Share on bsky
Almost everything we have been taught about sexuality begins and ends with another person.
We learn how to attract partners.
How to please the other person.
To capture attention and be desired.
To have someone else give us an orgasm.
To give another an orgasm.
But no one teaches us how to have a relationship with our own sexuality.
There are two fundamental relationships with sexuality.
Sexuality and Self.
Sexuality and Other.
They are reciprocal. Two halves of the same education. As one deepens, so does the other. When both are tended to, sexuality becomes a deeply embodied expression of intimacy, aliveness, love, and soul connection.
When only one is nourished, we unconsciously begin asking it to provide what only the other can. To compensate for what has never been cultivated within us.
Most of us have spent our lives developing sexuality with another while neglecting sexuality with ourselves. We then wonder why relationships carry so much pressure to make us feel alive, desired, and whole.
Sexuality and Other is the relationship most of us have inherited.
We are versed well in this relationship and it has become our primary sense of relationship with sexuality. Translating to the clear reality that we need another in order to have a fulfilling relationship with sexuality. And without another, this simply does not exist.
Sexuality and other is organized around attraction, dating, romance, marriage, intercourse, performance, pleasing, and orgasm. Whether we are pursuing love or avoiding it, our sexuality becomes organized around another person’s presence.
Sexuality and Self on the other hand is a relationship that remains vague.
What does this mean? At the most, it looks like a quick masturbation in the shower to have an orgasm or a release of tension and then to go about the day.
Sexuality and self is a relationship that few have been taught. How to source your own pleasure and aliveness within the temple of your body. This is not masturbation, not celibacy, not an absence of a partner—this is an intimate relationship with your own aliveness and your erotic life.
Before we can truly share our sexuality with another, we must first cultivate a relationship with our own sexuality, the relationship that has often been neglected entirely. This is the foundation of Sexual Intelligence, and the heart of my three-week introductory course, Sexual Intelligence Level 1.
The question I ask is:
Do you have a relationship with your own sexuality?
Not your partner, your dating life, or your relationship.
But with your own sexuality.
This is part of the concept of Sexual Literacy, I have written about in other articles.
Our relationship with ourselves becomes the foundation for every intimate relationship we will ever have. This we recognize as a collective and are gaining more awareness moment by moment.
Humanity has spent generations becoming educated in relationships.
Yet, few have become educated in sexuality.
They are not the same thing.
One teaches us how to be with another.
The other teaches us how to be with ourselves.
Until we cultivate both, we will continue asking another person to give us a relationship with our own aliveness.
~
Read 0 comments and reply