Sex When You Don't Feel Like It by Cyndi Darnell

Author:Cyndi Darnell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2022-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Body as a Vehicle of Desire and Knowledge

Ask any bodyworker and they will tell you infinite stories of how different massage and body work techniques produce a variety of emotional responses in their clients. Responses that transcend remedial pain relief to involuntary release of stored emotion and somatic history. Acupuncturists describe floods of tears. Rolfers witness coughing fits. Practitioners of Alexander Technique facilitate ease with blocked communication. Anecdotally, the lists grow each year. This increases significantly when the attention shifts to the pelvis, a phenomenon also recorded by Dr. van der Kolk’s trauma team at the Trauma Center in Massachusetts.3 What we know now is that information that orients us toward well-being is stored within the body and in order to access its wisdom, we must consult it directly. There is an increasing body of evidence arising from the world of psychiatry and neuroscience that describes in detail how the relationship between the body and well-being is mirrored within the brain. The understanding is that our well-being is bidirectional. That is to say, information about our well-being travels from the brain to the body, but it also travels from the body back to the brain.4 Knowledge is not just one way. Our capacity for reorienting toward the body, desire, and, ultimately, pleasure is more multifaceted than simply mind over matter. We can actually change our brains by changing our habits. This echoes what the science tells us as described in chapter 5. Our attitude really is everything, and our attitude is so much more than just our thoughts. It’s also our bodies. Our environments. Our values. Our beliefs. Our spirituality. Our identities. Our privileges. And, as you’re discovering, our sex education.

The rewire your brain argument has been used with vigor over the past ten years or so by extremist anti-porn crusaders to remind us how such online activity affects our brains. While online activity does affect our brains, what is also true is that anything and everything we do rewires our brains. The anti-porn brigade is not telling the whole story. Social media rewires your brain. Eating potato chips rewires your brain. Reading the Bible rewires your brain. Taking time off work rewires your brain. Attending a funeral rewires your brain. A global pandemic rewires your brain. Sitting in front of a computer writing a book is rewiring my brain right now. But the good news is that science is telling us that none of this is permanent. What was wired can be unwired, and it needn’t be a top-down process; bottom up works equally as well. This means we can rewire the inhibitions caused by our brakes mechanism by thinking and talking about it; through the mind. We can also change its effects through the way we engage and experience our bodies sexually.

In order to develop and expand sexual curiosity, it’s helpful to connect and stay with the sensations in our bodies. To experience erotic desire, it helps to explore sensations more fully as a pathway to greater self-understanding.

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