Read Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being Online
Authors: Dr. Christiane Northrup
Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (24 page)
Sexuality is power. It’s our connection to the creative life force. When you connect with your Aphrodite energy, you remember that you’re worthy of receiving what you desire. You
surrender to sexual and other pleasures without fear of displeasing anyone, and you enjoy a bounty of sexual delight that can include multiple orgasms. To embody Aphrodite is to be a diva in the original sense of the word, unapologetic about your longings and cravings and unchecked in your pleasurable pursuits. That’s hard for many of us to imagine, because we’ve been taught not to take too much, not to laugh too loudly, and not to be too aggressive in getting what we want. We’ve been taught to question our yearnings and make sure we’re not being selfish.
To become ageless, we must learn to distinguish selfishness from self-nurturing, because self-nurturing is the replenishing act of reconnecting to the energy of Aphrodite, the creative and sensual force of life itself. To be self-nurturing
is
to serve the world. As Judy Harrow wrote in
Gnosis
magazine, “Aphrodite’s rituals of love and pleasure are the acts which connect the inner and outer planes … we must actually dance, sing, feast, make music, and love in Her honor. It is with our bodies that we worship Her, and through our bodies that She blesses us. By these earthy rituals the false divisions between body and spirit, between mind and nature, are healed. We find the Sacred within us and all things, within our beautiful, living Mother Earth.”
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You offer your own joy and irresistible deliciousness for others to savor even as you’re recharging your own batteries. The Breathing In Aphrodite exercise, inspired by Laura Bushnell’s book
Life Magic,
is a great practice for connecting to your pleasure.
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Exercise: Breathing In Aphrodite
Take a walk, whether in nature, by yourself, or on a crowded city sidewalk. As you’re walking, imagine that a very sexy woman is pressed up against your left side—the side of your body that represents receiving and femininity. (Your right side represents giving and masculinity.) When I do this, I imagine that Sophia Loren or Salma Hayek is on my left, but you can use any woman you find sexy and powerful.
Now, breathe in that woman and her energy. Imagine drawing in her sensuality and sexuality, and increasing your
life force with each breath as it is channeled directly from the Divine through her into you.
Do this exercise for two to five minutes a day for 21 days and watch what happens. You can combine it with affirmations about your sensuality, such as “I am Aphrodite. I make love with wild, unleashed abandon. I am an irresistible force of nature.”
Libido is the life force coursing through our bodies. It’s the natural yearning for more pleasure, and for more of what pleasure creates.
The life force is creative and abundant. Trees generate a far greater number of seeds than will ever sprout and grow into new trees. This past year, the yellow pollen from the pine trees in my yard was released all spring in huge amounts whenever the wind blew. The pollen covered everything on the ground and fed the other plants with its rich nutrients. I recently learned that it is this same pine pollen that awakens the forest floor and signals the growth of plants and mushrooms. Talk about fecundity! Fish lay far more eggs than will ever hatch. And women are wired to experience multiple orgasms because that moment of ecstasy is an expression of the life force accompanied by a burst of nitric oxide. Our bodies are not designed to limit or contain our pleasure. They are meant to experience it as the medicine it truly is. Orgasm is a gift that, quite literally, resets our personal energy fields and radiates out from there.
If you want to live healthfully and as a goddess, you need to know how to work with your innate sex drive and spiritual life force, bringing it down into your pelvic organs and your female erotic anatomy. Spirituality and sexuality are two aspects of exactly the same thing, despite the fact that they have been separated by many cultures and many religions for millennia. If you expect to shut down sexually as you grow older because that’s the accepted cultural norm, you’re likely to do just that, but it isn’t necessary and it won’t lead to agelessness. You can become
a sex goddess right in the privacy of your own mind, your own body, and your own bedroom.
REPRESSION BEGINS—AND ENDS—AT HOME
Part of my own journey to sexual wholeness involved teaching others to use pleasure to fuel their lives, which I did at Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts (
www.mamagenas.com
). As I watched the women I was helping to teach break open into healthier and happier versions of themselves, I realized that I needed to learn the womanly arts as much as any woman there did—and my daughters decided to take the “Mastery” course with me.
