Pleasure Prayers and Pleas

I am certain the earth has always known women to pray this way.

When I calibrate my energy with the energy of the earth, especially erotically, I can feel my nerves like mycelium, intertwining with the roots of trees and fungi. And that makes me sensitive to the way I walk upon the earth. It brings forth a form of prayer and stewardship.

In light of my upcoming Body Literacy & Pleasure Playshop this coming Sunday, I decided to re-work this piece, originally published in May of 2023. It’s full of good reminders and was medicinal for me to read again - hope it is for you too.

Luxury of pleasure

Growing up I never was exposed to a religious system of shaming women for their bodies and sexuality, at least not directly. 

Unfortunately I learned it all the same, in indirect ways, in a culture permeated with puritanical ideology and misogyny. It’s nearly impossible to escape it. 

But I’m grateful – because as a child I wasn’t sermonized about the horrible eternal hell as payment for touching myself and learning about pleasure. 

I consider this a luxury. Considering how widespread most sexual shaming is, in most organized religions, in most of the world… I was born into a unique landscape free of religious sexual dogma.

My grandparents have the same birthday on my father’s side. They were coupled three times longer than they lived apart. As a matter of fact, their love was so strong that they united despite their differing religions, and left their churches to be together, which was considered quite blasphemous back then.

I am lucky that they chose love over religion. Because their house always had plenty of love, hugs, backscratches, and affection. I never had fear or shame about who I was in their home. 

Many women I work with were not as lucky. They tell me stories of the things they were told about sex and self-pleasure, things of nightmares. Their bodies were imprinted with a desperate lie, and their innocent sensual expression was thwarted. Their innate feminine nature, vilified, before it even had a chance to blossom. 

It’s taken my clients decades to undo the harm this caused them. To unwind the trauma from their tissues, to allow their body to menstruate naturally, for fertility to return, and for their innocent sexual expression to be re-embodied.

Worshiping dirt instead

I grew up on a dirt road in the Northwoods near Lake Michigan. I found my religion in nature. In the earth I buried my heart, not in the sky at the feet of some in-fathomable idol. 

I found my place by watching the ferns unfurl with green mathematical precision, by familiarizing myself with the habits of vultures, and by wandering the spring woodline in search of delicacies. 

I didn’t grow up in a highrise, in a war-torn nation, under a fear of God, or without a loving family. Luxury.

Despite these luxuries, I still fell prey to predatory sexual deviance and malevolence at the hands of men. I was trespassed as a child, as a pre-teen, and as a young woman. The odds are currently 4 in 5 women, so this isn’t statistically surprising. I was not that lucky.

Connecting my body to the natural world

I have done a lot of body-based therapy. I’ve explored a winding path of therapies and therapists, and the constellation of support I was guided to was absolutely vital, but it was nature that saved me.

Regardless of where or how you grew up or what they told you, you belong in nature. Remembering in our bones that we are of this earth is absolutely vital tor healing the wounds of trespass and reclaiming pleasure.

In the face of augmented reality and social media influencing, technological/medical ‘advancements’ that say they are for our health but truly serve to conquer and profit off us, and increasingly confusing messaging about what a woman actually is…

We need our bodies to be synched with natural rhythms now more than ever - just to maintain connection with biological and earth-based reality.

As I have reconnected with the deep connection between my body and the natural world, I am increasingly aware of my own physicality and sensuality. Unplugging from devices and walking barefoot daily for 30 minutes, for example, offers a soothing balm for my very DNA. The energy of the earth de-fragments and re-aligns me, chasing the static away.

I can feel myself again, I can identify my own energy, I can return to sensitivity, and reclaim my body from the edge of dissociation. I can FEEL, which means to sense, which is the bedrock of sensuality and pleasure.

Imagine drinking in the pleasure of standing at the lake’s edge as a storm approaches, watching the lightening flashes, sensing the electric and erotic energy… and feeling that eroticism in your body. That’s our birthright.

