đď¸You Canât Have Good Sex If You Hate Your Body (And No, Itâs Not About âLearning to Love Yourselfâ in the Mirror)
You canât have good sex if you hate your body.
Not soul-shaking, nerve-tingling, fully-present sex. Not even pretty good sex.
And yetâeven the most powerful, resourced, spiritually-attuned women I work with are still silently fighting with their reflections. Still caught in systems of self-surveillance. Still measuring their worth by a gaze that was never theirs to begin with.
In this episode, Iâm channeling a fiery session with a client who finally cracked open the truth: body image isnât about beauty. Itâs about power.
Weâre diving deep into the historical roots of body shame, the erotic cost of conformity, and what it really takes to reclaim your bodyânot as an image to fix, but as a living, feeling, sovereign experience.
đ§ In This Episode, We Cover:
Why body image challenges are the last frontier of healing
How your erotic power became a site of political control
Why it makes biological sense to love your bodyâand how hating it is a cultural implant
The PBQ (Professional Beauty Qualification) and the real cost of conforming to beauty norms
How body image challenges are stored in the nervous system, not your mind
The shift from being chosen to choosing yourself
Why affirmations donât workâand what somatic healing actually looks like
A new, embodied definition of beauty that is non-hierarchical, cross-generational, and pleasure-based
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You're not chasing beauty.
You're chasing a feeling.
And your body? Sheâs always known how to give it to you.
You just have to listen.
đâ¨
transcript
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You can't have good sex if you hate your body. Not mind blowing reality, bending, soul connected sex, not even pretty good sex. And yet even the most powerful women I work with, the one with spiritual practices, businesses, platforms, leadership roles, they're all stuck here still silently fighting with their reflection.
I see this so often that body image and sexuality are often the final places of healing and growth. The last frontiers in spiritual growth and self-improvement, I. And I believe that the reason behind this is that These are the sites of the greatest and most potent political disenfranchisement in social control.
Control of our bodies has been embedded in our culture for several thousands of years now. because of this, we often confuse this control with our biology and our organic nature. But let me assure you that it is not biological and it is not organic to hate your body. It actually biologically and organically makes no sense to hate your body.
This is the topic I will be tackling today, and I will be channeling a specific session with a client, after we went through this learning in this journey. She said, I really wish you had recorded that, and I totally agreed. So here I go, trying to channel that same fire and anger and rage.
It is no coincidence that by the end of that session we were talking about, embodying her best predator energy. Because it is only logical to feel sacred fucking rage when it comes to this topic because it is infuriating the loop that we find ourselves in as powerful boss as women when it comes to the topic of body image.
So today I'm taking you inside that conversation we're going to talk about why body hatred is never about looks, what we lose and gain when we give up beauty as currency. Why body image isn't a mindset problem. It's a nervous system pattern, how predator energy, eroticism and sovereignty go hand in hand.
And why? Reclaiming true beauty can fuel erotic life like nothing else.
đ Oh, and before we dive in, if your body is already whispering more, please, I've got options. If you're just starting this journey, or your nervous system needs a gentle private invitation, back to sensation, grab my free video series, the Three Best At Home Sexological Body Work Practices
for More Embodied Sex. These are slow, simple, body loving rituals you can do from the comfort of your own bed. No pressure, no performance, just reconnection. And if you're listening with a partner in mind or you've been dreaming about what it would feel like to be touched, like someone actually studied for it, reset your erotic rhythm is my step-by-step couples chorus for reawakening desire, even if it's been on mute four months.
You can find both in the show notes. Go get 'em. Your body is already asking.
All right, let's zoom out for a second. Because the way that we feel about our bodies, the shame, the obsession, the micromanaging of every curve and pour, it didn't just drop out of the sky and land on us. It was crafted very intentionally.
let's start way, way back. Pre-history. Back before patriarchy, before the gods of war and judgment, there were goddesses, fertility, goddesses, earth, goddesses, sky, goddesses. The divine was actually feminine. The gender of God was not, not a man. And worship was centered around the body, the womb, the blood, the breast, the erotic.
