Breaking the Bonds of Shame

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Breaking the Bonds of Shame – Creating More Confidence For Ourselves

If you are are a Brené Brown fan, then you are part of a small percentage of people who are willing to have a look a the impact of shame in your life.

However, for most of us, shame is not something we willingly explore or spend time contemplating. If anything, we hide it when we feel it and we avoid it when we see it others.

Yet shame is everywhere, and although it’s not inherent to our nature, we still undergo a powerful process of learning shame through our conditioning.

“You should be ashamed of yourself!” Does this statement sound familiar? It’s something often said to children when we want to influence their behaviors, yet we don’t realize the lasting impact of those powerful words. In fact, shaming others is so prevalent, it’s rare to meet someone who hasn’t been on the receiving end of those words at least once in their life.

Once we’ve learned shame, we self-propagate it: we shame ourselves. Self-shaming is so ingrained that we barely notice it. What is noticeable is the erosion of our confidence and ability to learn and grow from the mistakes we make.

That’s a big problem with shame. It means something is fundamentally wrong with us, so there’s no way we can actually do something about our condition. We give up and stop trying.

Making mistakes is necessary. It’s how we grow our wisdom, learning to discern how our choices are impacting our lives and adjusting our behaviors according to the insights we gain from these awkward and often painful moments is crucial for healthy maturation.

But it’s not all bad news about shame. Because we learned shame, we actually can unlearn it.

There are 3 ways we can interrupt shame and start to reclaim our lives and rebuild our confidence:

1. Name The Shame: When we are in shame, our tendency is to hide. Yet shame thrives in isolation. So the first step to interrupting the pattern is to recognize when we are in shame and to name it. If we can identify when shame is present, we have a chance to transform it. In the beginning, this isn’t easy, but the more we practice, the stronger and more agile we become when handling our shame. For example: I feel shame about my body, I’m not beautiful enough.

2. No More Blame: Once we have identified the presence of shame, we then have the opportunity to turn our attention to how we are using blame to avoid the responsibility of transforming our lives. We may blame ourselves, others or circumstances. When we do this, we assign our power to the blaming rather than the transformation.

This step is more like taking honest stock of all the contributing factors in our situation and then shifting our attention to transformation, what we’d actually love as an outcome. For example: I haven’t actually been loving my body or doing the things that allow her to thrive.

3. Fan the Flame: What we’d love is no small thing. What matters to our heart is crucial, consider it like a form of inner guidance. Even if we have no idea how what we’d love is possible, it is viable as an option because it exists in your heart.

When we ask ourselves: What is the outcome that I would love? We mobilize our creative genius. We shift our power from what felt like an impossible and horrible condition into the limitless realm of possibility. For example: I’d love to feel vibrantly healthy and switched on in my body. By fanning the flame of what we’d love, we become aware of what is possible and can mobilize ourselves in that direction.

It takes great resilience to choose to face shame head-on and to reclaim lives. We will be faced by this choice, not once, not twice, but possibly many time every day.

The good news is that through exercising the 3 steps outlined above, you’ll be using your will in new, powerful and creative ways and this builds confidence!

If this article has been helpful, please share it. I’d love to invite you to join me for my 6 hour Shameless Surrender training. where we not only look more deeply at shame, we also explore the importance of shamelessness and surrender, especially with regards to creating more sensual and sexual confidence. Together, we can do this.

A Simple Remedy For Holiday Burn-Out

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Have you felt completely overwhelmed with meeting the demands of work, family and creating a beautiful life for yourself?

Maybe you’ve been under a stressful dead-line and unpredicted things have created delays, causing you to push and overwork in order to keep your business thriving?

Or perhaps it’s been so long since you’ve been relaxed and playful that numbness has taken over and you don’t remember what it’s like to have fun?

Or worse, you’ve been feeling alone and isolated, even when surrounded by people?

Disconnection is real. Stress is real. Trying to live up to our ideals is real. And learning to transform our stress is not only an essential part of reality, it’s a must.

