Sexuality as a gateway to embodied power

Sexual expression is a form of personal power, which is often loaded with complex feelings of shame, repression, addiction, self-doubt, and even fear.

Sexuality is one of the most shamed and taboo human expressions of healing, power, and intimacy in our culture.

Consequently, our sexuality is a potent gateway into the shadows of the personal and collective psyche. It reveals the wounds and beliefs we hold when it comes to love, desire, lust, power, pleasure, shame and guilt.

90% of how we operate is through our subconscious mind, which means we primarily function on autopilot. It’s incredibly insightful to explore the ways in which we operate consciously and unconsciously in the realms of sex and relationship.

Studying sexuality is a fast track into the dark crawl spaces of shame and repression that long to be liberated, and folded back home into the entirety of our being.

We suffer when we feel separate from Love itself. We hurt when we’ve forgotten our sense of belonging and value in the cosmic order of creation.

Studying and exploring your sexual expression, and patterns of operating in intimate relationships can be an incredible gateway to emancipate yourself from the war of separation (shame, guilt, repression, trauma) and the behaviors of striving originally induced as a means to offset fears of unworthiness.

Sexuality is a potent gateway into feeling our primal body and the shadows of our personal and collective psyche.

If you’re afraid of sex, addicted to sex, or ambiguous about sex, this may be an important gateway for you to explore related to disowned parts of your power or inherited beliefs and self-images that no longer serve you.

How has your sexuality and sexual expression empowered and/or disempowered you?

What creates sexual desire is one of life’s greatest mysteries.

The drivers of our sexual arousal develop early in life. We can’t control what turns us on. And unfortunately, we may feel shame or confusion related to both what arouses us and what doesn’t.

Our turn-on templates are based on a multitude of variables, starting with biological and physiological drivers. But what about the psychological and emotional components of our sexual template?

And how about other wild cards that induce our sexual responsiveness? We’ve all experienced the ineffable energetic and magnetic chemistry with another that sweeps us into lust and obsession with no logic or reason.

What drives our behaviors and choices is an ever-unfolding riddle, which makes sense, since 90% of how we operate is driven by the subconscious. There are a number of entry points to reveal the subconscious drivers of our sexuality and beliefs about love, belonging, and our sense of worth and place in the world.

Let’s look at these four doorways to sexual arousal and attraction.

Physiological and biological markers
Pleasure
The wild card of mystery
Seeking to repeat & repair missing experiences

1. PHYSIOLOGICAL AND BIOLOGICAL MARKERS

We are mammals, wired to procreate and survive. Physiological wiring such as hormones and pheromones contribute to our sexual arousal. These drivers are rooted deep in our reptilian and limbic brains, below the surface of our conscious awareness. These biological markers serve as bonding agents between lovers. Are you aware of how your primal wiring and biology drive you to feel attracted and bonded in sexual relationships?

For more on the hormones of sex, read my article: How Does Attachment Theory Relate to Sex & Intimacy?

2. PLEASURE

Humans are wired with creatures cravings of pleasure and sensual experiences. Our sensory nature leads us to seek expression and fulfillment in various ways. Sensual and sexual touch are different channels of pleasure and can become foreplay to incite arousal and desire.

There are countless avenues through which we each find and seek pleasure through our senses of smell, taste, touch, sound and sight. What’s pleasurable sexually is unique for everyone. For example, when it comes to touch, one person might prefer soft feathering contact with slow and light gestures, while another snaps open with playful wrestling, rough grabbing and passionate primal play.

Each sense is teeming with unique invitations for turn-on and desire. What senses and sexual activities are your greatest sources of pleasure? Do they change or stay consistent for you? Do you ask to create the conditions to experience these desires with your lover?

3. THE WILD CARD OF MYSTERY

Have you ever met someone with whom you experienced a deep sense of familiarity and irresistible attraction, as if you knew each other beyond time and space? This mysterious component of our individual turn-on is sometimes referred to as a karmic or soul recognition. A seemingly random encounter with a stranger can feel like someone you’ve known your whole life and beyond. Can you recall a time when you experienced this kind of magnetic pull and recognition?

