Pleasure Your Gender!

We experience gender so many ways - through our fantasies, the clothing that we wear, the way that we present (and possibly alter) our bodies, our personalities, how we have sex with ourselves or others, how we create, play, storytell… and oh so much more.

I like to think of gender as the ‘art and storytelling of the soul’.

Sometimes we might find ourselves on autopilot with our genders. Perhaps because we’ve never given gender much thought, or perhaps we *have* but still find ourselves in a rut with how we understand and connect with our sense of self.

So! How might we take some time to pleasure and explore our gender(s)? Here are some ideas!:

• borrow differently gendered clothing from friends, family, and lovers and scatter them around a quiet private space. Take 20 minutes to slowly explore them (textures, colours, fit, how they make you feel), trying on whatever catches your curiosity.

• go to a public place and people watch: how are people gendering themselves? What would you like to try out, and what is juicy to enjoy about other people’s genders?

• choose some porn, erotica, or other sexy content that has differently gendered folks in it, and lean into fantasies and a variety of differently gendered experiences - what shows up when you explore these fantasies in different ways?

• try a sport, art form, or other skill that brings out different energies or qualities of yourself: what’s pleasurable about this different type of embodiment?

Remember!

Gender is a galaxy, and there is no rule saying you have to stay on one planet! What would happen if you embraced an inner explorer (at the pace that feels right for you!) and visited other planets - perhaps in your imagination, or for a quick stop, or for a longer and luxurious visit?

You’re at choice with your gender adventures! Some ways we like to embody our genders might be just for ourselves, or only shared with a select few people. Other ways we enjoy our genders might be *only* when *everyone* gets to see! And everything in between!

You can change your mind! Have you realized there’s a gender within yourself that doesn’t align with the way you’ve understood your gender to date? How fun! What are some ways to let this new part of you get some pleasure, joy, and time to shine?

Our genders are an important quality of what makes each of us feel seen, delicious, connected, and powerful. It’s worth taking the time to give your gender some TLC and pleasure!

Wanting Sex or Enjoying Sex?

Would you rather want to *want* more sex, or *enjoy* sex more?

Our culture is centred around the idea of ‘spontaneous desire’ - the kind of desire that hits like a lightning bolt, full of need and drive.

While sometimes this type of desire may show up, or for some of us may be the primary way we feel desire, it’s not the whole story.

Another important pathway to pleasure is through ‘responsive desire’ - this is the kind of desire where something juicy starts happening and *then* feelings of pleasure and enjoyment arrive.

Often when we’re feeling the effects of low libido or disinterest in sex the ‘solution’ feels like trying to make more spontaneous desire happen (which is hella hard/impossible).

One other really great (and much more achievable) path towards expanding feelings of arousal is by creating the context for responsive desire to arrive.

This is all about amplifying turn-ons (and I mean this word reaaaallly broadly) and addressing turn-offs.

Within somatic sex education we practice the tools and skills to expand pleasure, openness, and create more *context* to erotically enliven and follow pleasure, while also addressing the things that limit our feelings of arousal.

A big thank you to Emily Nagoski for these learnings.

Healing Landscapes.

I just got off the phone with a dear friend who lives in Hamilton Ontario. During our conversation I shared that I find Hamilton to be quite a deeply healing and special place. Playfully she asked to learn more, since that is not a common reputation for a city more likely to be personified as a working class steel town that’s down on its luck (while simultaneously becoming the newest suburb of Toronto).

Back in 2019 I had an unexpected and transformative somatic experience of sexual healing while visiting BC. It wasn’t something I was planning, however, it was something that profoundly informed my being, and massively shifted my self perception, desires, and values. When I went back to my life in Ontario, I found myself destabilized and without resources and community to help me make sense of what had happened in my life.

I began fervently seeking folks who might support me in my journey. Surprisingly, they were in Hamilton. My felt sense of that city became one of an oasis - one where folks without pomp or pretence but with aligned and embodied values were living and offering their gifts. Hamilton was a place where I could visit my learning  and healing edge while being a very messy version of me. It was where I began learning about somatics, where I received the beginnings of my own work in somatic sexual healing work, and where I began to build new scaffolding for my soul.

Oftentimes there might be an idea of healing spaces and people as being ‘extra ordinary’ - of hermits living in cabins in the woods, or mystics living overseas: people and journeys that transcend the banalities and disappointments of daily life. However, as I sit with what has truly mattered and what has truly made a difference for me, it was imperfect and ordinary people in imperfect and ordinary places. I’m really appreciating the deep reminding that healing happens where we are, with those we find ourselves in community with, and in the ways that work with the gifts and challenges of the realities of life.

