All the Voices Inside My Vagina

It took me ten years to come to terms within myself, let alone share with anyone else, that I had been raped by six of my classmates, some of them my “friends,”  the summer before senior year of high school.

It took almost another twenty years to start piecing together memories of  being sexually molested as a young girl by a close male relative.

I had a life in the mean time.  I formed walls of protection. I dove into my sexuality in attempt to free it from my violators. I  learned about compassion and my spiritual self. I cultivated deeper relationships with women. I opened with men in spite of my suppressed rage and fear, knowing on some level, I couldn’t fully love my Self without forgiving them.

 Today, in grieving the tragedy in Isla Vista, both the lives lost and the lives left behind, suddenly old wounds are fresh.   Old feelings are larger and sharper than ever.

I can not do what I planned today. I can not think. I can only feel the waves of unresolved mystery inside my heart and throat. I can only let them carry me back to the past, when I did not know my body was mine, when I did not know I could choose, when I did not know my feminine heart and voice had power, and that my pleasure was a sacred experience.

 I remember in my late twenties writing the words over my baby picture, “Born to fuck.” I hung the photo, along with other symbolic objects, each representing a piece of my confusing sexual herstory, on a small potted tree. On the pot I wrote,“Schizophrenic Cunt-tree-All the Voices Inside My Vagina.”

I didn’t know at the time this was my first real expression of what was really going on inside of me, beyond my surface feelings of an otherwise relatively comfortable suburban life. Wanting to possibly enter my Frankengina in a local art show, I asked an older male artist whom I respected what he thought.

When he laughed and made the comment, “That’s the worst piece of political-trying-to-be art-shit I’ve ever seen,” I felt my artistic expression shrivel to nothing. With the exception of my mother, who could hardly look at my beautiful, ugly little tree, because its message was understandably too much for her heart to bear, I never shared my first step to healing my feminine body and sexuality with anyone else. I burned her, along with all of the photos of me as a baby and as a little girl that had hung on the tree and spread the ashes in the woods behind my back yard.

Then and now ALL women’s creative expression is needed-not only to heal ourselves, but to free the feminine aspect of humanity. Women’s poetry, stories, songs, paintings, sculptures are needed.

 Women’s vaginas are actually intrinsically connected to our voices. In the chakra system, the upper three chakras mirror the lower three-only at higher octaves-with the crown chakra being at yet another level. The throat is the higher octave of the sacral chakra. In fact, the vocal chords and the fibrous tissue in the vagina are very similar in make up.

 My point being, the suppression or expression of women’s voices and sexuality is an intrinsic relationship. We liberate our vaginas when we cry or scream or moan or sing. And by feeling our sexual pleasure, we liberate our feminine creative expression.

I first experienced the healing relationship between my throat and vagina years ago when I received a yoni massage. Before the healer went inside my vagina, she had me stick my finger down my throat as far as it would go. When I started to gag, she instructed me to roar like a lion, which she told me helps clear stuck trauma in the throat. “The quicker a woman’s gag reflex,” the healer said, “the more trauma she holds in her throat and vagina.” I gagged a lot that first session- and my capacity to experience sensation and pleasure exponentially opened- not just in my vagina, but in my whole body.

 This relationship between the vagina and the throat, between sexuality and creativity brings up many questions, like I wonder if conscious deep throating can be as healing for women as it is pleasurable to men. And I wonder if women who hold more sexual trauma in our bodies also take greater pleasure in sucking cock- not just because we are codependent wounded nymphos scrapping for love or we possess some extra gene that makes us more deep-throat friendly. Maybe our love of sucking cock comes from an animal instinctual part of us that simply wants to heal.

 I also wonder if I was trying to heal myself as a bulimic teenager-if my bulimia wasn’t just an eating disorder, but my subconscious’s way of trying to communicate something much deeper and/or purge something unspeakable-and how many other young women are sticking fingers down their throats for similar reasons.

As I breathe into the lump in my throat, which finally releases into tears, my grief breaks into tremendous waves of gratitude, followed by ripples of pleasure for everything I’ve had to go through to be here right now, in this precious human body, with my human experience.

 It’s such an incredible gift and I could’ve easily missed it. I could’ve spent my whole life being busy and not ever really experiencing a thing. I could’ve played it safe and been satisfied with mediocre happiness. But my feminine body and all of her desire wouldn’t let me. Though at times it’s looked like I was on a wild goose chase, I am grateful not only to my healers, but to my violators for giving me my drive to leave no subconscious stone blocking my feminine sexuality unturned.

Like pleasure, grief is a portal to the feminine soul. As I take time today to rock and undulate with my grief, I feel the deep pleasure of meeting my pain-and loving the lost parts of me that have been hiding until this moment.

 I breathe life into my ancient feminine soul, who thought by her conception of human incarnation she had murdered her divinity and forever relinquished her innocence. I breathe life into the little girl whose natural bodily experience of pleasure was twisted and tied into knots, so that she could only know sexual pleasure through violation. I breathe life into the young woman who didn’t occupy her body enough to have discernment- nor her power, heart or voice enough to speak up.

I breathe and enter myself-I let life enter me in a way no one else ever has before.

Wherever you are in your journey of reclaiming your female body and sexuality- no matter what your age or your physical condition-no matter how free or damaged you think you are-even and especially if you think you know all there is to know about your feminine sexual mystery-there is an opportunity right now to open fully to your experience, to open deeply to your pleasure. There is an opportunity to stop what you’re doing and let life all the way in. Don’t miss it!