“Who needs a church when you have a body?” (credit to my friend for this quote).
Church is where this story begins. The church parking lot, in particular.
I grew up in a very devout Catholic family. Without fail, we attended Mass every Sunday. Most of my education took place at Catholic schools (and when it didn’t, Catholic education classes).
This scene starts on a typical Sunday morning. I was around 15 or 16 years old, and prepared to leave the car when my dad saw my dress.
I felt so cute in my little white dress. I was exploring my personal fashion style and learning how to express myself through my clothes. My all-girls Catholic high school required uniforms most of the time, so I didn’t get many opportunities for this brand of self-expression.
I felt like such a beautiful flower, yearning to be admired, not out of desperation, but out of an intense desire to be witnessed.
But when my dad finally saw me, he was appalled, and spat out that I looked like a slut.
Not only had I never had sex, I was a homebody; I barely went out at all, let alone socialized with the opposite sex. So why did my father call me a slut? I was so hurt and confused.
The best way that I can describe that feeling is like being a flower crushed. Somebody who I loved, somebody to whom I looked up, somebody who I trusted would protect me, crushed that flower that wanted to bloom, with just one word.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t an isolated incident and my father has made comments about my clothing choices over the years, which have petered out as I’ve grown older and left the house. But that crushing feeling stuck with me, and it was only years later that I realized just how much this incident affected the way that I came to look at my sexuality, showing myself off to the world, and being witnessed in my full glory.
Read on or watch my YouTube video below.
I experienced my first ever orgasm the night before my 17th birthday — solo.
To be honest, I was initially a little scared of it. I asked myself, “What is this feeling? It feels so…good? But why does it feel so wrong?”
Masturbation is considered a mortal sin in Catholicism, meaning that you’d be damned to hell for all eternity — unless you confessed to a priest. Over the course of my senior year of high school, I would masturbate a few times, but then feel immensely guilty afterwards.
The guilt stemmed from feeling like I was doing something taboo and knowing that I would have to eventually confess if I wanted to avoid hell. Listing out all your sins is just so fucking embarrassing. Imagine saying, “Father, forgive me for I have sinned…I masturbated X amount of times, etc”…
So in order to avoid that little roleplay, I figured that I just would not do the sin. Easy and straightforward, right?
But as we all know, self-pleasure feels too good to just stop doing. It’s funny because I wouldn’t even call it “self-pleasure” at the time because I always associated masturbation — my orgasm — with guilt.
There’s so much to unpack…So let’s unpack it.
As I entered my 20s, I began to have sex with men, and encountered certain partners who made me feel deficient because I did not climax with them. They’d let out a sheepish “Oh, well, I did my part, so there must be something wrong with you if you didn’t cum” before rolling over…
I absorbed that shame, asking myself why I couldn’t cum with these partners, while knowing that I was able to perfectly bring myself to orgasm — multiple times at that.
I know now that there’s nothing wrong with me; that that kind of cavalier attitude was just a projection of that partner’s wounds which needed healing. I realize this now, and I don’t begrudge any of them for it.
My reality really shifted once I started to intentionally explore sex with myself. And that is how I discovered my spirituality again after so many years wandering a faithless wilderness.
By that point, I’d stopped going to church because the religion of my youth no longer resonated with me. I was just kind of floating, lost in the world with no real solid ground of faith in something larger than me.
A prolonged period of celibacy (whether it was voluntary or involuntary depended on my mood lol) gave me the opportunity to explore what sex meant to me, and discover the power of my orgasm, without anybody else.
If there’s one thing I want you to take away from me today is that nobody can give you an orgasm. An orgasm is something that lives within you.
Even when you’re having intercourse with a partner, they’re not giving you something that doesn’t already exist within you; rather, they’re helping bring out the orgasm that lives within you.
I love thinking of the orgasm — that really immense powerful life force — as a flower blooming. Remember how I felt like a flower crushed when my father called me a slut? Every time I orgasm, I feel the crushed petals slowly unfurl and I become a whole flower again, ready to be witnessed.
I suspect that a link exists between the inner child and sexuality. The only time that I orgasm is when I feel completely engulfed by a sense of safety. I interpret this as my inner child feeling safe enough to come out and play.
Sex is in all of us. We all (ok, most of us) were created by sex. If you want to go waaay back, the Big Bang was the original orgasm. It was this huge explosion of sexual energy, the ultimate climax. Everything that you see here and now, everything that surrounds us, is a result of that first orgasm, the ultimate orgasm of life.
And, as above, so below, right? We’re all a microcosm of the macrocosm. The Universe lives within us and so too, does the orgasm, the Big Bang. So every time we climax we experience a little bit of the Big Bang.
Something not that I learned, but something that I know to be true with my whole entire heart is that pleasure is a channel to the divine.
Pleasure is the ultimate hyperspace tunnel that connects us to God, to intelligent infinity, to all that is. It’s so sad how religion and societal norms have endeavored to suppress that power and make us feel guilty and shameful for wanting to experience that.
We were taught, at least in Catholicism, that priests had to be the intercessor or go-between between you and God, hence the need for confession. In other words, you couldn’t go to God directly, and ask to be forgiven; you had to go to somebody else — in other words, go outside yourself.
But I don’t believe in that anymore. It goes back to that quote: “Who needs a church when you have a body?” Everything that we can imagine, everything that we want, everything that we seek, is already within us. And through my own self-pleasure practice, I have found time and time and time again, that so much power lies within me. I have the power to give myself mind-blowing orgasms. That is just so amazing.
And when I get to that state, I really do feel like I’m offered a peek into a higher dimension. My mind becomes so clear when I get up there, and I’m able to receive potent messages. So during that split second or seconds, depending on how long you experience that moment for, I experience pure timelessness — eternity.
I’m getting flustered just thinking about it…
Life can be a constant orgasm — if you let it. Things are meant to be pleasurable.
Arousal is like a weather vane or an antenna. The kind of people and things and experiences you find yourself attracted to clues you into what your soul wants you to learn. What do you find arousing? What are your kinks? What is something that’s taboo but really turns you on?
Self-pleasure is the ultimate form of alchemy, in the sense that pain and pleasure become one in the same. For example, a sensation that is initially very painful becomes pleasurable. And vice versa. If you visualize pain/pleasure as a circle, you don’t know where one begins and one ends.
I have healed tremendously because I have come to see sexuality as something beautiful, and not something to be suppressed. It’s taken a lot of time and self-reflection to deprogram myself from the harmful beliefs that religion has ingrained in me. How sad because pleasure is the most direct channel that we have to God.
Sex is an immensely healing tool. In ancient civilizations, our ancestors built temples and celebrated festivals dedicated to the healing power of sex. In particular, women — the vagina, the womb — were healing. Men wanted to be healed by the feminine in order to access God through sex. So how powerful and beautiful is that? And how sad and shameful are our attempts to extinguish that flame?
I really do believe that part of my Cosmic Soul Mission is to help evangelize the power of the orgasm.
Pleasure is not something to be suppressed or to be shamed for (just as long as you’re not hurting anybody without their consent, of course).
Through self-pleasure, I found my power again. I pushed back against the physical aggression of the wounded masculine with the quiet power of the divine feminine.
This is a return to self. This is alchemy.
Thank you for holding space for me, my story, my journey, my pain. But we can transmute this pain into pleasure and joy. And I owe this alchemy to my orgasm.
The orgasm in me recognizes the orgasm in you 🙂
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