APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE
Summary
In this conversation, Sarah Ward and Adrienne Miller reconnect after years apart, discussing their personal journeys of growth, healing, and exploration of sexuality. They delve into the impact of their upbringing in the church, the importance of consent, and the role of somatic work in understanding one’s body. The discussion also touches on redefining sex beyond traditional norms, the significance of personal stories, and the connection between creativity and sexual energy. Ultimately, they emphasize the need for individuals to reclaim their bodies and desires, fostering a culture of openness and acceptance.
Stay Connected With Sarah Ward:
Instagram | Website | Blog
➕ Book a FREE discovery call consultation with Sarah here
➕ Grab your FREE pleasure toolkit here
➕ Grab your FREE Sensual Embodiment eBook and audio practice here
Stay Connected With Me at These Reveries:
Instagram | Pinterest | Facebook | Youtube
FREE Unschooling Resources:
➕ FREE Quiz: What’s Your Homeschooling Superpower? Take it here
➕ Grab your Unschooling Yourself: A Guided Journal for the Liberating Parent Get it here
➕ Grab the 10 Myths about Unschooling guide Find it here
Work with Me:
➕ Join The Reverie Collective here
➕ 1:1 Coaching Sessions here
Read the Transcript:
Adrienne Miller (00:00)
Welcome back to the show. I have Sarah Ward here. Sarah, you and I have been through some shit. And I want to get when I saw on your Instagram sexologist, I was like,
Sarah Ward (00:06)
No kidding.
Adrienne Miller (00:12)
Literally never heard that word, but I love it and I have to have you on so that’s I want to talk about We can talk about childhood trauma and like church trauma We both grew up in the church and no longer go but I actually really want to get into like somatic stuff Sexology stuff. So tell me one. How did you get into it in the first place?
Sarah Ward (00:33)
I mean, I think that we end up like seeking the medicine that we need, right? So growing up in a highly repressive, conservative, patriarchal society where I was told what I could and could not do with my body. It just felt as though the permission was outside of me by six feet and it resided in a man, a white older man who could tell me what I could or could not do with my body. And when I was going through my unraveling process of leaving the church and it felt like it landed in slow motion. I don’t know what your story was, like for me, I think I had just turned 30 and I was like, my God, I can’t do this anymore. Where I just started to realize all of the sexual religious trauma that I had endured in part of being Mormon and I had protected the church the way that people who are abused to protect their abusers. I was just like, no, there could be anything wrong with that. And then when I started reading other people’s stories and looking at my own story, was like, I cannot stay here. This is not a healthy context for me. I do not want to raise children in this context. I still haven’t raised any children, but you know, who knows that could change any day. And so this just like put me on the trajectory for my own healing.
And so, yeah, that’s really kind of where I ended up. And then I just realized there’s so many other people that are aching, that are hurting, that are feeling so disconnected from their bodies, their sensuality, their eroticism. It’s not just me, right? So it feels like such a gift and such an honor to be invited into people’s most intimate spaces to look at these parts of themselves. And so it’s not something that I take lightly by any stretch of the imagination.
Adrienne Miller (02:16)
Well, and I love about like two things that came up for me. One, this is why I keep telling my story because I only got to where I got because of hearing other people’s stories. You feel like you’re not alone. You’re you have things opened up to you about your experience that you never connected before. And so I just want to throw that out there as a plug for like, people just keep telling your story and your truth as like cringy or maybe you find it irrelevant or like whatever it is, but everyone I feel like has a story inside them, has relevant experiences to share and you will like undoubtedly touch so many people because we’re human. There’s like this whole array of human experience that you’re going to find with other people in a variety of contexts. Like people have found me from my political views and then they end up being like whoa, I didn’t know you were birth mother. Like I have all this with adoption. And so you just, never know like what you’re gonna find. And then the second thing that came up for me was I love that you like entrepreneurially turned this into a job that isn’t like, I didn’t know sexology was a thing. Obviously it totally makes sense now, but like, I feel like our generation is so great at just veering off this conventional path and traditional path of what we went to school for or what we had to get a degree for and just creating this industry, this space, this community and this way to serve your audience and your people. So I love that.
