Pussy Project: Healing the Feminine

I’ve been working with women for many years in healing the places they are wounded and fractured. My approach to this work is squarely centered on the place where sexuality meets spirituality. One of the first steps in clearing a path for a deeper exploration is through the doorway of our bodies. There is no more powerful vortex to the divine than the gateway of our womanhood: our vaginas.

We live in a world in which women’s sexuality is greatly misunderstood. We are bombarded constantly with messages in the media about how we should look, smell, feel, and taste. Our bodies are valued and evaluated as objects of desire to be used for the pleasure of others, separate from and with little regard for the souls inhabiting them. At the same time, we are shamed by various religious and cultural institutions with regard to our sexual desire and expression—and so it becomes nearly impossible to cultivate a healthy relationship with our bodies, and ultimately, ourselves.

As a childhood asthmatic and cancer survivor, I have scars all over my body from having endured 18 surgeries in my 53 years in this body. I have also dealt with a significant amount of body shame and disassociation. The one area of my body that I have felt consistently connected to is my vagina. I started masturbating when I was three years old. Far too young for any sexual association (that came later while watching Alan Bates make out with Lynn Redgrave in Georgy Girl), I used masturbation as a way of altering consciousness through the sensation of pleasure. The expansive, formless feeling of arousal was the complete opposite of the terrifying, contracted, trapped feeling of an asthma attack. By the time I was a young adult, I had had years of experience cultivating a relationship with my pussy and was quite comfortable expressing myself sexually. As you might imagine, I was shamed for this on many occasions, in many contexts. Men loved my energy until they couldn’t control it, and then they called me a slut, easy, loose. This shaming led me to a decade-long sexless marriage and moratorium on masturbation.

It’s a complicated world, and this last election cycle brought many of the issues we face as women to the forefront. It’s hard not to see that a certain level of misogyny exists on a granular level. Whether we label it “locker room talk” or sexism, how we view women, our bodies, and our rights to our bodies is quite different from the way we look at men. We can change this cultural and political narrative by creating a wave of wildly expressed sovereignty over our bodies—what we do with them, and who we share them with. A pussy is a doorway to the feminine aspect of the universe, to the creative energy that sparks life and sustains humanity. It is through our pussies that we give birth to the world—literally and figuratively. Our pussies are tender but mighty, loving but fierce, and they are not up for grabs.

As an exercise in self-love, compassion, and integration, I will often have a woman explore her pussy…how she looks, smells, tastes. This includes taking a selfie and studying her own beautiful body. When in retreat, I print out the selfies overnight and hang them (anonymously) like a gallery show. It’s a powerful moment to look around the room at the variety and uniqueness of each woman’s expression of sacred femininity. Last year at the Emerging Women Live conference, I was talking about this with a respected mentor, and she urged me to find a way do this online. Pussy Project is the result of her challenge. It is not a display for the arousal of others. Nor is it pornography. It is about reclaiming the places we have been violated—physically, emotionally, and energetically. It is where we take ownership of our power. These are OUR bodies. These are OUR stories. These are OUR lives. This is where we grab back. Pussy Project is the space for that healing.