Another wild card of attraction happens below the surface of our conscious awareness through our attachment templates. I’ve noticed that when my attachment wound matches someone else’s in just the right way it can make my attraction to them irresistible. These alluring dynamics are intended to create the conditions to both trigger and repair the fragmentation created when vulnerable parts of us have been banished or fractured. These attractions can be incredibly messy. But, I believe, despite the pain they are soul invitations to heal and further integrate core wounds and places where we defend from love and trust.

Our erotic mind attracts specific people and relationships that will illuminate hidden material. Core wounds between two people can hook together, in just the right way, and create a magnetic pull which becomes an unstoppable force of attraction.

This leads to the final driver of attraction called missing experiences.

4. SEEKING TO REPEAT & REPAIR MISSING EXPERIENCES

While sex fulfills a biological impulse to procreate, experience pleasure and bond, we come to sex to fulfill a need to feel something. This is often something that we missed on a consistent basis during our developmental years.

Missing experiences are a conglomeration of developmental needs that were missed consistently enough throughout our childhood, leaving a gap in our psyche and consequently, an imprint to that will manifest, and hopefully repair, in our adult relationships.

Repetition compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats or reenacts a familiar event over and over again.

The impulse to repeat can be pleasure-based. When something is good, why wouldn’t we want more? Repeating the past is also an unconscious attempt to resolve early historical pain, trauma, and feelings of loss and hurt. We repeat experiences to seek a new outcome and resolve the underlying pain that often creates states of fear, mistrust, anxiety, and collapse of our personal power.

This "re-living" can take shape through dreams, during which the psyche offloads memories and feelings associated with the earlier wound. Our inner wisdom wants to bring these fragmented and missing experiences home and into wholeness.

If we want to welcome exiled parts of us home we have to see what is hiding in the shadows of our conscious awareness and become a witness to our conditioned patterns and wounds.

Our adult relationships will naturally reveal attachment wounds. Studying how we operate in intimate relationships will illuminate our beliefs and the associated behaviors of anxiety, confusion, protection or withdrawal.

Understanding our attachment template is essential for our journey of embodiment. Mapping our specific adaptive strategies — the ways we protect our vulnerability — points to key areas to investigate if we want to fold exiled parts of ourselves back home.

Sex is a gateway to trigger insecurities and threats, in a way no other channel of our human expression can. This is why having a conscious relationship to our sexuality is a Pandora’s box filled with rich opportunities for healing and growth. We can reach deeper intimacy with ourselves and each other when we expose and explore our desires and feelings.

Do you know what you seek through sex and intimacy? What do you hope to feel about yourself or in relationship with another?

“We further embody our power, presence, and love when we consciously embrace the fertile shadow material associated with our sexuality and desires.”

Why map your sexual drivers, activators, and challenges?

Experiencing pleasurable, satisfying, and connected sex is a beautiful gift. When we consciously understand what drives our sexual arousal, we have the opportunity to deepen connection both with ourselves and with our intimate partners.

Understanding the psycho-dynamics of our sexuality and erotic mind helps us de-shamify the patterns that we innocently inherited early in life that have limited our sexual freedom and expression.

Sexuality is riddled with beliefs of sin and shame. It's time to dismantle this obscene cultural inheritance.

Ultimately, our sexual relationships can become a source of coming back home into our wholeness, with ourselves and with the world.

“Studying our sexual expression is the fast track to investigating the whole of our human experience, and cracking into deeper freedom in all aspects of our lives.”

What are your missing experiences?

If your sexual turn-ons feel cryptic, overwhelming, or confusing at times, I want to offer you this framework of missing experiences as an exploration to expand your understanding of yourself.

As a child, when our needs are neglected, not attuned to, or missed enough times, the fear and hurt related to these “misses” become woven into the fabric of our belief system and our sense of self-worth. This is a missing experience and an incomplete experience that will, subconsciously, drive us to repair the pattern in our adult relationships.

Through my training to become a Hakomi therapist, I learned about the eight adaptive strategies associated with each of these five needs, based on William Reich’s model of character development that was further developed by the Hakomi Institute a psycho-spiritual school of mind-body therapists.

OUR FIVE DEVELOPMENTAL NEEDS ARE:

To feel safety and security
To feel connected and be assured that our needs matter
To feel our power and influence
To express our independence and still be loved and accepted
To feel confident of our worthiness

To learn more about this topic, you can download my free ebook, Unraveling Adult Relationship Patterns: A downloadable field guide.

What are missing experiences?