Sarah Ward (03:27)
I’m so glad that resonates. Truly, right? here we are and there’s gotta be a better way to do it than the nine to five grind, the corporate America. I was listening to one of your podcasts last night and you were talking with your guest about how women’s bodies are primed for a 28 day cycle, 28 ish, right? Give or take, everybody is slightly different versus the men’s 24 hour cycle. And so, it just didn’t work for me. I mean, I’ve been hustling. I’ve been in corporate America more years than I can count. And I did it, but I suffered, right? I just, when I bleed, I want to bleed in peace. I want to be able to like make space for what arises in me and the rhythms that work for me. So, I mean, I unschooled myself. I opted to be unschooled when I was in high school growing up. And so I just don’t like structure. I, like authoritarianism doesn’t work for me. There was so much authority that I gave away all of those years, which I’m sure that you can relate to with the parallel paths that we trod during that time. So if there’s a way that we can do it differently, like let’s do it differently, please.
Adrienne Miller (04:47)
Well, okay, and explain to me, what is it that you do? What do you put out there for your clients? What do you teach? What do you offer? What does a sexologist do?
Sarah Ward (04:59)
So that’s a great question. Okay, so I feel like I’ve got several threads along that. So I’m a certified sexologist, I’m a somatic sex coach, as well as an erotic blueprints coach. And so, you know, I went to school for all of these things so that I could be certified to hold this sacred space for people. But essentially a sexologist is somebody who studies human sexuality in all of its different forms. And it’s really kind of more of an integrated way of looking at sex.
not just to the body, of course, like anatomy matters and understanding ourselves and our bodies and our partner’s bodies, but also the emotional, the relational, the spiritual elements, the traumatic elements. And all of these are so interwoven and it’s kind of frustrating because like you go to one doctor for this and one doctor for that, but ultimately like we are holistic beings energetically and to be able to look at that as a whole to say, okay, well, maybe because of your past around this or perhaps like this, your medical history around that, like all of these things intersect and we’re not necessarily looking at those things. And so it can be surprising when people come into session that it’s not just, we’re not just talking about like vibrators and how to get off and how to have an orgasm. Of course, like that is part of it, but so much of this work is really desire driven. And so it’s gonna vary from person to person to person who’s sitting across from me. There’s somebody that I’m working with who’s never had an orgasm before. And so we’re going along a specific track for this couple to be able to support her there. But really it’s like, what is it that you want? And let’s tap into that in a somatic way. feel into that, to rest rehearse the feeling of what it would feel like to receive that. Because I think that there’s this mistaken idea that like we can’t have the good, feel good feelings of whatever that goal or objective is until we get there. And until then, we just have to suffer as opposed to the idea of like, can I try that idea on for size? Can I feel into what it will feel like to be pregnant, for example, or meet the love of my life or land that job, whatever it is that people, it is that they’re desiring so that we can start to like magnetize and attract these things to us. So it sounds kind of woo woo to some people, but I’m all about the woo.
Adrienne Miller (07:19)
But so does what I do, like when I talk to people about unschooling, we just live life and they’re like, okay. Whatever, like woo. And especially I feel like coming from the church, I think the woo woo, like I know for me, because in the church we’re always told, right? Like, that’s the spirit, that’s not your body, or that’s God telling you this, that’s not your instinct. And so all of those woo woo thing, mysticism, and especially now with like the white women wellness industry too, where you have a bunch of people co-opting like sacred practices and then rebranding it, So I’m like really, really touchy with it. So I love that you brought that up, but okay, I wanted to do a few things. One, can you explain what somatic means? Because I remembered not totally knowing when I went into therapy about it. So let’s start there, yeah.
