Pleasure As Your Birthright:
When Knowing Isn’t Enough & 5 Steps To Making It Real.
Very recently, I held a live webinar called ’63 Ways To Orgasm’ and one of the questions I received stayed with me.
Let me paraphrase it here:
“What happens when knowing that pleasure is my birthright isn’t enough? I mean, I know this, and yet, my situation remains the same.”
I loved this question!
I loved it because it was honest and it pointed to something important when it comes to making pleasure real for us.
How do we translate our ideas or mental constructs into real, visceral sensations that fill our life with renewed delight and meaning?
Huge question.
First of all, we must understand that for the majority of us living in modern times, we are mostly walking heads.
Few of us actually embody our body.
Secondly, most of our learning and ideas about sensuality and sexuality are learned through observing (through mediums such as film, etc), reading, or discussing the topic.
Few of us actually trust and delight in our natural sensuality, being willing to explore from a place of erotic innocence.
And thirdly, due insidious messages and imprinting we receive from pre-birth onwards, most of us believe that sensuality and sexuality is something that we DO, not something that we naturally ARE.
Few of us have had the blessing to be brought up in an environment where sexuality and sensuality is a natural and normal as breathing.
Yet we all know, deep in our bones, there is more to sensuality and sex than what we currently know.
This encourages us to get curious, to seek information, to learn, to explore.
The confusing bit is when we come across conflicting information, or worse, misleading information.
Then, we attempt to translate this information into what we know to be true for us, only to end up disappointed and frustrated.
This is why clearly pointing out the pleasure is indeed your birthright—that it’s something that you have within you since you were just a baby in your mama’s belly—can, at first, seem quite inspiring, yet quite discouraging when it doesn’t translate.
How can we make something we understand mentally, real?
5 Steps To Making It Real:
Step 1: To make something real is to make sure that the very thing we wish to actualize is actually founded on truth.
For that, you will need to trust yourself and to question everything you think you know about the topic, especially when it comes to sex.
Step 2: Sit with the offered definition and reword it, so it becomes yours.
This small step is incredibly necessary to making something real—it must be stated in YOUR WORDS.
Step 3: Forget about how everyone else translates this truth and return your attention to yourself.
Sometimes making it real for ourselves means forgetting about how everyone else is experiencing and describing it and being willing to have a genuine, personal, and self-defined experience.
How would you make this real? What small action would genuinely begin to bring this home (into your body) for you?
Step 4: Be open to ‘not knowing’ and entering the mystery.
Are you willing to claim that you don’t know? Sometimes stating we ‘don’t know’ can open up the space for the mystery of life to come in.
When it comes to pleasure and accessing our erotic genius, we must get out of our own way.
Our mental ideals and assumptions serve only to numb out the potent signals that our innate erotic intelligence is attempting to communicate to us.
Step 5: Gnosis = Knowing through direct experience.
It is thought that we do not truly know something until we have a direct experience of it, yet how many of us claim to ‘know’ something just because we heard or read about it?
Here you are being invited to get curious and to start to open the possibility to that pleasure is something that you are.
Are you willing to discover this within yourself?
What would that look like? Get creative! Step outside of what you ‘know’ in your mind and get curious about ‘knowing’ something through your whole being.
Reclaiming pleasure as our birthright is one of life’s initiations and when we do embark on this journey, we will be facing age-old ideals and beliefs which are deeply ingrained into our psyche.
Being willing to be confused along with being open to “the new” re-calibrates your nervous system to re-pattern itself, not only to notice pleasure, but also to enhance your capacity to live as an erotically intelligent and expressed human being.
If you would love to live more fully attuned with your innate erotic intelligence, I recommend starting with my book: The Emergence of the Sensual Woman. Click here to get it now.
Now, let’s hear from you! How do you make something real for yourself? Leave me your comments below. If you loved this article, please LIKE IT and share the love!
