This is part two of the long journey to the body!  Here’s part one.  You’ll want to start there, ’cause it’s about to go deep, and quickly.

::ahem::

I remember Googling the symptoms and thinking, “Yup, must be it!”

Much like people diagnose themselves with cancer or a horrible, rare disease via Webmd.com and a few internet searches, I diagnosed myself as Asexual.

What else could it be?

I used to feel desire…and then I didn’t.
I used to feel lust and attraction…and then I didn’t.
I used to feel attractive and want to flirt and…you guessed it, then I didn’t.

The simplest, most direct route to an answer — any answer, really — was only a Google search away!

Hooray! I was asexual!

Never mind that the vast majority of asexual attributes didn’t apply to me, or that typically those who identify as asexual have never really felt any sort of sexually charged feelings, or that I didn’t dive too deeply into the articles I skimmed.

I decided I was asexual BUT that I would give sexuality one last try.

I’d been following this woman named Kim Anami, and she seemed to ooze healthy sexual vitality in a way that I’d never seen in any other person.

I signed up for Kim Anami’s Well-Fucked Woman course and did all the homework. I lifted my jade egg and did breast massage and earned an imaginary A in the class because that’s what I do: I earn A’s in classes. Even if there are no actual grades. 😉

If you’re curious, go get the free videos and see if you have a case of FUK*ME.

I left the course feeling more alive than I’d ever been, bodily-speaking, and I was awake in ways I’d never before experienced. I actually enjoyed having a body.  WHUT, I didn’t know that was possible (except for ice cream and sugar and eating all the things!).

I enjoyed activities like bathing and showering and being naked and massage and taking care of my body in ways that I simply hadn’t before Kim showed up and taught me her ways.

Unfortunately, this re-engaging with my own sexuality didn’t magically translate to wanting sex with other people. Namely, my husband.

I heard a friend of a friend talk about how she had the best month of her marriage by having daily sex with her partner. She called it the ‘Month of Jeff’ and said she had never seen her husband happier. Could I just try that?

UM NO. That sounded terrible.

Turns out I was asexual for just one person that I happened to have pledged to be with for the rest of my life, and that the rest of me was a fully functioning (i.e. sexual) human.

This complicated things. It led directly to marital counseling, actually. I continued to be an enlivened sexual being as long as my partner wasn’t in the bedroom.  Doing this work led to a brief tripling of my sex drive — as in, sex 3 times in 3 months, instead of once every 3 months — but that faded with the ongoing grind of counseling.

So: Well-Fucked Woman, check. Amazing, wonderful, lovely, check.

I bought Kim’s next class, Coming Together, because it was coming up and I knew I would need it eventually, but that I didn’t need it at the time. (Lol, lol, lol — I know it makes me old to say ‘lol’ but — lol.)

To say it a different way: my FOMO for Kim’s knowledge of all things enlivened and sexual was so great that I dropped money on a course before I had left my husband because I knew that eventually I would need it, and WHAT IF SHE TOOK IT AWAY FOREVER AND THEN I NEVER KNEW WHAT WAS NEXT WHEN I MET THE PERSON I WANTED TO TAKE THE CLASS WITH.

Coming Together is an 8-week-long sexual education course for couples that’s held live once a year. I’m finally taking Coming Together during this round of the annual course.

Kim can help you into the body, alone or with your partner or both.

In the course, Kim will teach you:

• Communication and space-clearing techniques
• How to keep a constant “simmer” in the relationship
• How to clear the blocks out of your relationship that are keeping you stuck…so that you can open fully to giving and receiving with your partner
• 5000-year-old ancient techniques to harness your creative, orgasmic energy and use it as a power source
• The secret to full-body and multiple orgasms
• The ins-and-outs of sexual reflexology
• How to use different sex acts to tap into different emotional and healing qualities.
• How to increase sexual chemistry and polarity

I can only assume that Coming Together is as amazing as the Well-Fucked Woman, only with partner activities instead of solo ones, and with introspection and homework that involves two people instead of just one.  I’m finally taking the course.  Five years later.  (Again: LOL.)