Sarah Ward (07:56)
Okay, for sure. So soma literally means body or flesh, right? And so the idea of somatic work, somatic therapy, somatic experiencing, somatic coaching, essentially it’s like bringing the body into the experience, giving the body a seat at the table. And the way I’ve kind of heard about like how the body can be, right? Like we have our, we have our cortical minds, we have our logical brains, our prefrontal cortexes. There’s so much logic-ing and thinking that we do, but also our culture has too much mind, as the Buddhists would say, because we’re stuck thinking all the time. We weren’t actually made as human beings to spend so much time in our cortical limbic brains. And so the body ends up being sort of like the subconscious brain in a way.
And so all of this, one thing I’d like to say is that your body essentially is your own book of life. Everything that you’ve ever experienced is recorded somewhere in the body. And there are certain organs that are responsible for certain emotions, feelings, that kind of thing. In the genitals also, we can have trauma. Even if you’re not a victim of sexual assault or sexual trauma, you can record things in this part of your body. So there’s all sorts of things that are happening in the body that are getting logged. And unless we are clearing them out through the body, not just talking, right? Like I go to therapy every week, you have a therapist, like we can talk about our problems, we can talk about the things, but unless we are sequencing out the stress and the trauma that is stored in the body, it will never leave quite honestly.
So somatic work, I remember when I first heard about it, I had just gone through a really traumatic experience. I was seeking healing. I was at a workshop. Somebody said somatic therapy, and I didn’t know what that meant. There was nothing in my mind that had any connection to that. mean, growing up in the church, you were absolutely taught to distrust your body.
You know, the body is sinful, right? And desires things that it’s carnal and base in its nature. So we didn’t trust the body. Like we lived from here on up. It was like, you’re trying to distance yourself from your body. But when I heard that phrase, I just had this internal instinctive knowing it was like, that is the medicine, that is the thing. And so I chased it. I started looking it up. I found a somatic therapist and
I met my body, Adrienne, for the first fucking time and it was so profound. Like, I can’t even tell you. It was like, how have I lived this many years? Like, brings me to tears. I’m like, understood that this entire ecosystem lives for me to keep me alive, to keep me well. And I remember just being like, okay.
This is the dividing line, right? The life before understanding the body and like really landing and really just like feeling myself received in such a sacred, profound way. So I very shortly thereafter ended up turning on a dime and saying like, okay, this is what I will do. This is the medicine that the world needs more of, right? We’re so disconnected from our bodies and our pleasure and our eroticism and our desires because it’s been too scary and we’ve been divorced from these things. And when you send anything underground, it gets distorted and it gets, you know, just wonky, right? So can we give ourselves the permission to feel? Can we give ourselves the permission to experience what is rightfully ours? It’s just a matter of like getting there. So that’s the work that I’m doing is untangling, unbraiding, decolonizing sexuality.
Adrienne Miller (11:53)
Mm oh I just I’ve full body chills. I love that so much. But it’s true, though. It is decolonization. And I talk about this all the time. Everything I’ve learned from Black and Indigenous people of colour that we are disconnected from our bodies, from nature, from each other because of white supremacy, because of colonial powers, because that is how they maintain control. You cannot possibly have 8 billion people living freely. You can’t control people that way. If they’re connected in community, if they have strong grassroots, if they want to hold on to nature, not cut it down for oil and for plastic and for all these different things, right? You can’t. That’s how they run the world. They’ve known that for a very long time. The Christian church has known that for a very long time or any organized oppressive religion. I teach the same thing in school as well that kids are disconnected from their bodies because they’re not allowed to eat when they want to. They’re not allowed to go outside when they want to or melt down or unmask or talk to certain friends. They’re only allowed to talk to talk when they’re allowed to talk or given permission, right? So for me, the church and school was so hand in hand in the sense that you brought up earlier that the church disconnects us from our body and it’s school is very similar. It might not have the same religious wording, but it’s based on people being like conforming, on people being obedient, on falling in line on working according to a specific schedule, timeline path, orders, commands, all of that. And everything that you and I talk about all the work that we do is, as you say, unraveling it all, detangling it all. And I just the somatic part I wanted to bring up because as someone who came from that environment that’s so disconnected from their body, I remember being in talk therapy and then being like where are you feeling this in your body or whatever and not even being able to answer like you’re so removed and I’m all up here in my head that I couldn’t name exactly what was happening in my body So suppressing it for so long and when you spend 40 years suppressing messages from your body, right like they get quieter or they get louder and come out as like health issues, which is really what turned me on in a few ways in the past few years where I’m like, things are happening in