EWR :: 16. Sex & Physical and Sexual Intimacy

Embodied Writing : Relating, Relationships, & Trauma series

This week we begin to examine our barriers around sex, touch, and physical intimacy. 

This may be the most uncomfortable topic for us to journey through.  We all have our own issues around sex and touch. Sometimes because of abuse.  Sometimes because of growing up in a conservative home or community.  And for all of us, we live in a puritanical patriarchal culture, where we are sluts if we have sex and ice queens if we don't.

Women and femmes are truly damned if we do and damned if we don't when it comes to sex.  Men and masculine persons are praised for the number of notches they have on the their bedposts and demeaned if that number isn't "high enough."   With this in mind, I invite all of us to let go of living up to some external expectation of sex and in this place allow ourselves to explore what WE truly want, desire, need and what physical intimacy means to each of us, individually.

Sex, and especially physical intimacy, is also private.  It is deeply personal.  And so in talking about it, in exploring it, in expressing it, we are allowing ourselves to be deeply vulnerable.  

This vulnerability can be terrifying.  

Allow the space for your own discomfort.  For your fear.  

And, most importantly, for compassion for yourself.