Coming Home: Day 31 -- getting curious about radical self love

Today's the last day of National Masturbation Month -- how have these thirty-one days of radical self love treated you? Have you come every day, or loved on yourself most days, or thought more frequently about how your body likes to be tended to? How have you marked National Masturbation Month -- and what are you carrying forward with you? What will you leave here in May?

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For me, self-acceptance is the notion that I am not fundamentally wrong because of my history or physical body. It’s the realization that I am fundamentally right because I am neither my history nor my body. It’s the choice to recognize my humanity just as I recognize and respect the humanity of others. And, sadly, in our culture and in our time, accepting ourselves is really radical. It’s not common. It’s not expected. And, yet, it can be the greatest difference maker in moving forward gracefully in doing the work we are meant to be doing in this world.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/03/08/2122252/what-is-radical-self-acceptance.html#storylink=cpy

- Rosie Molinary, author of Beautiful You

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/03/08/2122252/what-is-radical-self-acceptance.html#storylink=cpy

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I'm thinking about radical self care, radical self love, and radical self acceptance -- these are all intertwined, don't you think?

I'm both excited and disappointed that it's May 31; I have been consumed by this daily project, which perhaps has not been the best for my own personal orgasm. It's easy for me to get obsessive, especially about how I'm doing sexually (and by doing, I mean recovering/healing): Are we all better yet? Are we fixed? Can we stop worrying now?


I learned well how to focus overmuch attention on the how of my sex, whether I was doing it right, whether or not (mostly not) I was coming, and why, and what I should be doing about it. I had to spend a lot of my adolescence in those sorts of conversations, whether overtly or covertly. This particular layer of my obsession with sex was fed to me, and I learned to breathe it in order to survive.

Obsession isn't the same as curiosity. What I've found this month is that I am happier and so much more functional when I can be curious about my sex, my desire, my orgasm rather than obsessed about these.

Curiosity, I think, is a feature of radical self love/care/acceptance. What happens when I get curious about this aspect of myself, meet it with love and interest, rather than with knives and hammers and microscopes, ready to study it away, ready to slam it into a new shape?

Here's an interesting definition I found just now:

obsess - haunt like a ghost; pursue;

Haunt like a ghost. Right. Exactly. When I am obsessed, particularly around my healing or my sexuality, I get into a rigid, numb place. It's hard to breathe easily. I want to be fixed now. I take on the characteristics of my old, scared self -- that girl who had to actively interrogate her body just in order to get through the night. I don't have to inhabit that ghost anymore. I can choose to meet this body with different lenses, different stories, different possibility.

I feel like this month of orgasms has invited me into a new relationship with my body, has invited me to consider my blocks and struggles, the places where I'm selfish and the places where I'm generous, where I'm still terrified and overwhelmed, where I'm still armored, where I ride shame, how much I need laughter with my sex, how I release and where I hold tight -- and has invited me to consider every breath a practice. Even coming, particularly for trauma survivors, can be a place of meditation and centering.

This month I got to tell people, over and over, about this project, that I was writing about masturbation and healing, trauma aftermath and radical self care, and got to push more deeply into the shame I hold about the very work that I feel has chosen me, and that I choose every day. For ten years, I have waited for people to tell me that I should be ashamed of myself for doing this work, for talking about powerful sexual desire and sexual trauma in the same breath, in the same workshops, in the same piece of writing (as though their disapproval would mean I had to stop!). But when I talk to people about the work, I am consistently met with encouragement, enthusiasm, curiosity, new ideas and subjects to consider, even tears: we all of us need more spaces to talk about the complexity of our desire and our relationships with our bodies, not fewer. And so, as I move into the end of this first part of the Coming Home project, I am so deeply grateful to get to engage in these conversations, to think critically about the ways we talk about healing in our different communities, to get to revitalize my own relationship with orgasm while doing the other thing I love most in the world: writing.

So thank you for being with me during this month. I look forward to more challenge, questions, laughter and wonder to come.

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Coming Home doesn't stop on this 31 May 2012. I'll be here again tomorrow, June 1, and we're going to be moving within the next week to our own domain, and will continue this curiosity-centered engagement with healing from trauma through (and sometimes against) radical self love and exactly the sorts of orgasms we want. Stay tuned, ok?