As we traverse these phases of development, it’s likely that some of these needs will be missed. If missed, but attuned to later with loving connection, we can recover our sense of self-worth, belonging, and confidence.

When a need is missed, but then followed up with love, safety, and encouragement, we settle. This process teaches us to rely upon a consistency of attunement, and validates the importance of our needs, which builds our resiliency and capacity to self-regulate as adults when stress arises.

If our needs are missed entirely, or only met intermittently, then our system registers a loss or lack, and will seek to adapt to these missing experiences through a myriad of behaviors and beliefs about ourselves and the world. These protection patterns become part of our operating system and personality traits.

Chronically missed developmental experiences cause early onset of anxiety patterns that carry into our adulthood if not investigated and integrated from the root cause.

How do missing experiences impact our sexual template?

There are countless ways a missing experience becomes entwined with our sexual desire. For example, if being vulnerable as a child resulted in painful rejection or shaming, you may develop an adaptive strategy of always being the one in control. This feeling of being in charge and dominant may become the source of your sexual arousal.

If as a child you felt responsible for the emotional needs of one of your caregivers then, as an adult, you may attract partners with high emotional needs so you can play your role of savior and hero and potentially heal the missing experiences of being overly responsible to get love if your partner is willing to explore their missing experience of needing someone outside of them to help them regulate and feel safe. Or you might go the opposite direction and withdraw, or ghost when a lover’s demands on your time and attention hit your saturation level of emotional need.

Studying our missing experiences helps to highlight the secret desires and longings played out through our sexuality as well as reveal ways in which we feel stung by repeating relationship dynamics of disconnection and hurt.

Unearthing our missing experiences is ultimately a study of our human condition. Consciously exploring our erotic mind is a powerful tool to claim our agency and make empowered choices with our sexuality. It’s also an opportunity to further integrate exiled parts of ourselves that long to come home and rest into our open heart.

“Missing experiences are cause for some underlying states of anxiety and patterns of control.”

An example of embracing a missing experience during sex

Recently during sex, my lover’s missing experience arose, and we made space to attend to a fear that he doesn’t deserve me. He felt an anxiety that our relationship was too good to be true. It wasn’t rational, it was an early conditioning belief he inherited about being worthy of love and feeling alive and adored without having to work hard to deserve it.

We discovered that this painful feeling came from an early imprint in his upbringing, a distorted familial and religious message that “he will be punished if he doesn’t work hard.” Our love affair was easy and drama-free. One of his beliefs sounded like “I’m not working hard enough to receive something so easy and fulfilling. When will I be punished for this much pleasure?”

We made room to challenge the belief and made an agreement that he would name it when it arises. We laid quietly in each other’s arms, peeling away any judgment or shame and extending acceptance and love to this part of him.

Eventually he whispered in a deep, vulnerable, and raspy voice: “Do you know how different the world would be if we all could feel this level of love and acceptance? If we could admit our earnest desire to be in connection instead of separation? I believe global wars would stop. Starvation would cease. Road rage wouldn’t exist. Generosity and love would reign.”

I smiled, kissed his chest and closed my eyes, feeling this liberation and love buzzing through my whole body.

Something had softened inside of him, and he had an embodied recognition of how this false belief had held a grip on his freedom to trust, love, and surrender. He was taking in a small sip of a new experience that was more accurate than the one he learned as a child.

Over time, he has slowly been reintegrating the knowing that he is worthy of this amount of love and pleasure. This is the journey of the repair process. For the old belief to become a new belief system these moment of interruptions will likely need to be repeated until his brain starts to wire a new neuropathway that associates connection and pleasure with love and trust, instead of fear of unworthiness and punishment.

I was inspired and grateful that he had the courage, presence, and inner strength to embrace and name this experience, rather than drive beyond it. Tactics of override or suppression usually express sideways through some form of withdrawal or controlling behavior. I was so glad for his self-awareness and reveal to me of this aggressive voice he was living with. Meeting this missing experience together created more intimacy, and now we both have our radar up to transform this outdated belief together.

If we drill deep enough, all conflict and struggle links back to some kind of trauma, interruption in development, or belief system that is skewed or outdated. As I mentioned earlier, besides the pure source of pleasure and intimacy, we come to sex to fulfill a need to feel something. We reach deeper intimacy with ourselves and each other when we expose and embrace the undercurrent of feelings and missing experiences we seek to integrate and heal through sex.

