Sex & God
Pleasure is Your Birthright, a Health Behavior and a Path to Healing
If Trauma is part of your sexual reality these are two resources for healing -
Healing Sex, A Mind Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma
I used to masturbate as a replacement for the sex I wasn’t having. I used to think the only way to climax was to think about someone older than me, with more power than me, controlling a sexual encounter. I didn’t know how to give myself an orgasm until I was 22. I thought I was beholden to my male partners for pleasure. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the agile fingers to change the things I can.
Your body is built for pleasure. Your trillions of nerves carry sensation through tissue at astonishing speed and with incredible sensitivity. Pleasure is a biological imperative, an essential part of your nature and full of information about your deepest desires. Like any other actionable human language, pleasure can be used to live in to our wholeness, to explore, pussy first, or head first as the case may be, the dynamism of being alive.
Pleasure bolsters immune function, guides your body’s release of cortisol (our unfortunately demonized stress hormone but more on that another day) and eases the burden of chronic stress. It is associated with better sleep, healthy appetite and promotes optimal mental health. Has your primary care provider ever asked you about your sexual function? What about your sexual satisfaction? Planned Parenthood, God bless their souls, is so busy and overworked trying to keep you from getting HPV and swabbing vaginas for BV that they Even medical professionals rarely take the time to address complex issues of pleasure, desire and satisfaction. I have never been asked by a clinician at PP if I am satisfied with my sex life although their intake surveys are at least twenty questions long. I appreciate that they check in to find out if I feel safe in my sexual relationships, but I want to live in a system that covers more than just survival. Let’s get to thriving.
I don’t just want to have sex. I don’t want to live a belief that sex means penetration. I want to lose the boundaries of my identity and experience fusion of self with other as a way to embody my spiritual beliefs, sexuality as an expression of yearning to be in union with my spritual self with God. This can be animal, a sensory immersion that overwhelms rational cognition so that we are in a state of full being, rather than thinking, storytelling or judging; using duality to move beyond duality.
Whenever I remember to pause, and ask myself the question “What would feel good right now?”, I am led where I want to be, which is perpetually the present moment. Pleasure is a gateway to deep presence and presence is our portal to connectivity, to the divine.
I worship the forces that coalesced to create the Big Bang, supernovas, black holes, backlit full moons through high mist like last night on Ithaca’s South Hill, intimacy and orgasms. That’s how I think about God. I worship mystery while moving in its direction with my senses.
How many times has orgasm with a partner seemed elusive? How much of that is due to striving, straining, wishing, and concluding, rather than full vivid attention to the experience at hand? The vivid kind, when I have it, allows me to either relish the pleasure already occurring or realize that I need something different. This is how we can think about basking in desire rather than allowing it to hook us and pull us out of presence.
That the male orgasm is centered in heteronormative cultural imagery was born out in my own fantasy life until my thirty-first year. This was when I recognized that I always fantasized escalation of pleasure from a male perspective and reached my own climax as I imagined a man reaching his. While this visual narrative is not problematic in itself it is problematic in its exclusivity.
Our sexual lives at their best can be as varied, dynamic and ever-changing as the versions of ourselves we are constantly becoming until we die. Maybe even after. If sex is always any particular way, consider exploring the possibility of touch as rich as your imagination, as de-programmed as your mind after a social media detox and a talk with your favorite mother figure.
Pleasure can be found in sensual experience beyond sex. Have you ever eaten with full attention on your food, phone away, TV off, focused on flavor and savoring the kaleidoscope of taste? Have you ever focused on your pelvis while nothing is externally going on. Just brought your awareness to this part of your body and noticed what you can feel by simply paying attention? I can feel my blood pulsing through the tissue of my vulva, muscles squeezing from being placed under my warm attention, energy as potential, percolating just as I sit.
Imagine warm sunshine on your waiting skin, the feeling of dancing fully entranced, kissing for its own sake, deep presence in any form of feeling that centers the body and reclaims attention from the wreckage of the past and the anticipation of the future.
Pleasure is not the opposite of pain. Pleasure is a willingness to feel sensation and follow it like an explorer. We know that pain can be pleasurable and that something pleasant can be boring. We know that the brain, not the genitals, is the showrunner of our sexual sagas. So if you want skyrocketing ratings, as determined by yourself, give pleasure your full attention and stop waiting for someone else to make it happen for you. This is not to say we don’t crave union in intimacy with our partners, but that the depth of your sexual relationship with yourself is an ally in any bid to explore pleasure with another human being.
I spent my 20’s becoming comfortable with my kink and learning how to ask for what I want from my partners. I thought liberation was not being ashamed that I like pressure on my neck during sex, that I like roleplay, being dominated, lots of talking, (I can quite literally be talked in to orgasm), that I like to pretend things are happening that I would never want to happen in real life (hark, the nature of fantasy), that I like slow, stare me in the eyes sex and quick animal sex and that foreplay is as important and pleasurable as the fireworks at the end. This was my liberation then. Now I want something else.
As recommended by Glennon Doyle in her grab you by the roots and shake you book “Untamed”, live from your imagination. Ask, “What is the most beautiful expansive version of pleasure that I can imagine?” Walk that way. From acceptance of a sexuality largely handed to me by mainstream American culture and early childhood experiences, I want to claim a role as creator of my sexuality, collaborator with my body, explorer who finds whole realms of experience with the power of my mind and muscles.
Recently I masturbated imagining a prismatic wash of colors. I put myself into the blueprint of sensation and mapped its expansion through my own touch. There were no power dynamics at play. No narrative, which I thought I was completely bound to, only my full attention on sensory immersion. When touching yourself try responding in real time to intuitive direction of feeling and asking What do you want? What do you imagine? I am a portal for my own experience. I am full holy magic accessed sometimes easily and sometimes through excavation of falsehoods I am ready to lay to rest.
When I lose my voice in the realm of pleasure, somehow cannot say that doesn’t feel good, or ask for something different, I tunnel into a trauma response. My body is slingshot into hiding from sexual harassment and assault by my former boss. I shut down, tighten up, settle in and wait for it to be over. This is the definition of disempowerment and oppression: A loss of agency and mental subjugation that follows a person beyond an event through the matrix of time. I am unlearning this response and it requires trust. Trust that my desires will be honored, that my pleasure is a priority to my partner, that my ask to be adjusted for, is essential rather than inconvenient, to the process of intimacy.
The more comfortable and clear I get in my pleasurable relationship with myself, the more open and relaxed I feel voicing my desires in partnership. I’ve recovered more than once at times when I felt myself begin to shut down. I’ve said “that hurts”, “slow down for a minute”, “let me get on top of you” and the opening of my voice yielded the opening of my body to vastly more juicy stimulation.
Instead of always lying down to masturbate like I’m about to embark on some grim duty, sometimes I start on all fours, sometimes I crawl around on the floor in front of the mirror in lingerie, sometimes I remember that pleasure is mine.
Sometimes I salivate and moan while I eat a nectarine. Sometimes I swing my arms like a spazzing pinwheel to the beat of the perfect song. Sometimes my body asks and I listen with reverence.
Make of pleasure a treasure map. Explore for fun and abandon “should’s” and “good’s”. Be overcome by waffles and touch yourself on the bathroom floor. Dance not just to be sexy, but to revel in your body, get your eyes drunk on paintings and forest floors. Your body is a place to meditate on pleasure, a location to worship sensation as given to you by the great mystery. Be enchanted as this is your birthright and really, just a way of acknowledging reality. It is wild to be alive.
In Pleasure,
Hilary Elizabeth