Last week was the cannabis episode, which was, honestly, harrowing. To record and to share. I told Bear I was pretty sure it would end my career, that all my clients would abandon me, and that I’d never work again. He said, “Have you ever felt like this before?” “YUP,” I answered, “so many times.” Every time something awesome is about to happen, in fact. So, I hit publish and then geared myself up for another round of more of the same.
This week, it’s another taboo: sex! I can feel my palms sweating as I type. I’m sharing anyway. You can listen in or keep reading…
Let’s start back in the day, shall we?
Throughout my teen years and high school, I went to various ultra-conservative Christian workshops and meet-ups in places as exotic as Orlando and Salt Lake City. I was on the Bible quiz team. I came thiiiiiis close to signing a True Love Waits pledge. (True Love Waits being a pledge that says sex is for marriage, and signing means you agree.)
Sex wasn’t something that was talked about, ever, for any reason, unless it was to shame someone for having it before marriage or for being gay.
Pile on the feelings of a shy kid who’s also smart (read: dudes don’t speak to me unless they want to copy my homework) and suddenly you’ve found someone who is TERRIFIED of sex. When, exactly, in the marriage ceremony does sex go from being forbidden to being something that is glorious and wonderful, fully condoned? How does that work? Why is God such a prude? How are we supposed to shed all that shame of doing a forbidden thing in mere minutes on our wedding night? I never found good answers to those questions.
I was a fairly late bloomer all the way around, with regards to my body. I came to sex late and with much gratitude. (As in, someone is willing to have sex with me! Yay!) I didn’t wait until marriage, but I was pretty picky and have a short list of sexual partners.
I was 20 when I had sex for the first time, and WEE IT WAS ALL THE FUN I LOVED IT SO MUCH. Then I had more sex with the same person, and HOLY SHIT IT WAS SO SO AWESOME.
Then I got married. To a different person.
As I’ve discussed before, my marriage wasn’t about sex or enjoying sex or exploring sexuality. It was about ‘working on’ the marriage from the moment it started.
Six years into the relationship, I had convinced myself that I was broken and/or asexual in order to avoid confronting the deeper truth: that I was not and never really had been attracted to the one person on earth I was committed to having sex with in this lifetime.
Which is when I discovered Kim Anami.
…and she sort of ruined everything.
If you also feel broken or like you’ve shut down completely and totally — which is a dramatic shift from how you were previously — I recommend picking up Kim Anami’s Well Fucked Woman course. Or if you’d like to have a libido and…don’t. WFW is all about the tricky work of reconnecting with yourself and with your own sexuality before you attempt to add a partner into the mix. Even if you’ve got a partner, I highly recommend it.
If you’re ready to explore partnership in sex, I can’t sing the praises of Kim Anami’s Coming Together course enough. I’m gonna tell you what I’ve learned from her work, and what you might learn, too.
1.) You are not broken. You can have every type of orgasm. Yes, you.
One of Kim’s primary tenets is that everyone can have every type of orgasm if you have the corresponding body parts.
So, clitoral orgasm? Check.
G-spot orgasm? Check.
Cervical orgasm? Check.
You can have all of those orgasms, period. Even if you’ve never had any at all.
…if you’re like, ‘Wait, WHAT THE FUCK IS A CERVICAL ORGASM,’ exactly. That’s why you need Kim’s work. It’s the holy grail of connection and intimacy, available only after you’ve done the work of being seen, clearing the space between you as a couple on a regular basis, and having a few other orgasms to get the body going and to step into sexual flow.
The good news is: now you’ve heard of it. You can go try it out. And make it happen. (If you want help, look no further than Coming Together.)
2.) Not all orgasms are simple pleasure.
This was a shocking revelation, and I would have thought something was completely and utterly wrong with me if I hadn’t been intimately acquainted with Kim’s work.
I cut myself off from the waist down the minute my former husband said he wanted kids, then used my lady bits as an emotional trash can for lots of years because it was a damn good hiding place. It was rarely accessed in sex because that part of the relationship had died. It was impervious to the work of body-based professionals like masseuses and aestheticians because it was always off limits.
I shoved my feelings about the patriarchy and sexual violence and injustice and the wage gap into it. I shoved the pain of my marriage into it. I stacked boxes and boxes of brokenness in every available corner until I literally couldn’t breathe into my body any further than my solar plexus.
Your lady bits are the perfect hiding space. Clearing that space takes time.
Clearing the garbage took years. Years of going past my own boundaries of pleasure — of how much delight and goodness I was willing to let myself experience — as well as years of trusting Bear and our partnership in deeper and fuller ways.
Most of all, it took years of not shaming myself for my own reactions.
When you commit to coming together in all the ways, you naturally open up space for any reaction to an orgasm to be on the table. You might sob. You might wail. You might laugh. You might feel waves of ecstasy that go on and on. You might issue guttural noises from your throat. You might shake and flail and kick. You might push your partner away or draw them closer. You might go for a combo of these things. Each and every one of those reactions is completely valid and acceptable.