my body that my doctor can’t answer. And every time I would talk to like a psychedelic assisted therapist or something, they’ll be like, yeah, that’s probably trauma coming out because your body keeps the score. There’s that very famous book that is the hardest read I’ve ever done in my life, but I know it’s really, really good because it makes sense. I just want someone to take it and just like rewrite it in a voice for me that I can understand and like regular people can understand because I feel like it’s so, it’s so technical and it’s so heavy and it’s so like it takes 100 % of my processing power, which I can’t do for a very long time. okay, I wanted to talk about a couple of things. One, have you seen that picture of the universe and there’s an arrow that’s pointing to like a tiny star and it’s like, this is like penis in vagina sex. then the whole rest is like, this is the sexual experience. Like that is just such a tiny, tiny part of it. And I was like, oh, cause that’s but we’re all taught, right? It’s a cis straight man and a cis straight woman and they’re skinny and they’re white usually and penis goes in vagina and that’s it, that’s sex. And usually it’s the man organizing, yeah, yeah, and you’re married, that’s right, yeah. And so I wanna talk about the experience as a whole and I remember having this, I’m like really, really open with my kids and one of them asking if sex, like if you need a penis and you need a vagina, like those are the ways to have sex. And I was like, my gosh. And just like everything else, I am learning right alongside my kids because I wasn’t taught anything, anything, anything like avoided at all costs. Then you get married and then in a Mormon marriage, right? You just do the one thing and it’s missionary and you like aren’t even encouraged to explore or broaden or whatever all these things anyway. So I want to talk to you. Yeah. my gosh. Or just get used to it or just like, whatever the phrases are. So I want to talk a little bit about how this work has really expanded maybe your view of what sex is and how you define it. And do you need another person to experience sex? Can you have sexual experiences as an individual or how that differs for queer couples or trans couples or, or, you know, polyamorous relationships or whatever. So can you like delve into that just a little bit and how you’ve
gone from this Mormon, like, cis straight hetero view of sex.
Sarah Ward (16:55)
Yeah, super straight. So yeah, I recently had a call with a client and he was saying, well, we didn’t exactly have sex. And I was like, come on, let’s broaden our definition of sex. You might not have had P and V, like penis and vagina, penetrative sex, but oral sex is sex, right? Manual stimulation, outer course is sex, anal sex is sex. Come on, let’s zoom out a little bit, right? And I was actually just writing a piece today about solo sex and just how important it is to cultivate that kind of practice with yourself because ultimately like this is where we lay the foundations and in the Mormon church like we are told absolutely not do not touch yourself do not stimulate those feelings in yourself certainly don’t do it in another person and so I landed myself in confession in the bishop’s office like every single week it felt like because I was just doing very run-of-the-mill normal teenager behaviours and trying to figure out my own body. And curiously, I met a sex therapist, gosh, maybe 10 years ago now, right when I was about to leave the church. I was at a Mormon feminist retreat. Her name is Jennifer Finlayson Fife, and she did her whole thesis on masturbation and how women in the Mormon church who had had a masturbation practice before they got married were far more likely to transition smoothly into a healthy sex life than the women who had not touched themselves at all, who had no kind of carnal awareness of their bodies, what they were capable of, what sort of pleasure they liked, how they liked it. And I thought that was really fascinating that the very thing that we’re told to do is actually the thing that can be so empowering in the process. But in a way, that’s not curious at all because I do believe that shame is weaponized. Shame is used as a modicum of control for, to your point, right? Like people that are unhappy, unwell are a lot easier to control than those who are awake and alive and connected to their pleasure and their wellness and their just like this deep well that we have within our bodies. And that’s the incredible thing about our bodies is that we are capable of making all of these feel good hormones. There’s a fancy word, endogenous drugs in our bodies without having to go out and inject ourselves with anything or take pills, right? Like all of this is possible within our own bodies that we operate, but we never got a user’s manual. And so a lot of us are just trying to figure it out in the process. when I was first exposed to the erotic blueprints, there’s this show on Netflix called Sex, Love and Goop and my teacher Jaiya, who’s the founder of the erotic blueprints, she was one of their like main teachers. And so I think it’s either episode one or episode two, Jaiya is working with this couple. It’s like a cisgender heterosexual couple. And he’s convinced that he’s hypersexual and that his wife who didn’t have nearly as much sexual experience, she was younger, that she had to kind of catch up. And they were disconnected. That dynamic exists in a lot of relationships, right? Not just heterosexual couples where there’s a desire mismatch, right? And so he felt like the problem was not in him. Well, interestingly, Jaiya gets him on the table and they start exploring different types of touch, different types of pleasure. And we see this man have an energy orgasm on the table. He’s not being touched genitally, but he’s shaking and you can see his like eyes rolling back in his head. And he’s like, what was that?