No matter what the scenario, living in a stress cycle creates a lot of wear and tear on our body and spirit. And to add fuel to the fire, the more we are stressed, the less we are resourced to transform our stress.

So how do we break this pattern?

Oxytocin.

It’s one of the amazing secrets of our regenerating bodies!

Not only is it a powerful connection hormone, it’s also a very important neurotransmitter that assists in creating more brain plasticity which is essential in creating new healthy habits and giving us greater access to our creative genius.

Deeply embedded patterns lead to rapid aging and illness. To transform those patterns, we need to be able to change our habits and to learn new ways of being and living. Having a boost to our ability to shift and grow has very powerful and lasting results in our well-being.

To break our stress patterns, we must engage in a pleasure-based hormonal cycle which is most easily induced through direct connection with others. Not the ‘online-through-an-app’ connection, but direct human contact, where we give and receive physical touch.

Yes. This means getting off our devices and seeking out personal time with others, preferably playful, sensual contact such as the kind experienced through partner dancing or snuggling.

But what happens when we don’t feel safe enough for connection of this kind or don’t have access to other people?

If we do not have access to others or we don’t feel safe to connect physically with others, we can still induce an oxytocin state within our own body. This can be a huge game changer, especially for those of us who are under a lot of stress such as having young children and/or running our own businesses.

Steps to transformation stress into vitality:

  1. Recognize and admit we are stressed. This is important so that we are aware of our need for connection and relaxation.
  1. Break our habits. This means literally doing something different every 50 mins or so during our work day. For example: get up and move if we sit all the time or reach out if we have a tendency to isolate.
  1. Breathe more deeply if we tend to shallow breathe. Breathing is key, especially if we can combine it with gentle, yet firm contact with our own body. Let your out breath be slightly longer than your in breath.

If learning more about Oxytocin and how self-inducing oxytocin can benefit your relationships and well-being, you’re invited to join my oxytocin training and start to harness your own self-inducing skills: Transforming Holiday Stress Into Connection

Kavanaugh’s Wildfire: The Rise of Sacred Anger

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Thanks to the recent Kavanaugh event, we have added more fuel onto the already spreading wildfire of outrage—a fierce call igniting within each of us an opportunity to look at how we perceive women’s bodies and sexual rights, along with the larger issue of human dignity.

This is an unprecedented time when the full spectrum of change and possibility is alive for each of us. Some of us are the rising storm itself, while some of us are the storm-riders, attempting to make sense of how we feel and how we can affect change in the climate of overwhelm and confusion. Thankfully, there are stages to this storm that we can map out and use to our advantage.

Three Stages of Transformational Storms

 

Stage One: Turning Righteous Anger into Sacred Anger

Before we get creative, we must feel what we feel or risk numbing out, or worse, deepening our own trauma and pain. Anger is a good sign. It means we are no longer willing to be frozen and numb. It means we are waking up to all the ways in which our own sovereignty as individuals has been overridden and disrespected.

The only trap to look out for is that of feeling righteous in our anger—where our own experience is viewed as more important than that of others, and where we, in turn, disrespect others through how we react to our challenges. This kind of anger can feel good after feeling helpless, and as it gathers momentum and power, it can move through a greater and greater number of us. Yet this kind of anger, like a wildfire, seeks only to obliterate whatever is in its way, no matter what the cost.

This is where sacred anger comes in—the clear, focused anger that’s the cornerstone of catalyzing a transformational and effective end result. When we harness the intensity of our rage with lucid clarity, mobilizing ourselves and others to create the change we believe is needed, we become powerful change agents.

So yes to our collective anger, and rather than wasting it through emulating the behavior of those who enrage us, we have the opportunity to rise together in sacred anger—a force more powerful than imaginable. It’s in service to the common good of everyone: one in which our sovereignty is seen, respected and heard.

Are you willing to let yourself feel anger and focus it into sacred anger?

