Radical Self-desire.
The more turned-on sister to self-love.
I spent last week in the jungle of Costa Rica with 100 other women learning about and experiencing the power of breathwork, sisterhood, pleasure—especially self-pleasure—and the magic that can happen when you feel free to show up as your truest, most authentic, and vulnerable self.
It was a retreat for the coaching program I’m in and it was life-changing, which is not an exaggeration in any way. At the closing ceremony, after doing a catwalk back into our regular lives—wearing a rose-gold bikini top and looking hot AF I might add—we were asked if we could only take one thing with us from our week what would it be?
As I stood in the circle with the humans who had held and seen me through the most transformative week of my life and listened to their answers mine came to me almost immediately, “Radical Self-desire.”
What does that even mean?
You might be wondering, as my best friend did when I told her upon my return, what does radical self-desire mean?
When I said it Friday night it just made sense, it felt true in my body and my mind, but trying to explain it to my friend Sunday afternoon was a lot harder. Now that I’ve had a few days to be back home and away from the incredible container in Costa Rica the definition has solidified for me.
Radical self-desire is the art, skill, and permission to not only love ourselves but to find ourselves sexy, to be turned on by our own bodies and minds, to find and enjoy pleasure with ourselves, and all of it without shame, fear, or guilt.
Most of us have been raised to believe that embracing ourselves in this way is arrogant and vain. Especially if you are in a body that isn’t “conventionally attractive”. Thoughts of “Who does she think she is?” come to mind. While they didn’t come right out and say it, I’ve had people insinuate that I don’t deserve to think I’m as hot as I do.
Because we’ve been conditioned to believe anyone without a perfectly proportioned body and curves in the right places can’t possibly be sexy. We’ve been brainwashed into believing things like stretchmarks, cellulite, hair anywhere but your head, or tits that sag make you somehow less than desirable. Let’s not even talk about the treatment most fat people get.
Going beyond self-love
In the past several months, I’ve made it a habit to tell myself “You’re cute”, “You’re hot”, “You’re fucking sexy”, or whatever other compliment comes to mind when I see myself in the mirror. This isn’t forced at all. I don’t make myself complement my reflection, I only say those things when I’m really feeling them.
But radical self-desire goes far beyond just looking in the mirror and liking what you see. It’s finding pleasure and turn-on in your body, regardless of what it looks like. It’s knowing that you deserve pleasure, and are unashamed of giving it yourself.
Have you ever tried on new lingerie and gotten so turned on by the sight of yourself in it that you had to touch yourself? Have you ever caressed your own skin and felt your body come alive under your touch? Have you ever performed a striptease in the mirror just for you? Have you ever teased yourself the way a partner would to see just how much pleasure you could pull out of your own body? That’s radical self-desire.
It’s radical because it seems so far outside of what’s considered “normal” when in reality we were born to be sexual creatures, we were born to feel pleasure, we were born to feel alive in our own bodies.
And that’s what I’m taking with me from a catwalk in the Costa Rican jungle. Because we are all worthy of radical self-desire and feeling the innate pleasure inside of us.
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