire things in this physical world, I must not be spiritual enough.” “Having sexual desire is bad.”

Depending on your upbringing, you may have been taught that certain kinds of desires are wrong. Your family, religion, parochial schools, caretakers, doctors, therapists, or other authority figures may have taught you many rules about how to feel sexually, how to express your sexuality, and who to be as a sexual person. Your peers also may have had strong beliefs, misconceptions, or even myths that they spoke as hard truths that you believed, causing you to feel shamed, isolated, or bad about yourself or your desires.

I believe that if we are going anywhere in our lives, we must be in a natural state of human desire. There is nothing undivine in desire. Just the opposite. Desire is challenging when we are never satisfied with anything we get and we're constantly off searching for the next greatest thing. Feeling desire does not have to mean unhappiness with where you are or what you already have. So the question may be “Can you simultaneously experience desire and gratitude for all you have?”

If you are striving to do something with your life, to create something, to feel good, to improve your relationships, to grow, to be happy, or to connect to your higher self, you are in a state of desire. You are here to create something. You were born to be creative. There is a natural state of desire in your wanting to create. Sexually, desire reminds us of our ability to feel, to connect. Desire fuels flirtation, seduction, and good sex. Desire moves us to engage in good conversation and other forms of friendly intercourse.

Desire is divine. Desire is rich. Desire—if it comes from a healthy place—guides you toward the wholeness you seek. You are already whole; your desire just reawakens the dormant parts that you think
are missing but may just be asleep. You would not have desire without being capable of fulfilling it.

I delivered my first TEDx Talk, “Owning Your Sexual Power,” in Napa Valley in 2014. On the break, I had lively conversations with people about how they would parent their kids differently and how my talk gave them a new perspective on sexuality and its importance. One woman wanted to engage me in the idea of desire after hearing me talk about how I want to live in a world where we are each guided by our own internal desires.

She got really stuck on the idea of unfettered desire. She said, “I agree with what you said—but that desire part, I don't know about. How can you say that desire is good? If we encourage people to follow their desires, what about pedophiles? You didn't talk enough about that. I needed to hear more about that. I just can't accept desire as blanketly good.”

I responded, “What you're talking about is a dysfunctional desire. If you desire something that will harm another person, harm yourself, or take away someone's freedom, it's dysfunctional. I'm talking about people connecting to their authentic, healthy desires—allowing themselves to follow those desires and not judge them as bad. I'm talking about healthy desire that will create more life for you and for others, desire that connects you to your creative sexual self.”

Should I have not mentioned desire at all? No. Desire was important to mention regardless of the discomfort it inevitably brings up in some people. So why did she go to the worst-case scenario about desire? The question wasn't “What if I desire someone who
isn't my husband?” or “What if the thing that I want makes someone else uncomfortable?” but literally the worst thing imaginable for most people. Catastrophic desire.

Just bringing up the idea of desire at all puts fear in many people. To really give people permission to identify their desire and to follow it brings up so many “what ifs?” that people will abandon the idea altogether and stay right where they are with desire: not feeling it, not acknowledging it, not going for it, denying it, judging it as not okay, suppressing it, or being frustrated by it. There is a built-in fear that people just won't be able to handle desire.

In my experience, people are in a lot of pain about desire—especially women. Many people believe deep down that they'll never have their true desires, so they avoid going for their desires at all. They avert the inevitable disappointment of an unrequited desire, and so they stay in “not enough.” That's not the way to really live passionately, full-out, all-in. Many women do not know what they desire sexually, and this confusion causes them distress.

When Michelle, a thirty-three-year-old designer and entrepreneur from Ohio, first came to me, she knew she had some sexual trauma to work through and that there was something about her sexuality that was holding her back, but she didn't quite understand what it was. She was frustrated in her sexuality and in her marriage. When she talks about where she was then, she says

I was afraid of the power and themes in my sexual voice. I thought I needed to control all that in order to be a professional and to sort out past traumas. I found out that I was just suppressing my desire. I told myself that sex was bad, and that exploring sexuality was
bad. I felt really conflicted in my story and couldn't understand what to do with my desire.

Michelle worked with me as a private client over the course of six months and attended one of my weekend workshops, where she had some profound shifts. I could feel the tightness she felt around sexuality, and yet she was committed and open to doing this radical work on herself so she could free herself in her marriage as well as in her business and the greater whole of her life. She had squashed any desire she ever might have felt.

I needed to release control. I was mitigating my whole life. I did not know how to handle my desires or how to integrate them into my life. They seemed incongruent with where I was in my reality. I needed to go to Al-Anon and to see how the alcoholic patterns around me were contributing to the way I was stuffing my desires away and controlling my life. I needed to release all the ways that I was giving my power away and not making decisions for myself. I felt really insecure and ashamed of who I was and how I was being, but I couldn't find a way out.

Ideas like desire and sexual power scare people because we haven't done a great job of addressing them for the big, complex, and important things they are to us. When women are not tapped into their true desires or find it hard to allow those desires to emerge, it creates a blockage—not just sexually but in many areas of life.

For yourself, start by noticing whether you do the same thing as the woman at TEDx did, even in small ways. Does talking about desire make you uncomfortable? Do you sometimes repress the
desires that well up in you? Do you go to the catastrophic worst-case scenario—thinking of all the ways your desire will be hurtful or shameful? Or can you see how desire opens up and expands your sexuality and your life?

I think many people have knee-jerk reactions because desire isn't safe. But neither is life. And it's not meant to be. If you spend your life trying to stay safe, you'll never take risks—and to live true desire means taking some risks. It's a built-in function of desire. To strive for more than you have ever had or have ever been, you've got to release who you were before. Are you willing to release that, truly and totally?

I believe that a world where people are guided by their own internal desires to be more, have more, and do something bigger and more expansive—sexually or otherwise—is a better world. It's so easy to go to the worst-case scenario. So let's not confuse it. It's healthy to strive for more. Life creates more life. Energy creates more energy. Ecstasy begets more ecstasy. Desire propels us to create what we are here to create.

The most common issue women come to me wanting help with is their sexual desire. There are several key struggles women have with desire: they don't have any desire and never have; they don't know what they desire and feel confused; they used to have desire and it went away; aging or health issues have impacted their ability to feel desire; they have guilt about their desires, so they hold back; they have “too much” desire and judge themselves for it; or they have a different amount of sexual desire than their partner and that is causing discord in the relationship. Most women want to feel more desire and to understand their desire more deeply.

Sex and desire are culturally framed from a male perspective in
ways most of us never perceive. They are also framed in a heterosexist way in which sex is assumed to center around penile-vaginal intercourse. This is slowly being questioned, but we have a long way to go. We have learned a very linear male, heterosexual model of sexual response:

DESIRE/EXCITEMENT
AROUSAL
ORGASM/PEAK
RESOLUTION

This does not reflect the experience of most women or people of other sexual orientations. In the recent past, research about sexual desire and arousal has been done entirely on men and on young people in their twenties and then extrapolated to the whole population. This is terribly problematic.