Stage Two: Moving from Assumptions to Clarity

Rather than throwing tantrums kindled through assumptive reactions, we must put our genius to work and attain clarity. It enables us to create lasting change in which the choices of each individual within the greater collective are upheld and considered. We are not a one-size-fits-all world.

Assumptions can only take us so far, often at a great cost. By allowing ourselves to integrate our feelings with our capacity to use our intellect, we start to engage in the clarity needed for us to move forward with integrity.

This includes recognizing the essence of human dignity: that only WE can be the true authority of our own choices. We’re not children needing mother and father to patronize us into proper behavior.

Up until now, we have put conditions on our healing and reclamation, deferring our power to an external authority. Yet both the #MeToo movement and the recent Kavanaugh hearing have clearly shown that although conditions are not what we’d like them to be, we no longer buy into the idea that those conditions pre-determine the trajectory of our own lives. In other words, the full reclamation of our power isn’t dependent on any conditions, including the ones we are currently facing.

Are you willing to get curious, letting go of assumptions, to have a deeper look at issues through the lens of your own sovereignty?

Stage Three: Creative Action

Structures help us function better, however, when they shift towards tyranny, it’s natural to be ignited with sacred anger—anger that arises from noticing injustice and offering forward-moving solutions. It’s time for a structural upgrade.

As we address many large issues that impact humanity, and we work together to improve the conditions for all people, we are realizing that we cannot leave behind the issues that surround our body and sexuality. The dissolution of existing paradigms about sexuality makes the idea of sexual sovereignty an important one to consider.

Sexual sovereignty is a new possibility, one that will be fleshed out not by the few, but by the many. What would it look like to live in a world where each of us feels safe to be in our body, we enjoy our body, and we naturally take on the responsibilities of being a sexual being?

Establishing the profound respect for oneself naturally allows this same respect to flow outwardly to others. No longer can we stand for slavery, serfdom, the sex trade, and all manners of outdated ways in which we treat each other’s body and sexuality.

Kavanaugh’s recent rise to the Supreme Court need not predetermine the outcome for all American women. This is a unique opportunity to laser-focus the fire in our belly to moves into right action and to co-create a world where sexual sovereignty is established as a true human birthright.

Now’s the time to come deeper into our body, to let the rage flow through, leaving us crystal clear that what we stand for does matter and is worthy of our continued attention. We are setting a precedent for the future generations, one in which, against all odds, we come together in common purpose for the good of everyone. One in which we stand so fully in our power that we no longer regard men as our enemy, but are finally willing to invite them to stand with us as our allies.

Our sexuality isn’t a commodity, a weapon, a thing to be used. It is who we are. By learning to heal ourselves of our traumas and wounds, by taking a stand to fully abide in ourselves, by using our voices, sharing our stories, we become the change we desire and we open the invitation for others to do the same.

It is time for each of us to heal, to speak, and to contribute to creating more of what we’d love in the world. What is one thing you can do today to take creative action towards what you’d love?

To discover more about the impact of desire, explore Dr. Saida Désilets’ newest book, Desire: DesireTheBook.com

Jade Eggs, Lawsuits & Throwing Out The Baby With The Bath Water (or not!)

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In the light of world events, a lawsuit about jade eggs may seem rather contrite and of little importance. However, when we look a little deeper, a greater issue is revealed: the abject disrespect for women’s erotic intelligence.

As the founder of the modern Jade Egg movement and creatrix of a powerful psycho-sexual method, I’m not at all surprised by the recent lawsuit against Goop. For years I’ve been speaking up against the outrageous claims made about the Jade Egg, taking a stand for the fact that it’s the woman herself that creates her transformation, not the Jade/Yoni egg.

This fact was revealed while during the research for my dissertation—the functional model (do a certain technique with the Jade Egg and get a particular result) was only 1/2 the answer. The more important part of the equation was being left out: the deeper meaning and purpose of our sexuality.