And for him to just have this expansive vision about what sex could be, what pleasure and eroticism could be, that was not part of his very narrow definition of PNV sex before. I saw it and I just burst into tears. I was like, what is this witchcraft? Like, I need this in my life. I think that we all just need to be so much more aware of how much more pleasure we’re capable of that doesn’t have to do with that very narrow idea of just genital stimulation. We see that in porn. We see that in our mainstream culture that sex has to do with genitals. And yet, like, I feel like I’ve had like an elbow orgasm before. And I was like, what is happening? Like, I didn’t know that my elbow was capable of feeling this incredible pleasure. I just talked to a woman today who was like, I just had a breast orgasm for the first time. I didn’t even know it was possible. And so there’s so much more once we start kind of peeling back the layers and understanding ourselves as erotic beings and just how expansive we really are. Like the sky is the limit. There is so much more. we’ve got incredible erogenous zones in the body that we’re not even touching on.
Like the inner wrist is so delicate. The back of the knees is another beautiful, erogenous zone. Just your ears, your neck, your lips have incredible, I mean, I think it’s one million nerve endings in your lips. The clitoris has 10,000, which is pretty incredible, but one million in your lips? I mean, we’re just not giving enough attention to the rest of the body, quite honestly. So one thing that I’ll say to your point about like, know, queer people, trans people, I really believe that queer people do it better in so many ways. Like one of my teachers, she says like, I’m in a heterosexual lovership, but we have lesbian sex, basically, where she says, you know, we get really creative with the way that we’re pleasuring each other. So it’s not just like this one way, right? PNV, missionary style with the lights off. So there’s so much more and it can be threatening and it can be scary and it can be wonderful too.
Adrienne Miller (22:55)
Well, I love, to me everything from the queer and trans community is always so much more expansive and so much more liberating, right? We’ve learned that with clothing, we learn that with makeup, with pronouns, with just gender being a spectrum, identity being a spectrum, like all of that because the the systems that we rely on now are so binary and there’s one or the other and you can’t be anything else. And it’s these very specific things, right? Like the new Pope once again just came out and said, marriage is between a man and one, blah, blah, blah. So, but I feel like the queer and trans community are always the ones being like, we have to unbox everything and unpack everything. And so the fact that this goes into sex just obviously makes sense as well, because they do it in every other avenue of life, I feel like.
