An adventure? Or a tragedy?

This is a question I have been waking up to, and many of us have been waking up to, pretty regularly as of late. Escalating racism, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ attitudes, gun violence, and intolerance in our country and the world, have hit me, and many of us, like daggers of grief and rage to the heart, body, and soul. My own personal challenges of caring for an aging momma who is facing major surgery, and the tasks and tests of single parenting a daughter are the ongoing currents of my life right now. I know you have your own list of huge hurdles, perhaps even more grave and profound than mine, to either fly over or trip over, every day, as well.

I don’t know about you, but when my hurdles get larger than I think they should be, I react poorly. My first thought is, “Oh no!!! I can’t handle this!” My second impulse is to feel sorry for myself. To blame the external, basically.

In defense of my extremely victim-y, habitual behavior, I must say that my mind and body learned this pattern from my mother, aunts, grandparents, and all the other girls and women in my growing up life. I don’t know if a tendency towards depression was in my DNA, or if I just got stuck/gifted with a super sensitive soul that did not know how to manage or process all the complex feels that life had in store. Nor did I see many females who were rocking with life’s challenges, or enjoying the adventure of womanhood in all its many facets and manifestations.

To be perfectly real here, my biggest hurdle has always been what’s happening in my own head.

And I see this reflected in the stories of the thousands of women that I work with. Our inner coping/reacting/processing mechanism is what trips us up – or has us soar. And most of us have spent way too much time tripping, and too little taking flight. I suspect many of you can relate to that.

Each of us has a feeling, deep inside, even when we are in the thick of all that negativity and self-attack that goes along with being life’s victim, that inner darkness and despair is just not our natural, native state. Which makes us feel even worse when we feel bad. Ugh. As if feeling bad wasn’t bad enough…

There is one foolproof, fail-proof, bungle-proof method for making the transition between victim and heroine. And that is a willingness to take your pleasure into your own hands. Why? Well, each of us is gifted with 8,000 nerve endings dedicated to pleasure, which we have been warned away from for thousands of years. Not just by our families, but by a larger misogynistic culture that fears a woman’s power so deeply that it terrifies each female away from connecting with her very own power source. It’s been more than a few thousand years of our mama’s mama’s mamas (and so on) being taught to never, ever own their sex, but rather to live as if the very heart of their feminine power belonged to others — especially men.

When our connection to our sexuality is taken away or violated, we are left with fear, shame, and silence in its place.

That’s a lot of fear, shame, and silence to overcome in this lifetime. So most of us just choose the easy way out and never open the adventure of connecting to our power source. Which is completely understandable. The process of feminine freedom and owning your power doesn’t happen overnight. It’s basically like they say in The Sound of Music: “A dream that will need all the love you can give, every day of your life, for as long as you live…”

The opportunity is that we are blessed to be alive now, where many of us in the world have the ability to freely express and explore our sexuality, passion, and feminine truth.

Right now, there are more places in this world than ever before, where it is actually safe to explore these matters, and if we choose, we can each reclaim what has been lost.

One technique that can instantly and immediately change a woman’s perspective and put her in touch with her body, as an instrument of radiance, is self pleasure. Self pleasure is a practice that each of us can choose to explore. The object of this practice is to spend a few minutes a day, stroking your pussy, with the goal of pleasuring her and exploring what kinds of touch she likes. I like to start my day, every day, with a few minutes of self pleasure. Why? It changes my chemistry.

Instead of cranky, I feel delicious. My habitual pattern of crusty, cranky victimhood is immediately replaced by a feeling of joy and possibility.

The hurdles magically transform from bone-crushing problems to opportunities to practice… leaping.

Literally in five minutes. No Xanax, no Zoloft, no Prozac. Just me and my little jar of coconut oil create this majestic transformation.

With my innate wiring, my long list of hurdles, life could be experienced as a tragedy. But self pleasure makes it an adventure, every single time.

Try it. Just for a few minutes. Let me know (on facebook or instagram) what happens…

With so much love and pleasure,

Regena Thomashauer, aka “Mama Gena”
The School of Womanly Arts

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.