I have always felt a little more sexual than most.

This manifested in many different forms—from in my younger years “giving it away too soon,” being the one in my group of friends to “most naturally speak in sexual innuendos,” and overall just exuding sexual energy a lot more than I might have intended to.

I loved having sex, but always felt completely unfulfilled by it.

Because of this aspect of my nature, I felt shame, guilt, low self-esteem, disrespected, and overall disempowered as a young woman in this age.

Why was I not able to attract harmonious relationships? Why was I attracting men who I felt disrespected by? Why did I feel taken advantage of? Why was I feeling so much shame around my body?

In this society, we are bombarded with images that exploit sex and our bodies as something trivial and mass produced—something that we should want but only in a certain way. Simultaneously, we have the majority, if not all, religious institutions telling us to repress our sexuality because it is bad.

This is the great alchemy of widespread shame around sex.

It took years of exploring other lands, different spiritual communities, and immersing myself in the most devotional aspects of the path of yoga, to realize that I was missing something incredibly important along my journey. This whole time I had been searching for a way to transcend my body altogether and found myself feeling more disconnected and further away from my true nature. It was not long after that I realized there was a huge gap between my spiritual life and my sexual life.

The concept was introduced to me by a friend and so, immediately after, I began my journey into a more empowered life with sacred sexuality.

I chose to begin awakening this aspect of myself with breathwork, visualization, movement, art, and, for the first time, I began to incorporate these practices as foreplay whenever I felt like getting sexy!

The more I practiced self-love in this way, the more I began to embody it in all aspects of my life, and the more I saw it reflected back to me. As sexuality itself became more sacred to me, feelings of collective and personal shame in my subconscious began to melt away.

I began to understand that there was a way to channel all the organic sexual energy I had into something authentic and empowering. There was a way to bring this fundamental part of me into greater balance. I realized that a natural part of this process is to confront any memories and traumas of past relationships, social conditioning, and childhood upbringing that still encourage feelings of shame or unworthiness.

To me, sacred sexuality means empowering our most fundamental and basic life force energy. It is bringing mindfulness and ceremony into the most beautiful act that we experience as humans. It is acknowledging and embracing the body in its organic ebbs and flows. It is the freedom to express ourselves as the creative, sensual beings that we are. It is honoring sex as the union of two souls meeting in physical form.

Sacred sexuality is confidence in body, mind, and soul. It is freedom. It is feeling sexy and in tune with spirit. It is having more harmonious and balanced relationships.

It is also discovering, in my opinion, the most fulfilling sex ever!

Life is created through the act of sex. We are all born from this act. We all engage in it. We are all, in many ways, driven by it. Yet, somehow, many of us have still never experienced deep intimacy and sacred sexuality. I believe it is a fundamental aspect of all of us that needs to be empowered and healed.

We can start by looking in the mirror, taking a deep breath, and saying, “I love you.”

By bringing more breath and mindfulness into our sex lives, we empower ourselves and our relationships with others, whereby feelings of shame and fear naturally begin to fall away.

Not only are we breaking out of mainstream thinking, we are reclaiming our right as sacred, sexual beings and unlocking the hidden treasure endowed to us as part of our human birth right!

~

Author: Sarah Dobbin
Image: Flickr/GreggMP
Editor: Leah Sugerman
Copy Editor: Sara Kärpänen
Social Editor: Danielle Beutell