Counternormative Erotic Principles.

This is an article that was recently published by my mentor, colleague, and friend Caffyn Jesse. It spoke deeply to me and powerfully illustrated many of the guiding principles and values that inform my work as a Somatic Sex Educator:

This is another reflection on what principles might distinguish my approach from those you might find with other teachers of eros and intimacy. In all my ways of work and play, I want to trouble normal and embrace the counternormative. 

When people arrive at the studio of an intimacy educator, they are often driven by the question, “How can I become more normal?” The Diagnosic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders offers an overwhelming list of s*xual pathologies, ranging from Hypoactive S*xual Desire Disorder to a variety of Hypersexual Disorders. There is even a Non-Normative Paraphilic Disorder ever-ready to pathologize anyone who longs for something outside the box. 

I see all our so-called pathologies as creative adaptations. They save our souls; they simultaneously have enormous costs. I want to invite each person I work or play with into a counternormative framework, where the inquiry can gently shift to one of “How can I become more fully me?”

Standard s*x therapy works towards normalization. Consider unintentional ejaculation – a common problem. Desensitizing creams, dissociative techniques, medications and exercises are focused on getting the person with the so-called problem to better approximate an ideal norm of PIV intercourse. Two minutes of penetrative s*x is considered a cure. Taking normalization out of the picture, we can focus on building capacity for expanded pleasure through body-based exercises and experiences. We can create counter-normative erotic space where ejaculation is welcomed and celebrated without signaling the end of a s*xual experience, and where s*xual experiences can include a wide range of physical and emotional pleasures that do not depend on having a hard c*ck. Ending unintended ejaculation is a welcome effect of this approach, but the creation of counternormative understandings is its foundation.

Common presenting issues in the realm of intimacy education include painful intercourse, low desire and anorgasmia. Often a client’s reach for healing and well-being is framed as a desire to normalize s*xual behavior and s*xual response. But all these “dysfunctions” fall away in the counternormative framework of erotic culture that celebrates non-penetrative options for erotic expression, solo s*x, erotic interactions without the orgasm imperative, and the choice to not be s*xual at all. When we don’t make our bodies' choices into dysfunctions, we get space to listen, tease, please and engage in respectful dialogue.

Whether someone is healing s*xual trauma, mending a couple relationship, exploring identity or navigating a gender transition, we can support each person on their journey to healing and well-being with a critical framework that challenges the biases, suffocating paradigms and structural inequalities held in ideal norms. We inherit a culture that specifies an ideal norm for gender, body size, s*xual expression and relationship structure, and we embody the daily and lifelong challenges of either conformity to or deviation from ideal norms. By looking critically at the regime of normal, and grounding our work and play in counternormative culture, we can offer people joyous and creative alternatives to normalization, including self-acceptance and the celebration of diversity. With a counternormative perspective, we can see that ideal norms do not emerge naturally. Our practices, identities and relationships unfold in an environment that punishes and pathologizes certain ways of being, while rewarding others. Normal is a social location that is continually produced and policed. 

Contributing to counternormative culture and dwelling in counternormative community, we co-create a crucible in which we can go on becoming truer, wilder, evermore deeply erotic versions of ourselves. When my attention is not focused on values that cluster around an average, I can better see what is rare, and find it precious. There are aspects of me and you that are unique, and no one else will do. There are extraordinary moments of life and death in which different elements interact in the creation of something new. That is the great holy wild I want for us. Those are the otherwise-unknowable ecstasies.

My Journey With Erotic Ritual.

Erotic rituals have transformed my life, and I have seen the sacred cauldron of erotic ritual transform the lives of so many others.

I began studying and working in the realm of the erotic in 2006. I loved the work I was doing, and I was good at it. I worked as a sex educator supporting folks as they learnt about how to have better sex. It was very rewarding work. I worked with people from all sorts of different life experiences, and, it was a real joy learning about the sex they were having and how to best support them in having more of the sex they longed for.

One day I met someone who offered erotic rituals, and, it piqued my interest. I decided to not think about it too much and dove into a session. And, that session was the beginning of profound spiritual and sensual embodied change for me. While in that session I was guided in how to be with my body and pleasure, and how to express my erotic energy. I felt deeply held as the complex erotic being I was. I felt my body ignite.

