Do you find it challenging to feel love for yourself?
Has it been difficult for you to truly enjoy your sexual body?
If you answer yes to either of these questions, you are not going to truly enjoy sex.
How can you enjoy sex when you don’t love your own body? When you don’t know your body, when you don’t have a really intimate relationship with your body?
Intimacy means the absence of fear.
If you are carrying programming, ideas, thoughts, beliefs, that your body is in someway sinful, dangerous, disgusting, shameful, dirty… then how are you truly going to be able to abandon yourself to the pleasure of sex?
Can you truly enjoy your partner giving you oral sex if you are worrying about your smell, or your taste, or even what you look like? If you don’t love and enjoy and appreciate your vagina, how are you going to expect anyone else to enjoy your vagina?
Whatever is running in you, whatever your beliefs about yourself, you are going to project that onto your partner and you’re going to have that experience in sex.
So the first step to having truly beautiful sexual experiences is to truly know and love your sexual body. And this is really, really challenging for women. We have been conditioned to shut it away, ignore it, cover it, not touch it, not smell it, certainly not taste it...we don’t know ourselves.
So my invitation is to get to know yourself.
Get a mirror, actually properly look at your own genitals, look at how your vulva is shaped. Appreciate your labia. Every single woman’s labia is different to every other woman’s labia. We are so beautiful in our uniqueness.
Appreciate her.
Try and give her the space to be seen and appreciated without judgement. Without criticism. She is perfect. She is exquisite. The more you can enjoy her and love her, the more you are going to enjoy sex with her.
Look at her, taste her. Put your fingers inside, pull them out and lick them. This is going to make your sex so much better, when you enjoy the taste of your partner’s tongue after it has been inside of you because you already know and love your taste. Smell her.
Take photos of your vulva. Look at her beauty. Then paint her. Or make clay models - whatever your modality is, get creative. Appreciate and celebrate your unique and glorious sexual body.
I am also a strong advocate of women claiming the language that they want to use.
Vagina is anatomically correct for the vaginal canal, the internal part of our genitalia. It’s not correct for the whole area - the inside is the vagina, the outside is the vulva. Vagina translates as “Sheath for a sword”, I am not wholly comfortable with that, I do not consider my partner’s penis as a weapon and I do not want to consider that any part of my body exists to be a sheath for his sword.
I do still use the word vagina a lot because I like the way it rolls off the tongue. I am not comfortable with the etymology of the word, but I do like the way it sounds.
My personal favourite is cunt, it’s the word I use in my relationship and which my partner uses when he is talking to me about her or speaking to her directly. And I am careful about using it in my professional life because, well, as you know it carries a whole heap of cultural baggage.
Lots of women like the word pussy, it’s not my word, it’s too fluffy and lacks gravitas, my cunt is way too powerful to be called a pussy. And if that is their word then YAY!!! That is their chosen word.
More and more women are choosing yoni, the sanskrit word for female genitalia. It feels divine and using the word yoni helps them to connect to this very divine and sacred part of their bodies.
And I have nothing against creating our own words to refer to and talk about our own bodies. As long as we are doing so from a place of power, love and respect.
The key is to choose and use words you like.
And my final thoughts on getting to know and love your sexual anatomy is to do so from a place of innocence. I invite you to reclaim your innocence as you embark on this journey of falling in love with your body.
Innocence is what we had before we had shame, before we had judgement, before we had criticism, before we found ourselves disgusting, before we grew up in a society that told us that women’s bodies are disgusting and shameful and sinful and wrong.
So try to step into that space of innocence, reclaim your innocence.
Yes, there will be discomfort along the way. Be kind to the discomfort, nourish it, accept it and then say, “I choose innocence. I choose innocent exploration, I choose innocent discovery, I want to know myself from this place of innocence. Because the judgement, the shame, the criticism, that’s all cultural baggage. I choose innocence. I am choosing to know myself, I am choosing to love myself.”
And as you fall in love with your sexual body, you will find that you are able to enjoy so much more pleasure with her.
Have a wonderful journey!
Photo bySharon McCutcheon onUnsplash