Better Late Than Never?

The action of exploring an unfamiliar area - age 38.

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I started crying before she’d even laid a hand on me.

Automatically, I apologised for the tears I hadn’t seen (or felt) coming. “I’m sorry, I’m getting so emotional here. I don’t know where this has come from.”

But that wasn’t entirely true, of course.

Sitting facing one another on the white linen sofa, our legs folded underneath us, eyes locked in on each other, there was nowhere to hide — and so my very honest answer came spilling out and tumbling down my face.

Her question was a simple one: “How have you been since our last session? What’s been happening for you?”

The start of my response had been quite easy to share.

You see, my first bodywork session (a combination of massage, reiki and gua sha) with Asha that I’d had one month prior had been one of the catalysts for my inner change, my new era of womanhood, my sensual awakening.

There had been a moment on the table when she had one hand gently placed on my womb space and the other on my heart space, and I’d felt a jolt of electricity in my sacral. The message I received from my body was that my feminine had come back online. And from that very next day, everything started to shift. I began to move differently, dress differently, speak and share differently — and the external world immediately began to respond to me differently. At the time I was jokingly referring to it as my feminine magnetism, but it was no joke. It was (and is) very very real.

That part of my update was easy to share.

And then… the tears started.

Following my automatic apology and my somewhat false confession of emotional confusion, I admitted the truth: there was a part of me that felt so sad that I had spent over a decade wishing for this alive and thrive-y feeling. Longing for this connection to my feminine and my sensuality. Disappointed that some 13 years — thirteen years — had passed me by without feeling truly radiant or confident or womanly or sensual or sexy.

She nodded slowly and smiled gently.

I then went on to say that a bigger part of me felt excited and grateful and happy that this was happening for me now, age 38, and that I have all these years ahead of me to enjoy this new era of my womanhood. Which was (is) also true.

And then I got on the table.

The magic about Asha is that you don’t just receive the most blissful massage and beautiful energy clearing and healing, she also channels for you. And so following my time on the table, I got dressed, she handed me a fresh glass of water, and we sat down once again on the white linen sofa to debrief.

The message she had for me was that there is truly an opening and a stirring of my sensuality and sexuality taking place. That this is a time of exploration for me. And then she set me two pieces of homework — to sink into and move my hips as often as I can and feels good, and to research the feminine archetypes and look further into the one that most resonates with me.

As I finished my last sip of water, we both stood up, hugged tightly and I got into my car for the drive home from Byron Bay to Lennox Head.

While driving, I noticed a very different feeling to the one I had following my first session with Asha.

Instead of the light and happy floatiness I had experienced the last time, this time I felt like I’d had a clearing — almost like an internal clean out — but there was also a lingering thin and wispy cloud of sadness.

What was that… why was that?

After singing along to a song or two (ironically from my HIPS. playlist on Spotify), it revealed itself to me. Asha had said this was a time of exploration for me, and I had subconsciously associated that with being a beginner and had begun to internally ridicule myself for it.

A beginner? Aged 38?
A beginner? With my sensuality?
A beginner? With my sexuality?
What am I? A teenager?
How ridiculous!

How ridiculous indeed… because: aren’t we all beginners at something at every age and stage of life? Aren’t we all trying something new every single day of our lives? In fact, let’s take it even further — because we’ve actually never lived today before and we haven’t lived tomorrow yet, so aren’t we all really just beginners, day in day out, for the duration of our lifetime?

Yet here I was, ridiculing myself for being at the start of this new exploration of my sensuality and sexuality because it felt like something I should already have embodied by now.

But that hasn’t been my journey.

I spent the ages of 10-15 in a back brace for scoliosis, followed by spinal surgery, plus braces on my teeth and acne just to top it all off. (I was put on the pill, age 15 to ‘fix’ my skin… did this happen to anyone else, too?)

I didn’t really start to blossom until the age of 17-18. A late bloomer, compared to those around me.

I had my few dating years, and then met my husband age 20.

That chapter of my life — a relatively short time of about 8 years, between the ages of 17-25 — saw a very fledgling version of my confidence begin to emerge. And when I say ‘confidence’ I don’t mean my personality.

I’d had to develop that as soon as a back brace was wrapped around my 10 year old body. From that point, I was confident in my ability to talk to people, connect with people, and even make them laugh. It was a protective mask for the inner turmoil and pain I was experiencing as a young adolescent going through the most awkward and excruciating time as someone physically different to all of her peers and being treated like a science experiment by the Australian medical industry. (Being the youngest person with the largest spinal curvature at the time will do that to ya.)

What I wasn’t confident in was myself. My true, core, raw, feminine, sexual self. The one we draw upon, from our sacral chakra, all the way up and through our being. That had been shaken… it was fragile, underdeveloped, unfamiliar and untrusted… and there was more to come.

By age 25, I had developed a hormonal issue. I remember the day it started so clearly: I was standing in the bathroom of an Airbnb in the Barossa Valley, a wine region in South Australia, and it felt like a switch had been flicked — my sexuality had been turned OFF.

Following this, I bounced between my GP and various specialists, being tested and probed with no clear answer. So they prescribed me different contraception pills to ‘fix’ the issue, the last of which killed my libido and saw me on the verge of depression.

For the next 13 years, I felt like I’d been robbed of my mojo. I felt dead from the waist down. Like someone had pulled the cord that ran all the way from my head down through the rest of my body, out of the electrical socket within my yoni. No sex drive. No lust for life. No confidence. Unable to access pleasure. Constantly trying to explain to my husband that it wasn’t him, it was actually me.

And then, just over a month ago, it all finally changed for me — without a doctor in sight. My sex drive started to rev back to life. My sensuality began to emerge. My feminine came back online.

It’s still early days, obviously, but that’s what an exploration is, right?

EXPLORATION (noun) :: ‘the action of exploring an unfamiliar area’

After I got home from my bodywork session with Asha yesterday, I took a long warm shower, allowing the water to flow over me and wash away all that was being released from me. I didn’t try to force the sadness away. I just let it be. I let me be.

I put on my soft and comfy PJs in shades of pink, had dinner and dark chocolate (with sea salt — my fave) with my husband… and fell asleep by 7.30pm.

This morning, I awoke from a deep slumber just after 4.30am and had this story swirling around me, gently nudging me to get up and share it with you.

So here I am, on the couch with my laptop. It is now 5.53am. The sun is beginning to gently illuminate the early morning sky with shades of pink dotted with wisps of light grey clouds.

The sadness has mostly subsided. A little of it still lingers, but that’s OK. It can do its thing while I get on with my day. There’s no rush. For it or for me.

I’m going to start my homework that Asha set me, if not today then definitely over the weekend.

And I’m going to begin to actively learn to embrace what it means to be in an exploration phase of my sensuality and sexuality, age 38 — and beyond.

…to be continued…

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