I was raised to fear and hate women.

I read the piece of paper before I said it out loud.

I was raised to fear and hate women.

Tears. Shaking. Recognition of truth.

These weren’t my words, but they might as well have been. They were cut from a book of women speaking about their relationships with women. I drew this piece of paper with these words from a pile of many.

In my family, there was the right kind of woman to be (smart, put-together but not sexy, outdoorsy, able to belch and fart with–– no better than the boys) and the wrong kind (high maintenance, slutty, vapid, caught up in appearances).

At the beginning of each Verdant Collective program, as we’re bringing women together, we offer up a few “agreements.” (I use quotes here because we aren’t quite sure that word captures what it is we’re offering.) One of these agreements that is regularly followed by palpable relief and a hint of confusion is, “You don’t have to like one another all the time – in fact, if you do, we aren’t doing our job.” We follow this unusual invitation with an explanation expounding upon the benefits of our differences and a request that we bring them to the table.

You see, the people I’m most grateful for in my life are the ones who regularly push me outside of my comfort zone. The ones who are unwilling to let me sit there for too long; who point out to me the places where I could move and grow, or maybe just step a little to the left, outside of my habituated ways of being, and into something more true, more honest, and more effective.

I wouldn’t be who I am, capable of what I am, and supporting other people in all the ways I am, without the friends and community that have pushed, shoved, at other times pulled, sometimes gently invited, and, on perhaps a few occasions, carried me kicking and screaming, outside of my comfort zone.

​​Perhaps one of the most revolutionary things we can experience is sexual touch – meaning, touch that potentially leads us into arousal and orgasm – that has no agenda. Touch that needs nothing in return, and that doesn’t have us worrying about the other person’s experience or feelings.

Touch that we can relax into, guide, and receive from, knowing that nothing else has to happen. There are no expectations. Touch that is entirely for you, your body, your experience, your sensations, your pleasure.

This touch doesn’t assume it knows what you want. It is patient, supportive, welcoming, receptive, attuned, and listening deeply to all the ways that you communicate. It’s also curious! This kind of touch preferences BOTH present-moment sensation and next-moment possibility.

Can you imagine being touched in this way?

The Verdant Collective isn’t simply about learning how to experience more pleasure – although that will likely occur. It’s about the bonds we create when we pursue wildness and enchantment side by side. The truth we commit when we stand naked, look one another in the eye, and roar or whisper our pleasure-grief-longing with fire in our bellies and tears streaming down our cheeks. And the belonging we can find when we step out of our cages and into one another’s arms.

So many of us are feeling the extreme tension between an urgent desire to participate in the Great Turning and our feelings of powerlessness. Our capacity to trust ourselves, our bodies and each other is at the heart of our courageous activism. More accurately, our capacity to remember that we––our bodies, our longing, our rage, our grief, our sexuality, all of it––are expressions of Earth, just as numinous and powerful, just as essential and on-purpose as the Sun at dawn or the rainbow trout gliding over smooth river stones. The fact that most of us do not remember this is, perhaps, one of the primary reasons we are in such tremendous peril at this time. This disenchantment that is our forgetting is catastrophic.

We know our healing and our wholeness, our capacity to live lives of meaning and value in service to all we hold dear (and the gorgeous, wild and free orgasms that live in this place), all of this comes from belonging.

In order to belong, we must be (and feel) safe enough, sound, and intelligent in our beautiful bodies.

We must remember, our bodies belong to The Wild.

We must rediscover our own wild language.

We must be witnessed by our people, speaking our wild language.

It must matter to our people, like the Air, Water and Earth matter, that we remember our wild ways.

So many powerful women teachers, leaders, and facilitators I mentor speak of their great and understandable longing for a woman’s community in which they can be held with intelligence, strength and care.

This is a complex negotiation, this ‘being held’.

So often, women who end up in the role of teacher, leader, or facilitator within healing professions do so because they were born into family systems that were not safe, where there was a great need for guidance and maturity and a great lack of any well-enough adults to appropriately fill the role. We learned to be self-sufficient and we learned to be wise.

Our capacity to be available to, shaped, and inspired by the Erotic requires that we do not expect it to feel good all the time. To be available to the Erotic, and therefore to experience erotic pleasure, requires that we welcome the intensity, the fear, the pain, the grief and all the other aspects that dancing with Life entails. The more we are able to take on the shapes of all the embodied experiences that are simply a part of being alive at this time, the more we are brilliantly powerfully available to the many experiences of erotic pleasure.

Adorning ourselves and expressing ourselves through what we choose to wear is different from, and also overlapping with, the tweezing, trimming, plumping, slathering, stabbing, and cutting that are packaged as self-care. It’s also true that doing things that have us feeling better about how we look can improve our day-to-day experience of life. But it feels important that we start to ask why.