All of it was sacred. while I know that a lot of us have heard little snippets of this history before, it really is worth diving into in depth because it's not as simple as it may seem. There wasn't simply goddess worship. It's not about simply knowing that there was goddess worship. This is about really seeing the truth that if you look at the systems that we have today and how much surveillance and monitoring there is of our bodies, our beauty and our sex, you really start to see the inherent strength of.
Pleasure
and beauty in worshiping ourselves, that must be there because if it were not organic and naturally occurring, we wouldn't need such strong and intricate systems to work against. That naturally occurring thing, namely our pleasure and our joy in our own bodies and our own like somatic experiences. if you look at the systems that remain now as an inverted monument to.
What was once there, then you start to truly understand the history of what we are talking about. the dismissal of this history in our minds is it lives so deeply in us because the goddess religions. Have been referred to as fertility cults in all of the historical texts until very recently. It wasn't until the book, when God was a woman, was written by Merlin Stone, that we actually had a logical and continuous.
Account of the pervasiveness of the goddess religions in the world before the invasions and the intentional political and religious conversions happened. I can't stress enough how important it is really learning this history in your bones if you're struggling with body image because. We need quite a strong, counter script to fight against the cultural script that we are all holding in our bodies with this.
back to the history, a little snippet of this is that around 3000 BCE waves of Indo-European innovators, nomadic herding tribes from the north. Began moving into the goddess worshiping lands, and they brought a completely different worldview, one rooted in conquest and hierarchy, and importantly male dominance.
They introduced patriarchal religion where power was passed through the male line. And if you think about what that takes to make it work, if you need to know. That power is passed through the male line, you have to severely limit female's sexuality because it's the only way to guarantee paternity is that if this, if the woman only has sex with one man, wow.
Previously, divine right to rule was passed through the woman women's sexuality was not limited at all. In fact, it was a way of worship and that, was an easy thing to track, divine right to rule pass through the females because the baby comes out of her body and there's really no questioning whether or not that's her baby.
as a political, an intentional political move, sex became sinful. The body became suspect, and they had to start weaving this narrative thread that sex was not safe, that women were not to be trusted because the goddess was being replaced by a single male God. There were only virgin and horrors and nothing in between.
So it was a very intentional political move. They had to create a religion and a social order that was,
a direct negative image of what was already there. So if it was women, positive religion, they had to create. Women negative religion. If they created, if there was a, sex positive religion, they had to create sex negativity. And then importantly, if they wanted a divine right tool to pass through males, then they had to severely limit women's eroticism and they had to try their best to make sure the men were only having sex with their wives as well.
What happened was we ended up with a cultural historical inheritance of sex, negativity, and body negativity because to limit people's pleasure and sexuality, you have to program their brains to think their bodies are dirty. You have to instill a sense of self surveillance in them.
đ If you've ever wished someone would just hand you a pleasure map and say, start here, I have got you my free video series, the Three Best At Home Sexological Body Work Practices For More Embodied Sex is like a sexy little user manual for your nervous system. They're gentle, juicy, and designed to be done in your bed on your time with no mirrors, no pressure, and no one watching unless you want them to grab it in the show notes.
Your body's already curious.
This self surveillance started to take a very specific form
after World War II Naomi Wolf and the beauty myth talks a lot about this. millions of men had to go off to war while they were gone. Women entered the workforce. for the first time, they had jobs, money agency. And when the war ended, there was a cultural panic. The system that had kept women in line necessarily had to break down.
They started gaining sovereignty. And find a little bit, not complete, but a little bit of financial freedom. And so to keep the social order. They had to find, another way they couldn't use the same tools as before because women were voting, working, earning.