I want to go back to the first point that you made about masturbation as youth, because one, I had a sexual educator on here last year and they were saying that not only is it like normal, it’s healthy and natural. Like it’s good for youth to be doing that. It’s the curiosity is good. Getting to your own body is good. Like it’s not even just something that we need to allow. It’s like, no, we need to encourage it just like we encourage all other healthy and normal behaviours or natural behaviours or whatever, not to always want to be mindful of like the asexual community. So maybe I won’t say normal, but like that if that’s happening, if someone is curious about it, that it’s okay and great if that is something that you’re interested in. But I also wanted to point out just how so incredibly fucked up it is that our first sexual experiences as Mormon, Christian, whatever, straight women, it’s a man and someone else getting to know your body first as like a 20 whatever year old, right? So like, that is so, so bizarre to me, but that’s all of the messaging that you get is to save yourself for marriage, but you’re saving yourself not for you, like not even your own pleasure. feel like even if in the church they encouraged like, masturbating as soon as you got married. That would even be like one step above, but it’s not even that. It’s, wait till you’re married so that someone else, a straight man gets to get to know your body first. And I thought about my first sexual experiences were abuse, which was like a whole other level. Like before I had gotten to know my own body, it was someone else and it was not consensual. So it wasn’t even marriage. Anyway, and yeah, thanks. And, and I also wanted to get into like, no one talks about marital rape either. And, and assault because it’s the green light is there. And once you’re married, like all it’s just this consensual thing all the time you’re, do you know I mean? And so I just, all of this like really hard messaging from the beginning from so early on where we teach kids that their bodies don’t belong to them and we teach them that or we say maybe your body belongs to you, but then they spend K to 12 being told what to do with their body. right. we’re, we’re now going into our generation is really big on consent. And there’s so many books around like teaching kids to say no. And they’re all geared toward like preventing sexual assault or like teaching kids what to say around sexual assault. But we actually don’t let them use that language at school or at church or with us and with their relatives, right? Like, we’re safe. this doesn’t apply you know, I’m not a stranger danger. This doesn’t apply here. So your body does belong to you. but except when I say otherwise, because I’m your parent, or when your teacher says otherwise, or your coach, or your church leader, because they’re safe, trusted adults. And I just find that the cognitive dissonance in that messaging to be really, really messed up and traumatic. And there’s so much to untangle there when we grow up. Yeah.
Sarah Ward (26:40)
Yeah to say the least, yeah. I feel like I had a memory that came up where like I’m in the back of the minivan, my dad is driving, I said something, know, first born daughter here, right, headstrong. And ⁓ I said something to him to offend him and he’s like, you will apologize. And I said, no, I won’t because I’m not sorry. And he was like, you will apologize. And you know, there’s this like control, right? Like I can just feel him freaking out and they couldn’t control me. And rightfully so. But I wasn’t about to give him something that wasn’t sincere, right? Like that doesn’t work for me, I’m sorry. And I thought about this and I’ve pulled, so one of the things that you brought up, which was so important is this topic of consent, right? And we were talking about it now, me too, thank you for bringing this to the forefront. And we’re hearing this word consent now and we’re teaching it to our children, but I don’t remember ever learning the word consent until I was like, maybe in my late thirties. That’s a really long time to go for an entire fucking lifetime without, without knowing how to have consent. And I mean, kind of going back to one thing that you had said earlier, right? Like, is sex sex if it’s just with yourself? Absolutely. And in fact, I try and encourage everybody, my clients, my readers, my subscribers, like if you are touching yourself, start an exercise of consent with yourselves. Consent begins with us. So before you touch your pussy, before you’re touching your cock, whatever parts you have, right? Or if you have intersex parts, before you touch yourself, please touch base internally and say like, am I a yes to this? Are you a yes to receiving touch? Are you a yes to receiving penetration? Because so often we’ve been taught to override that. He wants my body. Somebody else wants something to do with me and I will let them because I’m a good girl or I’m a people pleaser, right? Like I think that there are so many wounded people walking around on the planet because they’ve been disconnected not just from their no, but from their yes. And so if you don’t know what your no is, how will you ever know what your enthusiastic yes is? And that’s really where sex should be coming from. Not from like, okay, yeah, I guess we could do that. Sure, if it makes you happy, but two people, two or more people, right? Like it can be more playful and expansive than that. But for people in a sexual context to all say like, yeah, we absolutely want this. And so that has to start with that mind-body connection, with that felt sense. And that’s something that if the connection is severed, like I’ve heard you talk about the connection, and you and your body have been severed, there’s no way that you can access that, right? And so in the tragedy of this experience that you shared about your first sexual encounters being non-consensual, in so many ways, it feels like that’s not surprising coming from the context in which you grew up, the context in which like you don’t have access to your own body. And the only way that you’re allowed access to your body is through another person. And you know, what they talk about in the Mormon temples, it feels like it follows that thread around, no, no, women don’t have access directly to God. Women have direct access to their husband who has direct access to God. And so it’s this like weird, through some triangulation where like the only way that you have access to him, they, them, I don’t believe in a male God anymore. The only way you have access to God, the goddess, God X, whatever you believe in is through your husband. Like that doesn’t work for me.