I couldn’t go back after that. I wanted more. This led me into a beautiful chapter of travel and adventure, where I sought out and learnt from erotic ritualists, masseuses, tantrikas, dominants, sex workers - travelling the globe in my quest. I wanted to immerse my soul in the magic that I was experiencing. I wanted to understand the science behind it. The transformative neuroscience, biology, chemistry, and spirituality of trauma recovery, sexual healing, tantra, and erotic ritual work enraptured me. This was a new realm - one of communing with the pleasures of my body and wider world in a deeply intimate way. It was a soul awakening experience.

After such a transformative journey along the winding path of reclaiming my erotic joy, it only made sense that I would become a sacred intimate - a bringer of erotic joy - for others. I have offered erotic rituals across Canada and Europe, plus to journeyers from Spain, Brazil, Lebanon, Romania, South Africa, Iran, the USA, and many more beautiful places on this planet. I have savoured every single opportunity to drop into transformative exploration with others. I treasure being an erotic ritualist and guide for those who are wishing to deepen into the erotic and immerse themselves in the pleasurable delights of ecstasy. I treasure being an educator for those who wish to practice expanding their pleasure using the sacred gifts of breath, sound, movement, touch, and imagination. And a companion for those who wish to be exquisitely held and cared for as they tend to their erotic wounds and fall back in love with life.

Connecting with bliss is a journey. Listening to our erotic souls is a skill. Communing with the Divine is a process. It’s rare to be taught these practices, yet make no mistake - they are learnable. Having travelled the path of manifesting a deeply erotic life, I delight in being in service to you and your manifestation journey.

That is why I am here.

Why Explore Healing Erotic Bodywork?

Living in this sex negative culture, we have all experienced some form of sexual trauma. We’ve been circumcised, diapered, spanked, shamed for exploring our genitals, taught to conceal our sexual urges. We’ve been programmed into narrow gendered personas that aren’t who we authentically are, and bullied when we don’t adhere to that programming. We’ve experienced unwanted sexual advancements, abuses, and assaults. We’ve experienced sexual stereotyping and violence based on our race, gender, ability, age, class. We’ve been denied access to money, housing, food, love, respect, and care if we are not compliant with the sexual expectations made of us, or, if we are deemed sexually undesirable.

While sex therapy and sex coaching exist, the magic of exploring trauma healing in organic containers that include the potential for chosen and client led erotic touch and play is that these containers include the *whole* body. The *erotic* body. The exact parts of ourselves that have been the sites of battles and wounding.

This welcoming and holding of the whole self is a sacred and deeply healing experience that cultivates lasting change. Further, it is needed. It is critical to explore trauma at it’s source - the body. We will never think or talk our way out of trauma. Trauma lives in the body, and we must meet it in the body.

Trauma Healing Is Spiritual Work.

First, a caveat: spiritual healing and growth is in the eye of the beholder. If you resist or reject the premise of having a spiritual landscape, that’s awesome! If you are in process with your own relationship with spirit and healing, read on!

When we are living with the impacts of unresolved traumatic stress in our lives, this affects our ability to navigate daily life with grace. The manifestations of traumatic stress are very individualized - maybe manifesting as chronic activation and anxiety. Or as despair and lethargy. Often as some blend of the both.

Traumatic stress usually comes about from a rupture in the relational matrix - perhaps because of a shocking experience. Perhaps because of a lack of social and systemic supports. Perhaps because of bias and bigotry. Perhaps because of childhood neglect and mistreatment. Perhaps from the literal rupturing of the boundaries of bodies and skin.

Trauma recovery is a winding path of repairing these ruptures. It’s not a one-size-fits-all journey. Often there are trends and overlap, yes, however, *your* trauma recovery journey and *my* trauma recovery journey are two very different journeys.

Certainly a key quality of trauma recovery is the welcoming home of our fractured parts and experiences. And, as we integrate, opportunity arises to notice and attend to deeper feelings of fracturing and isolation that might exist that sever ourselves as individuals from the larger relational matrix of humanity and the beyond-human-world. 

This experience of noticing and choosing to weave ourselves into the larger web of relationship is a slow and spiritual process. For myself, I’ve discovered that the landscape of the erotic is a powerful landscape within which to practice this weaving.