“Missing experiences are a powerful entry-point to build self-awareness about areas of challenge in our sexual relationships at an emotional and psychological level.”

Tether or compartmentalize physical pleasure and emotional intimacy?

Is sex an emotional experience for you or primarily a physical outlet? What feelings do you seek to experience through sex?

Porn has been a beneficial resource for many people to rev their sexual engines. It’s exciting to witness the wellspring of conscious artists creating porn in support of embodiment and connection. And, as with all things, there is a shadow side.

Research is revealing how excessive porn viewing can influence receptor sites in the brain. This phenomenon is causing a separation of physical pleasure from emotional intimacy.

For many people, when physical pleasure and emotional intimacy are linked together during a sexual experience there is an increase in their sense of embodiment and connection with themselves and their lover.

When the physical and emotional components are severed it can truncate the integration of mind, body, and spirit with self and connection to another outside of objectification and mental concepts.

How do we self-reflect on this phenomenon? We can start by exploring where we fall along a continuum between two extremes.

On one end, we may crave sex for a physical release as a means to quell states of anxiety, loneliness, and fears of unworthiness or rejection. On the other end, we may long for sex as a vehicle to sacred union and merging with another to dissolve any sense of separation.

Our sexual expression serves as a holding container for the integration between our body, emotions, and energy — our whole being. We open to the opportunity to merge with all of who we are, as well as our partner, despite our messy human condition.

If you watch porn, your preferences can reveal key ingredients to what you want to feel emotionally through sexual expression. What are the scenes, verbal content, gestures and configurations that light you up? What are the feelings they spark in you?

I recently listened to a young man share what it was like for him to discover porn at twelve years old. It became his sexual initiator.

Porn taught him what to expect from his body, and eventually, what to seek from his lovers. It was his go-to for masturbation and education. He diligently attempted to replicate what he saw in porn with his lovers, and seemed satisfied, until he met a very special woman.

Eventually, in his early thirties, he fell in love with a woman who was committed to embodiment and integration in her own body. She was unwavering in her desire to weave her physical senses with her emotions, rather than compartmentalizing them. During sex, she felt him go into his head and out of his body. She would gently ask him, “Where did you go?” He had no idea what she was talking about. He thought he was right there with her, but upon investigation, he painfully realized that he was unaware of sensing her touch and presence, because of his trained hyper-focus on self-pleasure and orgasm. Often, he was completely disconnected from her in those moments.

Over time, they had an agreement that when she felt his disappearance, she would name it to bring him back into his heart and connection to her. In the middle of one of these moments, when she softly asked him to come back, he exploded into tears and felt his heart during sex for the first time ever. He described this shift as moving out of a catatonic state of a cold physical act into something technicolor, warm, and vibrantly alive.

I invite you to contemplate your relationship to porn. If you watch it, does it creates more embodied pleasure and sexual expression? Does it foster a disconnected experience between the physical act and emotional connection? There is nothing wrong with sex that is void of emotional intimacy, if that’s what turns you on. It’s all about the nature of what you want to feel, or not feel, as the linchpin to engage your erotic mind and study the patterns that drive your arousal.

If you’re interested in exploring the journey of integration through exploring missing experiences, then sexuality is one of the most promising doorways.

“When sex becomes a purely physical and performance-based conquest, with minimal self-awareness, we lose the potential to engage with the medicine of integration and healing that are available.”

Since much of our emotional content lives in the shadows of our subconscious mind, how do we uncover what we’re seeking to feel through our sexual expressions? The best place to begin in through studying our fantasies.

Fantasies are scents on the hunt to experience embodied and liberated sexual expression

A fantasy is an imagined situation or mental simulation orchestrated in such a way that illuminates the feelings we seek to feel turned on.

As children, we focus on an imagined situation or feeling that would counterbalance the missing experience or unanswered need we’re having. We self-soothe through fantasy. Fantasies allow us to focus on an imagined situation, and the associated feelings that arise in that scenario, which serves to counterbalance the missing experience or unanswered need we’re having.

As children we create fantasy as a wise method to metabolize the pain of missing experiences.

For example, if a child feels lonely or lacks nourishing relationships, then the child might construct an imaginary friend to fulfill a nurturing, bonded and safe relationship. Children often use imagination as a creative means of getting their needs met.

