What do you need to feel safe?

My post on the Virgin/Whore split really created a stir.

It came from a place of inspired passion. My best blogs always do.

Where the words pour out of me. A transmission of gold. Touching hearts. Loosening tears. Truth's recognition.

The theme is still with me and more is percolating to be told. As I feel into the yearning and passion of the feminine womb and heart.

And safety keeps cropping up as a key word. The question:

"What do you need to feel safe?"

I recall holding space for a beautiful women's workshop on connecting with the Sacred Yoni and how this one question stirred so very much.

She - Yoni - unanimously expressed her need for SAFETY to open to pleasure and penetration.

And yet there were oh so many times, when this wasn't present and she had opened anyway.

Pushed past her "I'm not ready", "No!" or her "ouch!" and allowed an entering that didn't feel good.

And then, of course, the shut down, the numbing out, the guilt, the shame, the disempowerment, the self-recrimination.

Which, if not embraced with awareness, leads to resentment, blame and withholding.

Stultifying intimacy. Deadening feeling and sensation. Closing the precious flower of your heart and yoni.

How hard it can be to stop the conditioned response to please and submit.

To stay silent, rather than voice a preference or need.

To take full responsibility and ownership, when we have only been shown how to objectify ourselves.

To lead and educate, when we are both afraid to hurt his ego and longing to let go in his clear direction.

I know.

And so we (and the men who love us) must ask our selves/us, our hearts and our yonis:

"What do you need to feel safe?"

In full acknowledgement of all the times we or others have failed to practice this fundamental level of care and how that experience will still be coded in the body.

Each boundary breech, each abuse, each abandonment, trauma or betrayal. Which may not even have happened in the obvious realm of sex. But still. It happened.

Needing now our utmost respect and tenderness. Not yet another pushing through.

Once we become aware of this, we can either keep over-riding it: adding further layers of defence and armouring to our body-mind.

Or we can begin to love and heal ourselves by asking: "what do you need to feel safe?" And then honouring and communicating the answers and knowing we are given. Moment by moment.

Even when this goes against everything we think we are supposed to do and be to "be sexy."

Even when we are terrified of rejection.

Even if this means stopping mid-way.

In my experience, it always boils down to a combination of sensuals, practicals and deeper fundamentals, such as the fact that he is present, trustworthy and there for you.

That he's not just going to fuck and run. When, more than likely, a fair few already have.

But ultimately, it starts with you being present, trustworthy and there for you first. In order to say no, when anything is off.

Please understand how sensitive and subtle your body, heart and energy field are. Listen in. And take care of them.

What do you need to feel safe? It might sound boring, but this is the question that will lead you to your ultimate sexual ecstasy.

Love, Shakti xx

Art by Ines Honfi