We can practice cultivating erotic feeling and energy (an abundant internal resource) to manifest states of excitement, bliss, connection, and creativity. Through practice we expand our capacity to feel ourselves and our aliveness more deeply. Perhaps as individuals, and, as we practice, perhaps as part of a larger web of abundant and vibrant life.

Spiritual journeying is a quality I never expected to find myself exploring in professional practice, however, having an erotic spiritual practice has become a constant companion that has made all the difference for me.

Your Pleasure Is Dangerous.

In this world is there anything more dangerous than a person that has realized that they control the means of their own pleasure production, and that pleasure is an abundant renewable resource?

Is there anything more dangerous than a person who has discovered that 'resisting temptation' is a strategy that has been taught to maintain the paradigms of colonial and capitalist and white supremacist control?

Is there anything more dangerous than a person that has learned how to cultivate and follow bliss, excitement, pleasure, and connection based off their own internal truths and wisdom, as opposed to listen to external sex negative culture?

Is there anything more dangerous than practicing exploring the tools of our bodies - our breath, sound, movement, touch, and imagination - to cultivate greater and greater erotic aliveness?

Is there anything more dangerous than pleasured bodies radiating that pleasure-full erotic aliveness into the wider world? Is there anything more threatening to current systems of power and control than speaking and acting from a place of embodied pleasure and wisdom?

Don’t underestimate the power and wisdom and truths that that are available to you through cultivating your pleasure.

Your Erotic Garden.

I recently had a lovely session clearing out my garden and planting new seeds for this upcoming season. And was reflecting on how cultivating eroticism and pleasure is like cultivating a garden. ⁠Our gardens are our right and our responsibility. Our pleasure, sexuality, eroticism, gender, relationship models, and joy practices are *ours*. ⁠

However.⁠..

As young people, the world around us was tending to our garden as we grew into ourselves. And, they might have planted some things that don't serve us in our gardens. They might have planted in sex negative education. Shaming about bodies, gender, pleasure, and sex. They might have planted the idea that other people have rights to our bodies or sexual energy.⁠ They might have planted that we are not good enough as we are to have the joy, pleasure, and sex that we are deserving of.

In fact, they might still be trying to plant more of these things into our gardens.⁠

Now, as a grown-ass gardener, the joy is in exploring what kind of garden *you* want. Because the stuff that others planted in your garden can be weeded out. You can plant and water new seeds. And you can create vision and intention for the kind of erotic garden that would nourish you.⁠

So! What kind of erotic garden do you want? What plants need to be weeded out? What plants need your protection and care? What could you do to begin cultivating the perfect erotic garden for *you*?

Many thanks to Emily Nagoski for offering this concept of the garden in her book Come As You Are. ⁠

Erotic Ritual.

I’ve facilitated a few transition rituals recently - and am feeling grief about living in a world where ritual has been sanitized and removed from the winding path of our soul’s journey.

Throughout our history we’ve cultivated ritual for many reasons - from connecting with the seasons to communing with our past or future lineages to deepening into the milestones of our journeys and relationships. And, of course, so much more. Perhaps we have used food, sacred objects, rites of challenge, the erotic, or art, dance, storytelling, and creative practices within ritual.

For me, one of the most powerful affirmations and healing ingredients that I experience in ritual process is how the messy, unknowing, emotional, liminal and chaotic is acknowledged and often centred as revered qualities the human experience. What a far cry that is from the sanitized rituals we still observe in secular culture - birthdays, holidays, graduations, etc - these hollow rituals often enforcing the systemic oppressions of capitalism and white supremacy: tendrils of perfectionism, wealth, power, and hyper individualism wrapped around birthday cakes, fancy clothing, and ‘certificates of achievement’.

Within erotic rituals, a very different story is welcome to unfold. Liminal not-knowings. Occupying non-ordinary states of consciousness. Following the winding rivers of pleasure, grief, rage, and eros. Casting a container of time away from time within which unwinding, unlearning, and unbecoming can happen. Being a body that drips, smells, bleeds, moans, wails, and shakes. 

And! Sometimes erotic rituals are pedestrian - which is also it’s own magic! Not everything has to be an extra-ordinary experience. Not everything has to be perfectly on-brand, on-point, blog-able, 14/10-would-do-again.

That said, I feel erotic rituals always touch something real. Pedestrian or ecstatic, connecting with erotic energy is connecting with life force energy, and leaning into the experience of being alive will always give the gift of wisdom.

Trauma Informed Care.

