Hi everyone!

I say that with such a swell of gladness to be with you again. It’s hard to explain the love and tenderness I feel for you and the honor it is to be here, exploring such important, tender things each month.

This month, though, while guests have so powerfully filled this space with stories and questions, I have felt personally absent on most levels. I’ve been turning more inward and further outward than I normally turn – inward to try to understand some of my fears and blocks around taking my work to the next level and outward to try to see and paint some outlines of what Life beyond MY fears might be on this front.

Dyana Valentine has been an outstanding midwife through this process, and while there have been times I’ve wished I could just say, “Here. YOU do it,” about giving the actual birth, I’m feeling deeply satisfied with the hard work I’ve done and a quiet, even reverent sense of gratitude to be both responsible for my own life, and absolutely helped with that task. I’m alone and I’m not. I’m weak and I’m strong. I’m beaten down and I’m standing up on both feet, so glad to be with you again!

On that same note, there are things I want to say as our month on sexuality closes.

First, I want to say thank you. Thank you, to all who shared posts and comments this month. What an honor for the rest of us to be given such gifts! Thank you for your courage and your willingness to be seen. Thank you for helping our own wounded places find solace in your stories and your companionship and your healing.

I’m so moved by you! – teared up as I type all this.

My own experiences this month also move me to speak to those of us who haven’t felt able to engage this topic with the type of depth or energy we might have expected to engage it with – at this site, but really much more broadly, too, beyond any thoughts of Trust Tending.

Back in January, when I created my list of topics to cover each month, I looked with so much joy and anticipation toward this one. I’ve been so aware in recent years how constricted I’ve felt my whole life, how much of my beauty and radiance and sexiness and sensuality have been hidden behind fears and insecurities…and how possible it seems to me now to move ever more into the freedom I long for. Writing posts for this site has been such a powerful source of these shifts for me that I was STOKED to get to explore sexuality here.

And then this month arrived, and beyond my kids getting sick and my husband traveling, I started my coaching with Dyana, and every available emotional resource got tied up in that work. I had no idea how deep my fears went around taking my work to it’s next natural place! I’m still baffled by it, really. But the point is that I *wanted* to be focusing on sexuality, and even felt relief at the thought of growing more trust and awareness around it, but the stars were not aligned for that to happen.

Often we hear about the sacral chakra – the power center located in our pelvis and the base of our spine – being connected with sexuality and creativity. We hear about how growth and awakening in one of these areas (sexuality, creativity) has implications for the other, since both are so connected. And as a creative person who ALSO happens to live in a culture that lauds sexual prowess and sex appeal above much else, I’ve felt a kind of urgency about getting my game on in the sexual arena (speaking broadly here to include not only sex itself, but a kind of powerful, life force energy) in order to live the creative life and creative dreams I feel are mine to live.

I’ve felt like growing in wholeness as a sexual/sensual being is my best and next route to living my best creative life.

But hell if I didn’t cover some of the most important ground this month that I could have ever covered around healing deep wounds and preparing ground for my life’s next harvest. And that ground had nothing overtly to do with sex or sensuality at all!

So I’m moved as I write this last post to shout out to those of you who feel on the outside of some important thing when it comes to body love, or sexual healing or awakening or exploration, or the capacity to even care or give attention to such things at all. If you feel on the outside of all this, and wonder whether the work in front of you – whether it be your literal job, or the parenting you’re doing, or the depression you’re experiencing, or the grief, or the anxiety about some upcoming change – whatever it is, if you’re wondering whether the work that’s in front of you right now is way off in left field – or the bleacher seats, even – of the game you think is most important to play, I want to tell you: I think it’s very much not.

Where you are RIGHT NOW is good. It’s where your path has taken you. And if that path leads on toward something that feels way more juicy and appealing and sexy and cinematic than where you are today, I’m sure that will feel great. But skipping the lessons in front of your face, or assuming those other, more appealing ones are somehow BETTER, or more POTENT than the drip drip or slog upon sloggy-slog step you’re taking right now is the very best way to miss your life’s greatest gold. The gold that actually makes your life – the whole of it – rich in the ways you most want it to be.

(I’m not talking here about staying stuck, either – about assuming that suffering is what the gods have bestowed on you and the outstretched hands or resources around you need must be snubbed. I’m talking about staying with yourself, rather than flitting off away to try to be other, or to be like someone else. I’m talking about listening more deeply than you might otherwise do to what IS, rather than leaning your ears constantly into the future to try to receive what could or might be some future version of you.)

((The secret irony here is this: your future unfolds more beautifully and richly, and with far less angst, if you get to it this way, rather than through all that leaning.))

So here’s my best advice for you and me: Do your very best to open your heart wide to the life and lessons in front of your face. If a crack in your heart’s door is all you can muster right now, that’s more than fine, too! Be unsexy for as long as you need to be. Be uncool or out of date or off the grid or on something more like a carriage ride than a fast train.

Do whatever it takes to be…you.

In almost every way, this is my biggest life’s challenge, and I’m venturing to assume it is for many of you, too.

And the more that I rise to this challenge, in the only ways I know how, the more love I feel for my life, and the more patience I feel to watch my life’s fruit in ALL of its stages – bud, flower, hard little knot, growth, expansion, ripeness, decay – rather than only the juicy, mouth-watering ones.

It may sound strange to say, but I love you. The real you. And you have my promise that I’ll do my very best to love and be and share with you the real me, too.

Yours in trust,

P.S. Though not a typical resource round-up, I want to at least document some of the resources that I know of or that some of you have sent my way for growing trust around sexual things. I hope to explore these more (or again) when the time is ripe for it.

Eleven Minutes, a novel by Paulo Cuelho
Writings and audio by David Deida
This TED talk on female orgasm
Sex for one: The joy of self-loving, a book by Betty Dodson
The Tao of Sexual Massage, a book by Stephen Russell
The Welcomed Consensus, a website with tons of resources focused on female orgasm
Sex, Love & Liberation, a website and more
Embody Tantra, classes and resources related to tantra
Breasts, a short documentary about breasts. On demand from Netflix.
All posts from Trust Tending’s sexuality theme This links to July’s theme page

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