If you’d like to join me as a fellow student in the class, you’ll get a 1-hour bonus coaching call with me when the course ends.

We can talk business, life, marketing, sales, boundaries, and/or Kim’s genius.

A one-off hour-long call with me isn’t available any other way, so hop on over and take a look.

To be crystal clear: I’m an affiliate for Kim’s work, which has changed my life in good ways (yay orgasms!) and eye-opening ways that seemed bad in the short term but were good in the long term (marriage counseling that hurried the departure process).  You’ll need to purchase through my magical affiliate link when the time comes, should that be interesting to you.  For now, watch the videos.  (E-mail me at k@kristenkalp.com if you plan to buy, and I’ll make doubly-sure you’re hooked up with the appropriate links when the cart opens.)

At the very least, head over to watch her free videos with your partner and see if the messages you find there resonate with both of you.

I’m talking about this because I spent lots and lots of years trying to fix lots and lots of things about my marriage, and Kim’s work helped me find a way to my own body that had nothing to do with my partner at the time.  ‘Your first intimacy is with yourself,’ as Brian Andreas says, and Kim helped me find my own self, deep within my body.  I’m forever and ever grateful.  

P.S.  When you try and pretend nothing is wrong, sometimes your body has to get serious.  Here’s what happened to mine.  Also: breathwork is amazing.

I spent the first 30 years of life completely detached from my body.

When I was awake as a kid, I was reading: on the bus, under the desk, during breaks, and throughout recess, when I supposed to be playing with the others. I got straight A’s and excelled at all things academic.

I was also demoted from Intermediate to Beginner to Remedial in a single swim class assessment that was alleged to have lasted only 43 minutes, but that I’m sure spanned decades. I had a heart murmur and was afraid I would literally explode if I ran out of breath during physical activity. (Naturally I didn’t share this fear with my mother or my doctor, I just lived in constant fear of movement.) In high school, I ran the mile as fast as I could. It took 15 minutes.

I was bad at the body, so I built bigger and bigger worlds in my mind.

As I grew older, having been praised for my intelligence and all things academic, I retreated even farther into my mind, my thoughts, and my imagination. This had great side effects, like scholarships and a perfect GPA and admiring glances from the old ladies at church, but also had major-big-giant-negative ramifications for living in the present.

I imagined every life situation as slightly different or slightly better. Yes this movie is great, but what if I had more popcorn? What if Ryan Gosling had a cameo? What if unicorns burst onto the scene to deliver a monologue in the next scene?

Imagining things as 3-9% better kept me from seeing things as they were.

I lived without being in the present, preferring to be juuuuuuust a few minutes in the future at all times: where would we do after the movie? What would we do after we got home? What would happen when we got to where we were going? And on and on and on, never in my body or in the moment. Always a few steps, seconds, or thoughts ahead.

It took an actual human being sitting with me for hours upon hours over the course of nine months to begin to discern the sensations my body was sending me at any given moment. (At first, I was sure my body wasn’t providing any sensations or doing any talking. Turns out I had just stopped listening.)

I got less bad at the body.

My mind had long since overridden the tingly, prickling hot feelings in my belly to mean ‘anger,’ which was bad and should therefore be shut down. Only that tingling and prickling also appeared when shamed, when surprised, and when dancing, which meant it wasn’t only anger and it wasn’t necessarily bad. I began to feel the difference.

I started to be able to identify my thoughts without believing all of them.  (Asshole brain isn’t some neat thing I read about, it’s a gremlin that took years to discern from the rest of my thoughts.)

I started to pay attention when the body wanted to stretch or move or eat instead of deciding it didn’t need those things (and shut up, we have serious work to do).

Learning to discern the body’s cues from the mind’s many attempts to control everything has been and still is a long process.

Today’s episode of That’s What She Said focuses on the first steps toward pulling yourself out of the mind and into your animal home, the body. These are simple-but-not-easy, hard-earned tidbits that have helped me become a healthier, more energized, and more connected human.  See also: breathwork, breathwork, and breathwork.

Let’s dive in:

P.S.  This is part one!  Part two in the series stars Kim Anami and lives here.