Having been immersed in trauma informed friendships, community, and work for a number of years now, it can sometimes be easy to not notice the gift I've given myself.

In my work I offer education and training about trauma informed, sex positive, LGBT positive care for allied professionals - therapists, pelvic floor specialists, naturopaths, and more. In working with these amazing folks who have such gifts to offer their fields, I often feel that mainstream trainings still have quite a way to go towards offering trauma informed care.

I do not believe that every person needs to be a trauma expert - yet, I do believe that even a basic awareness and wisdom about the impacts of systemic oppressions, historic life experiences, power, and environmental realities on clients’ bodies and nervous systems has the potential to radically shift experiences of care.

After all, often we seek out the professional support of therapists, medical professionals, and other healing professions because of traumatic experiences. When our contractions and challenges are met with regimens that don’t intersectionally understand and account for this, sometimes re-traumatization can occur.

With trauma informed care, a little trauma magic can go a long way to offering a more deeply resourcing healing environment that allows the soul and body to unwind.

To all of the folks who have learnt about trauma informed care - I applaud you! To all the folks contemplating learning about this concept of care, I applaud you! To all the folks who feel resistant or questioning - I also applaud you! Resistance and questioning is just as important an ingredient in the cauldron of this conversation - I’m so here for it all!

The Medicine Of BDSM.

When I started exploring BDSM I was young and delighted by the sexiness, mystery, and badassery of playing with sensation and power. Over the years since those initial dabblings, my relationship with BDSM has occupied many realms. Currently I feel quite discerning and careful about this kind of play for myself. I’ve deepened into a space of more fully feeling how sacred and powerful this kind of erotic journey is. Through BDSM I access a depth of awareness of how I exist in this world.  A deepened ability to feel my skin, my nervous system, my trauma, my biologic, chemical, spiritual, and psychic composition. I  expand capacity to feel and understand power and oppression in somewhat shuddering ways. This makes BDSM a powerful healing tool for myself, and, one to be handled with care. I very much feel that BDSM is a part of my soul’s apothecary, and a key resource in my wisdom journey.

Along my path I have been blessed to have learnt with and from many wise players, educators, artisans, and sex workers. And, I am now delighted to accidentally find myself occupying all of these roles for others. I am teaching a workshop on somatic trauma informed BDSM practices soon - one I’ve developed for the University of Victoria. I’m reflecting with appreciation on the winding path of my journey, and how I will be teaching much different content to the students at this workshop than what I was learning as a university student. Seeing and feeling the cultural advancement of social justice, intersectionality, and trauma informed care is a delight as I build out my offering for this workshop.

I won’t be able to weave all that I want to into this workshop, however, I feel absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to emphasize the importance of following your own body wisdom when exploring BDSM. To tune into the somatic conversation happening within in these potent experiences of power and eros. That there is a reason behind whatever your desires, preferences, and limits are being felt. And those feelings are important and needed parts of your journey with BDSM.

A Story About Yesterday’s Pleasure Practice.

A little story about my pleasure practice yesterday.

I took (most of) the day off, and went out to the coast for a beautiful walk in the afternoon. It was raining, and I forgot my raincoat… again. Hearing the sound of the rain in the woods was such a gift. “Life is much simpler, more richly complex, and a helluva lot bigger than your stories” it pattered soothingly to me, teasing my curls and kissing my shoulders.

I stopped to visit a small waterfall & peed (because, waterfalls) as I listened to the water churn. Absentmindedly gazing at the leaf humus & rich dark soil holding me as as my pelvis dipped to the earth, steam rising from between my boots.

Driving home, I made myself the best meal I’ve gifted myself in some time. A beautiful detoxifying & healing soup of bone broth, cabbage, mushrooms, ginger, turmeric, and garlic. Sulphur magic - offering medicine to my mitochondria and connective tissue. And, a blueberry pumpkin cake. Offering the medicine of memory and cognition, yes, but more importantly, the medicine of savouring the sweetness of life and love and blissful carbohydrates.

And, most importantly, the memories of processing the broth, pumpkin, and blueberries for my freezer. Yes, I come from somewhere. Yes, I am somewhere. Yes, I am going somewhere.

Then… I logged onto Instagram and accidentally fell into a shame hole.

My learnings / rememberings? Watch out for that damn algorithm! It is not benevolent! It does not want me to have an ambiguously deep and connected life. Honour and fortify my sacred time with the agreements, infrastructure, and intentions that protect my needs and goals!

