*Warning: naughty language ahead!
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We walk with ancient, primal wisdom.
It fires our emotions, our desires, our need to create—to feed, fuck, and feel!
It’s fine to talk about mind: mindfulness, mindlessness, and so on. It’s fine to talk about heart: wholehearted, heartbroken, heart intelligence, and so on.
Then there’s cunt—I’ve been reclaiming the word.
There’s something delicious about it, especially since it used to be associated with powerful women and, somewhere along the line, became an insult. It became vulgar. Vulgar had the same root as common, or belonging to the masses. There is nothing more common or holy than the way we enter the world, and that is through the sacred portal of the cunt.
I’ve reclaimed it—cunt. It feels bold on my tongue and in my body, reverberating something sound and sacred.
Cunt—a bell being rung in my pelvic bowl, humming through my belly, my heart, and out through my mouth—all my portals connected in expression of the hot, hard, holy, and humorous elements of my own humanity. We can’t keep cutting ourselves off at the waist and expect to be healthy. Our bodies, Earth’s body—it’s an unbreakable bond.
Arousal and anxiety seem to be birthed from the same place in my body. One fires up all my pleasure circuits; the other completely shuts them down. We only have one nervous system and it is wired for both pleasure and pain, stress, and excitement.
I believe in the intelligence of my body. It is wise; it is healing. It is still unraveling the unfortunate confusion that happens when we trauma bond to an abuser, and sometimes, being turned on—experiencing arousal or pleasure—still trips the trauma circuits.
This has been especially relevant for me with that holy combination of sex and creativity. I am as turned on by my own mind as I am by the opposite sex. When I am aroused, desire pours out of me—my fingers, my eyes, my lips—and it is just as, if not more, likely to turn into some sexy prose as it is to turn into a roll through tousled sheets with a man.
When I am anxious, my mind hijacks my pleasure centers for some other twisted agenda. I can’t think straight; it cycles through obsessiveness and shutting down. I’m certainly not turned on, as my head feels like it’s floating about four feet too high above my body.
I know lots of people think cunt is an impolite word, that they consider it derogatory toward women—I used to as well. It used to deeply offend me. But it has ties with priestesshood and, at the very least, CUNT: A Declaration of Independence, by Inga Musicio, is a fantastic book that brought me even deeper into the richness that is my own body, my cycles, and my relationship with the moon.
And for me, it is part of my holy trifecta—mind, heart, and cunt. I have learned that they each possess their own intelligence, and when that intelligence is combined and met, it is truly a delightful encounter of which I will inevitably want more. It is when one gets away from the others that I tend to create problems for myself.
In order for me to sustain interest in a man (hell, in life!), all three parts need to be on board. This is something I tend to solo as well as in relationships. Chemistry will carry me only so far as physical connection goes. And as I have written before, “If our minds don’t spark, we’re not even gonna get to getting naked.” I have, however, let my cunt lead me into situations that I didn’t really want to be in.
A couple of months ago, I was making out with a guy I was pretty certain I wanted to sleep with, only the further we went, the more I felt myself withdrawing. The old me would probably have gone through with it. I would have felt too embarrassed to stop, or possibly too guilty. But as he got pushier, and the monochrome hotel room began to fade, I knew it wasn’t the booze I had drunk earlier dulling my senses—I was dissociating. So I pulled myself together and left.
I’m done having dissociative sex! My primal and emotional intelligences are completely on board with that. My mind, heart, and cunt say—no. I want to be present and engaged.
My trifecta, when aligned, has led me into some truly stimulating and highly satisfying encounters.
There is my lover who, the first time we met, I drew into my bed on a full moon’s beam and a whim. And my lover who I finally met, after talking with for years, on a star-speckled desert night and instantly melted effortlessly into each other, dreaming our long held desire into being. These two, I cherish.
My heart is open—relentlessly so. Shutting down at any level is not even an option. I am vividly alive and full of feelings. I have learned that those feelings don’t actually mean anything. They are, more often than not, a result of the vulnerability that I swim in, as well as the physical sensations that being wired for pleasure (most of the time) tends to evoke in me. But I don’t need a man for that. I get that feeling simply wading bare-breasted in the Gallatin River. Do me Mother Nature, yeah!
It’s the mind that seems to be hardest to match and maintain for me. I once heard that it is a fascination with another person’s inner world that is the best predictor for long-term compatibility. That makes sense to me. That makes sense to the whole team—the holy trifecta—mind, heart, and cunt.
There is a man, a lover, and I can’t seem to absorb enough of his words, nor offer him enough of mine. We communicate so well naked, clothed, or flying down the highway at 4 a.m. I had shot him a text, then hopped into the tub, only something in my gut started churning, leading me to check my phone. “Don’t wait!” it said. The next thing I knew I was sitting beside him in his farm truck, muddled moon riding high, so happy.
When my holy trifecta is talking to me and each other, my life is on fire.
My somatic practices have given my body a deeper sense of peace and aliveness than I have ever known, and I am doing my damn best to tame my monkey mind, whose obsessiveness has a tendency to steal life’s sweetness.
We need balance—to not let our heads rule but to listen with wholeness—to feel and think and dream with our hearts and our bodies too.
This is the way that I want to live—my instincts, intellect and intuition, and my mind, heart, and cunt singing my soul into existence.
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AUTHOR: JUSTICE BARTLETT
IMAGE: PAUL B/FLICKR
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