Every time we make promises based on a technique or a thing, we disrespect a woman’s inherent erotic intelligence. We actually propagate her social conditioning, anchoring further that we are not enough as we are, broken and in need of fixing, and must have the guidance of a expert to activate our sexual powers.

Sadly, this industry is profiting from women’s pain and insecurity. And the only solution to this is for women to claim their sexual sovereignty and for professionals to treat them as such.

Jade eggs are not sex toys or gym equipment. We can use them that way, but we won’t get what we are really looking for: ourselves and a confident relationship with our sexuality.

A woman’s body and psycho-sexual health is not something to joke about or to treat like a commodity.

I realize we live in a culture that likes the quick fix, but when it comes to our sexuality, we deserve to invest time and energy in learning high quality education, steering away from wild claims.

There isn’t a quick fix or a pill that will solve our deeper healing. Each one of us has our own journey, one that deserves our high standards and due diligence.

Maybe this incident with Goop will encourage us all to rethink our approach to this practice, and more importantly, how we treat women’s erotic intelligence.

Why I Wrote About Desire

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We all come from desire and, whether we acknowledge it or not, desire will remain an integral and intimate part of our lives.

Yet despite its intrinsic power and influence, desire still remains one of the most misunderstood parts of being a human being. And although no one is exempt from its impact, few of us consciously engage with desire. Why is that?

The answer is multifaceted and involves looking more closely at the living edge of where our desire and conditioning rub up against each other.

We can see that now, and throughout our history, desire has been vilified as the source of human suffering and misbehaviors.

The element of chaos is one of the main reasons for desire’s ill repute. It is by nature an essential disruptor; how else would evolution progress as it does?

However, this unsettling facet of desire doesn’t need to deter us. In fact, I believe that we can use this to our own creative advantage.

Imagine harnessing such a powerful force? What would happen in our life?

There is a greater purpose to desire than just titillation or instigating trouble. In fact, my new book explores the idea that desire is an emerging, evolutionary force that we can harness for the better. The problem, however, is that we will have to contend with being consistently side-tracked by ‘hijacked desires’—desires that are co-opted by social mandates.

It’s this distinction that’s crucial to transforming our relationship with desire.

I also wanted to present desire as a symphony, giving it a greater range within our lives. This is why I looked to our desire for sex, love, creating a family, thriving, spirituality and contribution as unique and powerful desire songs.

The idea behind this came from witnessing an elder friend in a state of grief, saying she was terrified of dying with her song unsung. For years this moment touched me and led me into a deeper inquiry about my own song.

I then came to a realization that if I asked myself the simple question of “am I willing to let this song be unsung?” I would inevitably find myself confronted with the truth of a desire. In essence, this question helped me separate my true desires from hijacked ones.

It also sparked in me a daring quality necessary to propel me on my evolutionary journey. This daring quality lives in all of us, yet apathy has clouded it. It’s my hope that this little book called Desire will clear any confusion we have about our own desires and reignite our own daring nature so that we all can become the powerful creators of our own lives.

In a time when we are being overwhelmed by the monstrosity of humanity, we are in need for the nourishment of inspiration and the purification of truth—not mine, but each of our own emerging understanding of what it means to trust our own heart’s calling.

How do you feel about your desire? Would you love to understand this part of yourself more? It’s easy to get your own copy of my newest book, just visit DesireTheBook.com

Gurus Aren’t Gods

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Sexual Abuse in the [Un]Conscious Sexuality Movement

More and more gurus are being called out for their sexual abuse and sexual misconduct.

This is not actually surprising. What is surprising, however, is that we are repeatedly surprised by this fact.

There’s something important about this behavior to point out because the most obvious path is to blame the gurus or men in positions of power and forget that it takes two to tango.

There are no victims here, not really.

Naiveté is no longer a free ticket to making bad choices and pointing our finger at our abuser.

If we are adult enough to make choices, especially around sexuality, then we are adult enough to be responsible for the outcome of our choices, even when we are unsure of ourselves or new at an endeavor.

I’d like to propose that there’s something else, other than just the obvious abuser/victim cycle, at work here.

