Sex, Death, Meditation and Trauma: All Tools for Transformation

I am currently diving into many books, one of them being, Healing Trauma by Peter Levine which offers a 12 step process for learning how to deal with trauma as well as recover and even transform from it.  What he wrote that struck a chord with me was that sex, death, meditation and trauma all play a part in our continuing transformation.  I like how, in a way, there is almost a distinct method or way of allowing for transformation to happen in your life in one of those four aspects.  Maybe for one person, it would not involve any of these, but I have a sense that for the majority out there, these four play a big role.

So, in this blog, let’s talk about sex!.  No, death or depressing talk here, at least not today.  I really hope to get some comments from this blog, because I would love to know how other women feel about this subject and how maybe sex has or has not been a transformative power in their lives.

Obviously, much of what I have been doing recently is linking my current issue with uterine fibroids with any physical or emotional pattern that I have been avoiding, messing up on or could improve upon.  I could definitely say that my view of sex, sensuality, what is sexy, how to be sexy and not be a slut have all been skewed from a very young age.  I won’t go into too much details, but I had my first encounter of what sex was at a young age when I discovered my dad’s Penthouse and Playboy magazines that were hiding in a drawer in our apartment at the time.  I believe that also coming from a somewhat conservative and overly protective family, we did not talk about sex much except for the talk of the birds and the bees.  I never had a romanticized mother to daughter conversation about puberty and my cycles and what they would mean for me as I got older and became a woman.  I also remember this very clearly in my mind that as a little girl, maybe 11 or 12, I distinctly remember thinking to myself that I would either become a nun or a Playboy bunny.  Not sure how that came about, but those were some of the thoughts running in my head at the time.

Getting older and into middle school and high school, I had a very low self-esteem of myself and confidence.  Maybe it started then, of not feeling girly or feminine enough.  If you look at pictures of me from those days, I had really short hair, like a boy; I had started puberty and went from being stick thin and eating whatever I wanted, to getting curves and even a bit of a belly as well as acne! Now, I didn’t lack in the smarts or even a little healthy athletic competition, I was always ready to prove myself to the boys.  However, my sense of being a girl, of being pretty or attractive was lacking.

I never kissed a boy until I got into college and also did not lose my virginity until then.  When I graduated from college and made my way into the Navy, I felt for the very first time that I was being noticed as a woman, as someone who was sexy and enticing and appealing.  I never had that attention before and all I can say is that it was very addicting. Yet, I still struggled with feeling feminine enough or sexy enough, even to this day.

These are some of the words/characteristics that I found while looking up the second chakra: opening, release, vulnerability, sensuality, procreation, creativity, finances, relationships, low back pain, vaginal infections, assertiveness, comfort with sexuality, inherited generational discomfort with sex from mother. These are some of the  characteristics taken from Christiane Northrup’s website and the Mommy Mystic Blog.

For those not familiar with what the second chakra is, it is derived from the 7 chakra system where whorls or vortexes of energy are found running vertically along the center of the body starting from the genital region running all the way up to the top of the head.  All of these energy centers have some correlation with our emotional or psychological state.  For example, the first chakra, muladhara, the root chakra deals with the basic needs in your life, security, shelter, food, etc. The second chakra, svadisthana, is located right in the sacral region, where the reproductive organs are located and I firmly believe that issues with any of the above will manifest physical problems, such as chronic vaginitis (me!), back pain (me!) or fibroids (me again!).

So coming back full circle to this moment and what I have learned/realized and my past, I realize I have some work to do in this area as it definitely fuels a lot of wanting growth in the other areas of my life, like my relationships, my self-confidence as a person, a teacher, a wife and even future mother.  Yes, sex, and not in the most crudest of terms, is and can be a method of transformation.  Maybe in the way of discovering your first orgasm, masturbating, feeling comfortable undressing in front of your partner or even touching yourself during sex!  Even writing this stuff and thinking about it makes me blush :) Why does it have to conjure up almost shameful feelings?

My question, is why have I been so afraid of my own woman-ness and why have I not owned my sexuality?  Why are we as a sex constantly comparing and even degrading our own bodies so that we can in some lifetime look like the young girl on the cover of Sports Illustrated or Victoria’s Secret?  Are those ideals even worth it and why do we as a society allow it?  Are we willing to spend the rest of our lives trying to attain this ideal when we could just own what we have right now and enjoy it? Is it worth doing this to ourselves and passing those same ideas on to the future generation?

So, I see these questions as great pathways for me to explore and they probably would never have erupted and come about  if I did not have my recent tragedy occur.  There is a lot of healing that needs to occur in my second chakra and lots of opening and release…you can take that it either literally or figuratively :)

Subtlety vs. Intensity

This past weekend, I attended the International Association of Yoga Therapists Symposium and had an enriching weekend of learning, moving and shifting my consciousness with my personal practice.

I titled this blog, Subtlety vs. Intensity because I feel that in a yoga class, we are always playing between that boundary.  Depending on the type of class, you may intentionally allow for a strong amount of intensity in your practice or the work can be so small and so subtle that it can still have such a powerful and lasting effect.  I am a student and an instructor of Yoga Tune Up® and love what the practice does for my body in re-engineering parts of me that have been so locked up.  In a way, it is a pretty intense work! it is that kind of work where you begin to sweat in places you never knew you could sweat.  You also feel muscles where you never knew there were muscles present there before either.  It is deep work and for that I am grateful, because it automatically brings you into your body, you cannot run or hide and all of your stuff, whether it is tension, ego, the negative stuff, it is all there and you get to excavate it out.

I was fortunate enough to take a wonderful class with Carrie Demers and Sheri Friedrichsen. The session I took during Labor Day weekend at the IAYT Symposium was called Stoking the Digestive Fire: The Key to Radiant Health and its focus was all about the first three chakras and keeping the agni or digestive fire healthy, glowing and contained.  Maybe becuase the chakras and learning about them have been slightly esoteric for me, I feel that I relate and and can connect with at least the first three, they are currently challenging areas for me right now and ones that I realize I may have even been avoiding and not addressing readily.

The experiential part of the session included work that was very subtle and for me in a way almost bordered on frustration.  This was not big, dynamic movements, they were somewhat static, but in such miniscule terms that the only muscles we were trying to innervate and engage were the muscles along the pelvic floor.  Now, this was different than Kegels, we didn’t just squeeze everything down there and we were not using accessory muscles, like our neck, to help us in our effort.  We slowly built up to Agni Sara, slowly adding muscles that started along the pelvic floor, moving up towards the internal obliques, the transversalis, the external obliques and then the rectus abdominus.  It was absolutely shocking and thrilling when I was able to “master” the engagement of one of the sets of muscles at a time.  As I had to work with my breath and then integrate them all, that was more challenging; but that was where the work was and where it was so subtle, but so defining.  I was thrilled as I moved my muscles and began to take the movement into Agni Sara where I was standing and feeling a huge release along my lower back.  In a strange way, it was slightly addictive, feeling what I felt and wanting to feel that release again and again.  I know you have felt that way when coming into a deep stretch that feels “oh so good”, it was the same here, even though it was subtle.

So, subtlety vs. intensity, I think they can go both ways.  A very subtle and somewhat un-intimidating pose or exercise can have the most profound effects as does an intense pose or exercise.  I have much more respect for the subtlety in life even now and continue to try to find the subtlety in even the most intense experiences in my practice and my life.

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