What do you believe is missing for us as women in terms of understanding our connection with our sexuality?

There are two related pieces

1. A deeply embodied way of living
2. A true experience(not just an intellectual understanding of sexuality)

Nature is the original temple, and the modern world has severed us from the natural world, creating an even bigger wedge between understanding and embracing our sexuality. It has become easier to take from the earth because we are more removed from it. 

Trusting Our Intuition and reclaiming our sexuality

The female body has become fetishized, and women are shamed for their sexuality. We are taught not to live and trust our embodied knowing, intuition, and wisdom. These pieces are essential to reclaiming our sexual energy and embracing our sexuality.

 Fearing the Embodied Knowing

In the past, women were trade healers and medicine keepers for their communities. This inherent knowing threatened the early inception of the church, which wanted to control the body. Midwives and healers became demonized and were even hung and burned.

But, there are pockets of opportunity to build self-trust in this space from which we have been taught to fear and push away.

As women, we have learned to fear our own pleasure. So many women feel embarrassed by their own pleasure, both sexual and sensual. Often, this fear comes from a radical unknowing, a radical discomfort with our pain. The practice of coming home to our pleasure and embracing our sexuality has so much to do with building a capacity.

Building a Capacity

Building the capacity in the body to hold more pain and, ultimately, pleasure comes back to doing work with your nervous system. Our nervous systems are calibrated to what's familiar, even if it is unpleasant. When you tie in the longstanding ancient negativity bias, we tend to be a lot more comfortable with an amputated pleasure range. The gateway to expanding that pleasure range is through discomfort.

How can we sit with and cultivate the ability to be with discomfort? How do we feel clean pain without adding the story of dirty pain? How do we become present to the beautiful, tenderizing emotion of Greif? Grief is such a portal to pleasure. Grief, pleasure, and erotic potential are all interwoven because they all come down to building capacity in the body

Kirstin Hotelling Zona

Kirstin Hotelling Zona, PhD, is a double-certified Life and Leadership Coach, Founder of Full Potential Coaching, LLC, and Trusted Advisor to conscious leaders and changemakers who yearn to feel fully alive. She is a trauma-informed Vitality Mentor and specializes in creating safe spaces in which her clients and students feel deeply seen, lovingly challenged, and profoundly empowered. Drawing on 25 years as an award-winning university professor, poet, and community builder, Kirstin brings a wealth of knowledge about human potential and the creative process to her passion for helping others thrive. Host of over 20 women’s retreats, Kirstin loves working with women in sacred community and holding space for transformation.

Kirstin's Website

Safety Within: A Guided Meditation for Difficult Times

The Sex Retreat

3/20-3/24, Riviera Maya, with Kirstin Hotelling Zona

Learn about and register for The Sex Retreat

Questions about the retreat?

Contact Kirstin directly via text: 1-309-829-3222

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