However, before I dive into why hijacked desires are a detriment to all involved, I do want to take a moment to point out the obvious:

A Sexual Guru Isn’t Not A God, He/She is Human

There is a need for people to learn about their sexuality and sexual energy. It’s part of our erotic evolution to seek out teachers and guides in this area, yet there are no real standards in place for these teachers/teachings.

Somehow, for many decades (if not longer) no one has ever questioned the authority of these sexual guru figures.

Or if someone did question them, their voice was never translated for the rest of us to benefit from.

Personally, I started my journey with a wide open heart and a deep desire to learn the arts of conscious sexuality. As a young woman, I viewed advanced Taoist and Tantric practitioners with a sort of reverence reserved for the gods of ancient Greece.

Very quickly, however, I got to see how ‘unconscious’ the conscious sexuality movement actually was:

Story 1: Men surrounding me at a Tantra evening, calling me a Goddess and saying all sorts of ‘formula’ phrases designed to make my female ego throb with desire. All it did was freak me out. And worse, they would NOT let me out of their circle. I had to force myself out between two bodies and literally run away. So much for being adored as a ‘Goddess’.

Story 2: My first teacher seduced me with ideas of ‘higher teachings and special initiations’. Because of my need to be seen and feel special, I bought into his ideas. They involved having sex with him. It was pretty lame sex and I never felt the promised ‘orgasm that takes me to God’. To be honest, I felt more with my own hand in the quiet of the night.

Story 3: As a teacher myself, I was confronted, over and over again, by mothers whose daughters had fallen for the ‘sex teacher’. When I approached the founders and leaders of my community, I was told that I didn’t understand because I was married!!! What?! I retorted that even as a single woman teaching the work, I had never looked to my students for my sexual and relational needs, so why would male teachers be exempt of this? Are we not here to serve our students to learn, grow, and evolve? Obviously not, it’s more like having easy access to a lot of willing sexual partners.

The list odd stories is endless.

I’m sure this has been going on for as long as there have been sexuality teachers. What’s surprising is how few of us seem to go into these communities armed with this knowledge.

I’ll tell you why this is so:

  1. We have our own agendas that we want met. We are blind to what is obvious and see only our own projections rather than the truth.
  2. Living by ideals and not reality. We all have a fantasy of the perfect situation, with the perfect teacher, and the perfect outcome, but the truth is that this is rarely the case and we’d be served to notice the truth of a situation instead of insisting on pushing our ideals.
  3. We assume that anything ‘Eastern’ is holy and impeccable. This is absolutely ridiculous. Humans are humans. They have needs. If we cannot see this, then we are intentionally sticking our heads in the sand.
  4. Young women are especially vulnerable. We are resolving our daddy issues, we want to be special and unique, we want to be Goddesses (especially sex Goddesses), we believe that we need a teacher to unlock our potential, and so forth. You get the picture. We do not teach young people about the right to say what happens with their bodies—what I call Sexual Sovereignty. Because of this, they simply don’t know any better and with that comes risk.
  5. Drive-Thru Sexuality Practices. This is at the crux of most of the issues in this industry. What is known and out there is actually of very poor quality. It has been left unchallenged for far too long and diluted more and more as the information gets shared wider and wider. The truth of the practices is that they have long been exchanged as an excuse to resolve sexual tension and insecurities.

Fairly early on in my journey, it became very clear to me that the information that was available as ‘alternative or conscious’ sexuality practices was more of a joke.  Many times were led by sexual predators and/or sexual addicts.

A large number of people seek alternative sexuality education as a way to initiate their own sexual healing. Some of these individuals teach. In truth, they decided that they were qualified to lead and teach, yet have only managed to grow their neurotic relationship with sexuality and propagate more trauma.

This issue is compounded by ‘hijacked’ desires.

We want what we want no matter the cost,
even the cost of our own integrity

The desire to evolve sexually is honest and real.

The desire to do this no matter what the cost, is BS.