As many have stated, bless you Sadia! And Miss one way microphone, (for probably half your audience) Ruth! Being authentic and vulnerable is seriously tough to embrace. But I find the more I “show up” the more I am rewarded with experiences that counter the negativity I absorbed growing up. I happen to be a gifted empath raised in a textbook alcoholic family, suffering with textbook ADD and internalizing it all. Needless to say my internal pressure cooker blew up about 2.5 years ago, and I’m STILL cleaning up the bits of fragmented self that was contained within. It’s amazing how we can go nearly a lifetime sleepwalking, mere shells of human beings, unaware of our own capacity to create profound purpose and meaning FOR OURSELF. Therein lies my struggles as well. My natural instinct is to nurture and soothe, to heal others with acceptance and acknowledgement. I have an inability to allow myself to receive, & struggle making decisions/ choices. So to CREATE something for MYSELF, is extremely daunting. It feels selfish and narcissistic to be concerned with my needs and desires when so many need so much more than I, that or I judge myself less worthy of attention based on circumstances. Anyway great job! Keep up the discussions that keep the sharing flowing!
Rayla, the great news is that you have such tremendous capacity to nurture, just turn a little of that for you. Why not? I get that you love to be of service, it’s much more fun when you’re full of energy and life. Taking care of yourself, although feels selfish, is one of the greatest acts of helping others since you’ll be coming from a full place versus the feeling of obligation.
Saida: your words are very beautiful and it opens up thoughts that deep down we know but reluctant to admit because of fears that it’s not true. Thank you for giving me hope and excitement to start a journey to get to know myself better.
Ruth: Thank you for your honesty, I live thousands miles from all of you but I feel grateful that i’m not alone with my feelings and thoughts. Also thank you for the text from Pressfield book.
I feel I need to keep a copy of this conversation page. So much wisdom from everyone 🙂
Thank you Indira!
Beautiful wisdom being shared here…thank you Saida & dear women!
Yes, thank you Saida for the work you do and your way of bringing it into the world and sharing it with women.
I just learned about the writing of Steven Pressfield. Perhaps you already know of him? For the sake of those who don’t, here are a few lines from a summary that has been written about his book, The War of Art:
This book is about fulfilling our potential as a human beings. To do this, he says, you must overcome Resistance (the “R” is capitalized be Pressfield to represent the fact that it is a very real entity
The whole aim of Resistance, says Pressfield is to prevent you from doing the work you are called to do.
Resistance wants you to take it easy, to be ordinary and mediocre, to take the low road.
There are two occasions when Resistance will be the most relentless, and they are related.
The first is when something really matters to you. “Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.”
The second occasion that Resistance is most dangerous is related to what Pressfield calls “the mother of all fears,” namely the fear that you will actually succeed. Resistance builds as you get closer to the finish line. “At this point, Resistance knows we’re about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it’s got.”
There is a real paradox here: the closer you get to reaching that proverbial tipping point, where things are really starting to click, the more likely you are to engage in the self-sabotaging behavior that is the calling card of Resistance.
Pressfield offers a prescription for defeating Resistance. You must, he says, become “a pro.” But he does not mean that in the sense of earning a living at the work, in the sense of being a member of a certain profession, or in the sense of being looked up to by your peers. Rather, he simply means showing up every day with your lunch pail and getting to work.
Amazing comment… and I would say this would be true for all areas of our life.
Hi Ruth thanks for your question bringing up difficult things gives a chance for things to go deeper and thank you saida so much for your delight and openness in hearing every question and taking them deeper xx
love your words Saida…..you are a divine blessingforce on this earth. you seem to really understand what so many of us are feeling and experiencing and you are the voice of many words that resonate with me. thankyou for your writings and your teachings. love angela x
Thank you Angela!
Hello again, I have been musing over the exchange of emails above for a couple of days now. I am sure that hoping my turn on will be met by someone external to me is a factor.
I also agree that a relationship is the result of what two people bring to it. I just don’t feel I have any genuine spark to bring to my sexual relationship with my husband. Faking spark doesn’t feel right.
When I consider leaving him, a part of me knows it would be just me running away from an aspect of myself I need to face. I heard it said once that the best time to leave a relationship is when it is working. To me, this implies that if a relationship is working, no one would want to leave it…
I comprehend that I am entitled to pleasure. My current mind funk is not serving me well. That is why I have sought out resources. Despite reading books and doing body awareness exercises etc. I feel as stuck as ever at this impasse. It must be rooted in fear of some sort but I can’t seem to unearth it.
