The Feminine Body Temple
Reclaiming intimacy with the body
I have spent many years exploring the relationship between women, the body, sensuality, intimacy, movement, and being witnessed. Much of what I understand about embodiment has come through lived experience, through following my own curiosity into places that stretched my understanding of intimacy and invited me to question what I had been taught about my body, my sexuality, and what it means to be a woman in relationship with myself and with others.
For many years, ecstatic dance was a significant part of my life. I spent a lot of time moving, sweating, shaking, dancing, watching, being watched, and learning how much information could live inside movement.
I became fascinated by energy and by the way something could shift simply through changing the way I moved, breathed, touched the ground, or allowed myself to be seen. Dance gave me a language for parts of myself that had never felt particularly verbal.
My exploration also brought me into communities and spaces that were willing to question conventional ideas about relationships, sexuality, intimacy, and desire. I spent time dabbling in and being adjacent to polyamorous and nontraditional relationship communities, at festivals and gatherings where people were exploring different ways of relating and pushing against some of the cultural assumptions I had grown up with.
Some of those assumptions were about what intimacy should look like, what makes a relationship legitimate, how much of ourselves we should share with one person, and how we are supposed to experience and express desire. Many of them also brought me back to that familiar experience of seeing myself and my body through an external (male) gaze.
I am grateful for those years because they gave me a much more nuanced relationship with desire. I began to see how easily desire can become entangled with being wanted, being chosen, being witnessed, or feeling desirable. I also discovered that there is something very different about experiencing desire from inside my own body and experiencing myself through someone else's gaze.
So many women have learned to experience their bodies through an external gaze. And then to place value and worth on that experience.
We learn to notice how we look, how desirable we are, whether we are feminine enough, attractive enough, thin enough, sensual enough, or doing intimacy correctly.
Even when we have done years of personal growth, it can be surprisingly easy to continue relating to ourselves from the outside, subconsciously monitoring how we are coming across rather than actually being inside the experience, sensation, and full feeling.
I remember having this experience many times at dance. I would be surrounded by women and men moving in that beautiful, uninhibited way that can happen when the music gets loud enough and the room becomes its own little world. I was turned on by the energy of it. There was something about being around so many bodies moving freely that made me feel alive and curious, and I could feel myself opening into the experience.
And then I noticed that I was watching myself.
I could feel a part of me dancing while another part was watching how I looked dancing. I realized I was moving away from the intimacy I was actually longing for and into the experience of imagining how I was being perceived. I wondered how my body appeared from across the room, whether I looked sensual, whether someone was watching me, whether I was moving in a way that was attractive. I was having an experience and simultaneously observing myself having it.
I became curious about what would happen if I stopped performing the experience, even subtly, and let myself disappear into the sensation of it. I closed my eyes and brought my attention back into my body. I felt my feet against the floor, my breath moving through my chest, the warmth in my skin, the rhythm moving through my pelvis. I let my body move without needing to know what it looked like. I let myself experience a fuller, more unabashed expression and embodiment.
I remember realizing that there was a profound difference between feeling sensual and trying to appear sensual. One came from inside me. The other required me to leave myself just enough to imagine how I was being perceived.
Because… I know how often this happens outside of dance too. In intimacy, in relationships, in sexuality, even in ordinary moments. There can be a subtle movement away from my own experience and toward an imagined version of myself in someone else's eyes.
Learning to come back to this embodied presence has become part of my desire and commitment.
“The most profound and full presence can only be experienced if we’re awake right here in this body.” ~ Tara Broch
Through ritual, dance, bodywork, relationships, ceremony, sexuality, solitude, and my own ongoing somatic practice, I have learned, on my best days, to listen for the information that arises before my mind turns it into a story.
This is one of the reasons I believe embodiment becomes especially meaningful for women who have already done a great deal of inner work.
There comes a point when understanding yourself intellectually is no longer the same as actually living in relationship with what you know.
I can understand my attachment patterns, know my history, recognize my conditioning, and have language for my nervous system, while still discovering that my body is asking me to practice something much more immediate.
For me, feminine embodiment has become less about learning how to perform femininity and much more about developing an intimate relationship with my body as the loyal companion she is.
I’ve changed over the years as I enter perimenopause. My desires have changed. My relationship to sexuality has changed. My relationship to being witnessed has changed. The ways I experience pleasure, safety, attraction, creativity, and connection continue to evolve. And life is still beckoning me into a deeper relationship with myself as I change.
There is a kind of wisdom that becomes available when I allow those changes to be part of the conversation and not something to overcome.
I think this is also where sensuality becomes much more interesting to me. Sensuality isn't limited to sexuality. It is the capacity to be deeply available to sensation and to allow the world to reach me. It is the feeling of warm sun on my skin, the pleasure of moving my body without needing to make it productive, the texture of my fur babies, the smell of rain, the feeling of music moving through my chest, the way my body responds when I am genuinely attracted to someone, and the pleasure of being alone and completely inside my own experience.
Genuine intimacy requires me to remain present with myself while allowing another person to come close. It asks me to let myself be seen without abandoning my own experience in the process. It asks me to remain curious about my own body while also becoming curious about another person's.
For women who have spent years working on themselves, this can be a beautiful next layer of the work. We can spend so much time understanding our stories, healing our wounds, identifying our patterns, and learning how our nervous systems work that we sometimes forget that there is an entire living intelligence beneath all of that understanding.
The body is where so much of our knowing actually happens. It is where desire speaks, where boundaries become felt, where pleasure registers, where grief moves, and where intuition often arises before story.
And perhaps that is one of the deepest invitations of feminine embodiment: to become intimate enough with ourselves that we no longer need to leave our own bodies in order to belong, to be loved, to be desired, or to be witnessed.
This is the foundation of
Somatic Ritual Sessions:
Creating a compassionate relationship with the parts of yourself that have shaped your life, while using ritual to honor the moments when something is changing, being released, or beginning anew.
Ritual might support you through leaving a relationship, moving through grief, or stepping into a new chapter of your life. These moments can become opportunities to consciously mark what is ending, honor what has been, and make space for what is ready to emerge.
For those wanting a longer communal journey,
The Devotional Body...
Weaves somatic practice, plant medicine - microdosing, ritual & embodiment into a group container for women returning to a deeper relationship with themselves.
Ceremony and Psychedelic Integration...
Offers support in navigating expanded states of awareness with grounding, intention, and integration.
You may leave feeling...
Less weighed down by anxiety, fear, or sadness.
More spacious and at ease in your body.
Clearer about what you need and what comes next.
Less caught in old patterns and emotional loops.
More connected to your desire, vitality, and sense of possibility.
More able to meet yourself with compassion rather than overwhelm.