And.

That there’s always another moment available for joy. There is always another moment of choice. There is always another moment to practice protecting internal and external boundaries with clarity and integrity. There is always another moment to sink into who each of us is are beyond social paradigms and cultural shaming, even if just for a few minutes.

Elemental Arcs of Arousal.

I often think about eroticism using the elements - it helps me steer clear of gendered or cultural expectations of how sexuality or eroticism is meant to look, and offers a greater capacity to understand the profundity and power of my experiences beyond modern limiting belief systems. If it’s helpful to hear, I’ve shared a little about how I notice the elements in my arc of arousal - and, I would love to hear how you notice the elements in yours, if you wish to share!

For me, I begin with earth: I connect with this element by honouring my boundaries, needs, and desires - tending the soil before planting begins. I ensure that I can feel myself - the earthy culture of who I am - at the onset of my journey. If I wish to explore the other elements of my arousal, my Virgo self needs to have a relationship with my parasympathetic state: feelings of slowness, rest, and digest interwoven with self intimacy and integrity.

Often next I unwind into air. My Gemini soul feeling gusts of desire, the heady and breathy intoxication of adventure and possibility. I connect with air by circulating my breath and movement, and by honouring the complex dance of my nervous system - the sympathetic arousal of excitement woven in with familiar feelings of fight and flight responses. I find beauty and movement in feeling the ‘both/and’ of my joyful activation.

My experiences of air often combust into feelings of fire. The power & energy of my Leo sun - contracting muscles and the brew of excitement and sympathetic ‘fight’ responses deepening me into an otherworldly land of fire and strength. Growling, mane-shaking, and grappling with myself or others - feeling the primal truth of being an animal, living in a blissful moment of time away from time in the erotic realm.

Sometimes this slow deepening - moving at the speed of trust from earth to air to fire offers the deepest gift of arriving to water. Arriving to an ocean of feeling. Arriving to an endless well of intimacy, love, grief, wisdom, and tears. When I arrive to water, I arrive to a primordial and uterine-like experience of existence. I feel deep truths of me, my wounds, my fundamental worthiness, and that of those I may be in an erotic weave with. 

And, slowly, I surface, and climb back onto land.

Learning how to come into mindful presence with, and build an empowering and value-neutral way to celebrate my arousal has been such a gift within my training as a Somatic Sex Educator that I’m deeply grateful for. And it is such an honour supporting clients in reclaiming and rewriting their own erotic truths in creative defiance of the disempowering sex negative culture we live within.

Recovering From Sexual Trauma.

Most current content about trauma recovery does not include information about recovering from sexual trauma. And, by sexual trauma I mean trauma that has manifested through some form of sexual experience, or trauma that impacts people’s relationships with sexuality or gender.

Which, frankly, is a wide range of experiences that affect many (if not most) folks! Yet, we’re not talking about it! I have a few choice words about how problematic this is, but, I’ll save those for another day… 

In my experience and in my work, the process of trauma recovery is a unique and winding path. That said, I believe recovery work involves five key elements:

1. Establishing Voice & Choice: Recovery work includes identifying our yes’es, no’s and maybe’s. It includes developing embodied wisdom about ‘what would be perfect’, and learning how to listen to and respect our internal voice and preferences.

2. Expanding Embodiment: Recovery work includes connecting more deeply with our bodies and emotions. Practicing embodiment means practicing feeling a wide variety of experiences and emotions and being able to sit with them. This may be done by exploring sex and pleasure, but, it doesn’t have to!

3. Healing Through The Body: Whether practiced solo or with folks that feel safe enough (such as a Somatic Sex Educator!), receiving pleasurable touch and fulfilling desires can be a beautifully healing and sacred experience. As can touch that aims to unwind trauma stored in tissue.

4. Exploring Mutually Respectful Connection: Within recovery work, the process of asking for what we want while celebrating others’ boundaries is deeply supportive in learning to unwind feelings of fear, contraction, and self-silencing.

5. Embodying Wellness and Pleasure: Recovery work is a process meant to open each of us to greater aliveness. Manifesting the practices, pleasures, and people that most deeply support our experiences of aliveness is key to ensuring that we cultivate a joyful life.

Supporting clients as they come home to their bodies and joy is always such an honour. In my practice trauma recovery work is more than learning how to not get triggered as easily - it’s about connecting with your power and passion and individuality!

Where Do I Want To Go?

