Woman on Fire: 9 Elements to Wake Up Your Erotic Energy, Personal Power, and Sexual Intelligence - Couverture rigide

Goddard, Amy Jo

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1594633762 ISBN 13 : 9781594633768

Editeur : Avery, 2015

A propos du livre

Extrait :

MORE, PLEASE!

I absolutely love my tribe, and I’m so glad you are a part of it. I would love to connect with you further.

Your place to go for everything about this book: womanon firethebook.com

I write and produce weekly articles and videos about sexuality and relationships at amyjogoddard.com and would love for you to join the juicy conversation there. There are tons of free resources for you.

Sexual empowerment is a process, a practice, and an experience. You’ll want some tools and juicy resources to help you along your journey. At womanonfirethebook.com, find all kinds of goodies to keep your fire blazing, including:

   · Your Sexual Empowerment Workbook: your own downloadable copy of all the worksheets and assignments to fill out and keep, along with some extras that are not in this book
   · Free audio classes to help you deepen your understanding and take the work further
   · A step-by-step guide on how to create a Woman on Fire book club so you can work through the nine elements with a group of juicy women who are ready to claim their sexual power

SPARKS

This book is birthed from my desire to help you come home to yourself and live a sexually empowered life. I hope this book will inspire you, be a harbinger guiding you toward the sexual wholeness you dream of, and help you live the fulfilling sexual life you deserve.

I believe that having healthy, nonviolent relationships and working toward a pleasure-filled, creative life for all are the keys to changing the world. This vision comes from a place of knowing the world can be so much better, so much sexier, and more beautiful. And what peace, magic, and joy we can experience when we live in this more delightful, loving place. Healthy relationships are essential.

Sexual empowerment has to be holistic. It can’t be partway. Your sexuality exists inside of a larger life and a larger world. A person does not become sexually empowered because they start having good sex, although good sex can be a very good start. Plenty of women know how to “have good sex” without fully realizing their own power. You’ve got to look at the whole package to become empowered sexually, emotionally, and spiritually.

I want to see us stop defining ourselves by forces outside ourselves, forces that tell us what to like, rather than defining ourselves by our own internal desire. I want us to embrace our desire fully without fear and to wholly express our own erotic being. I want women to demand healthy, mutually satisfying, fully lived relationships and to stop settling for less than they want or deserve. I want women to inhabit their bodies, take back their power, and claim their birthrights of pleasure, passion, and desire. I want each of us to be a Woman on Fire.

IT’S NEVER TOO EARLY OR TOO LATE

Women are the focus of my current work as a sexual empowerment coach. I have coached women via video conferencing from Switzerland to New York and Jamaica to Ohio. I’ve worked with women of different cultural backgrounds, class backgrounds, and sexual orientations. I’ve worked with women in countries where gender and sexual norms are very different from those in the United States. I’ve coached women in their early twenties who want to heal, women in their thirties who are feeling a dissatisfied itch telling them they need to focus in on their sexuality, women in their forties who are ready to address the famine in their sexual lives and the post-divorce women who are dating again and re-creating their sex lives, and women in their fifties, sixties, and seventies who want to do the work before it’s “too late.”

I’ve coached so many women who are single and know they must unlock the buried treasures in their own sexuality—and that they must do it for themselves. It’s a tremendous honor when they show up. I’ve coached women who are married/partnered and don’t want to have sex with their partners, women who are partnered and desperately want to have sex with their partner who can’t or won’t, women who are about to get married and are scared they’ll never get to have the sex life they dream of. I’ve worked with women who are pregnant and are opening the capacity of their bodies to new experience, who are excited and also fearful of losing something they haven’t quite found yet. Women who are lesbian or queer and refuse to succumb to the lesbian stereotype of companionate-not-sexual love, women who are becoming aware of their attraction to other women and want to explore it—and who know that something about exploring that love of other women is about learning to love themselves more fully. I also work with women who have big sexual wounds, who feel like they lost something at an early age and are saddened that now, in their thirties, forties, even fifties or sixties, they are working to get it back—or to have it for the very first time. I have worked with many powerful women who are doing extraordinary work in their lives, who are power players in the world, yet nearly mute in sex. They want to find their sexual voice and experience their sexual power. They want more pleasure.

In this book, I am honored to be able to share some of these women’s stories with you, in their own words. I know you will appreciate if not relate to their tender, vulnerable, and honest tales. I work with creative, self-aware women who speak eloquently about their processes and growth, so I will quote them as much as possible to privilege their voices. This book is for all women—however you identify with your womanhood. We are not all the same kind of woman and I honor that. My perspective comes from my experience as a queer, white woman from the United States, with a middle-class, military family upbringing. I will speak to women directly in this book and talk about the socialization of girls and women, although people of other genders may also find it powerful.

