Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (26 page)

Figure 2. Vaginal reflexology

If you’d like to learn more about how couples can use clitoral stimulation with the hands as a most enjoyable form of intimacy and pleasure, I highly recommend the husband-and-wife team Steve and Vera Bodansky’s book
Extended Massive Orgasm: How You Can Give and Receive Intense Sexual Pleasure
(Hunter House, 2013). I also highly recommend a DVD called
A Guide to Your Orgasm,
produced by The Welcomed Consensus (
www.welcomed.com
).

Making your sexual and sensual pleasure a priority will change your life and fill your cells with life-giving nitric oxide, the molecule of life force. Let your inner Aphrodite and your emotions be your guide, have fun with your erotic anatomy—and remember that there’s no more powerful aphrodisiac than a woman who feels irresistible. Be a goddess of sensual pleasure!

SEXUAL HEALING FOR TRAUMA AND BLOCKAGES IN THE LOWER CHAKRAS

If you’ve suffered sexual trauma, or are holding on to the energy of fear and loss in your pelvic area due to surgical procedures there, such as a hysterectomy or removal of a cancerous tumor, you can use sexual energy to heal the blockages in your pelvic center. There are many ways to reawaken this area of your body and begin its energetic healing.

The psoas muscles are part of your core muscle groups and run from your lower spine through your groin to your upper legs. These muscles support range of motion, balance, and proper functioning of organs in the pelvic region. They get stretched and worked in Pilates and in some other types of exercise, such as erotic dance.

The psoas muscles have a close relationship with the emotional centers in the primitive, limbic brain, so emotional stress, particularly fear and anger, can affect the health and flexibility of the psoas. These muscles are located near the first chakra, the seat of the kundalini life force—the female energy located in the base of the spine, connecting the body’s energy to that of the earth. The kundalini life force is often depicted as a coiled serpent that holds the potential to rise up, bringing chi into the rest of the body. The first chakra is associated with survival instincts, while the second chakra is the seat of sexuality, power, and creativity. Moving your hips, relaxing your psoas, and letting go of your fear that you’ll be shamed for being a sexual, sensual, creatively expressive goddess is vital to your health.

It’s crucial to have a physical practice that addresses these chakras—and every other muscle in the body. It could be yoga or Pilates. It could be dancing. Horseback riding is another way
to reconnect to your hips and reclaim your relationship with the force of your inner Aphrodite. To have a huge, strong animal attune to the movements you make with your pelvis and the area between your legs, and respond to them, is empowering and deeply sensual.

Erotic dancing, such as pole dancing, belly dancing, and close-embrace Argentine tango, also reconnects you to your pleasurable core. I once took a private pole dancing class to learn some of these fluid and beautiful movements. In a dimly lit room, my instructor encouraged me to truly surrender to some slow, sensual hip circles with erotic music. As I began to move my hips in circles that grew ever wider and more sensual, I thought,
I have waited my entire life to be given permission to move my hips this way!
Taking a private or women-only class taught by a woman can help you get past any shyness or embarrassment to discover that you were born to move sensually. Belly dancing was originally taught by grandmothers to their granddaughters as a way to help with birth—not to seduce men. Whatever you want to give birth to, believe me, it will help if you reconnect with the power in your pelvic bowl.

OVERCOMING THE OBSTACLES TO BLISS

What gets between women and their pleasure? For one thing, many women are exhausted. An uninterrupted night of sleep is the most desirable activity they can imagine. Most blame it on hormones, and those can certainly play a role. But hormones aren’t really the issue. The fatigue comes after several decades of putting your own needs last and caring for others instead. Your body just says, “Stop it.” If sex is just another item on the To Do list to attend to because you “should” have a sex life to please your partner, of course you’re going to have trouble feeling sexual desire!

As adults, we don’t talk about how overwhelmed we are by what we have to do because we don’t want to be seen as whiny or angry. The striving for perfectionism, for never letting them see us sweat, for not giving anyone reason to shame us, sucks the life out of us. Our desire for sex naturally suffers. This has nothing
to do with age or hormonal changes. Women are presented with unattainable, conflicting expectations topped off with a huge serving of shame, and
that
is what kills sex drive.

Recently, it was announced that a pharmaceutical company is working on a drug to boost the libido of women who are on antidepressants, because those medications have the side effect of killing sexual desire. Hello, we don’t need more drugs to address the side effects of drugs! Women need to grieve and rage, let their feelings out, and nurture themselves so that they feel pleasure. Then their sexual desire will increase automatically.

