Pain, sex and intimacy

Last night I had a such a nourishing conversation with a beautiful human who is well on her path to healing and living in a pain free body.

It was one of those conversations that fills my heart and makes me glad to be working in this arena, supporting incredible women to thrive.

We talked about all sorts of things to do with sexuality and our bodies and healing, and we also explored one really important thing that I wanted to share with you all.

It’s about what happens after you have done all of the practices and exercises and stretches, and you find yourself in a pain free body.

It’s about what happens when you want to explore that pain free body and take your next steps into intimacy and connection with another person, when it hasn’t really been an option up until now.

Because it’s often a reality that when you open your body in a physical way, it becomes a whole different challenge to be intimate with someone else, when that intimacy has been your major cause of pain up until now.

One of things that I’ve been noticing is that there is often a gap between healing and thriving. A really big gap between ‘no pain’ and ‘a lot of pleasure’.

So last night this wonderful human asked me what I would suggest to bridge that gap, and how I work with women when they want move from ‘no pain’ to ‘lots of pleasure’.

I thought about it for a moment, because of course there are things that I can suggest that can create connection and safety between you and the person that you want to be intimate with, and this is important.

But what I realised is that there is something more important that needs to happen first.

And that more important thing is all about you, and your body, either pain free, or on the way to becoming pain free.

We have a tendency to treat our bodies as machines.

Like, penetration hurts, so I am going to do the things I need to do so that it doesn’t hurt anymore.

But we forget that we are so much more complex than just that. And that it isn’t as simple as just being pain free.

When we want to move from ‘no pain’ to ‘full pleasure’, it isn’t about the other person. Not to begin with. Not right now when this pain free body is new and raw and feels vulnerable.

At that moment, it is all about you.

And what that means practically, is that it’s time to take a step back and learn for yourself what it means to be in a body that doesn’t hurt. To learn for yourself what it means to be in a body that can finally focus on feeling pleasure. To learn for yourself how you like to be touched. Where you like to be touched. How to love yourself in the most intimate sense of the word, to bring your heart to your body through your hands and show your body that you are ready for a whole new relationship with it.

At the speed and timing that your body needs.

Because if you move straight from healing to focusing on another person, you are missing yourself in the middle, and that means that you are missing the whole reason that you healed in the first place, whether you were are aware of that or not.

If you check in with yourself and your healing, and you realise that you don’t know how you are going to bridge that gap between ‘pain free’ and ‘full of pleasure’, no matter where you are on your healing journey, now is the time to address it. So that when you are fully pain free, you are ready to thrive.

Or, if you don’t have pain, and have never had pain, but you really want more in your pleasure in body and pleasure in your intimacy, now is the time for that as well.

Reach out. I love to support women to be pain free, but I really love to support women to be full of pleasure.

Because we are born in bodies that are built for pleasure, we just forget and sometimes lose that part of ourselves. But our bodies are always waiting for us to come back to them.