I heard on a podcast a while back that if you are interrupted while you’re in the middle of something it takes 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you were at before the interruption. 23 minutes! And that’s if you aren’t interrupted again. I imagine most-if-not-all of us are living in a state of continual disruption, unable to fully absorb ourselves in whatever it is we are doing.

If you haven’t heard of the social psychologist James Pennebaker, I strongly recommend that you check out his research into Expressive Writing. The basics are this: Write about your emotional and somatic experience as related to difficult and/or traumatic experiences from your past for 15 minutes. Uninterrupted. Keep the pen moving (or your fingers typing).

Over the last decade or so, I’ve transitioned from being a serious introvert to a burgeoning extrovert. I will never be the life of the party, and it’s still unlikely that I will introduce myself to someone. But I have learned that thinking out loud with another person there to reflect and ask you questions can be a delightful and generative way to learn about what I know to be true.

That’s exactly what happened in this podcast interview. Amiee and Alexis’ questions pushed me to dig deep into myself and this thing I call my work. We talked about belonging, eros, sex education for kids, writing, pleasure, sex magic, and more.

I was at a friend’s house the other day and noticed their kids’ growth charts hung on the side of the fridge. Their heights and weights carefully plotted out with a lovely straight line connecting them from their birth, up through the most recent time they were measured. It occurred to me that this is how growth happens when we are kids. Assuming everything is working the way that it’s supposed to, we get bigger and taller. We learn to roll ourselves over, then sit up, then crawl, walk, run. The alphabet becomes words that we string together into sentences, and then paragraphs, and then whole pages. Capacity and complexity growing ever wider, deeper, and larger as the years go by.

Similarly, we learn that sex is supposed to go arousal, intercourse, orgasm. Sensation and pleasure getting bigger, stronger, more intense with each breath and every thrust.

Your body is a doorway, a threshold into these other ways of knowing. Your erotic pleasure can lead you into encounters with your soul. No one ever told me this; I stumbled upon it accidentally in the way that I so often do. The possibility that my pleasure and orgasm could be about more than connection with another human being, that it could connect me with the depths of soul and belonging that I so desperately longed for rang a bell in me that has not stopped since.

As you eat your feast of a meal, take it in with all of your senses. Notice the sound the food makes as it lands on your plate, the clinking of serving spoons on dishes, the conversation happening all around you.

Check out the colors and textures with your eyes.

Smell. Oh! the smells of warm dressing and green bean casserole, fresh-baked bread and melting butter.

As you bring a forkful up to your mouth, pause before shoveling it in and really take it in. The smells and the sights.

On the Winter Solstice, I committed to 100 consecutive days of self-pleasuring. I invited people to join me, offering them guidance and community, and proclaimed that I was going to share my process daily.

100 days (and then some) have come and gone, and here’s the truth: this experiment didn’t go exactly as I planned…

22 years of my life were dedicated to gymnastics, as both coach and athlete. I slept, ate, and breathed gymnastics, and to this day, I miss the way that it felt to flip, fly, and swing. I could say that it was my first love, but that doesn't feel true. It wasn't something that I fell in love with, it wasn't something outside of me, or something to do, it was me.

In a world where facts are disregarded; where questionable, often fake news is swallowed whole by the President himself, and credible news is accused of being fake; where there is little agreement on what the most pressing concerns are; and where we seem to be more interested in ranting and raving on social media than in hearing the perspectives of our opponents, leading to exponentially increasing divisiveness, how do we get to the root of it all and enact real, lasting, meaningful change?

Masturbate.

Instead, a strand of grief winds intimately around one of pleasure forming a single indistinguishable thread that becomes a part of the fabric of my being.