Some women have fear surrounding sex because they’ve been sexually abused and exploited, or they have looked around and seen how other women have been sexually violated or simply shamed. Secrecy, silence, and judgment make matters worse. Many women don’t even remember traumatic events until somewhere around menopause, probably because survival depended on forgetting. Given that most abuse takes place in the home, we really can’t allow ourselves to get in touch with what we know and feel because there’s no safe place to retreat to—even as adults, women who have been traumatized may associate “home” with abuse and a lack of safety. It’s hard to be open and trusting when you know you’re vulnerable to being hurt again.

Brené Brown says, “Vulnerability is not weakness and that myth is profoundly dangerous. Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.”
⁹
Vulnerability
comes from a Latin word for wound. When you’re vulnerable, you’re more easily wounded, but that doesn’t mean you’re weak. It takes a lot of strength to open your heart again and trust another person enough to be physically intimate. If you’ve been hurt in sexual relationships, or hurt sexually, of course it’s going to be difficult to reclaim your sexuality and your vulnerability, but it is definitely worth the effort!

Another obstacle to experiencing our “inner erotic creature” is the shame that comes from having an “imperfect” appearance. Brené Brown wrote a book on rejecting shame and delivered a magnificent TED talk on the topic. Afterward, many people shamed and judged her in the comments section of the TED website for her clothing, weight, and hairstyle, making catty and
cruel remarks. Apparently, those viewers didn’t get what she was saying at all! She admits she cried her eyes out and then, over time, realized that if someone wasn’t out in the public arena like she was, “daring greatly,” as she calls it, she wasn’t interested in what they had to say. Bravo! Better to feel sorry for someone who is so unhappy that he has to resort to shaming a brave woman to feel better about himself. When a well-known male film critic used rude terms to shame actress and comedian Melissa McCarthy for being overweight (and what does being overweight have to do with her performance in movies?), her response was, “Why would someone be O.K. with that? I felt really bad for someone who is swimming in so much hate…. That’s someone who’s in a really bad spot, and I am in such a happy spot. I laugh my head off every day with my husband and my kids who are mooning me and singing me songs.”
¹⁰

To experience earthly pleasures and nourish the life force within you, you’ve got to release the shame—and anger, guilt, grief, and fear—that kill the libido by constricting blood flow. The truth is that you’ll never get it all done and you’ll never be perfect. You’re a goddess just as you are. Stop worrying and put pleasure and play
first.
And then, believe it or not, you’ll find that you are so energized, you’ll be able to get far more done and you’ll be far more relaxed.

Exercise: Body Love

ADDRESSING PHYSICAL OBSTACLES TO ENJOYING SEX

Of course, there can be physiological reasons for sexual desire waning, one of which is pain during sex. If sex is painful,
it may simply be because of vaginal dryness—which is easily addressed with lubricants. But it can also be due to repressed anger or trauma manifesting as scarring or vaginal adhesions. These can form after inflammation, infection, and surgery. In the late 1980s, it finally dawned on gynecologists that women with chronic pelvic pain very often had experienced rape or other sexual abuse. Given that every year one in three women on this planet is raped or abused, it’s not surprising that so many women experience pelvic pain and painful sex.

One of the most effective modalities for women with pelvic pain, urinary problems, and sexual pain is the subspecialty of physical therapy known as Women’s Health Physical Therapy. Therapists trained in this modality know exactly how to retrain the muscles of the pelvic floor and help reestablish normal function. You can learn more at
www.thebathroomkey.com
or
www.obgyn-physicaltherapy.com
.

Sometimes, manual therapy, a type of massage, is required to break up fascial scarring in the pelvis. My colleagues who do manual therapy work have reported many cases of women who’ve had painful sex being cured in a very short time with this type of therapy. Women’s health physical therapist Tami Lynn Kent (
www.wildfeminine.com
) reports some incredible results with using manual therapy on women who find sex painful due to fascial scarring and lesions. So do Larry and Belinda Wurn (
www.clearpassage.com
), who developed the Wurn Technique and have trained many other physical therapists. Jennifer Mercier, M.D. (
www.drjennifermercier.com
), is also an expert in this area and has trained other practitioners in manual therapy for pelvic scarring.

To avoid pain during intercourse, you need adequate lubrication. Lack of lubrication does not mean a lack of sexual interest or response. Some women naturally generate a lot of fluid when aroused—others, not so much. If you have difficulty with lubrication, go ahead and use lubricant liberally. There are many types available over the counter. Low estrogen can also cause a decrease in lubrication. My favorite approach to this problem is to use
Pueraria mirifica
either orally or topically. It is very effective for restoring vaginal moisture.

Birth control pills, patches, or shots, while highly effective, may alter your natural testosterone levels in such a way as to quell libido. Continue using some kind of birth control scrupulously if you’re still
physically
fertile—and you have to consider yourself fertile for a full year after your last period ends. Consider using a type other than those made with synthetic hormones. IUDs and tubal ligation are good choices as well.