At one of the after-parties, a woman invited me to get up on a bar and dance. I don’t drink alcohol and have never been drunk or high on drugs. But cheered on by the love, support, and urging of all the other sister goddesses, I figured I’d give it a try. Up until then I had never ever experienced myself as a sensual, sexy anything. I saw myself as a serious doctor who had worked hard my whole life to have my point of view accepted. But there was something about dancing sensually on top of a bar in New York City while being encouraged by dozens of joyful women that felt really good.
But I noticed that my daughters were not exactly thrilled with my performance, even though I wanted their approval. My youngest said, “Really, Mom. I don’t like seeing you like that.”
Wham! Instantly, I’d been smacked down from ecstasy and fun to shame and constriction. Not wanting to embarrass my daughters further, I considered shutting back down into my maternal, asexual Mom self. But then I spoke with Anne Davin, Ph.D., a cultural anthropologist who, at that time, was part of the Mastery staff. She’s an expert on addiction, psychology, and anthropology. Anne told me that in indigenous cultures that have coming-of-age rituals, girls are initiated into the rites of womanhood by mothers who have been initiated separately, years earlier. In Western culture, which has few cultural coming-of-age rituals for girls, both adult mothers and their daughters are, in essence, uninitiated girls. Consequently, it feels uncomfortable for both mothers and their
daughters to be undergoing the same “rites” at the same time. She suggested that I shouldn’t let my daughters’ reaction stop me. It was too important to claim my right to sexual pleasure.
Months later, while still in the Mastery program, I had run out of the room to get something, and when I came back, I realized everyone had paired up for an exercise and the only person who didn’t have a partner was my daughter Ann. Neither of us knew what the exercise was about, but then we were told we each had to do a sensual move and have our partner comment on it. I laughed. Of
course
my daughter and I would end up being partners in this exercise! I went first and did the move with all my heart. Ann responded, “Mom—you moved like a snake. That was so beautiful it almost made me cry.” Breakthrough! And when she did her beautiful, sensual move, I complimented her. Since then, both my daughters and I have come a very long way in supporting each other in being fully alive and fully embodied.
In freeing ourselves, we free our daughters. They will get to see and experience a woman past her childbearing years feeling powerful, sensual, and beautiful and know that they, too, can continue to be sexual and alluring, ageless goddesses.
Women are rising at warp speed! Back when my father was growing up, the sight of a woman’s bare ankle as she stepped into a carriage was considered risqué. At the height of the American feminist movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, women were wearing miniskirts one day, maxi dresses the next, going braless, or wearing high-collared, puffy-shouldered prairie-inspired wedding gowns and cosmetics with “baby” in the name, completely confused about how we “should” present ourselves! In the 1980s, we learned to “dress for success,” which meant wearing suits with big shoulder pads to make us look like men and little floppy silk bowties that suggested we were authoritative, like men, but soft. These fashions reflected the cultural ambivalence about looking feminine that was part of that time. The old staples of Hollywood glamour, from bold lipstick to draped satin, were discarded, but now we’re reclaiming them. Finally, we’re realizing that the glamour queens were no pushovers, and like them, we can be sexy, powerful, and smart. You have to love the fact that 1940s movie star Hedy Lamarr, known for her
classic glamour-girl looks, had an onscreen orgasm in a European film back in the early 1930s—and also invented a key piece of technology that she incorporated into a torpedo tracking system designed to help the Allies in World War II and that became integral to the cell phones we use today. Soak that in!
The fact is that you can enjoy lipstick and draped satin even if you’re a breadwinner and mother. You can dress in a uniform during the workday and sweatpants at night, and then become a divine, erotic goddess in bed. You can be the hot librarian or rock a pair of yoga pants. It’s not what you wear but how you carry yourself. Clothing and makeup just serve as accessories. I love the women’s bathroom scene in the movie
The Heat
where Melissa McCarthy tries to explain to Sandra Bullock why she needs some serious wardrobe help to express her sexuality. McCarthy’s character can do it simply through movement because she owns her womanly power. She doesn’t need to be thin or traditionally beautiful. The challenge is to let go of the virgin/whore archetype that disempowers and disrespects women. Find your own unique blending of the earthy woman who knows how to shake her stuff and the bold and brainy woman in hot pants who is selective in choosing her partners.