As we grow up, our subconscious mind will search for the specific people and conditions that will elicit the distinct feelings we sought to fulfill as children. This is the way our being aims to repair a core wound or missing experience, and resolve the looping behaviors associated with the loss.

When it comes to sexual fantasy how does all this play out?

Well, if you felt invisible, forgotten, or didn’t receive the attention you craved as a child, one way of coping with these feelings may have been to daydream about experiences in which you’re the center of the universe, and all attention is poured upon you. As a child, maybe your imaginary friend gave you this attention, or you gained this attention by becoming an accomplished student or athlete. In your adult life, this longing may subconsciously turn into a sexual fantasy of being adored, worshiped, and devotedly focused upon by one or multiple people at once. You may seek to attract partners who will intensely focus on you in this way, or you may draw upon these fantasies when you self-pleasure.

Remember, the key to self discovery is to target what you seek to feel emotionally through sex. Do you seek power, adoration, control, primal passion, innocent playfulness, feeling surrendered and out of control?

SOME EXAMPLES OF WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN YOUR FANTASIES:

Are you being worshiped? If so, does this make you feel special, chosen, worthy, and safe? Does it relieve you from fears of rejection or abandonment?
Are you dominating someone into surrender and pleasure? Do you like having control and power to please another and take them places they’ve never been? Do you want to be in charge of someone who is eager to please you? In this situation, you may seek to feel confident, empowered, worthy or safe by being in control.
Are you being dominated into receiving pleasure? Do you imagine being begged by your lover to give them what they want? Does this give you permission to have the full expression of your desire because you know you won’t be rejected or feel like you’re too much because your lover is free and wildly unashamed of their hunger?
Are you being devoured and taken against your will while feeling safe? Do you want to be taken against your own will (but are secretly turned on by this helplessness) because you want to feel desired, passively devoured, and out of control while at the same time feeling safe?

For a deep dive into fantasies, read my article Fantasies: What They Teach Us About Our Erotic Architecture.

Can we change our sexual arousal templates?

My working hypothesis is that we can change aspects of our erotic templates through the process of integrating and healing missing experiences over time. The key ingredient is a nonjudgmental and safe container built on trust and vulnerability.

As we interrupt and address outdated reactions, a new response begins the rewiring process in our brain, similar to what is happened for my lover and the missing experience of associating pleasure with deserving rather than punishment or denial.

Extensive neuroscience research shows our brain has neuroplasticity, which means the brain is pliable and has the capacity to rewire neuropathways, including our beliefs and mind-body patterns.

I’ve become my very own experimental project, and will keep writing about what I discover as I consciously transform the wiring of my my missing experiences and core wounds through intimacy and sexuality.

Self knowledge is power, and having choice creates freedom. Studying our erotic architecture can assist us in creating a more satisfying and empowered sex life. It will also open doors to more self-love and playful authentic sexual freedom.

To learn more, read my article, Sexual Sovereignty: Embodying Your Authentic Sexual Expression

Exploring our erotic mind is an evolutionary process

Beyond pure enjoyment, sexuality helps us to understand and define what drives our turn-ons sexually, mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. We’re multidimensional in nature, so understanding our erotic intelligence means engaging with the conscious and unconscious drivers of our longings and desires.

Ultimately, the components of our turn-on can become our teachers. They guide us to discover, transform, and deepen into our most self-compassionate and authentic self.

Sexuality has been loaded with shame and repression in our culture. Let's evolve and transform this together!

We live in a world riddled with shame and a misuse of power related to sexuality. I want to initiate the conversations that will help us find common ground and birth a new way of being. The #metoo campaign began a larger collective conversation that is essential.

As we drop layers of shame, guilt, and judgment, we re-discover creative, healthy, and fulfilling ways to express ourselves through integrated and soulful ways. These doorways of healing settle the pain of separation that lives within each of us. It transforms the ground of our being and builds new footpaths for the generations to come.

I revel at the inherent genius living within each of us. I believe that we are evolving creatures and that our natural state of being is Love.

Even when we face difficult patterns in our life and relationships, we can curate a place to rest within our being, where fear and reactivity are welcomed and embraced within our larger Self.

“The key to sexual liberation is to free ourselves and each other from patterns of shame and misuses of power.”

What Drives Our Sexual Arousal?