Pamela Madsen
I spend a lot of time thinking about women and vaginas. I am re-watching “Hysteria”, re-reading Naomi Wolf’s new book, “Vagina: New A Biography”, and planning details for my next retreat for women. I went to sleep literally holding mine in my hand, and lulling myself to sleep. My vagina gives me comfort, pleasure, and is literally the biggest tool in my tool chest for my own continued transformation. I want that for all women.
It makes me so sad that many women don’t trust their own vaginas. We have so much fear about them, and create a world of Grimm Fairy tales around them. We worry that we smell funny. That we won’t orgasm, or lubricate enough, or that our vulva is funny looking. We worry that our vagina will take too long to give us pleasure and that our lovers will get bored or tired.
Most of the healing and relationship building I have done with my own vagina has been through vulva massage and through talking about vaginas in the company of other women. Most heterosexual women have never seen another woman’s vulva. We have no idea of the different shapes, colors and textures. Many men know more about vaginas than women because they actually get to see them, and touch them.
Most women are left alone, in isolation with their own vagina for our entire life. We don’t even have words we are comfortable with to name our vagina, and way too many women cannot name the landscape of their own vulva. Let’s face it. Nobody talks about their own vagina. Women talk tons about their relationships with men, but when was the last time (if you own a vagina) that you talked about your vagina? If you are after 50, I know that you have talked about your neck sagging!
I believe that women need way more touch on their vaginas then they are currently getting. I am not necessarily talking about love making. I am simply talking about women holding and petting their own sacred parts. Women can learn to do this for themselves, and it is absolutely awakening to us, to simply be able to lie back and receive this. It can bring you into a place of transcendence.
It will open you up to parts of yourself that you didn’t know existed. Your vagina has messages for you if you can only listen. Emotional weather will come in like a tornado, and leave you in sunshine. You may cry, scream or laugh. You may have an orgasm, or you may not. The more you receive genital massage the deeper you will go. You will wake up in ways you cannot even imagine. And once you wake up your vagina – you will touch your own beloved, and she will never leave you. You might even lull yourself to sleep, gently holding her. Once you make this connection again, you may find that you go through a kind of “reBirthing” of yourself.
Here are a few of the tell tale signs that you are connecting with your vagina again:
* an impulsive decision to do something out of character
*a willingness to take a calculated risk into the unknown
*a determination to make contact with ones’ authentic self and tap into the true passion there
*a desire to become a source of truth about life for the next generation
*the delicious freedom of looking the latest expectation in a life time of expectation in the eye and saying “not me, not now!”
Do you feel the twitch? Are you ready to reach down inside yourself and ask your body, “What’s next?”
Maybe you find that question challenging and exciting. You might find that in this new place that you let go of drawing from your past experiences. What was, may no longer fit all. As the journey goes forward you may need to get to know this new persona a little bit. Welcome your new outlook, new confidence, new dreams. We are not programmed to fade away.
As we move into this place of reconnecting with our most primal source and this process of rebirthing ourselves, we might find that we are better suited to new challenges than we ever were in the past. As you move forward in your new explorations and learn to listen to your body you may find this unfamiliar persona, this mischievous Tinkerbell at our ear, matures into the voice we count on most. It gets stronger, more authoritative , more philosophical, more courageous.
Listen to your voice. Listen to your body. Tune into your vagina.
The feminine spirit lives there, and we need to teach women how to access it. Why don’t we teach girls about vaginas and the emotional powerhouse that is stored in them? That is the endless question, that there are way too many answers too.
But we can take control now, and teach ourselves. It is never too late to access the power of your own vagina and learn to trust her.