But what they could do was attack the body. The self surveillance started to evolve into a form where the object of. The obsession was the body that the body had to look a right way. eventually the appearance of the body in a very specific form was eventually tied to sexuality.
And so our beauty became.
A gatekeeper for our pleasure
beauty is not only the gatekeeper for pleasure and sexuality, even though those are huge and so painful, but it's more than that. In, the Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf also introduces this concept of the professional beauty qualification, she. Uses this to describe this like unspoken requirement that women must meet certain beauty centers in order to succeed professionally, no matter their skills, intelligence, or competence.
women are implicitly expected to earn this invisible qualification through maintaining a culturally approved body size, grooming and styling to match dominant beauty norms, presenting in a pleasing, often youthful image, and investing time, money, and effort into appearance. if they don't do that, they risk being seen as less competent, less capable, and less deserving of opportunities.
And this professional beauty qualification, the PBQ, can be seen even in, legal cases. There's legal evidence of this. just a little quick search, and I was really expecting the last case of this to be further back in history. but in 2006, in Jesperson versus Harris's operating Co, there was a federal court case where.
Darlene Jesperson, a bartender at Harris's Casino in Nevada was fired for refusing to wear makeup as required by the company's grooming policy. She had an otherwise spotless performance record and had worked there for over a decade. Harris's policy mandated different standards for men and women. Men had to be quote, neatly groomed.
While women were required to wear makeup style, their hair conform to a feminine aesthetic.
Jesperson argued that this violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sex-based discrimination. However, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against her stating that the policy did not impose an unequal burden on women. this is still happening. one of the biggest reasons why it's this last frontier for personal growth and healing is because it's somehow no longer in fashion to talk about body image challenges anymore.
It's fallen out of the feminist agenda, and that is really. It does a great disservice to, us as women because I still to this day have not
had a client walk through my doors that didn't have some block of the way that they looked to enjoying sex fully and feeling completely. Powerful in their bodies. the history that we're coming from is long and it's ornate. There's a lot of little details that are actually very useful to know. learning that history is so incredibly important.
But I also wanted to acknowledge this other huge dynamic at play that is , once I point this out in session with people, it is usually a lot easier for them to understand why it is difficult to let go of this fixation that we have. We have to give up power.
In order to heal this particular area,
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They are intimate. They're designed to wake you up without rushing you because your pleasure isn't gone. It's just been waiting for the right kind of attention. It's free, it's yours. Go get it.
to heal your relationship with your body, you have to give up a particular kind of power, that conditional power that is based on how well you perform beauty, the power being palatable, the power of being seen as, quote, respectable, desirable, worthy. If you stay in line.
And only if you stay small, pretty and charming. We have to give up these measly crumbs of power that we were given in exchange for being under the thumb of the dominant systems. it's the only power many of us were ever permitted to have through our beauty, through our charm, through the way that we look.
when you give that up, you are actually giving up power. That's something that we really have to contend with. You're giving up , the gaze of others, the gaze of men, even the gaze of other women. You're giving up a kind of assumed respect between other women.
You're giving up the power of jealousy as currency, the power that comes from being one of the ones who's. Winning inside of the system
what you receive when you give up that power is actually responsibility. You are no longer in collapse. You're not just surviving or participating. You're in ownership. You're in sovereignty, and that means something. It means there's no script anymore. There's no pre-written story. You're performing.
There's only who you actually are, and you have to know who you really are. If you're no longer defined by being beautiful or morphing yourself to fit the gaze of other people. And that's a big responsibility. that power has weight and the shift from one kind of power to the other.
That other conditional fragile power into full-bodied sovereignty is a scary jump.
yet, what we stand to gain is so much bigger, so much more power. that new updated, more complete power is bigger and it's also scarier. And it's uglier. It's more raw, more feral, less tidy. It's not the power that comes from being chosen. It's the power that comes from choosing yourself.
It's not collapse, it's capacity.
