Artwork by Heidi Ryan Evans

Dear Pinkies, Please welcome an anonymous Pinkie who has written a gorgeous and powerful story about lessons she's learned from Yoni. Please hold loving space for her as she tells her powerful truth.

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I didn't want my vagina to be my portal to self discovery, but as hard as I fought it - it was. Crap.

As long as I can remember, I've struggled with the messages I've gotten about being a woman. All of them. The goddess ones and the witch ones. When I was very young, this manifested itself as not wanting to dress like a woman. I preferred jeans and shapeless shirts to dresses and pink frills. I was never gender-confused, but I was very confused. I revolted against the barbie doll media women (still do) and yet - of course - I secretly loathed myself for not looking like them. Messages from society were jumbled up with messages from my parents, the conservative bible-belt culture I was growing up in and the glitzy Hollywood culture in the midst of which I grew into my adolescence. But I don't think it really matters where you are. If you're a modern woman, you know this weirdness we call "femininity."

The Divine Feminine

It wasn’t until I was well into my thirties that I discovered the concept of the "divine feminine," read about the Goddess as an archetype of nobility living within the female spirit, or felt the miracle of my own body give birth and nurture a child (not with breast milk, since my body didn't really function well that way despite many efforts to make it by the lactation consultants.) So, it wasn't until my early forties that all this confusion really came to a head.

I think it started when I began a conscious effort to be more ME. By opening that floodgate, many things came through, but in my early forties I began an obsession with sex. Ironically, not with my husband (though I will say our sex life improved a lot during and since). I became obsessed with sex in my imagination. I scoured porn site, erotic literature - I even wrote some of my own stories when the erotica didn't go far enough. And I began masturbating with a vengeance. Masturbation was nothing new, but this was different. I experimented, played with toys a little but mostly in my mind. Played with forbidden images, frightening images, multiples, non-humans - I went into places in my mind I didn't know existed and found unusual and amazing pleasures there. And thanks to the anonymity of the Internet, I found friends who shared these quirks - women mostly but not entirely. In this safe zone of privacy and anonymity - sitting in a dark room with only the glow of the pc for physical company but a wealth of friends and amazing images and ideas I'd never dreamed of - I could explore parts of myself physically and emotionally that I had no idea existed. I discovered (and eventually released) dark fears around an abusive situation as a child (which I'm convinced were exacerbated by past life memories of even worse abuse.) I discovered the multiple orgasm - mostly by reading about it and mustering up the courage to try it by myself.

My vagina as teacher

I'll spare you more details, but one example I think is important; it came as a total shock to me that women - in porn and in erotica - actually touched themselves during sex. After a few years of my obsession, I tried it. It was really a nice little shake of spice in a saucy meal. Why had I never thought of this before? Why was it so hard for me to do? Why is it STILL hard for me to do (with my husband, not by myself)? I'm not sure, but I do know that paralleling this from-the-perspective-of-social-norms bizarre obsession I was beginning to discover other things about myself, the kind of life I wanted to lead, what makes me happy and how I want to live. Though still befuddled, I think I have realized a few things about why it was so important for me to go through this sexual obsession phase and - dammit - let my vagina teach me some things only she can do.

1. To trust myself and the universe I had to learn what it felt like to be vulnerable and find joy not pain. When I really let go in the act of sex, I'm probably as vulnerable as is possible to become. Physically and emotionally open, and when with someone else, entered into. Opening myself to that vulnerability and learning to find true joy there - always with myself and often with my husband - is becoming a strength. I'm losing my fear of that kind of vulnerability. I'm gaining actual, tangible, physical experience with what it FEELS like to find pleasure in vulnerability so I can go there more easily when there is no reason to be cautious. And when I am vulnerable I find a new, softer part of myself. A part of myself that is intuitive and sensory, very kind and very very very loving. I like her and have decided to keep her.


2. To know myself I had to let go of control of how I appeared from the outside and release myself completely into the subconscious journey my body could come up without me - from the inside. Always worrying about how we look is a modern female obsession. It took an equally powerful obsession with sex for me to release that worry about what I looked like outside enough to concentrate on what I FELT LIKE inside to find the multiple orgasm. This switch in perspective - from outside appearance to inside feeling - was revoluntionary for me. It opened me uip to other kinds of feelings that suddenly I became more attuned to. I became more aware of my body's love of excercise and healthy food because I learned a whole new way to feel what my body felt like - feelings I'd long ignored because I was so busy looking at myself from the outside.


3. To own myself and my happiness I had to take responsibility for it myself and learn my own special recipe. This was huge. In my exploration I realized that programmed in my brain and my marriage was an assumption that "the guy" was responsible for my orgasm and my pleasure. He took on this responsibility too, I think. But he was never as good at it as I was once I started actually trying. I went through a breif spell of resentment and then realized "how could he be? Even I have a hard time figuring out what will work when." (The female body is indeed a mystery - a fun one!) So I let him off the hook and actually began masturbating while we were having sex. Our sex life has never been better. And in that shift, I've taken on a very deep, primal, physical and real responsibility for my own happiness that is translating into other areas of my life very nicely.

So, rats. I didn't want to be a divine feminist, but I am. I have to admit that lying in the unique, mysterious and extremely wonderful female anatomy are not only wonderous experiences, but lessons that have reverberated into the rest of my life and opened me to myself and the world in new and wonderful ways. Ok. I will let go of my dissapointment that my vagina was such a critical piece of my awakening. I'll release it and own it. Because, among other things, it feels really good!