Ruth,
I really love your vulnerability and truth, its refreshing and inspiring.
Initiations are difficult because they ask of us to look at how we are living (and have lived) and to let that go and step into what we would love.
The entire picture may not be clear for you now, but I would invite you to start asking yourself on more of a moment to moment level:
What would I love now? What part of me needs to be noticed/loved into wholeness and then, being willing to ACT on what is revealed, even if the action is purely admitting aloud what has emerged.
Gentleness is key in this process.
Perhaps I should clarify. Today is an incredibly beautiful Fall day in the city where I live. I notice the warm sun, the cool breeze on my skin, the beautiful trees filled with leaves changing colour, the sky a clear blue. I had an an opportunity to meet a friend for coffee at an outdoor café this afternoon. I enjoyed our conversation. I savoured the delicious café au lait that had been prepared for me. I enjoyed riding my bicycle on a beautiful autumn afternoon. However, none of this incites me to go home and jump into bed with my husband. Do you see what I am saying? Do any of the other women feel this way?
Yes… I do get what you are saying Ruth.
Many women feel this way… and… this doesn’t mean that this is where it all ends.
In fact, this is usually where something incredible begins: This is where you get to grow emotionally and sexually.
Where you get to really claim your erotic life and take responsibility for how well it is thriving.
Do you want to be in a relationship with him? Do you want to have sex with your husband?
Is it time for you to move on? Or is it time for some habitual patterns to be shaken up a bit?
In general, and I’m not suggesting you are doing this Ruth, most of us still behave like teenagers when it comes to our erotic life.
We expect that our turn-on and sexual fulfillment will be met by someone external to us and so, we wait… and we wait… and nothing happens and something inside of us dies.
A relationship is always the result of what two people bring to it.
What are you bringing to your erotic relationship with your husband? What is he bringing?
Are you willing to take a stand for your erotic fulfillment and explore your erotic edges… and once you know them, articulating them and gifting them to your partner?
In truth, every time we make love is both the FIRST and the LAST time. Every time.
So, notice how you feel when you contemplate leaving your partner and moving on.
Considering endings is a great way of seeing where we really are at.
And then truly claiming this invitation to blossom into the next phase of your erotic evolution.
I truly resonate with what Ruth is saying, and with your reply, Saida. I was a much more adventuresome and sensual as a young woman, but now, through much of life’s difficult experiences, all of that interest and excitement in life seems to have gone underground. I struggle to get in touch with it again. Your response brings to light thoughts I have had about my own situation, and I thank you for stating it so clearly. It is insightful, and very helpful. Thank you for championing the succulent and sensual woman.
Thank you Sherrilyn!
This is how we co-create together. 🙂
awesome reply. We’ve got to take the responsability to ignite our own sexual self before claiming to share it, in other words…
Yes.
If we truly want to be sovereign and free and able to tap into our full potential, then we must take responsibility for our lives and that includes our erotic self. 🙂
Saida, I really appreciate your willingness to address this question.
However, your response “being willing to be confused along with being open to “the New” recalibrates your nervous system to repattern itself to notice pleasure”
I have read your article several times through, attempting to allow what your saying to sink in. I don’t want to be a “downer” to you or any of your other readers but I just feel incredibly sad.
I have read your book.
You are NEVER a downer Ruth!
Your truth is very welcome here. 🙂
Being sad is natural.
And… I’m curious about what you make this all mean for yourself.
How is it translating into you?
What a potent topic. And so important. This has helped me a lot. I am grateful you are sharing your succulent wisdom Saida. Much love. 😉 I have your book and probably need to start reading it…
Aloha Ale,
I’m really happy to hear that. Yes… do start reading it… and then stay in touch so we can keep the dialogue going. You might like to join my private FB group for women only (global community of like-minded and like-hearted women), called Succulent Women.
Awesome question – I didn’t ask it but I do feel it too!!
Thanks for the answer hope to follow the process you describe on the MO course you’ve designed!! Or in another online seminar… Would be great!!!!
Thanks for everything you do xxx
Awesome Freya!
🙂