THE NINE ELEMENTS

It is out of this intensely personal and powerful work with women that a framework for sexual empowerment revealed itself to me—growing organically from something unformed taking form, as a tribe of women expanded in this work. I teach with frameworks to make it more easily understood, accessed, and integrated into one’s life.

In this book, I detail what I have found to be the nine essential elements of sexual empowerment. In chapter 1, I define what it means to be sexually empowered, which is the foundation and my approach to sexuality. In chapter 2, I lay out my Core Energy Model of Sexuality, which helps to organize sexuality as the powerful force it is in our lives. In the chapters that follow, I detail my Nine Elements to wake up your erotic energy, personal power, and sexual intelligence, which to me are the core components we each have to develop in order to make our sexuality as powerful as it can be. These elements are the ways we can animate, expand, and dance with sexuality. They are:

ELEMENT 1. VOICE:
Excavate and Rewrite Your Sexual Story

ELEMENT 2. RELEASE:
Make Space for the Sexual Self You’ve Been Waiting For

ELEMENT 3. EMOTION:
Show Up as Emotionally Powerful

ELEMENT 4. BODY:
Know and Radically Accept Your Body

ELEMENT 5. DESIRE:
Activate Desire and Create a Sexual Practice

ELEMENT 6. PERMISSION:
Give Yourself Permission to Be Erotically Authentic

ELEMENT 7. PLAY:
Develop Sexual Skills and Remember How to Play

ELEMENT 8. HOME:
Build Sexual Confidence and Come Home to You

ELEMENT 9. FIRE:
Use Your Dynamic Sexual Energy to Live Vibrantly

I believe we can use these elements of ourselves to develop our erotic energy, improve our sexual intelligence, and step fully into our own personal power. We can and should approach sexual intelligence the way we approach emotional intelligence: as something that requires knowledge, understanding, and the development of skills. Most of us are missing the information we need about the things we don’t discuss. We need to ramp up our emotional skills in order to have the fully blossoming lives and relationships we most want. Our erotic energy is often our most untapped resource, and yet it is there inside us as a wellspring of juice we can use to direct our lives, and as we do, step more and more into our personal power. In the modern world, it’s easy to spend the entire day in our heads in front of a computer, almost entirely disconnected from our bodies, eroticism, and desire, and then we want to turn back on when we are with our lovers. Our well-being and sexual fulfillment depend upon taking seriously improving our sexual intelligence and lighting up our core erotic energy.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

I have created an online portal for you with play sheets, exercises, and resources that will help you to get the most out of this book. Go to the portal at womanonfirethebook.com now to get a sense of what is available to assist you on this journey. I like to think of assignments as “home play.” There are play sheets for all of the exercises that are included in this book and additional exercises and resources you won’t see here. I RECOMMEND THAT YOU PRINT OUT THE DOWNLOADABLE PDF OF THE WHOLE WORKBOOK. All of it is designed to help you go deep into your sexual exploration, expansion, and healing.

You might choose to do some of the exercises or all of them as you go, taking in each aspect of the work and exploring it deeply. You may want to read the whole book through and then go back and do all of the home play. You might read the chapters in order or you can skip around. I have put them in the order that made the most sense, as one will build on others; however, they are not linear, so you can read them in the way that works for you.

I suggest you read this book with a friend, partner, therapist, or group of people so that you can have live conversations about the material and what it brings up in you. This journey is yours, and you can do it in community and with guides. Many of us are used to doing things alone. Not having been mothered properly, or busy caretaking everyone else, we often feel isolated in our own internal process and crave the support we typically give to others. The learning can often be deeper when you grow in a community. You have an opportunity to give your sexuality the attention it deserves, bring others into your journey, and find a new tribe. Even if you choose to read the book solo, know that many other women are on this powerful journey too. However you choose to do it, there is no wrong way. Engage with this book in the way that works best for you.

You picked up this book because there is a desire in you, in your sexual being. Your desire could be to figure out what you want, and to learn to get it. Your desire might be to go deeper in your relationships and in your life. It might be to become a sexually self-actualized being who lives her life in unapologetic ecstasy. Your desire might be to heal and develop a new relationship to sexuality. Your desire might be to more fully understand your sexuality and how to express it in powerful ways. Your desire might be to experience pleasure more wholly.

