Letting Yourself Be Loved like a Goddess.
The first time I performed oral sex on a guy, I only thought of what he was getting out of the experience and whether my technique was good enough.
I mimicked what I had seen in porn and hoped that I was doing it right somehow. I wanted him to be pleased with me. I didn’t care if I was pleased in return, having learned the bitter patriarchal lesson that my needs were secondary.
Throughout most of my teens and twenties, I was fueled by too many Cosmo articles that focused on how to seduce men and how to make sure they have a great time, as though that were the only key to maintaining a relationship. Just satisfy him. Just be what he needs. Then he’ll love you.
Except he didn’t. He loved the idea of me. He loved the shape of me. He loved the feel of me. He loved what I did for him. He did not love the heart and soul of me.
I can’t blame him entirely for that, because I wasn’t bringing my heart and soul into the equation. I didn’t know how.
I stayed completely inside my head in the bedroom, as did he, and we had fantastic physical sex. I’ve always reached orgasm easily, so I had no idea that I was supposed to be feeling something deeper and more transcendent. Where would I have learned that? Certainly not at school, at home, or at church.
I was in my late thirties by the time I woke up to the fact that what happens physically between two people is minor in comparison with what happens energetically.
I was missing that entire dimension of sex, because (a) I wasn’t connecting my heart with my womb, so my own sexual and creative energy stayed blocked and stagnant, and (b) I consistently chose men who were not heart-centered. They were smart, driven, athletic, charming, and successful in most areas of their lives, but they were terrified of being in a genuine, no-holds-barred kind of love.
I attracted exactly what I was projecting. I was accomplished and terrified too.
I had studied Goddess spirituality for years, and had participated in countless circles and rituals that felt empowering and transformative. I grew in many ways and healed a lot of damage to my self-esteem, yet this one crucial part of my life stayed unfulfilled. I still settled for lackluster sex out of loneliness or frustration, giving up hope that it was ever going to feel any different for me.
I felt as though no men were out there who could honor and love the Goddess within me and through me, as though all of that had been lost in antiquity with the destruction of the last pagan temples. Then the pattern shifted. There was a ripple in the fabric, responding to the latent part of me that desired sacred sex enough to push through my fears about openness and vulnerability.
Someone entered my life who called out to the buried sexual priestess inside, and he met me with the same kind of energy. It’s difficult to describe exactly what it was like to get out of my head and into my heart and my body.
I remember trying to float on my back in the pool when I was a kid, but I wasn’t very buoyant. The more I tried to float, the more I sank. Eventually, I figured out that if I just let go and stopped trying so hard, the water would carry me.
It was the same kind of feeling when I stopped worrying about technique and whether I was enough for him, and I just surrendered to an energy that was bigger and more powerful than both of us. I felt the Goddess in a way that I never had before, and I knew it was because he brought that out in me. He was secure enough in his own divine masculinity that I didn’t need to hide or repress anything.
In that moment, everything about me was holy. I had never felt so completely safe and wrapped in a cocoon of love and light before. If there were any pockets of resistance at all, they melted like snow in the noonday sun. I finally began to understand the true meaning of sexual healing.
There is a saying that bright lights cast dark shadows, however, and I quickly realized that sex at this level actually highlights whatever hasn’t healed. Though I had experienced what it was like at the pinnacle, I hadn’t reached the end of my journey at all, I was just at the beginning.
If your own path has been anything like mine, then letting yourself be loved like a Goddess is going to feel spectacular at first, and then it’s going to hurt. It’s like working a muscle that rarely gets used and then feeling the delayed soreness afterward. My first instinct was to run. Yours probably will be too, but I invite you to lean into the experience instead.
Feel the feelings. Work through them, be gentle with yourself, and never give up. It’s worth it. You are worth it. We are all worthy of so much more than the crumbs that fall from the table. It’s time we joined the feast.
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Jen Miller is a witch, priestess, and pagan blogger. Her passion is exploring and celebrating the Goddess through creative writing, shamanic ritual, sacred sexuality, and holistic healing. Her works have been published in SageWoman, Wild Woman Rising, and Goddess When She Rules: Expressions By Contemporary Women. Follow her on Instagram and Patheos.
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