It's a big deal. It's a big thing, a big journey that, that if you choose to go on it, it's not necessarily easy. I always like to dump like a truckload of compassion onto my clients at this point, because it's not our fault that we carry these stories. We weren't modeled anything else and finding a new story, the right story is not an easy feat, and it's actually not cognitive work either.
And this is the other big thing about body image is that body image challenges are a nervous system pattern. They aren't cognitive. Work. They're not healed through affirmation, and only staying in the mind. They are any fixation we have on our bodies. Any, monitoring we're doing, any body checking that we're doing is a chronic embodied safety response.
It's how we've historically found safety for ourselves. healing that is not going to be mind work because this affects your actual safety.
that's true actually for any intimacy challenge that brings people through my doors where they're having these repeated. Body responses that they don't fully understand, pulling away when their trusted spouse, reaches for physical contact with them or having a low libido. Or disassociating during sex.
All of these things are body patterns so the site at which we need to re-pattern them is through the body. It is not through the mind and body image these challenges through the body healing. This is actually about. F loving.
the body logic of this is that body image is not about how you look. This isn't about appearance. It never actually was. Body image. Challenges are about behavior. They're about control. They're about safety. How we've been taught to act, behave, survive. the body has been used as a side of political disenfranchisement.
It started thousands of years ago. And continues today. the thing that I find it's so important to point out to people in this moment where they're widening their lens to the broader cultural history that we're all carrying with us. Is that the thing that we are. Needing and craving and yearning for when it comes to body image is to feel beautiful.
It's not actually to look beautiful. It's a sensation that we're seeking. We want to feel our beauty. We want to feel worthy.
the thing we're seeking is sensation. the way that we. Interrupt the pattern of body image challenges and self-hate talk and body checking is not by doing affirmations, it's not by trying to interrupt the, self-hate talk. With positive self-talk, the way that we do it in somatics is actually.
To start orienting to your body as a verb and not as a noun. Because our bodies are living experiences. they move, they morph. We aren't sculptures. We are living, breathing things. our bodies are verbs. They have life. They're in movement. this is why it can be a blocker if you're thinking more about how you look than how you feel in sex.
Because once you've done that, you've cut off your awareness at the neck and you're looking down at your body as if it's an object to observe, but it's not. It's a first person experience. Really slowly we start helping you create
spaces where you can experience the sensations of your body in a safe way, and you start orienting to your body as the first person experience of it rather than. The object of your body. I always love to bring in a little metaphor here, this is from the book, eating in the Light of the Moon, how women can transform the relationship with food through myths, metaphors, and storytelling.
There is this metaphor that the author uses to describe what it's like to find a new way of relating to your body. And it's perfectly illustrates how these challenges are, or somatic patterns living in the body. she describes this.
Girl who's been swept away in a fast moving river and she is nearly drowning until she finds a piece of driftwood to hold onto and it's just barely keeping her afloat. It's keeping her alive. She's definitely not thriving, but she is alive and she's floating on down the river doing pretty okay, and then she sees a shoreline, but it's quite a ways from where she is.
she doesn't know if she can make it to that swore. Sure. If she lets go of the driftwood and just starts swimming there, she lacks the confidence and she might actually lack the actual like muscle strength and endurance to get there. what it looks like with embodied learning is you take it one tiny chunk at a time, so you're holding on to this.
Flotation device. And rather than just letting it go completely and start just swimming frantically, what you do is you take your hands off of it for a moment and then hold on again. Take it off. Hold on, take it off, hold on. then maybe the next step is that you release it for a few moments more and then you hold on and you release it for a few moments more and hold on.
And then maybe you start swimming around this driftwood. then hold on around the driftwood and hold on. eventually you build the endurance and the muscle and the trust and the confidence with yourself to let go of that old pattern and swim to the shore and be in a new somatic shape. And that is truly what it's like to heal your body image.
It is, slow and gentle and compassionate. Process of learning how to find joy in the actual experience of your physical being and really tiny, doable chunks because when we are fixating on how we look, what we are really actually craving is a way that we feel. We want to feel whole and we want to feel worthy, and we want to feel beautiful.
