by Victoria Redbard

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Majority of women I speak to have a fear of being caught masturbating. The others have a hard time admitting that they even masturbate. I used to hate Self Pleasuring…

Being with ourselves in our rawest form is a vulnerable place to be. When we recognise that Self Pleasure is not masturbation, and that it doesn’t need to involve touching our genitals or taking our clothes off, we open a portal to a deeper relationship with our bodies. Yet it doesn’t get any less vulnerable.

Every time we decide to be with our bodies in a quiet place, we don’t know what will arise. It could be tears, grief, joy, intense volcanic erotism, whatever is there is perfect and beautiful, but it’s edgy. The people who I’ve seen have the best results with the Self Pleasure modality are the ones who are able to let go of what they think Self Pleasure needs to look like, and get present to what’s happening in the body right here, right now.

Spoiler Alert: The present moment is where ALL the pleasure lives.

I personally used to think I was no good at Self Pleasuring because I’d be journeying with my body and it was nothing like the sex I’d have with my partner. I had judgements around this and believed I wasn’t good at it, as it was nowhere near as pleasurable or erotic as what I’d journey in partnered sex.

As I was a sex educator at the time I decided to shift my perspective on how to approach my Self Pleasure practice. Instead of working towards the goal of arousal, pleasure and orgasm, I shifted my focus to staying present with my body for 10 minutes, and after some time I increased my allocated time to 20 minutes and then 30 minutes.

This capacity to learn to stay present to my inner world and not get distracted by the busy world around me was really what birthed the Self Pleasure modality. In the beginning, there were layers of discomfort and memories I didn’t want to face when I would go inside but after some time and letting go of any idea that I knew what I would face when I sat down with my body, things started to move.

I began to recognise that with each moment of presence I offered myself, I gained the capacity to feel more of the ecstasy that lived in my body.

The sensations inside of me began to inform my actions more than any conditioning or ideas other people had about how sexuality should look and be.

The idea of ‘sexy’ became a feeling inside of my body and not a hollow concept of how I needed to look to others.

On top of that I started to find the clarity to questions I had about my life.

What to do next?

Where did my career want to take me?

What is the meaning behind the things that were happening to me in my life?

All of it became easier to understand when I came inwards and invoked my life force through Self Pleasure. Letting go of the goal and just opening myself to listen to the sensations I was experiencing within allowed me to discover the meaning of my life.

Every time we’re brave enough to face all of ourselves we become one step closer to creating the deep intimacy we long for with ourselves, our partners, our family, and our life path.

By combining our state of being with our strongest life force energy (our eros), we are able to pull back the veil and uncover everything we need to know.