I can help make some sense of the vast terrain of sexuality. I’m going to define sexuality and sexual empowerment in a useful and practical way. I will give you tools. And a lot of encouragement and permission to explore your sexuality, to claim the sexual power that is yours to claim, and to live vibrantly at full capacity. I’m going to do my best to make it relevant to your life, and to share all of the things I wish someone would have shared with me when I was feeling pain and searching for answers. I hope that the framework of sexual empowerment I use in this book is powerful for you. I hope that it will allow you to see many of your blind spots, to heal your wounds, and to take on a new way of being that allows you to have the sexuality and life you desire.

1

THE BIG ROUND BALL

All of us have a desire inside of us for more. We want to experience more, to grow more, to have more, to be more fulfilled, to be more of who we are meant to be. Women come to me in this place of wanting more, knowing it is intrinsically connected to their own sexual being. I am a guide. It is their journey. This is your journey.

You know there is more. Sexuality is at the core of the longing in us all. It is the core. It is the seduction of life itself, the texture of rain on your face, or the dry, cold air you feel in your nostrils on a winter walk. It is the creation of beauty and the meeting of the divine in you, in life itself. It is the enjoyment of being, the pleasure of creating your dreams, and it’s there in the expansive space when you pause to appreciate your process. So many women have this hunger inside of themselves, this magic wanting to birth itself into life. To have your “more,” you will have to claim your sexual power or there will always be a gap between what you want and what you have.

THE FEAR

I hear many of the sentiments I experienced at a young age from so many women: that fear of being the only one. The only one to experience shame, to have unfulfilled desire, to have deeply ingrained fears of being “broken,” of never having experienced orgasm, or of being the only one who needs “this” particular form of healing (whatever “this” might be).

So many people fear they are sexually broken. Unfixable. It’s a tremendous fear—that their sexual history, sexual functioning, sexual problems, or sexual trauma is so bad, so impossible to fix, that they must be permanently damaged. Yet I have watched client after client change her life entirely—change her experience of sex, her sexuality, her body, and her relationships dramatically—because she committed to the process and worked through those parts that made her feel hopeless and lost.

You are powerful and nothing is impossible for you no matter what your experience has been. Your journey might look different from everyone else’s, yet it is possible to achieve your vision. You may have gotten messages from your family, friends, or culture that something about you is broken, because we live in a society that likes to tell us how imperfect we are (gasp!) so we stay stuck feeling bad, buying products to help us fix ourselves, and choosing not to rise up and use our power to challenge the systems that oppress us. You are whole and capable of healing the things that you are not at peace with.

In my two decades of teaching sexuality I have witnessed the transformations of many people. I have developed an understanding of the sexual and emotional devices that keep women from coming home to themselves, of the struggles and heartbreaks that keep them feeling alien to their own sexuality. I have listened to and learned about the stories and secrets women keep—the ones they are terrified of other people discovering or of showing to themselves. The stories I hear over and again are each precious and unique and yet so many threads of similarity are woven into this collective sexual herstory.

In this collective vision, I hear many of the same wants. Women tell me that they want more sexual confidence, the ability to get their ne...

Revue de presse :

“Woman on Fire is a compassionate, loving, and tender guide that will assist all women in owning and operating the life force that is our erotic energy and sexual intelligence.”
—Christiane Northrup, MD, author of Goddesses Never Age

 
“My long-term friend and colleague Amy Jo Goddard, offers powerful guidelines to expand women's sex lives so we can become decisive orgasmic women who are able to state our pleasure and get what we want—from the bedroom to the boardroom.”
—Betty Dodson, sexual pioneer and author of Sex for One
 
“Amy Jo Goddard's new "you can have it too" book, brings together the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects of sexuality in a way that is easy to understand and implement into any woman's life who is yearning to set her life aflame.”-
—Pamela Madsen, author of Shameless, Founder Back to the Body: Sensuous Retreats for Women
 
"I want every woman, young to old, to have access to this beautiful and compassionate book––and there’s much insight here for people of every gender who want to heal their relationship to their bodies, their ability to experience pleasure, and to the cultural stories about sex and gender we are so deeply affected by." 
—Carol Queen, PhD 
Co-founder, Center for Sex & Culture
Staff Sexologist, Good Vibrations
Author of Exhibitionism for the Shy and The Sex & Pleasure Book: Good Vibrations Guide to Great Sex for Everyone
 
“As someone who has also been privileged to travel this terrain with women, I love Amy Jo’s easy way with ALL of who we are as women—never losing sight of how much our own sexual liberation will lead to our joy and success in life.  Her program is deep and profound and I believe that many women will benefit from her knowledge and expertise.”
—Rachel Carlton Abrams, MD, author of The Multi-Orgasmic Woman

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Avery
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1594633762
• ISBN 13: 9781594633768
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 320