As Dolly Parton has said, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” You don’t have to justify your personal expression of your Aphrodite nature. Don’t apologize to anyone for what makes you comfortable. All humans have feminine aspects. Don’t deny yours out of a misguided notion that to be feminine, or womanly, is to be weak or inconsequential. Then you’ll be able to own your womanliness and express it in your own unique way.
Male Sexual Health
Just like women, as men reach their 40s and 50s, they typically undergo a transition into a new stage of life. Though this is medically called andropause, I really dislike the term because it can be a form of the same “hexing” of men’s sexuality as menopause is of women’s. (By hexing, I mean that as soon as you set up the cultural expectation
that people will face challenges at a particular time in life, people will respond by having crises they might not have had otherwise.) Yes, at this stage of life, testosterone levels in a man may drop, but this is not inevitable. It depends on a man’s health and well-being. (It also depends on how big his gut is. That “beer gut” that so many men develop creates all kinds of hormonal havoc because it produces inflammatory chemicals and excess estrogen, which shuts down testosterone.) And just as in women, men’s old buried emotions may come to the surface in the form of physical problems. For men, it tends to be erectile dysfunction and circulation problems. Erectile dysfunction drugs, such as Cialis and Viagra, may resolve men’s difficulty with attaining an erection but mask deeper problems of unresolved anger, fear, and grief that may stem from sexual abuse. I once heard Dr. Oz call the penis the “dipstick of men’s health.” By this, he meant that erection problems may be the first thing that signals the beginning of heart disease. And as we have already discussed, heart problems are often associated with old, unresolved resentment and grief.
If a man in your life is having health or sexual issues, his main issue may actually be his fear of mortality, which is showing up as a loss of potency. Share with him what you know about cultural portals and biology. Suggest to him that he hasn’t even begun to reach his peak of effectiveness! (And yes, erectile dysfunction is far more common in men who sit all day long, so if you have a male partner, tell your partner to get up off the chair and join you in pleasurable movement!)
Because a man’s sexual prowess is so deeply connected to his sense of power in the world, he may act out by having an affair or develop a sudden obsession with pornography to prove to himself that he’s still “got it.” Remember the movie
Moonstruck
when Loretta’s (Cher’s) mother, Rose, played by Olympia Dukakis, asks the character Johnny why a man would need more than one woman? He replies, “Maybe because he fears death.” Men may have sex with a new woman to feel alive again. As his partner, you can be that new woman yourself by reconnecting with your own vitality. Several years ago, I met a man who was in his 70s who told me that he no longer needed Viagra for sex since
his wife started the Mama Gena Mastery program and connected with her own sexuality and sensuality. Unfortunately, some men are so overwhelmed by the challenge of opening their own hearts that they can’t maintain their commitments to their partners.
As a woman partnered with a man who is having a so-called midlife crisis, you can best support him by being your most joyous, flourishing self. He may not like this at first. He may feel as though he is losing control of you—because he is! But that will most likely save both of you from disconnecting from each other.
You need to take the lead in being a role model for pleasure and joy in life. Women set the tone for men. Don’t allow his anger or sadness to drag you back down, which would be a disservice to you and to him. Do
not
make the mistake of waiting to have fun until your man agrees to accompany you on the pleasure train. Board it yourself, and then invite him to come along!
EROTIC ANATOMY
For years, I’ve been teaching women about their erotic anatomy, something that even ob/gyns are not taught in our formal training! Trust me, most don’t ever address it. Few women have been shown how to use a hand mirror to examine and explore the external part of this erotic anatomy, which is part of the reason they’re unfamiliar with it. How often do you hear women talk about their vaginas when they really mean the clitoris, inner lips, and outer labia, all of which make up the vulva? How ridiculous is it that most of us weren’t even taught what the terms are for our organs “down there”?