Embodied Knowledge

For twenty years or so, I was a professional nerd. An academic. Three degrees, research, elite universities...day and night I read (and wrote) books and articles. I attended scholarly conferences and lectured around the world. I debated big ideas with extraordinary thinkers.

However, I wasn’t prepared when, during a week at a conscious sexuality festival in the desert, I was faced with a different kind of knowledge than I’d encountered in academia. The workshops at the festival "schooled me" in topics society generally ignores: intimate communication, touch, boundaries and consent, tantra, aggression, body image, self-pleasuring and menstruation. I’d signed up for the festival thinking it was going to be a big, sexy party…but I spent much of the time in the desert crying, overwhelmed and trying to understand how I’d gotten to my forties without learning how to listen to my body and its needs. This deep dive into conscious intimacy was unsettling. For one so overeducated on matters of the mind, I was ignorant in matters of the heart and the body. Since that festival, a lot has changed. I left my steady job as a professor in academia in pursuit of more holistic and experiential knowledge about pleasure and sexual wellness. I retrained as an intimacy and sexuality counselor, opened my own clinic and even became the CPO of a sexual wellness company - Spicy Berry: The Virtual Home for Sexual Wellness - whose goals and mission align with mine: getting people to understand their needs and desires and express them. In short, I’ve become a "pleasure activist." But, once a nerd, always a nerd. You can take the girl out of academia, but you can’t take the academia out of the girl. I continue to value deep and meaningful learning processes, evidence and experience. There are some things we can't talk our way out of...the body will always keep the score. As I always say in the clinic, I only teach and counsel with methods that are empirically proven and that I know offer benefits to your wellness and sexual health. And all of these methods are rooted in mind-body practices (somatic therapy). So, read a book, think a lot...but don't forget to embody your learning...