This time of year is so dense with emotion.

If you love the deep, dark, rich range of human emotions – like I do – you are feasting right now.

If the deep, dark, rich range of human emotions terrify you – like they do me – you may feel somewhat tentative, somewhat overwhelmed, somewhat apprehensive about how to manage yourself and your heart as we circle into shorter and shorter days, and longer and longer nights, in this hemisphere.

Let me jump inside the darkness with you.

I want to hold you as we look around together.

One of the most important and life changing lessons that I’ve learned, as I study the arc and art of orgasm, is how I was built for this.

What do you mean, built for this, MG?

I mean that this holy human body of mine, when I truly trust her, can navigate the full range of my woman with the skill of a cat dropping from a window ledge two stories from the ground, landing lightly and moving on to catch her next mouse.

It is not in my nature to fear loss. To fear darkness. To fear swift unexpected changes in the path of my life…

My nature is to ride transitions with deep inner trust. And so is yours.

It is not in my nature to be needy or desperate for someone or something outside of myself to find my own center. 

It is my nature to love. To love what is, to appreciate what is.

But until I can connect with my nature, a sense of desperation and neediness blinds me to the truth of my own magnificence.

It is only pleasure that brings me home to myself.  

The pleasure that is available – right here, right now – no matter the circumstances.

Let me show you what I mean.

I am about to face my first holidays in four years without my partner, Peter.

The part of me that was raised inside a Patriarchal World Culture – where I was both wounded, and then attacked for feeling the feels of that wounding – might turn on myself in a blind rage of self recrimination and self attack for being single, again, this holiday season.

The part of me that has been remade – through the study of orgasm and the constant ongoing surrender to the study of pleasure – knows that this is a useless direction to pursue. 

No good can come from heading down that trail. 

So instead, I reach for…breath. Movement. Dance. A quick swivel into gratitude. Poetry. More gratitude. Nature. Feeling the beating of my own heart. Self care. Self pleasure. Orgasm.

This choice is the ultimate game changing choice of a woman’s life.

True sovereignty can only come when a woman is willing to lay down the instrument of self attack and pick up the orchestral magnificence of her true nature. She then breathes into her own divinity.  

Feeling utterly completely herself through practices that connect her to herself and her Goddess. 

And I had the thought we could all use this holiday time to practice feeling through to this truth, together…you in?

Every time the road to hell and self recrimination opens to you, choose another pathway.   

This is not an easy journey. But your freedom and sovereignty is worth the price.

With so much love and pleasure,

Today, like every other day,

we wake up empty and frightened.

Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.

Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

From: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing, by Jalal al-Din Rumi

Regena is a feminist icon, a teacher, a speaker, a mother, a best-selling author, and creatrix and CEO of The School of Womanly Arts.