We live in a world that has made a currency out of our sexuality for so long we’ve no clue what it actually means to be a sexual being.

Add sexual repression and layers of dissatisfaction and sexual shame, and we have the perfect climate for an unconscious ‘conscious sexuality’ movement.

Transforming Lead To Gold – Awakening Consciousness
In the Conscious Sexuality Movement

Judging something to be right or wrong only serves to separate ourselves further from it, but it doesn’t actually make the issue go away. This means that instead of judging people and their choices, practitioner or participant, we’d be better off learning from what we are witnessing and using that learning to create deeper, more meaningful experiences.

If we want to actually contribute to bringing more consciousness into sexuality, then we need to hone our discernment while we ditch our judgements.

Discernment is the ability to see the truth and to act in alignment with it without having to make something good/bad or right/wrong. Discernment empowers aligned action, which deepens our self-trust and personal impeccability.

Seven Crucial Aspects of Transformation

  1. We get to own that we desire to grow sexually and sensually. This is a true and honest calling.
  2. We get to also own that we feel incomplete and that we are seeking something or someone to reassure us that we are okay.
  3. To speak out, to question, to challenge authority is crucial, especially in the field of sexuality. Although this can lead to being ostracized, shunned, we must be willing to risk ‘not being liked or approved of’ if we are to take a stand for our own sexual sovereignty.
  4. We must understand that there are literally ZERO standards in the [un]conscious sexuality movement and that we must exercise discernment to the utmost degree.
  5. If you want to know the truth of a teacher, look at their life: How do they live? Are they single or partnered? If they are in a relationship, is it successful? [Many people have a public persona, but what happens when no one is looking is a different matter all together.] Do they have their own method or are they proposing they are following a lineage? How long have they practiced? Who did they learn from, and more importantly, how did they take the information and embody it? Do they believe you need them to grow and evolve? Are they insisting on teaching you through having sex with you? (FYI: The most inadequate teachers require this form of contact. Very high level practitioners would never request this of you NOR would they need such an exchange to transmit their understanding of the deeper wisdom to you).
  6. Have you already experienced abuse? If you have, where are you in your reclamation of your sovereign space? You have the right to feel all the feelings you are moving through, there’s no need to be anything other than who you are in this moment and to learn from what happened so that you are able to choose differently in the future.
  7. Call out those who are out of integrity. It’s important not to collude with the group. If something is off inside the group or with the leader of the group, call them on it. It will not feel nice to do this, but it’s worse to stay silent. If you aren’t ready to do this for yourself, then do it in defense of others.

A New Paradigm For Sexuality

Sexuality isn’t just the act of sex, or more specifically, the act of intercourse.

For more than two decades, I’ve been inviting people to consider the idea that they are sexual beings, not sexual ‘doings’ and inviting them to explore what that means for them personally. This idea can be profoundly challenging as it goes against the ideals and assumptions of society, yet it’s worthy of contemplation.

Being able to define something for ourselves is also invaluable on this journey along with the ability to understand that we were born erotically intact and intelligent.

We are standing at a crucial moment in human history and evolution, a moment where we no longer can afford to be unconscious, where we must ‘grow up’ emotionally and sexually and from this new vantage point, create the world we’d love to live in.

Gurus, old ideals, and ongoing, recurring human behavior are being upgraded, whether we partake willingly or not. Either way, through choice or pain, we will grow. How we go through this growth phase is determined by the choices each of us makes in the micro-moments of life.

It’s time to put sexuality in its rightful place: a natural, sovereign, integral part of being a human being.

This birthright comes with responsibilities. If we want deeper, more intense and alive sexuality, then we must equally be willing to take greater and more thorough responsibility for our choices—from birth control to saying yes or no—and owning the consequences of those choices as a sexually sovereign adult.

If this article speaks to you, we’d love to hear your thoughts (feel free to leave them in the comments below) and have you share it with your community. Come over to TheDaringProject.com  to deepen the discussion and we’ll gift you a free 30-day trial.