“One of the things about it [trauma] is it can also be full of pleasure, it can also be delightful. That’s something true on the trauma path; you know I also say, “One part pain and two parts pleasure.” Like you have to learn to support your nervous system to take care of yourself; it’s not how much pain you’ve released its how much you love your self right.”

“Sex is actually an expression of life; so that means that sex isn’t always just pleasurable. Sometimes in sex you cry. Sometimes in sex you actually get really creative. Sometimes it’s like you’re actually feeling really emotional and really tender. Sometimes, as someone who has experienced trauma, I’ve experienced fear before in sex, I can even experience anger. So there’s this allowance of what is.”

“When I wanted to change my reality, I could not think my way through it.”

“Every single time that you have a sexual experience you’re actually hardwiring your nervous system and your brain to experience sex that way, and a lot of us never question how we use masturbation, either now or when we were younger. And what we wired into our system: what kind of images, what kind of emotions, what kind of beliefs about sex? So self-pleasure can be a zone to find profound self-love, to find incredible creativity, to literally have spiritual states of ecstasy…”

“What I’ve had to do over time is really learn to rest with that part of myself that can be with disgust, with fear, with pain, and in that beingness, without trying to transform it or change it, when I can meet it with a depth of love and a depth of presence and a depth of acceptance, if it’s not in alignment with my truth as a human, it starts to melt or change or transform on its own.”

“It’s a similar process actually where women go into their heads more from shame and fear and their specific conditioning around sexuality, men go into their heads because they’ve been wired to experience sex as a disconnected, fantasy-based, two-dimensional reality.”