“If we could heal only one thing in the human experience and it was our relationship to our sexual selves, everything else would heal as a consequence.” -Wendy Strgar

Sex is at the beginning and end of who we are. Indeed, we are each the most profound products of the sexual act, and the more we learn about our fragile, erotic selves, the more obvious it is that this is the center around which our lives orbit, whether we are conscious of it or not. I often say “After we eat, drink and sleep, the next thing we are is sexual.” Peering through our cultural lens, we see this in the multi-billion dollar advertising industry, which continuously employs blatant over-sexualized messages to sell everything. At the same time, we have become a technology-driven culture that has all but divorced sexuality from intimacy while still insisting that sexual education has no place in our schools.

Sexual confusion and ignorance is amplified into terror as we look around the globe. Not uncommonly, young women are sold, bartered, raped, cut, silenced, covered from head to toe, and even murdered in the name of sexual ignorance, shame and fear. The tragedy of our collective human sexual pain is something we bear together as a race. None of us escapes unscathed by the trauma that is too often synonymous with our sexual souls.

Telling a true story about this mysterious part of ourselves may just be the open door to healing what I believe is most broken about living on earth. Rectifying our relationship to our core erotic identity and protecting it from shame can only happen from the inside out. Protecting ourselves without simultaneously nurturing ourselves just hardens us, making the wounded places impenetrable. This is an all too familiar result of naming but not healing our injuries. Nurturing and comforting ourselves sexually resembles a childlike curiosity. All of the wonder and amazement we had when we first discovered pleasurable sensations is still alive in us.

Reawakening to our capacity to feel happens when we stop paying attention with our thinking minds and focus instead on our sensory capacity. Besides the most obvious reasons to invite and cultivate a pleasure response of how good it feels, there are hundreds of medical studies that reinforce the multi-layered impact of a healthy sexual response to every other aspect of our wellbeing. Everything from reduced risk of disease to stronger immune response to higher self-esteem comes through our capacity to give and receive pleasure.

But even more compelling, is that as each one of us breaks the chains of sexual trauma, our intention and freedom shakes the archaic structures that have bound our humanity for way too long. Individual sexual healing is magnified in ways that are hard to explain, except to note that it so completely changes your relationship to life and that life itself changes.

So dare yourself, for the good of all of us, to begin your healing journey here- where your work carries the miraculous capacity to heal us all.