That's what it's like to let go of this, the old scraps of power for this new intricate one. Once we're able to swim to the shore for the first time, we can actually construct This rock solid foundation and this beautiful like castle on top that we've never had before. We get to start thriving and what's waiting for us on the other side of this growth is our organic state and our organic state of relating to our bodies is actually to be intimately in love with our bodies.
We're supposed to love effortlessly. Our genitals and our zones and our belly and our thighs and everything. That's our organic state. the work of healing this is, is revealing that again, yes, there's so much to unlearn and yes, there is power that must be relinquished and it's a long journey.
But what is also true is that the simplicity. Of the healing is in that all it takes is reconnecting to your body in this way, to your beauty, in this way, to your image. In this way is just to feel the sensations in your bones, in your skin, in all of you. Start to actually feel your body again, because the truth of all of this is just sitting inside of your skin waiting.
Remember that in order to take away or extract from its essence a natural organic process, it takes a lot of work. It, and it never goes away fully. The DNA of that organic process still stands and its resting inside of you and your body, when you start really connecting with. Yourself, your lived experience, you start to actually experience the, the true definition of beauty that just lives inherently in your body.
there are a, few essential pillars of this like true definition of beauty. And one is that it is non-hierarchical. One form is not better than the other. One. Texture is not better than the other, and as a result, it doesn't pit women against each other because it's completely non-hierarchical.
It wouldn't make sense to talk about art that way either. If you think about all the different shapes that are in a piece, pieces of art, you wouldn't say that, well, art with a round shape is better than art with a line that would be. Completely ludicrous. the art that lives in our bodies is the same way.
It's completely non-hierarchical. another pillar of this true beauty is that similarly, it's subjective and there's no universal ideal. So it's different from person to person. There's gonna be things that I think are beautiful that you do not think are beautiful Which creates so much diversity in the way that we present ourselves and the way that we play with our appearance.
It allows for so much more diversity, which we're all we're meant to see. That's what we're meant to see. Another pillar of this true beauty is that it's cross generational and It honors experience because it is experience like beauty is experience. It's not an image, it doesn't separate our elders from our young women, which is another tricky and effective form of social control.
If you separate the elders from the young, the elder women from the young women, you're separating those that have lived through the experience of these beauty ideals and see that they do not lead anywhere. And they've gained the power of separating themselves from the ideals because they've had to, because they can't keep up with that ideal because it favors youth they have all of this wisdom of the how for how to do that, but their voices are dismissed because in included in the social definition of beauty is to discount
elders and age and experience is actually a negative. this true definition of beauty goes across generations. It doesn't favor youth. it favors experience, all kinds of experience. it heals this divide between the generations. Of women and another pillar is that it's pleasure based and so it doesn't hurt it.
We don't do things that cause us pain. If it's experience based, then it is also pleasure based. We do things that feel really good to our bodies and the light that comes from us when we are thoroughly ha experiencing complete joy in our bodies. That is what beauty is. this true definition of beauty that you start to just inherently access when you are experiencing your body, it actually nourishes your eroticism.
It, it would never block you from your eroticism. once we connect with our inherent living, just in our bones, definition of beauty, that is what is waiting for us. Our pleasure is waiting for us. Our experiencing the joy of our lives is just right there. starting to see every form that your body can take as.
Even more of a propeller and a push to find more and more pleasure and joy in your body and your sex and your intimacy. it's all just waiting there right under your skin. So.
All right. That's enough sacred rage and sexological wisdom for one episode. Your body's listening now. Go do something delicious with it. Check the stone notes for whatever magic I've mentioned. And if you want to take this deeper, I've got resources for you. The show notes are stacked, free practices, juicy courses, all the good stuff.
Now go drink some water, touch your body like it's a miracle, and I'll see you in the next one.
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