How authentic sexual encounters can lead to more wholeness
Author: Sabina Tschudi
Our approach to our own sexuality significantly determines how we experience it. Sabina Tschudi shows that each of us has a right to a fulfilling, healing sexuality – and how this can succeed despite limiting values, norms and language.
I would like to start by sharing from myself that I feel sexuality as something deeply personal and individual – and I am certainly not alone in this; thus, for me, speaking or writing about sexuality is always also a sharing of myself. The separation “here myself” and there this “topic” I do not want to create artificially.
First of all: What is “sexuality”?
The Duden defines sexuality as follows: “Entirety of the life expressions, sensations and behaviors founded in the sex drive”. Sexuality has developed in the course of evolution and is used today as a term for species with different sexes that reproduce via bisexuality. Our human sexuality, for that matter, in other mammals, naturally goes far beyond the need for biological reproduction. Sexuality has significant emotional components, bonding components, is identity-forming, has social functions, and also spiritual, or enhancing, aspects. In some areas, sexuality is also a source of prestige and is now an important part of a modern “lifestyle.”
Thus sexuality is always also part of our culture; it is shaped by culture.
Cultures create norms, and norms regulate our behavior, what is acceptable, what is not, where boundaries are defined and set, up to and including criminal behavior. In turn, norms (both set points and commands and prohibitions) have a significant impact on our psyche – culture shapes and forms us, including in the sexual realm. Cultural norms change over time, adapt as people change, or sometimes don’t, and also need to be renegotiated, sometimes fought over, again and again.
How authentic sexual encounters can lead to greater wholeness© Adobe Photostock
NORMATIVE CONTEXTS
First and foremost, it is not “the sexuality” that is healing, but our access to it.
Is this access healing? Free from pressure and coercion, free also from unwanted parenthood on the part of women as well as men? In this regard, there are other powerful currents of constraints to which we are all subject: the cultural “set points.” By cultural set-points I mean those overtly defined as well as subliminal values that regulate our sexuality and divide it into categories of right and wrong, enough or not enough, or somewhere in between.
How authentic sexual encounters can lead to greater wholeness© Adobe Photostock
In the past, set points like No Sex Before Marriage or Sex Only With Your Spouse regulated our behavior. Religious set-points literally demonize sex as a source of pleasure unless it is for procreation. In the change of values, we live today in a time in which “sexual self-optimization” has become a subcultural target value: We should always and everywhere want and also be able to achieve sexual high performance, in addition to job, career, children, sports and politics, round off our identity definitions with sexual masterpieces, remain sexually fit and youthful even as we grow older, please as uninhibited as possible.
And of course educate ourselves sexually on all levels, reading books, attending courses and so on. And some of today’s currents of sexuality represent further restrictive target values. Such would be: “Only slow is right”, “Men should not ejaculate, otherwise they lose vitality”, orgasms are suddenly supposedly damaging to relationships and to refrain from. Depending on the subculture, we should be poly-amorous, queer or tantrically oriented, for example. In other words,
we are also today bound in corsets of sexual target values, which reduce and hinder the healing power of sexuality.
This is because performance principles bind us and thus we are never really “right”.
SO WHAT IS HEALING SEXUALITY?
Healing sexuality is first and foremost communication, listening to each other and to ourselves.
If we now have a healing approach to sexuality, a secure and respectful framework, what then? I experience sexuality first and foremost as a form of communication. With myself and likewise with someone else.
To communicate is to exchange.
And the basis of any communication is listening, receiving, perceiving. Not primarily speaking and “giving in”.
Sexuality becomes healing when we first listen to ourselves and listen to ourselves.
Sexuality as a healing force© Adobe Photostock
Who am I right now? How do I feel, how am I doing? When I am in contact with my sensations, my feelings, when I pay attention to my thoughts. Becoming aware of what occupies me openly and subliminally. Whether I have fears or worries, expectations, hopes. Whether I am calm or excited, at peace with myself or not. To perceive myself as a whole being, to which sexuality also belongs. From this self-awareness I can feel what is good for me now, how I can be there for myself, whether I need silence or action, what nourishes me at this moment, so that I feel good, gain energy, simply feel good?
So I can decide in the first place: Do I want sex, sexual physical communication? And how? So I will feel if and how I want to touch (myself) – or be touched. My body talks to me, I listen. I am more listening than doing. In this state of noticing, I can also allow myself to go on a journey with myself, a journey of sensing, listening, exploring, and letting myself be what is true in this moment. Without needing or wanting anything, because what is, is actual, true, authentic, and therefore alive and well.
It is an “I am” moment of intimacy, truthfulness, and inner connection, out of which there is nothing “to do”, but a being moment that is self-sufficient.
Sexuality as a healing force© Adobe Photostock
Last but not least, I’d like to share some natural science findings about sexuality as a healing force. Because I find it worth knowing, encouraging and also funny. Here we are talking about very everyday sexuality, that is, sexual (inter)actions that may not take place in an extended fused, listening and eavesdropping space. Preliminarily, this:
Sexuality is medically curative and disease preventive.
The human sexual system is primarily neurally controlled, with the nervous system controlling the hormonal system. Sex therefore actually takes place “in the head” or at least takes its origin in the brain. Hormonal control emanates from the brain stem and diencephalon, while orgasm is triggered at the spinal level. The limbic system in the hypothalamus controls the emotional level and the evaluation of pleasure and displeasure. The basis of all sex hormones is cholesterol. (And no, increased cholesterol does not increase libido, unfortunately!) The basis of sexual activity, of libido, is testosterone, in both men and women. The female body, converts testosterone into estrogen. Estrogen is THE attractiveness hormone – it attracts males in the animal and human kingdoms “magically”. This is an essential move of evolution, it thus wnsures thepreservation of the species, because fertile females attract males.
About the author
Sabina Tschudi leads Body De-Armoring® in Europe together with her husband Johannes Schröder. She is a human scientist, studied sex therapist, medicine woman and has been on the Spiritual Sun Dance Path of Sweet Medicine from the USA for almost 40 years. Sabina Tschudi lives in Switzerland.
This article appeared originally on the German Homepage of Tattva Viveka: Sexualität als Heilkraft
