Founder Letter: Reclaiming Pleasure After Violation

Dear Rosies,

I'm at a retreat working with healers from the USA, Kenya, South Africa, India, the UK and Portugal, men and women who spend their work hours with the orphaned, the abused, the violated. They are here to be resourced, to breathe and dance and refuel and learn. My contribution here is to transmit teachings on the Body of Joy: deep rest, de-armoring, story transmutation, opening the energy body.

We're also including sexuality in the program.

From my perspective, there isn't a separate thing called "sexual energy." It's all energy. The buzz that wants to make love is the same aliveness that wants to plant a garden, start a business, run a race, go on a great adventure. It's the part that dreams big and wakes singing.

If anything is repressed (whether it's sexual experiences, or unprocessed physical or emotional experiences), it traps energy that could be used for creation, for enjoyment, for an affirmative life.

The West will run most of us at a pace where we have to paste over some things to keep going, to keep paying the bills, even if nothing gigantic happens to harm us.

But if you have had physical harm, or sexual violation, or desecration of your beautiful body, that will compound the lockdown. It seals off the range of intimacy available to you, and it also dims desire and clarity, the appetite… the easy yes, the fierce no.

If someone hurts another, the injury is a time-delimited moment. The lock-up, however, can hurt your whole life. That cruel trick of the psyche, which is trying to protect us, can be released. In one of our segments we talked about exactly this: how do you come back to pleasure, to the simple aliveness of your own body, if the body has been violated?

Reclaiming pleasure after harm is an act of sovereignty. You take sensation back because it's yours, at the speed you can feel it. We soften and receive and repattern, and we deshame: we send shame back where it belongs, to the person who caused harm. When feeling first returns to a place that went numb, it often arrives as tears: the body weeping for the years it spent guarding the gate. The current is moving again, and that's what its return can feel like. Like coming home to yourself, like lying on the floor of your own house.

I've summarized the teachings from that session in an essay on the Rose Woman blog.

To your most beautiful, valued, sacred embodiment,

All love,

Christine Marie Mason

Founder, Rosebud Woman