Be curious and adoring of your body today -- just exactly as much as you can be. Come again tomorrow. See you then.

Coming Home: Day 28 -- when is it too late?

Today I want much more than my hands on myself, than the water between my legs, than some simple contractions. Today I want the soar of connection, of hands touching, of love in and through a body that didn't expect to do any more, ever, than just survive.

Today I am slippery in all the poems, I am drinking tea and not eating enough, the tears are all stain and open throat, the quiet is broken by the sad songs, the puppy I let myself love is curled into a small groaning ball. Today I am preparing for what has always been my vocation. Today I want to slip out from under the writer/watcher, the part that analyzes and is already crafting description of my every lived moment -- I want to breathe into an unwritten moment. I am writing now, will come later, and I will not tell you about it. Today's orgasm will be just for me. 

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Didn't we have to include this one during this month's ode to the love and struggle of masturbation?

The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator

ANNE SEXTON

The end of the affair is always death.   

She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,   

out of the tribe of myself my breath   

finds you gone. I horrify

those who stand by. I am fed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Finger to finger, now she’s mine.   

She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.   

I beat her like a bell. I recline

in the bower where you used to mount her.   

You borrowed me on the flowered spread.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Take for instance this night, my love,   

that every single couple puts together   

with a joint overturning, beneath, above,   

the abundant two on sponge and feather,   

kneeling and pushing, head to head.   

At night alone, I marry the bed.

I break out of my body this way,   

an annoying miracle. Could I   

put the dream market on display?   

I am spread out. I crucify.

My little plum is what you said.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Then my black-eyed rival came.

The lady of water, rising on the beach,   

a piano at her fingertips, shame   

on her lips and a flute’s speech.

And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

She took you the way a woman takes   

a bargain dress off the rack

and I broke the way a stone breaks.

I give back your books and fishing tack.   

Today’s paper says that you are wed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

The boys and girls are one tonight.

They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.   

They take off shoes. They turn off the light.   

The glimmering creatures are full of lies.

They are eating each other. They are overfed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

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What does it look like to let go of hyper-vigilance, to release the energy that has been focused for twenty years on looking back over all my inside shoulders? What does it look like to have all of this one self present in this one moment, no fragments floating off to keep watch for any interlopers, any threat? What could it possibly mean that I am beginning to imagine such an embodiment, that, in my moments of meditation, I can feel the tremendous relief in my muscles, that I weep (it feels that heavy) with the ability to let my shoulders fall into right here, right now? 

What does it mean to know that I will still get hurt, whether or not I am hyper vigilant, whether or not I was on the lookout for the next assault, whether or not I thought I was protecting myself? What does it mean to breathe into that assurance, let it be just true: not a tragedy, just a human fact?

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I'm all questions and huge hope today, and I think this isn't so hot -- last night I dreamed about the Masturbate-a-thon: I logged in to the site just in time to see a gorgeous friend of mine saying, calling to Carol, that she'd just come. She had her clothes mostly on, a red dress to offset her pale skin and blonde hair, she'd been on her back and had her hands under the dress, the dress was wrinkled where it'd been pushed up around her hips. But when I get to the video stream, she's already pulled the dress back down, her face red and grinning, already re-composing into her public-performance persona. Later in the dream, I got to the Center for Sex and Culture just after the event was over. The room was filled with the energy of the just released, a few stains on the floor (the room was carpeted and in some industrial building, nowhere that the CSC has ever actually been housed during the years I've known about it.) I was disappointed to have worked up the courage to come out for the event and then have missed it, was a little electrified. I helped Carol and Robert with the last of the cleaning up -- 

What can I say about this dream? This line was in a poem I wrote in response to this weekend: too late to find / comfort enough in such small daily moments -- and I wrote, over and over, is it too late for me? I'm forty years old -- is it too late for this embodiment, this understanding and acceptance, this joy, this still-mourning. Is it too late to expect that I will wake up happy tomorrow morning, that my dreams can come so true that I will finally need new ones? Is it too late to take hold of my own hands and bless them? Is it too late to wake up?

I know -- it's a ridiculous question. We can say, reflexively, that it's never too late.


 And yet -- to feel it. To feel it.

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Come again tomorrow, ok? Only and always as you like it. See you then.