Embodied, I can peel back the masks I was forced to create for myself to survive, that no longer fit, and I can stand naked at the altar of nature’s church, welcomed. This heals everything. 

I have a sit spot in the woods on my land. When I start to feel dissociated, too busy, rushed, out of my body, or triggered, I visit my sit spot and I just sit the fuck down until I begin to resonate with the pace of the earth again.

I give my presence and attention like gifts to the land. Just sitting. Offering breath. Noticing the bugs moving below me, the birds above me. One thought at a time, I come back to presence, to my body and to the earth.

Sometimes I self-pleasure lying on the earth at the base of a tree, looking up at the canopy, letting the tree romance me with the soft whisperings of leaves in the breeze, the smell of soil being made around me, the gentle twinkling of light as it filters down across my legs. 

I offer my pleasure like a prayer. 

And I get so much in return from the quiet minutes afterward. 

A belonging that cannot be found anywhere else.

Affirming messages about the questions heavy upon my heart. 

Deep abiding companionship.

Love and reverence for my body.

This is where I learned about eternal mother love. And I strive every day to channel this love into the bodies and hearts that I have the honor to touch. 

When my heart shrinks for the ways of men, and I feel my sensual aliveness go transparent, I find opening again in places where man has touched the least, the wild earth. 

Our biology was not meant for this modern pace.

We are all slowly depleting, it’s no wonder we’re so sick. For my health, I need to go back to the woods, because it’s how I stay sane in this insane world.

The days are lengthening here in the Northwoods. The earth is waking from a deep winter slumber. Soon the saps will run, and with it the sensuality returns to our bodies at once.

I’ve become an apprentice to the earth, and now that I have this new piece of land to steward, I am thrilled at the prospect of what she has to teach me. I imagine how our ancestors used to live. All these years our lands have woven our bodies and beings together in cycles. I try to mimic the aspects that I can, to re-integrate myself into the seasonal flows, and this brings me a different kind of pleasure.

You might consider pleasure a luxury, but only if you think unstructured time in nature is a luxury. I believe it’s actually our birthright. It’s not our destiny to labor away every hour of the day. It’s not in our design to be constantly productive. Pleasure doesn’t come in states of hyper-vigilance and over-stimulation. We need to slow down to find our natural biological pace, and therefor our pleasure. This is the real life!

In real life, pleasure is our inheritance and our dowry. 

For the future ancestors, I offer my pleasure back to the earth in hopes that it will save us all. I want my body to hold these vibrations, to infuse my spaces with it, to pass it along through my work and words.

Because when I calibrate my energy with the energy of the earth, especially erotically, I can feel my nerves like mycelium, intertwining with the roots of trees and fungi. And that makes me sensitive to the way I walk upon the earth. It brings forth a form of prayer and stewardship. 

This pleasure prayer is women’s work, and always has been.

Exploring and researching pleasure with an animate earth is a form of pleasure activism. Through this language of love, the bodies of women and the earth awaken. 

In making small offerings of orgasms to the ferns and the wolf spiders, I believe I counteract some of the harm done to the earth and the collective feminine. It’s my own personal belief and I learned it by listening.

I am certain the earth has always known women to pray this way. 

We are emerging out of the dark ages of Big R religion’s control of the feminine. However, we face another dark age ahead, of transhumanism and techno-medical intervention, of pseudo-biology and ‘assisted’ reproduction. The lines of what is human, what is male biology and what is female biology are being intentionally blurred, ushering us away from the earth’s rules and rhythms and therefore, what anchors us.

Women are the life bringers, and we are healing from our trespass and reclaiming our bodies and our wisdom with the ferocity of SheWolves. We will be the harbingers of change, or rather the stick in the mud to anchor us. Believe in your body, it’s your source of connection and truth. Your ancestors are with you. I am with you. See below for support.

Stay soft but stand firm.

Please. I love you,

Sarah WM

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Join the pack next Sunday, as we explore Body Literacy & Pleasure from 12-2pm EST