By Krista Kujat

About 80% of what we take in everyday comes through our vision. When we see what’s outside of ourselves, we envision possibility and what inspire desires, and it also becomes a first point of reference for comparing ourselves to others. The massive overload of media messages we receive daily tantalizes us into believing we ARE our external selves and collapse our perception of who we are with how we look, especially when it comes to looking sexy. One of the most important things we neglect to create is an inner communion with our bodies and our internal selves.

The most tragic thing about comparing ourselves is that it gets in the way of being able to see, to feel and to know our own beauty. We get caught up in what we are not,which makes us feel trapped in a continual cycle of trying to change.

I felt “not enough.”

When I was six years old in ballet class, adults would casually comment about how I had more meat on my bonesor I was bigger bonedor a little more fleshythan my older sister. For some reason, people liked to categorize us and they were surprised to hear my sister was the older one when I was thebiggerone. When I was fourteen, I was still bigger than my sister. I was convinced I wasn’t skinny enoughto wear a bikini. I have a picture of my precious teenage-self wearing a one-piece bathing suit with big felt marks circled around all the areas of my body that I didn’t like. I wrote “FAT”and pointed arrows to the areas of my body I wanted to change before I deemed myself able to wear a bikini.

 

Years later, as an actor, I was continually criticized for how I looked. As a fit model, my income depended on being the exact measurements of the clothing the job required I wear. My financial stability and survival depended on how my body and image was seen and measured from the outside. I was convinced that I needed to do more exercises from my Mom’s Reader’s Digest and that I should eat only what my sister ate. In my brain, I believed that what I was doing was positivebecause I was “improving” myself.Little did I know that this quest to improve myself was not motivated by self-love—but by self-lack. Improvingmy body became one of the biggest forms of self-sabotage I’ve experienced ever. I was never done improving myself.

Underneath it all there was shame because I wasn’t “enough”. There was something “wrong” with me. Shame is the mother of doubt, fear, control, and self-sabotage. Shame is what no one likes to talk about. It’s what makes us hide. It’s the thing that makes us fear and avoid rejection at all costs. And it makes us believe that we don’t deserve happiness, pleasure or loveWe clench physically and emotionally because painful experiences make an imprint on our nervous systems. The contraction in our bodies lead to sexual frustration…because even if our minds WANT to experience pleasure, our bodies sometimes can’t.

Perhaps you’ve long outgrown some of your body image insecurities. But if you are like me, you have found yourself, at some point, experiencing sexual disconnection no matter how many affirmations you do, or how much you tally your gratitudeeveryday. This leads to not feeling fully self-expressed, and sooner or later we feel trapped. Often when we’re on the verge of feeling most alive… like on the cusp of orgasm, or opening up our hearts to the possibility of new love, taking on a new business venture, or exposing a new art project to the world–our deepest fears kick-in causing us to contract.

On a very basic level, the core cause of this system shut-down is not feeling safe.

When we don’t feel safe emotionally, as a result of fearing rejection (feeling “not enough”), fearing betrayal (because of a past experience with a lover?), and/or because of a physical trauma or violation (like sexual abuse), we can’t experience the full range of pleasure available to our bodies. Visceral, self-preservation mechanisms start to run the show, protecting us from re-experiencing past pains. Maybe you’ve not only experienced shut-down physically through touch and intimacy, but also emotionally. You may even feel disgusted, violated, overwhelmed or nauseous, as a “replay” of an emotional or physical pain activates in your body.

Thankfully there are a number of things that help break the shut-down cycle.

1) The Splendid Truth: Our Bodies Are Built For Pleasure.

When we don’t express the sensual part of ourselves, it reinforces the feeling of “lack”or “not enough” that our brains picked up over the years from either comparing ourselves to other people, by internalizing cultural messaging that our bodies are not our own, or by a trauma. So how do we dissolve the belief and judgments of being “not enough”,“tainted”or “shameful”in order to feel pleasure and arousal? Shame is held in our nervous system, in our bone structures, in the stature of our spinal cord, in the way we hold ourselves and even in the way we speak. To experience a change in our body and in our nervous system, a change needs to happen beyond the level of our mind.

2) Expressing the Sensual Part of Ourselves Fills us with Our Own Unique Beauty from the Inside Out.

Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, one of the leading psychologists in trauma and neuroscience, outlines the limitations of talk therapy, and shows his patients that the most powerful forces for healing emotional and physical trauma held in the body include movement, breath and touch. Van Der Kolk explains that talking through trauma either gets the patient disconnected from feeling, or leads the patient to re-live trauma and inhibits healing. However his research shows that through movement, breath and touch the body can learn to feel safe with any range of emotion, and therefore release the patient from overly-identifying with the trauma. *

3) Practice Observation of Your Senses Without Judgment.

Specifically with experiencing sexual pleasure, harnessing your mind to focus on sensation breaks the pattern that sends signals to your nervous system to shut down. It untangles the belief informed sensation that something harmful will happen when your body opens up.

Building the experience of pleasure and happiness in your body everyday leads to sensations of safety and grounding, and further and greater degrees of pleasure.

4) Enjoy Everyday Pleasure Without Guilt

Learning to focus on sensation, without guilt, without shame, and without even labeling it as pleasurable or not, but just noticing it, dissolves your body’s involuntary impulse to shut down. With practice it expands your ability to experience pleasure beyond your imagination.

When you breathe into those areas of sensation, you become more sensitive and open to express your emotions through your body and your voice. All of the above allows you to deepen intimacy with confidence, so you can feel fully self-expressed, fulfilled emotionally, and physically free — first and foremost with yourself, and also with your lover.

Connecting to your sensuality is as simple as shifting your focus from any action you’re doing, or from the emotion you’re feeling, to focusing on the sensation you’re feeling.

It doesn’t need to take a lot of time! Just focus on sensation.

5) The Key? Consistency.

You can focus on sensation anytime during your daily activities! When you do the dishes, focus on feeling the smooth surface of a plate glide beneath your fingertips… When you’re walking feel the textures of the stones beneath the arch of your feet. When you’re savoring fruit, feel the tiny bulbs of a raspberry as you roll it around the ridges on the roof of your mouth. When you take a bath, experiment with focusing on the sensation of your fingers sliding a smooth bar of soap over your skin, or caressing your skin with a sponge, or a wet face cloth. To amp up the focus on pleasure a notch, play music that evokes emotion, and let your touch express how the music moves you.  The trick is, no matter what you’re doing, no matter where you are, who you’re with or what you’re feeling, keep bringing your focus back to the physical sensation, observe every detail of the sensation, and breathe into it.

6) Meditate to Replace Lack with Pleasure

This short, guided meditation below will help you to:

• Get out of your head and into your senses
• Increase the levels of pleasure you feel in your body
• Interrupt yourself from shutting down either emotionally or physically
• Train your mind to be in observer mode, instead of judgment mode
• Biochemically open your nervous system, so that endorphins run freely from your body to your brain
• Help to ground you in feeling emotionally and physically safe
• Empower you to move through your emotions, when you may feel anxious, self conscious or frustrated during sexual intimacy

7) Pleasure is Your Birthright! Claim it now!

 

Krista Kujat is a passion crusader offering deep shifts in perspective on sensuality and sexuality through speaking engagements and writing. In workshops she guides women to empower themselves with pleasure and to free their fullest self-expression.

*Quote from Seminar by Bessel A. Van Der Kolk, MD: “Trauma, Attachment & Neuroscience: New Psychotherapeutic Treatments” San Francisco, November 10, 2014.