Why sex?
Body Compass is based on the paradigm that those things we all seek- belonging, safety, connection, enoughness, fulfillment, and vitality- are all things best sought through the pathway lit by our bodies. Noticing the sensorial cues of that which our bodies move towards and what it moves away from gives a beautiful and rich map that leads straight to vitality and fulfillment. Our bodies are our compass, showing each twist and turn we must take to continue to follow the path to our most authentic life.
In functional or dysfunctional ways, all of our actions are with this aim- each choice we make fueled by the earnest effort to find safety, belonging, and vitality (even those that seem quite to the contrary). So why are we not finding these things? We all have such a human need for safety, belonging, and to feel aliveness, that sometimes the flame of longing for these things gets snuffed out by its own intensity. For fear of never achieving them, we are governed by chronic and inappropriate nervous system responses to perceived threat, governed by fears of the future and a lack of trust in the present, controlled by body image issues and perceptions that our physical self just doesn’t look right.
So how do we make this switch? The switch
From—>
being at war with our body, its unpredictability, inability to be controlled,
its insistence to form itself into shapes we don’t like, and its need to run away from situations that would be better resolved by staying and remaining calm
—>TO
seeing our bodies as beautiful instruments, and the best equipped tools to craft our perfect lives.
Desire is nature’s most ingenious trick. Like a flower moves to the sun, we are so meant to orient ourselves to that which gives us most life and nourishment. Our bodies are perfectly calibrated to face what is most life-giving, and to turn away from that which is not. Following our bodily sensation and our deepest embodied desire with each and every choice we make, is a slow and steady practice that builds, block by block, the life you truly want.
So, what in the world does this have to do with sex?
The relationship people have to their sexuality is a potent example of their relationship to desire, fulfillment, and satiation on a larger scale. How we touch our bodies and how we allow others to touch our bodies speaks to how comfortable we are feeling desire and allowing that desire to take up space in the world. It speaks to how bold we can be in noticing what we want, seeing its value, and communicating it to those around us, and following it in the actions we take ourselves. Your relationship to sex is the same relationship you have to your ability to allow your body to go towards what it wants, to allow it to turn to the sun. Pleasure is: the body sensations we receive when we allow ourselves to move towards those things.
Sex is the site of a nerve bundle of the things keeping us from living a pleasure-oriented life. In sex we find shame, numbness, misinformation, automatic nervous system responses, trauma, fear, avoidance, pain, confusion, doubt.
We also find a physical site of the body where the most nerves are housed, the area of the body in which new life is formed and birthed, intensity of sensation unmatched elsewhere. We find a fountain of great pleasure- a locus of resource, able to be stretched as large as you need. We find infinite capacity for closeness with another, a place where we can feel completely held and cherished, a place where our inner child can rest and feel safe because it is me the other is here to see. In sex we find our ever-present need for touch satisfied, the need to be reminded that we are corporeal, predicated, real and exist firmly in this great big world. We can find love, safety, belonging, expansion, and fulfillment. Sex can be the scene for great transformation, healing, and beautiful soil for a continuous tangible sense of safety in our lives, even in the most challenging of experiences.
