What if your sexuality could be the source of your deepest confidence, creativity, and power—not your shame or struggle?
Sexuality is so vast that when people want to work on their sexual selves they often don’t even know where to begin. One woman told me, “It’s like my sexuality is a big round ball and I don’t know what to grab onto or how to get in.” She went on to take my deepest dive sexual empowerment program and found so many things to grab onto that she developed her body confidence, transformed her relationship to pleasure, and experienced her sexuality in a totally new way.
For over 25 years, I have taught sexuality to teens, college students, and adults. After having hundreds, even thousands of conversations with people about their sexuality, and hearing their struggles and challenges, as well as the places where they find potency and fulfillment in their sexuality, I have a deep sense of what the sexual empowerment journey looks like.
Through this work, I developed 9 elements of a sexually empowered life–the 9 elements I teach in my work and that I wrote about in Woman On Fire: 9 Elements to Wake Up Your Erotic Energy, Personal Power & Sexual Intelligence. In my coaching and educational programs, I work with people on these 9 elements of sexual empowerment so that they can express their sexuality from a place of confidence and clarity, and so that they can experience the wholeness, fulfillment and freedom they want.
They are not a step-by-step ladder but more like 9 congruent elements that are always in development and always impacting one another. There is no end point, no arrivals–only a deepening of the self with each piece of the journey. Sexuality is vast and complex — not a linear graph, not a one-way street, but an ever-unfolding prism.
9 Elements of Sexual Empowerment
1. VOICE: Claim your Internal & External Sexual Voice
Everyone has a sexual story. Not only a sexual lifeline of the experiences you’ve had, both solo and with other people, but also, a deeper internal narrative about what sexuality means to you and how you see yourself as a sexual being. You make meaning out of your experiences and that becomes your sexual story. Sometimes that story needs to be revised or rewritten. Sometimes you are enacting the sexual scripts you have learned that are not actually who you are or what you believe.
Part of the process with voice is to look at the beliefs you carry about your sexuality. What does it mean to you to be a sexual person? What messages from your culture and other people and influences have you internalized? Which ones are you ready to dump? A big part of the work here is shifting & re-framing negative views of sexuality into sex-positive beliefs that nurture you and make your life feel more juicy and alive.
Examining the beliefs you carry around your sexuality, what it means to be a sexual person and the messages that you may have internalized without realizing it helps you to reorganize your beliefs about sexuality so you can claim your true voice. Understanding how your internal sexual voice is externalized is key to creating the sexual relationships you long to have.
2. RELEASE: Make Room for the Sexual Self You’ve Been Waiting for
There are many things that get in the way of you having the sexuality you truly want. Sexual empowerment is about making room for the things you truly desire, and evicting the ones you don’t want, but who have been squatting in your pleasure center.
Release is about making room so your true sexual self can come in. As you identify beliefs about who you need to be, your sexual shame, guilt and unprocessed trauma, and the many other ideas, beliefs and perspectives that have blocked your own sexual magnificence and expression, you can release what you do not need and move into your ideal sexual self. In Woman On Fire, I talk about ten things that need to be released to free ourselves sexually. Let’s make room for the sexual self you long for. They are waiting for you.
3. EMOTION: Show Up as Emotionally Powerful
Photo courtesy of Kirschner Amao, Unsplash.
The intricacies of sex and emotions are vast. Becoming a fully functioning sexual adult requires emotional skills. This means
examining your people-pleasing tendencies, your needs for control, your fears of vulnerability and the things that take you away from your true self. It is also understanding your feelings about sex, identifying the defenses and patterns that keep you stuck around sexuality, and looking at how you are creating emotional and sexual boundaries for yourself.
As you break free of your damaging emotional patterns and learn to express and maintain healthy boundaries that support you to have what you want and avoid what you don’t, you come into a place of fully authentic emotional expression that does not harm yourself or others and allows for an expansiveness that involves all parts of who you are. Don’t forget to forgive yourself for old wounds and ways of being that didn’t serve you or those you love.
4. BODY: Radically Accept Your Body
In our sex-negative culture that picks at the perceived imperfections of our bodies constantly, nearly everyone has complaints about their body. Yet our body is the primary vehicle of our sexuality and sexual expression. It is so important to break your patterns of body abuse and learn to radically accept your body regardless of age, size, color or imperfections with grace and gratitude so you can begin to enjoy your body in ways you didn’t know–or forgot–you could.