The modality of Somatic Sex Education is a client directed one. This means that as a Somatic Sex Educator I believe that you are the wisdom holder. You are the one that decides where we need to go.

Embodying a client directed practice has been a deep re-learning for me as someone who has had so many experiences of authorities, professionals and ‘experts’ not listening to me or doing thing that I feel are deeply not okay. As a facilitator, I certainly arrive with tools, education, and professional training for the purposes of ensuring I can be a resourcing and helpful ally in my clients’ journeys - however, it is certainly *not* up to me to be calling the shots on how that journey unfolds!

Moving at the speed of trust, and following the client’s internal compass about what would be best for us to be addressing can be in and of itself a healing and wholing experience, restoring perhaps years of unwanted experiences in relationships, doctors offices, workplaces, and more.

In my practice I always begin my work with a new client by inviting them to explore the questions from earlier in this post: “Where do I wish to go?” “What are my goals?” - from this point we can begin to learn about the map we’re looking at together, and start understanding our path.

And, it’s always a beautiful path!

From The COVID Archives.

When COVID first arrived I was living in Ontario and working as a worker/owner at Come As You Are. One of my roles at the co-op was writing newsletters for our readership. I recently stumbled upon this beautiful pleasure-full pep talk I wrote during those first uncertain weeks of the pandemic. My hope is to offer the same spirit to you, as someone who has made it this far into these unimaginable times - with an eye to pleasure, healing, and joy.

—

As an online business, we’re fortunate enough to have the opportunity to continue to work during this Covid chapter, and while doing our work, we’ve noticed a shift in what you’re investing in. And through this shift, we have a confession: we have never been more in love with each and every one of you and your brilliant journeys than we have been over these last weeks.

This is because we see you investing in your curiosity. The number of times we receive orders for, like, a smorgasbord of lubricant sampler packs is unreal. The number of orders we’re receiving that are folks investing in educational books and DVDs (with maybe a length of rope or g-spot vibrator to supplement the learning) is exciting. The number of orders we’re receiving that include some of our less-mainstream gear - candles, floggers, speculums, e-stim toys, urethral sounds… so invigorating. The number of orders for copies of Pleasure Activism alone - beautiful.

Witnessing so many of you taking this challenging chapter and imagining how you want to harness it is inspiring. Witnessing so many of you making the choice to say ‘yes’ to pleasure is stunning. Witnessing your projects of expansion and healing and reclamation of your bodies breaks our hearts with so much damn love. Witnessing you as a community literally activating your bodies: inviting pleasure as a practice that transforms and transmutes.

This reminds us of the work of Joseph Kramer, Barbara Carrellas and others in the 90’s during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. That in the midst of a deeply dark and painful chapter, these brilliant queer activists turned to pleasure to heal. They turned to pleasure as a harm reductive strategy to minimize the impact of HIV/AIDS (which many of you are doing by opting to explore your own pleasure in your own spaces). And, they turned to pleasure because through pleasure we can come into relationship with our authentic power - that healing ourselves, building up our resiliency, integrity, and capacity through pleasure is powerful, and, well, pleasurable! Which, again, is echoed in what we’re witnessing is unfolding instinctively amongst so many of you.

Further, we’re deeply touched seeing how many of you are choosing to invest in your pleasure by also choosing to invest in DIY anti-capitalist / small-scale businesses. Seeing you spread your pleasure around - cultivating the multiplication and expansion of your pleasure by ensuring the survival and thriving of artists, visionaries, and tradespeople is nothing short of stunning.

As such, let’s team up and set an intention to collectively do what we can to take care of our grassroots infrastructure of makers and sex workers. We would like to donate 10% of the profits from the sale of *any* of our indie made goods to Maggie’s Covid fund - and we’ll match that donation. We will run this promotion until the end of April. This pandemic chapter is so dynamic and complex, it feels important to us to ensure that we can do whatever we can whenever we can to take care of our loves.

And, our loves are you: the folks that keep caring for us by writing us, investing in us, cheerleading us. Our loves are the makers that exist across the globe that labour tirelessly in unapologetic service to grassroots radical pleasure. And our loves are sex workers: folks doing hard and thankless work that have been disproportionately affected by this pandemic - and already disproportionately affected by the brutality of capitalism.

So, in closing, let’s remember that what we pay attention to grows. Wherever you are, whatever is alive and real for you during this unimaginable chapter, remember that your attention, your care - that is your power. May you find moments to pay attention to your self, your pleasure during this chapter where it is all too easy to forget that it is through darkness that we find our light.