Adrienne Miller (30:30)
Mm hmm. Yeah. Which again, control. It’s like always comes back to fear and control. I do want to bring up when I started going to therapy for it, like started as couples counseling, which I feel like that’s often where things start, right? It’s like something is not working in our marriage. And so then you go and then you actually start to realize like, there’s actually a lot of inner work for myself. Anyway, I remember talking about sexual trauma and the narrative kind of being well, let’s get you healed so that you can have the greatest sexual life slash with your partner and for yourself, but it was usually framed in like so that you can have a healthy like couple sexual relationship but even even with the one on your own, I did find that the most helpful thing, which again, my youngest sibling who is ace sent me a book called ace. And in it, it kind of delved into this idea that you actually don’t have to heal from sexual trauma for that reason. You can, one, can, like no one’s forcing you to do anything, but two, you can actually just heal for the sake of healing. So the goal doesn’t have to be so that you can have sex or so that you can have these sexual experiences. And I, I, it really took so much pressure off. Cause I was like, yeah. Okay. Cause for a long time, that’s what I was doing was healing to have better sex with Joe. And I just found that so not only is there so much pressure, but like the nature of that is so backwards and so wrong to me. And yeah, just like that purpose. I did want to touch on that a tiny bit about
And again, this will delve into your expanded definition of what sex is because it also, we can remove that and just talk about pleasure and desire and good feeling. And maybe that resonates better because if that’s something that’s important to me, that doesn’t have to do with anything scary for me, which at the time was touching myself penises, right, like all these ideas that I had around what sex was, but it can also just be pleasure and feeling good in my body and like all that energy and connecting back with myself. so we can, like, I don’t know if that’s in the realm of, of that sexual universe or if it’s something else or if they’re just connected or if they’re, they’re linked or whatever it is, but I did really appreciate that idea that that it doesn’t have to be on this road to having better sex with a partner, I guess.
Sarah Ward (33:17)
Yeah, and something that you said about that constellates something in me where my partner has been in recovery, active recovery for the last six or seven years now. And in his sobriety journey, whenever he goes to an AA meeting and somebody says, I’m here to get sober because of my daughter or my wife, like, I’m going to get sober because of them. And he thinks to himself, well, enjoy your next drink because that’s not gonna last because ultimately it can never be for somebody else. There’s no way that that has the staying power to be able to propel you forward. I mean, that can just lead to resentment quite honestly. So a healing journey can really only ever be for you ultimately whether you want to use it towards better sex with Joe or with somebody else or with yourself or not at all, right? Like that’s entirely up to you. But I talk about a lot how there’s just so much space that needs to be cleared out from the trauma and the traumatic experiences that we have. Of course, there’s like big T trauma, right? Like genocide is big T trauma, abuse, rape, murder, know, divorce. Like these are big T traumas. And then there’s little T traumas like bullying, but if you are a victim of bullying on a daily basis for all of the 10th grade, then that can also become big T trauma because it compounds over time.