Bigger, deeper female orgasms (which I’m speaking about because they’re the only kind I’ve ever had) often build like a storm, and they can ride the line between pleasure and pain. They can clear any pain you’ve tucked away in your soft tissue, any wounds you’ve carried from past lovers, and any emotional debris that’s getting between you and your partner. Or you and your life. Or both.
I’ve experienced orgasms that made me feel like an ascended master — enlightened, floating, and full of bliss — as well as orgasms that made me feel like a hermit crab without a shell — defenseless, frightened, and utterly vulnerable. Literally scared to exist.
Bear’s job as a partner has been and still is to make a space safe enough and big enough for all of those reactions to be not only okay, but welcomed. To be a soft space when tears are coming. To hold me through sobs of despair and pain. To let whatever is happening, happen, without trying to make it go differently, and without paying any attention to how sex ‘should’ look.
Where porn is all moaning and ecstasy and doggy style pounding, real life making love is a continuous transfer of energy that might sound and look sexy, or it very well might not. That’s okay.
Deep orgasms bring you back to life, and that process is neither linear nor straightforward. But it is worth it.
3.) Clear the space between you.
Female bits are wired for depth, both literally and metaphorically. We crave deep knowledge of our partners’ brains and hearts and thoughts…and then bodies.
Kim taught me to return to the space between us and to clear it relentlessly. Any small slight is discussed, because discussing small slights means they don’t turn into resentment, judgement, silence, passive aggression, or just plain aggression.
If your partner spends every waking minute on the phone, there’s no way your pussy is wet for them.
If your partner reveals nothing of his or her soul to you (and you’re in a committed relationship, not having a fling), there’s no way you’re having more and more amazing sex as time goes on.
If your partner has stayed exactly the same while you’ve grown and changed for the better, your sex life will suffer for failing to discuss that growth.
When resentments and hurts between you and your partner build, the debris tends to accrue in your genitals.
OF COURSE you have no libido when all you talk about with your partner is meal planning and scheduling and budgeting. There’s nothing sexy about picking up chicken fingers on the way home, or figuring out how to pay the mortgage again this month, but we’re often so busy that we try to get away with calling that intimacy.
Clearing the space between you means you’ve done the hard work of being human together, showing one another your true selves, and picking each other as partners for another day.
That’s square one.
That’s not an impossible goal or a pie-in-the-sky circumstance. It’s not a fairytale or the basis for a sitcom.
Clearing the space between you is the cost of having an extraordinary sexual relationship.
This is, hands down, THE hardest part of your time in a relationship. It’s easy to skirt issues, sweep them under the rug, bury them with busyness, or pretend sex isn’t at all important. I’ve seen women turn to me, time and again, to tell me they’re broken, when really they’re experiencing partnership issues that go back for years, if not decades. Clear the space, clear the space, clear the space. Kim does an intro to non-violent language and communication that’s super helpful for getting started.
4.) Use the breath as a powerful tool.
I was mostly unaware of my breathing until I came across Kim’s work in 2012. Of course I’d been breathing for three decades, but it had never seemed to need my attention or effort.
Kim’s courses helped me use the breath to stay present, to ride my own edges, and to distribute feeling and pleasure from my nether regions to the rest of my body. My lower half slowly came online with a combination of masturbation and the breath.
I can now control the intensity of my feelings with the depth of my breath. I can stay fully present with Bear for longer periods of time when I ride the breath. I can feel orgasms in my fingertips and toes when I ride the breath.
Better sex is often a matter of paying attention to the most ordinary thing we do each day.
When we’re truly present, we’re with our breath.
When we’re with our breath, we’re also with our partner.
When we’re with our partner, we deepen connection and intimacy.
When we deepen connection and intimacy, we become better versions of ourselves.
It’s so simple and so challenging, too.
5.) It gets better.
When you’re deeply committed to both your own growth and your partner’s growth, amazing sex isn’t the anomaly. It’s the norm.
Just as there are worlds you can explore only on your own, there are worlds you can only explore with another human.
You have an animal side and a softer side. You have harsh edges and abandoned boxes of garbage you can’t seem to shift. You have energies locked within you and forgotten. You have lands whose gates have been thrown open within you. You have rivers of delight flowing through you. Those are all on the table when you start coming together.
You find new ways to please each other, new ways to communicate with each other, and more depths to explore. Always.
The commitment isn’t for the faint of heart, but it pays dividends of ease and trust; pleasure and comfort; gratitude and bliss.
Kim’s Coming Together course is full of so much more than this tiny little introduction can contain. Click here for the free video series that will help you figure out whether this is right for you — and whether you choose to pick up the course or not, paying attention to her work is highly recommended.
The course is organized by which body parts your partner has and how to please them. It sticks with ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ polarities more than strict male/female or strictly hetero language. However! You will be disappointed if you or your partner are trans because that isn’t specifically addressed in the main or supplementary bonus materials. If you know of a course that *does* include that information, I would be *thrilled* to hear about it and to share it!
P.S. Here’s my interview with Kim about the Well Fucked Woman course!
