During our play, she discovered that she liked my belt around her neck.

(So I had it embossed for her, and I still think about her every time I put it on.)

During our play, we discovered there is a path of sexual experience—sexual exploration—that is a path of consciousness.

It’s a path where, through our sexuality, we choose to reveal ourselves.

It’s a path where, through our sexuality, we choose to experience, explore, and express all of who we are.

It’s a path where, through our sexuality, we choose greater freedom in who we are.

It’s a path where, through our sexuality, we go beyond our patterning, conditioning, labels, judgments, inhibitions, fears, and withholds.

It’s a path of relation, healing, learning, growth, and expansion.

It’s sexual consciousness.

What’s so interesting is that sex may be the only aspect of life that is physical, mental, emotional, energetic, and spiritual.

It happens in our bodies, in our thoughts, in our hearts, in our energies.

This makes sex a way to connect with all these elements of ourselves.

When we choose this path of sexual consciousness, it opens the door to so many parts of who we are.

It gives us the space to be tender, to be soft, to be hard, to give, to take, to receive, to share. To be fire and to be water. To be open, to be vulnerable—so vulnerable.

To be challenged, to be seen, to see.

To reveal ourselves to another, lay ourselves bare as we share our desire.

To explore what we’ve been given about sex, about love, about relationships, about pleasure—to examine that and see how much of it is control and how much of it is freedom.

When we choose this path of sexual consciousness, we choose to look at fear—the fear of revealing ourselves, the fear of being rejected, the fear of being ridiculed, the fear of weirdness, strangeness, and aloneness.

In our world (and recent events in the social and political arenas have shown this), sex is still the part of life judged most harshly. Sex is still the part of life so many want to control. Sex, sexual freedom, and sexual consciousness are still the parts of life so many fear.

And through fear comes freedom—and possibility.

The path of sexual awareness is looking at all the aspects of our own sexuality, of our own desire.

It’s an inner journey, a lifelong journey, as more is revealed, there is more to reveal.

As we see more with our inner vision (and the way we see in the world opens), we see how much more there is to see, to experience, to feel, to explore.

In all of our bodies, our minds, our hearts, our spirits.

It becomes a space where we see how many of our relationships are based on being acceptable to each other, and how narrow that often is. It becomes a space where, for many, the fear of revealing ourselves is so great that we deny ourselves, our truth, our creativity, our joy.

And when we begin to open the sharing, we open a space of deep healing, learning, growing.

We open intimacy in a way that we’ve never known or yearned for.

A short digression; this is what so many of us want. We want the intimacy, the connection, the deep experience of that, where every part of us is acceptable, seen, known, felt.

To experience this, we have to reveal ourselves, show ourselves, bring all of us into the light, and walk hand in hand into the dark.

And as much as we want this, we often fear what we need to do to have it.

So much of our energy, so much of ourselves, gets lost in this inner conflict, inner confusion. And when we suppress this energy, it often comes out in anger, in resentment, in frustration, in shutdown, in distancing.

When we acknowledge our desire, that doesn’t mean every desire is going to be expressed or experienced—the owning of it brings such a lightness of being.

This is me, who I am.

I can breathe, I can move, dance with myself, with you, in life, in joy, in pleasure, in love.

The path of sexual awareness that brings the whole into harmony, body, heart, mind, energy, emotion, and spirit is a path of freedom. It’s a path that takes courage to walk. In time, we see, and I love how every person I work with at some point sees this: it’s all about sex, and it has nothing to do with sex.

It’s all about love—for ourselves, for another, for life.

It’s this body, our senses, our thoughts, our feelings—the key to so much.

It’s about the mystery.

It’s about the juiciness, the curiosity, the interest, the fascination, the wonder, the awe.

It’s about the goddess drawing us into the richness of possibility and the ways we can love.

For many of us, this path begins with an experience, something that takes us beyond our boundaries.

My hand on her throat. The squeezing.

If that’s all it is, it stays in the body.

In acknowledging it, first within ourselves, it’s exciting, it’s scary, we deepen the experience.

In sharing it—the feelings, the thoughts—we deepen ourselves in the experience.

In our exploration of it, what part of us does it touch? What else is there? What does it mean? Where can it go? Can I have it again? More? Do I want to do it to you? We go deeper into ourselves.

In our connection to it, what if I allow more of that part of myself? How does it connect to other parts of me? If I surrender to that, how deeply can I go? How will that part of me, the gifts that it has, the creative possibilities, energy possibilities, healing possibilities, spiritual possibilities express themselves? How can I express that in life? We deepen our intimacy with ourselves.

Each experience, whatever it is, becomes a portal, a key, an opening.

A possibility.

~