Dearmouring and ReWilding are interrelated aspects of our healing that allow us to move fully towards true liberation and freedom.
The work I do as a sexual empowerment educator and healer uses both the clearing mechanism of dearmouring processes and fills the new open space with the wildness, freedom and liberation we long for.
When we do both, we come home to ourselves and live more vibrantly and fully in our human selves.
What is DeArmouring?
Everyone develops armor in our emotional body or what is often called our pain body. (For a great explanation of the pain body check out Eckart Tolle’s work.)
The best explanation of the emotional body I have seen is in the book Gift of the Body by Jonathan Goldman. The emotional body holds the physical body. He says:
“Furthermore, the health of the entire organism, the entire HEV [human energy vehicle], depends on the vitalizing of the emotional body. It is the emotional body that provides the rhythm to our aliveness. To do its job of vibrating in tune with nature, which is also constantly in motion and changing, the emotional body needs to be free and clear, running like a stream in springtime…A great percent of the physical pain that humans suffer from comes from clogging in the emotional body.” (J Goldman, Gift of the Body, page 47.)
When something painful or traumatic happens, what do we do? We brace ourselves, we clench, we tighten, we recoil, and as we do that, we bury the experience and we begin to carry it in the very fibers and cells of our bodies.
Most of us have experienced some kind of trauma, whether it is emotional, physical, mental, or spiritual, or all of the above. That trauma lodges itself in our bodies and it becomes a kind of armor, protecting us from further hurt.
If we carry that long enough without any discharge or release, it becomes a barrier to joy and fully accessing our whole range of feeling. We can experience it as feeling shut down, feeling numb, and not actually feeling at all.
Sometimes our bodies feel so armored that they feel unsafe and we live completely in our heads cut off from the neck down, subconsciously in fear of our own bodies.
The erotic lives in the physical and emotional body where we tune into nature, into the aliveness around us. We cannot be in our erotic nature if we cannot access our full range of feeling.
To free ourselves to be fully liberated means we must dearmor so that we can feel more fully in our bodies, so that we can be vibrant and alive again, so that we can experience the greatest ecstasy and the erotic power that is possible when we are fully connected to our sexual energy and creative joy.
Re-Wilding
Our natural state was wildness. As we liberate ourselves, we can move towards our wildness.
We were born as wild beings, until our wildness was shamed out of us, or squashed down, as we were told to be polite and to put all that playful energy away.
Yet our wildness lives deep underneath all of that armor, beyond the numbness, beyond the pain, beyond the need to protect ourselves.
And so when we dearmor, we release the things that we hold between us and the natural world, between our skin and the wind, between our flesh and hands that touch it, between our body and water, between our humanity and our animal nature.
We come back to our wildness.
My experience over 20 years of teaching sexuality is that so many of us are longing to be back in a state of our own wildness, to know what it is to experience our full erotic capacity, to know what it means to be fully in our sexual power and agency, to know what it is to experience ecstasy that is unfettered or mitigated by judgment or worry, too fully know what it is to be a erotic, sensual, human being.
The world is afraid of female sexuality because it is afraid of the wildness that is buried in our rage and expressed in our joy. It is a raw power we possess that creates life and love, and grieves just as deeply.
If we were all in that wildness the world would be a very different place. That wildness would protect our fellow wild animals and wild places–the rainforests and the animals, the things we hold dear.
We would rage against anything that would try to squash our wildness because once we know what it is to be wild again there really is no going back. We won’t be tamed again. Why would we choose to do that once we know what it means to be all of who we are without feeling like we have to tuck parts of it away because it is too much, too big, too loud, too erotic, too wild?
We would not.
We were not born to be wild.
We were born wild.
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I am working to bring entire communities of women back to that place. We will be doing that with fervor, power, and urgency at Fire Woman Retreat in September. If what I’ve written here resonates for you, and you are a woman or non-binary person identified female at birth, I urge you to be there.