Without a hint of judgment, just pure curiosity, she asked, “why do you wear eye make-up?” I answered reflexively, as if reading the cover of Seventeen Magazine or quoting my mother: “It makes me feel good.” She responded, “Why does wearing make-up make you feel good?” I opened my mouth to answer but, really, I was already floundering. No one had ever asked me anything like these questions before and I realized anything that would come out of my mouth in response to her second question wouldn’t be the truth. The truth would have been, “Actually I do it because I’ve done it for years now, and I don’t really think about it. It’s just what women do.” Except that, now that I’d met Lenore, I knew it wasn’t just what all women do.

As a little girl, I loved having a body. I could run, roll down hills, jump, cartwheel, spin until I got so dizzy I fell over, swing, climb, and after some instruction, tumble and flip, too. Sure, sometimes I got hurt, skinned a knee, rolled an ankle. But my body, miraculously, healed itself.

It felt good to have a body to explore, finding the spots that were ticklish, others that flooded my body with exquisite pleasure, feeling the strength and flexibility that coexisted in my muscles. With my body, I could taste food, read stories, see the Grand Canyon, smell flowers, pet a puppy. It was a source of delight.

We’re so often told to love our bodies. No matter how they look, how they feel, or what they do, love them. Unconditionally.

In contrast to the ten thousand reasons we’re given to hate and despise our bodies, this is definitely a step in a better direction.

But it’s yet another impossible standard to live up to.

Taking Our Bodies Back, is not about helping you form a ‘healthy body image.’ The very concept of ‘body image’ is part of the problem, and improving yours is not our intent. Doing so only maintains and keeps us trapped in dominant culture’s standards and expectations rather than setting us free of them.

Instead, we endeavor to break the paradigm of looking at our bodies from the outside in.

We live in a society that deems very specific bodies (young, lean, taut, smooth) worthy of love and pleasure. Even if we’ve worked hard to love the skin we’re in, we’re surrounded by opportunities – social media, the glossy covers of magazines at the grocery store – for comparison. Few of us are immune.

Changing your relationship with your body to one of love and appreciation and rendering yourself inhospitable to the expectations of dominant culture is a daily practice. It will likely involve staying away from the places where you are force fed images that reinforce expectations while also cultivating a relationship with your own body that comes from the inside out. A relationship that has you inhabiting your body rather than only ever looking at it.

Tonight would be a simple ceremony because the day had been a big one, made almost impossibly hard by Citrine’s violent death. Walking slowly, holding Citrine’s beautiful just-feathering body, her stripes and dots, her opulent creamy breast, her long strong prehistoric legs and talons, her bill made exquisitely for scooping, shoveling, crushing and filtering. As we walk in silence I remember that my people, the North Norse, (and particularly my first-generation father, his parents and their parents) have worked hard for my right to grieve. Allowing and feeling grief isn’t practical, or even possible, when you are struggling to make ends meet, to assimilate, to belong. But I imagine this quiet sojourn out into the fields to be one that my ancestors would be grateful for. To care for a thing and grieve its loss is the sign of a well-enough nervous system. To enact the necessary rituals and ceremony to keep the grief generative – as opposed to stifling it so it becomes toxic – is a sign of a well-enough life.

After years of reciting prayers that meant absolutely nothing to me, prayers meant to indoctrinate me into a sense of meaning and order that is ultimately demeaning and demoralizing, the prayer that came out was to the bees, to the horses, to the fields, to the water and to my own body. After that came my love for them all, and more…for the lake that these fields poured themselves into and for the fish who swam in that lake. For the raspberries digesting in my belly. Then, one by one, I began ceremonially removing the stingers of the bees (in some heartbreaking cases, with the dead bees still attached), who had sacrificed themselves to protect their hive. Under the branches of a tiny Balsam tree just sprouting on the bank of the stream, I made a small altar, arranging the bees and stingers in the shape of a heart.

At the beginning of October I did a ceremony on my own in the mountains.

A bowl of water, some stones I gathered from the land, a few feathers, many tears.

In the closing, I wrapped a strap of leather around my wrist, three times, and tied it with a knot, repeating out loud to myself, ‘I matter’ with each wrap.

The path of decolonizing our orgasm (and pleasure in general) is both practical and magical. It is not a linear path, but an unfolding experiential exploration of the places in us that have been domesticated. It is a coming-together in community to forge new practices and (neuro) pathways that reinforce and deepen our experience of our intrinsic belonging.

The word refugia comes from the Latin word, refuge, or hideaway.

In ecological terms, it is a location – perhaps the only one – in which a species has managed to continue to survive even though the surrounding areas are not hospitable. There are places in the world – for example, the mountains in central Africa that refuge the mountain gorillas – that are the only place these species continue to exist.

Though not a species, pleasure is very much in need of refuge. In a society that focuses on quick and intense hits of pleasure that are not nutrient-dense – junk food, social media likes – learning to experience deeply nourishing, embodied, and connecting pleasure, the kind that reminds us of our place in the World and our belonging, is a radical act.