Adrienne Miller (34:42)
Well, I did want to say that it can be a catalyst because I know there have been times in my life where I have had spiraling, depressive, suicidal episodes and stayed alive for my kids for sure as a catalyst to then getting to a space where I want to stay alive for myself. so, so yeah, absolutely. There are things I think that are catalysts, but the long lasting, the longevity staying power for anything, anything that we’re unpacking and unlearning and going into, even if it’s unschooling or being an entrepreneur, doing anything different that has to come from inside to, cause you’ll falter at some point, right? Like if you’re seeking for those external reasons for why you’re doing it or worrying about what other people are thinking about, you’re having to explain yourself to people, like unless you really, really, really believe it and internalize it and have it connect with who you are, I just, I agree. Like you will always be questioning and then that self doubt starts to creep in. And I just find that so, liberating when it’s coming from inside, which again, the church like didn’t really teach us, school doesn’t really teach us, because everything’s external motivators and extrinsic motivation for everything. Even a salary, right, at work or a title or any of that fame, all of that.
But what is your like in your zone of genius? What do you feel is the message that you feel like you’re screaming on the rooftops every single time? Or what do you wish like most of my audience is parents and homeschoolers raising kids. So what? Yeah, what do you feel like you just wish everyone knew? What is your core like Sarah message around pleasure and or sex or whatever it is.
Sarah Ward (36:52)
I feel like I could just continue to unpack this. I’ve got peonies on my table and you know how peonies unfurl, right? They start like a bud and then they keep just unfurling. I feel like this message could unfurl forever. I just have this memory of you and I having sleepovers when we were like 10 and 11 years old.
telling sexy stories at night and finding titillizing fantasies from when we were just little, little, I love that, that we have this old friendship that we’re able to come back to. So that’s just such a beautiful gift that we were aware of ourselves as erotic beings from that early age. What I wish that everybody knew is just how expansive and supportive their bodies are. There’s so much wisdom that is wound up in our bodies, right? And so oftentimes we wanna silence those messages. We wanna silence the wisdom that comes up where it’s like, God, that’s really irritating. If you have a yeast infection, that’s so annoying. I just wanna get rid of it, right?
But what is the message that’s coming through? What is the message if you’re inorgasmic, if you’ve not been able to experience orgasm? And ultimately, I believe that these dear sweet bodies are protecting us. They’re communicating with us at all times. In fact, there’s these incredible studies that show that the body is sending seven times more messages to the brain than the brain is sending to the body. And so when you think about those, we talk about intuition and we talk about gut instincts.
I just knew, I knew that that person was unsafe. Like those are the messages that are coming through the body. And we have all sorts of knots, you know, and tied up energy and unfelt feelings and really like everything that we want to be feeling. Cause I think, I believe not everybody, but a lot of us want to feel goodness. A lot of us want to feel pleasure.
And to your question earlier, yes, sensuality is connected to our sexuality and to our eroticism. And for us to connect to our inherent eroticism outside of it having to do with anybody else, outside of the male gaze, outside of a lover who is hungry and wants something from us for us to tune into that life force energy because ultimately our sexual impulse is life force energy and that can create a baby, which is really profound, but it can create a business or a bakery or whatever else it is that you are wanting to put into the world. That second chakra energy is so potent and so it doesn’t have to come out in sexuality with yourself or with other people to your point about your sibling being ace, right? It doesn’t have to be sex, it can be creativity. And there was a really long time in my life where I wasn’t sexually active, but my creativity was off the charts. I was dancing, I was channeling my energy to music. And so that creative impulse can be creativity or it can be like pleasures of the flesh and choose your own adventure. It can look different for everybody. Relationship constellations can look different for everybody. I know that we’re given these very straight and narrow ways of being, right? Heteronormative messaging, like you should be married and you should be straight and you should be all these things, but that may not be your truth and may there be space for it and may we make space for ourselves. May we be the permission givers and let’s take that permission back from whatever these external authorities are because really ultimately that’s going to free up all that space inside to do whatever else you want with it.
Adrienne Miller (40:54)
love that. What a great ending. Sarah, thank you for coming on. And I love that flamenco is such a big part of your life and that you talk about it as medium through which you are able to express and learn about sensuality and being in your body and all of that. we like, in creative ways, right, that most people don’t make that connection. And same with your wardrobe styling, like all of it. It just feels so soul aligned. So I will link everything below where people can reach accepting that this is where I am and that we’re going on from here. But anyway, thank you so much for coming on.