The Power Of Joy.

In my own healing journey I have spent years doing important unwinding and repatterining work, making changes in how I eat, sleep, organize my work life, and move my body. I did this based off of books, articles, and the advice of my medical care team. I was often spending my nights reading articles about the harmful effects of this or that, and trying to see how I could adjust my life in response to this information.

When I discovered Somatic Sex Education and started mobilizing the practices that inform the modality, I realized I had stumbled upon a very powerful ingredient that would completely transform how I understand healing, and how I would steward my experience of life.

That is, that instead of always reacting or responding to what I’m afraid of - the health impacts of X or Y, the relational challenges I was facing, the work stress I was experiencing - I could instead choose to choose pleasure and joy. This was a *complete* game changer.

When we mobilize pleasure, we are mobilizing powerful chemicals in our bodies that offer a multitude of healing effects that often outstrip antidepressants and other pharmaceuticals. We are repatterining our neurology as we practice - literally changing the way we think. We are also doing the work of social change - systems are literally woven into each of us as individuals, and we can create systemic change by creating personal change.

And, studies have shown that when we have a guiding star to orient our actions towards, we will feel greater satisfaction, efficiency, and experience more of the change that we desire. When we simply try to just avoid ‘the bad stuff’, we lack clarity, direction, a deeper purpose, and a balm for collapse or despair.

I am excited to be co-facilitating an upcoming somatic workshop on this topic called Weaving Collective Joy, with The Body Erotic. We will be diving into a rich 2.5hr somatic journey with fellow pleasure seekers and curious souls, exploring they joys woven within the body, and within the wider world. I hope you’ll join us! More information coming soon, or DM me for details!

Your Sexual Revolution.

While most of us haven’t been raised in sexually liberated spaces, that does not mean we are not entitled to living our sexual liberation *now*. History has shown that waiting around for someone else to do the work of “overthrowing the regime” means we’re going to be doing a lot of waiting.

There is no time like the present to say ‘fuckit’ and live the lives we dream of. As we do this, the world *will* slowly shape in that direction.

So! What does *your* sexual revolution look like?

Do you have sex with yourself? If so, what would your solo sex practices include? How often would you have solo sex with yourself? For how long? Would there be toys? Outfits? Porn?

Do you have sex partners? If so, who are they? Are they all the same kind of person, or, are they different? What kinds of sex do you have with others? What does ’sex’ mean to you when it involves other people? Do you do things besides have ’sex’ together?

How do you dress your body? Feed your body? Photograph your body? Care for your body?

What values do your friends and community embody? How do they speak about themselves, their lovers, and their desires?

Sustainable change is often found by visioning into deep dreams and fantastical futures, and then reverse engineering those dreams by making small choices in daily life. The thing is that simplistic & instantaneous sex positive utopias are not a reasonable expectation. The world is far too rich and complex for Disney-esque truths to come to pass. 

This is such a gift! It means that there’s enough richness and complexity for all of our personal sexual revolutions to unfold according to our unique needs & desires. We can live our revolutions by identifying and acting in service for what would be ‘perfect’ today.

Neuroplasticity and Sex.

Neuroplastic change is the shifting of patterns that results from changing your inputs. Brains remain ‘plastic’ throughout life - they are always tracking their environments and adapting as changes occur.

Changes can occur through new skills and experiences - our brains receive new information, and they develop new neural connections to respond to that new information.

Change also becomes entrenched when we strengthen those neural connections by repeating and practicing that activity. And, as we *decrease* an activity, neural connections also weaken.

Neuroplastic practices have been shown to help ease or overcome experiences of depression, addiction, OCD, ADHD, and more. We can literally always change our minds! 

A huge part of my work as a Somatic Sex Educator is in supporting clients in developing and strengthening new neural pathways - cultivating neuroplastic change.

This happens by being an ally that can offer touch, conversation, ideas, or education in collaboration with clients’ intentions and goals, and supporting clients as they practice towards pleasure, abundance, joy, and embodiment.

You can always learn new ways of being and responding. That said, the brain is value neutral - it just learns and deepens whatever patterns it is exposed to. This is why being intentional about what you are learning, exposing yourself to, and actively practicing is so important!

What are your deepest goals and intentions regarding intimacy, eroticism and sexuality? Practicing towards these goals *will* bring about neuroplastic change!