We each have a body and we each came from a sexual being.
We are all beings born to express emotions and to connect intimately with others.
And yet every person I know has their story of shame related to their body, sexuality, or emotional expression.
Often that story is deeply lodged in their body, buried from awareness, but it still plays out at various stages of life as nervous system reactivity, sticky relationship dynamics, and ignoring their body until it breaks down.
Centuries of repressive conditioning have condemned such natural aspects of being human.
Worship the rational mind and denigrate the savage and impulsive body, they said.
Abstain from emotions, be stoic, and smother your desires, they said.
As a body psychologist, relationship and intimacy therapist, and yoga teacher, I wrote this book to help overturn repression and shame for being the living, expressing, erotic humans that we were born to be.
I wrote The Pleasure is All Yours to free ourselves from reductionist views that pleasure, sensuality, emotionality, and intimacy are “dirty” words rather than life-giving, regenerative concepts.
We are meant to be embodied—to dance and sing, and cry and care and love, authentically and unapologetically.
I wrote this book to liberate us from the epidemic of disembodiment and body terrorism (the othering and judging of bodies), through the practice of bodyfulness, and to offer you potent tools to release trauma and stress, self-regulate, and feel the reparative effects of natural pleasures that can inspire collective care.
It’s time we take back joy in our body and have reverence for this as a life-force energy rather than a sin. Because every body deserves safety, acceptance, and belonging. And every body deserves the pleasures of connection, intuition, rest, play, and intimacy of all kinds. This is bodyfulness, the pathway to receiving life’s pleasures from the body up, and sharing them with others. This is at the heart of my new book, The Pleasure Is All Yours.