With thought leader Anne-Marie Clulow, founder of Intimacy Coach International
When I first heard about sexual healing, Marvin Gaye’s song started to play in my brain and I got stuck on the idea that this sort of healing is linked to actual sex.
It took me on a tango through tantra.
A tantalising dance forward, with a hurried retreat where my nervous system and relationship were battered by the storm of unsafe passage, high seas and chaos with unsafe teachers who didn’t have my best interests at heart…
The sad part was that the beginning of my rebalancing sexual energy, ended up bringing even more fear, guilt and shame.
It took years to find a better path with this energy that could bring healing and release within the natural pathways of my body.
It took a total reset of what pleasure was in my relationship and how those chemicals worked to bring balance and healing.
I was so used to quick results with modern medicine and so I struggled to work with this energy at first, expecting the same sort of results you get from a pill or surgery. I wanted that quick heavy-handed change that was instantly experienced.
Natural healing is so much slower, it takes integration time. When this sort of healing happens, it’s a gentle return to balance. It’s almost a ‘forgetting’ or cleansing of pain, as pleasure and connection have the chance to return in the body.
Sexual healing is what we do with our relationships and our patterns within pleasure, understanding grief, hurt, lack of connection and so much more.
Now, travel with me on a tangent that seems strange, but reveals patterns.
My mum was moved into hospice in a two-week whirlwind last December; there was very little warning and the grief was overwhelming, as well as the anger and the lack of closure.
This all took huge bites out of my ability to be intimate with my husband.
Grief and emotional pain tore my life apart and the first thing I reached for was a quick fix. I ate more, took sleeping meds, went to the doctor for pills for anxiety.
I believe in medicine and the balance of using what works for the individual and, for the initial shock phase, the meds were lifesavers for me.
The meds worked, until they didn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, they really helped in the beginning and I was truly grateful not to spiral into body shutdown through lack of sleep and the waves of exhaustion and anxiety crashing over me.
As they eventually stopped working, I knew I’d moved into the next phase of grief, where I’d have to face the feelings and travel through them. All I felt like doing though, was to numb them, to shut them up, to hermit and hide.
This numbing, this disassociating with my physical being, meant I couldn’t open myself to receiving touch of any sort, closing down endorphins, oxytocin, community and love.
I became angrily resistant to touch, my nervous system wanted me to hide away, to lick my ‘mother wound’ in private. That emotional wound that had infiltrated all of my relationships, my ‘worthiness’, my chasing of those who were emotionally distant, to somehow ‘fix’ this relating to my mum.
I knew I had to start by releasing my emotions by fully experiencing them in a space that regulated my nervous system, had a way to be supported by others, to flow them through my body without getting stuck.
I knew the technique, but have to admit, didn’t do it until I had to teach it to others.
Even though I’m a coach,
Even though I knew it would work,
Even though it’s worked for me before.
I was deeply resistant as my adrenaline had hijacked any desire for anything other than a quick fix. I had to teach it and fully walk my talk, so it could gift me what it always does, peace and a release of anxiety in my body.
The survival state in my body changed, I could finally move into conscious touch and move my life force energy (sexual energy) through my body with pleasure techniques returning me to balance.
I began to be able to cope with ‘normal life’ better.
My mum was still dying, we still had all of the admin and emotions connected to that, but they were more manageable with the connection chemicals and emotional regulation that had occurred.
Sexual healing had occurred.
I don’t believe that starting with sexual healing without the nervous system regulation works very well at all and it’s more useful when we start with emotional release and nervous system integration FIRST.
I believe that’s why therapy, EFT, EMDR, counselling, sacred circles, Yoga, emotional release techniques, retreats, conscious touch, massage and energy work towards nervous system regulation, can start the journey to awaken sexual healing.
The connection to all that is, is often somatically experienced through intense states of pleasure or pain.
Spiritual awakenings often arrive through pleasure or pain.
Sexual healing happens through the rebalancing of the root energy of humanity, our sexual energy.
After teaching the work with my clients on emotional release, even though I was just demonstrating the work, the relief from the anger and grief was a melting in my body, a desire to reconnect with my husband, to be close.
I’d reconnected to the warning systems in my own body, my emotions.
They are there as data, as early warning lights.
When we listen to them, feel them and flow them through fully, we can use them for the purpose in which they are intended to be present and move into rebalancing, which is where healing lives.
I’m still grieving. And I know there’s more to come as my mum slowly slips away and travels her physical death journey.
Yet I’m no longer resisting the pleasures of being alive, as sexual healing is a journey to better life balance, not a quick fix.
Real sexual healing has a chance to reintegrate divinity.
Real sexual healing has very little to do with how we see sex and is inextricably linked to allowing ourselves to feel love through conscious touch.
Real sexual healing is a rebalancing of our deepest selves into the somatic, connected fully to the emotional.
Sexual healing now reminds me of these lyrics from Coldplay:
“The universe connected
And I’m buzzing night after night;
This joy is electric and you’re circuiting through
Cause you’ve got a higher power.”