This is such important work in a world filled with distorted images of what the human body “should” look like, and media objectification of women and female sexuality is ubiquitous. When you radically accept your body, you learn to take greater pleasure in yourself, enjoy richer sensuality, and build your confidence and sexual-self esteem.
5. DESIRE: Activate desire & create a sexual practice
Desire is a core part of sexual self-actualization and it is overwhelmingly the issue that people come to me wanting help with the most. Where is your authentic “yes” and your clear “no?” You cannot know your “yeses” if you do not know where your limits are. As you explore your sexual desires, needs and fantasies and take steps to make some of your fantasies real if you choose, you open up possibilities in sex and relationships. As you learn to set healthy boundaries for the things you do not want, your desire feels safer and more accessible.
You can develop practices and increase your desire awareness with daily attention to your sexuality. This is about making sexuality a priority so that it stops being something that gets put off, procrastinated or that falls to the bottom of the “to-do list.” I love helping my clients maintain a sexual practice and create new rituals that support their potential for their highest sexual and spiritual good.
6. PERMISSION: Give Yourself Permission to Develop Your Real Erotic Authenticity
We live in a time when we are told what and who to want, who to be sexually, what to like and we are given a prescribed script for what sex should look like. In that context, we all need permission to experience our authentic sexuality and self-expression. Most of us hold back, and fear what it will mean if we go for the things we really want sexually.
What do you need permission for? With permission, you assess how you are best loved, and communicate your needs for giving and receiving love. It’s important to examine how power shows up for you most authentically in sex and relationships and what you want to incorporate into your erotic terrain. Ultimately, you will come into deep alignment with your sexual nature as you give yourself permission to develop your authentic language for flirtation, touch, connection, sex, power, and expression of your needs.
7. PLAY: Remember How to Play & Develop Sexual Skills
Play is an essential part of a sexually vibrant life. Many adults need to relearn how to play, let loose and be creative when it comes to their sexuality. Many of us had play conditioned right out of us as kids. Yet, it is a source of joy and an important part of culture and relationships. When you identify, improve and expand your sexual repertoire, you can start having the best sex of your life and the quality relationships you want.
Through play, we develop skills, which help to make sex better. What’s in your sexual repertoire? What sexual skills have you explored and which ones do you know need work? When you identify, improve and expand your sexual repertoire through play and skills, you can start having the best sex of your life and the quality relationships you want. Not to mention, a lot more fun.
8. HOME: Build Sexual Confidence and Come Home to YOU
A’magine
Most people are not at home in themselves. Many of us have experienced abandonment wounds that live in us and we find ourselves leaving ourselves in our adult relationships over and over. Learn how to come home to yourself and stop leaving yourself in relationships so you are more authentic, radically self-reliant, and able to meet your own needs. When two people are at home in themselves and come together in relationship, that very different from the constant controlling behavior and people-pleasing that keeps people disconnected from their true selves and relating to patterns rather than to one another.
When you fully love and embrace all of who you are, you draw to yourself the relationships that honor that person and you can live a fully expressed and intentional life.
9. FIRE: Use Your Dynamic Sexual Energy to Live Vibrantly
Your inner fire is the energy that fuels your life and makes it more juicy and alive. We all come from sexual energy, no matter how we were conceived and birthed into the world. That core energetic spark that creates new life is our origin–so there is no way to divorce ourselves from it! It lives inside of us and we get to keep that core sexual energy fed.
As we nurture that energy, we have more pleasure and joy in life. There are ways of connecting more deeply to your body and deepening your self-intimacy so you can express your vibrancy in a powerful way. You can develop your internal heat and expand your ability to run energy through your system. When you are tending to your inner fire, you can become unstoppable. This element is about learning to build that energy and fill your inner well so you can be fortified to create all you were put here to create, in love, in life and in the world.
Want to learn more about the 9 Elements of Sexual Empowerment? Get your copy of Woman on Fire: 9 Elements to Wake Up Your Erotic Energy, Personal Power & Sexual Intelligence, listen on audio, or check out my 🍯Honey+Fire Program🔥where we dive into the depths of these elements for a full year. If you’d like to take a journey unlike anything else to help you become the healthy, well-rounded sexual human you wish to be, this is for you. I’d love to support you in your reclamation and becoming.
Got Questions? Reach out to us. We are happy to talk.
