What kind of transformational communicator would I be if I left sex off the table?
It's only the one thing that humans - all humans - have in common; a basic drive, an essential facet of our experience of being mammals.
For better or for worse, though, it's not something that you can really talk about without also talking about relationships, love, connection, family, and all of the related subjects.
Nor can you really ignore the personal aspects - body image, how we think about our own sexuality and that of others, guilt and shame and ecstasy and perversion and all of the shades of kink that exist...
So it's not without some trepidation that I include this piece in this series; it's such a vast subject and it could be very easy to mess it all up - by not including something important, or by revealing too much without it being in the spirit of offering value in service of your aliveness...
But I'm going to do it anyway, and let you be the judge. Screw it.
(Ha - see what I did there?)
First, let me start with giving you some background on my particular journey with regard to relationships, sexuality, and all things therein.
I grew up in a Mormon family, which, in case you’re unaware, is a euphemism for “I grew up with a tremendous amount of sexual shame and guilt."
(To be fair to Mormons: there may be a strain of Mormonism in which sexual guilt and shame do not play a major role in the development of young people, but my experience was one that included these things.)
I also watched the dynamic between my parents very closely, and determined for myself that being married wasn’t something I wanted anything to do with.
You might surmise that these two factors combined to create a highly dysfunctional attitude toward relationships, sex, and interdependence in general...
Well, you would be correct. There’s no accident that at 43 years old I am the only one of six offspring in my family who has neither married nor fathered any children.
I did get engaged once. If you’ve been following along since the early 2000’s, you remember, because I shared my elation with this list back then.
But I didn’t have the stomach to follow through; I didn’t trust myself to make good on the promise I'd be making, and I didn’t trust the institution of marriage as a vehicle for anything good.
I've had my share of lovers, and have loved as well as I could along the way; with each relationship, I've grown more and more conscious of the alchemical process that takes place when love is present between two people who are committed to their own growth.
But rather than go through the details of my story, which I find to be virtually impossible without violating the sacred confidentiality of the others in that story, I asked Kim, the "extraordinary woman" I referred to back in the first of these emails, to join me for a dialogue on intimacy, relationship, sex, and love - and to record it for you.
One of the things I love about her is that she's pretty much up for anything - so she said yes. And you can hear it here:
