We discover a particular touch, rhythm, fantasy, or sequence that works, and before long, we’ve developed a reliable little routine. We know how to get where we’re going. Which is wonderful when we’re in the mood for a release.

But somewhere along the way, we may have stopped playing.

When was the last time you touched yourself simply to discover what might feel good? When did you last experiment with something unfamiliar, linger over a sensation that surprised you, or give yourself permission to wander without knowing where you were going?

And when was the last time you approached your own body with the same curiosity you might bring to a new lover?

Your body is changing all the time. Your sensitivity changes. Your preferences evolve. What felt wonderful five years ago might be different today. Something that barely registered last month might suddenly become one of your favorite sensations.

There’s so much more to discover than the handful of things we already know work.

Years ago, I began exploring something I call pleasure-oriented self-play. The premise is wonderfully simple: Instead of approaching masturbation with orgasm as the intended outcome, I give myself time to explore whatever sensations feel pleasurable in that moment.

Sometimes that means touching parts of my body that rarely receive much attention. Sometimes it’s experimenting with pressure, rhythm, texture, or movement. Sometimes I discover that a sensation I barely noticed at first becomes surprisingly delicious when I linger with it.

And sometimes I find myself making ridiculous sounds, laughing, or moving my body in ways that would probably look quite entertaining to an outside observer.

Fortunately, on my Goddess Nights, there isn’t one. The pleasure comes from the experience itself. And if an orgasm happens along the way? Lovely. I’m certainly not going to complain. But I don’t need one to consider the experience worthwhile.

That’s an important distinction, because when we’re focused on a particular outcome, it’s easy to become preoccupied with the methods we already know will get us there.

We reach for the familiar, we repeat what works, or we may even hurry past sensations that could have been wonderful if we’d given them a little more attention.

Pleasure-oriented play invites us to become curious again.

Your body has more to offer than you think.

One of the things I love about sensual exploration is discovering how dramatically the quality of an experience can change with the smallest adjustment.

—A touch that feels ordinary at one speed can become surprisingly pleasurable when it slows down
—A gentle caress might awaken an entirely different response than a firm squeeze
—The sensation of fabric moving across skin can be delicious in ways we rarely think to explore
—And sometimes a little movement, a stretch, a shiver, a sway of the hips, can change the entire experience

Then there’s sound. Have you ever noticed what happens when you allow yourself to sigh, hum, laugh, or make whatever noise wants to come out of you? For me, sound can become part of the pleasure itself—a long, satisfying exhale, a low hum that seems to vibrate through my chest., or a spontaneous little moan that makes me smile.

Sometimes the sound changes how I experience the sensation, sometimes the sensation inspires the sound, and sometimes they begin playing together in ways that feel unexpectedly wonderful.

There are so many ways to enjoy being in a body. And the more we experiment, the more possibilities we discover.

When Pleasure Becomes a Practice of Freedom

I think there’s something especially revealing about what happens when we give ourselves permission to explore without needing to accomplish anything.

We begin noticing our preferences. We discover what appeals to us today, in this moment, in this body.

We may find ourselves wanting something different from what we expected.

And then we get to decide what to do with that information. We may follow the sensation or try something else. We may discover that what sounded appealing a moment ago isn’t particularly interesting anymore.

Wonderful. We can change our minds.

I think this is one of the loveliest aspects of pleasure-oriented play. It gives us opportunities to practice listening to ourselves and responding to what we discover. There’s no one else to impress. No performance to deliver. No particular experience we have to produce. We can be curious, experimental, tender, playful, ridiculous, even indulgent.

We can enjoy our bodies exactly as they are today. And we can discover what happens when we give ourselves permission to want what we want.

What happens when we bring that freedom into Life? I’ve come to recognize that the way we approach our pleasure often reflects the way we approach other experiences.

We develop routines. We find reliable ways to get things done. We become skilled at reaching the outcomes we’ve decided matter.

And sometimes, in our efficiency, we lose touch with the pleasure of exploring. Think about how often we approach a meal with the simple intention of getting fed, rather than enjoying the extraordinary experience of tasting something delicious. Or how quickly we can turn a creative project into a list of things to accomplish.

Even our leisure can become organized around making the most of our time.

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying efficiency. I love a good shortcut as much as anyone, but I also love the freedom to wander or to discover something unexpected. To follow an impulse simply because it delights me, and to allow an experience to become something I couldn’t have planned in advance.

This is one of the reasons I talk so much about the Body as the Console.

Your body is how you experience Life. It’s where you feel pleasure, excitement, curiosity, anticipation, delight, and every other sensation that makes being human such an extraordinary adventure.

And the more intimately you become acquainted with your own experience, the more possibilities you have to play with. You begin discovering what awakens your aliveness, what makes you feel deliciously present, what you’d like more of, and what you might be ready to explore next.

A Little Invitation

So here’s something I’d love you to consider. The next time you have a little private time to yourself, what if you approached your body with absolutely no agenda?

What if you let yourself be curious? What if you touched somewhere you don’t usually touch, experimented with a different kind of sensation, or allowed your body to move in whatever way felt good?

What if you made a little noise or gave yourself permission to be surprised?

You might discover a new favorite, or you might rediscover something you’ve forgotten you enjoy.

And really, isn’t that a lovely way to spend some time?

Take It to Bed: The Touch Menu

For paid subscribers this week (I’ll return to create a hyperlink here when it’s up), I’ve created a guided sensory experience called The Touch Menu. Think of it as a little tasting adventure for your body. We’ll explore different qualities of touch, sensation, movement, and sound, with plenty of room for you to discover your favorites and create your own delicious combinations.

You get to decide what appeals to you, what you’d like more of, and where your curiosity takes you.

There’s no particular destination—just an invitation to remember how much fun it can be to play with yourself.

In sovereign pleasure,
—Sharon Marie

In Slow Enough to Sense Life, I explored how much of our experience happens beneath the threshold of our awareness, and what becomes possible when we begin noticing the subtle ways our thoughts, interpretations, and feelings take shape.

This week’s Take It to Bed is an invitation to catch yourself in the act.

We’re going to explore how quickly your body responds to what you imagine, how the meaning you give something can influence what you feel, and how becoming more sensitive to those responses gives you opportunities to play with them.

You might be surprised by how much is happening inside you before anything has actually happened in the world around you.

Find somewhere comfortable where you won’t be interrupted. You can listen sitting or lying down, and you may want a little time afterward to enjoy whatever you discover.

The audio is below, followed by the complete transcript.

Let’s see what your Console has been up to.

Subscribe now

[Transcript]

Hello, beautiful human. I’m glad you’re here. Today, I am inviting you into a little experiment. We’re going to explore something that fascinates me about being human.

How much of what we experience is already taking shape before we’re consciously aware of it? And what becomes possible when we learn to recognize that process while it’s happening?

Find a comfortable position. You might be lying in bed, reclining in a favorite chair, or sitting somewhere you feel at ease.

If it feels good, allow your eyes to close. Or simply soften your gaze.

Take a moment to notice where you are.

Feel the support beneath you. The temperature of the air. The sounds around you. Notice your breathing.

You don’t need to change anything. Just become curious about what’s happening.

Now I’d like you to bring your attention to one of your hands. You don’t need to move it yet. Just become aware of it.

Can you feel the temperature of your hand? The sensation of your fingers resting against one another? Maybe there’s a faint tingling in your fingertips. A little pulse. A subtle sense of warmth.

See what you notice.

Now, very slowly, move one finger.

Just a little. Slow enough that you can feel the movement beginning.

Notice the sensation of the muscles engaging. The changing position of your finger. The tiny adjustments happening through your hand.

And then let it become still again.

Isn’t that interesting? Something as simple as moving a finger contains an entire experience when we become curious enough to notice it.

Let’s play a little more.

Bring one hand toward your opposite forearm. But before you touch your skin, pause. Let your hand hover just above it.

You know you’re about to touch your arm, and your body knows it, too. Can you feel anything happening in anticipation? Maybe a little current of expectation. Maybe the skin beneath your hovering hand seems especially sensitive.

Perhaps you can already imagine what the touch will feel like.

See what you notice.

Now allow one fingertip to make contact with your forearm very lightly.

Notice the precise moment of contact. And then lift your finger away again.

I’d like you to do that once more. But this time, pay attention to the moment before your finger touches your skin.

Can you feel yourself anticipating it? Does your attention seem to gather around the place where you expect the contact? What happens when you wait just a little longer than you expected?

There’s something fascinating about this. Your body can begin preparing for an experience before it happens. And your imagination can participate in that preparation.

We’re going to explore that relationship a little further.

Okay, let your hands rest comfortably.

Now I’d like you to imagine something. Picture yourself standing in your kitchen, holding a beautiful, ripe lemon. You can feel its weight in your hand. The slightly textured skin.

Imagine cutting it in half. As the knife moves through the fruit, a little juice escapes onto the cutting board.

You lift one half of the lemon toward your face. The scent is bright and sharp.

And now imagine bringing that lemon to your mouth and taking a big bite. Feel your teeth sinking into the fruit. The juice spilling across your tongue. That extraordinary burst of sourness.

What happened inside your mouth just now? Did you notice your tongue responding? Maybe a little rush of saliva? Maybe your jaw tightened or your face made a funny expression.

Perhaps nothing particularly noticeable happened. Take a moment to become curious about your response. There was no lemon. Nothing sour actually touched your tongue. And yet, simply imagining the experience may have been enough to produce a physical response.

Your body can respond to an experience you’re creating in your imagination.

Which raises a rather interesting question: What else are you imagining throughout your day that your body is responding to?

Okay, let’s try something a little different.

I’d like you to imagine that you’ve sent a message to someone you care about. Maybe someone you’re dating or a close friend or just someone whose opinion matters to you.

You’ve shared something meaningful with them. Something that left you feeling a little vulnerable. And now you’re waiting for a response.

You glance at your phone.

Nothing.

A little time passes. You check again.

Still nothing.

Before we go any further, notice what happened inside you as I described that situation. Did you feel anything? Maybe a little tightening in your belly or a change in your breathing. A faint sense of anticipation?

Maybe you felt perfectly comfortable, or maybe your mind immediately supplied an explanation. See if you can recognize what you imagined was happening.

Now we’re going to play with the story. Imagine that the person has seen your message and is deliberately ignoring you. Maybe they’re irritated with you, or offended. Maybe they’re losing interest.

Let yourself entertain that possibility for just a moment, and notice what happens inside you. Is there a little contraction somewhere? A sinking feeling? Maybe a flicker of embarrassment or anger or disappointment.

Maybe you notice yourself wanting to reach for your phone. Or compose another message.

See what happens.

Now let that story go and take a big, comfortable breath. Feel the support beneath you. And remember that we’re playing with an imaginary situation. You can leave any part of this experiment behind if it feels too uncomfortable.

Let’s return to that unanswered message. Only this time, imagine something different. This person is having a wonderful afternoon with friends, completely absorbed in the experience. Their phone is tucked away somewhere. They haven’t even seen your message.

Or maybe they have seen it, and what you shared touched them so deeply that they want to give their response their full attention. They’re even looking forward to sitting down later and writing back.

Imagine that for a moment.

What happens inside you now? A softening? Maybe you feel a little warmth toward them? Maybe you find yourself smiling.

Or maybe your body is still holding on to the first interpretation. That’s interesting, too. Just notice. The circumstances haven’t changed.

In both versions, you’ve sent a message and haven’t received a response. And yet the experience inside you may have been entirely different. Your body has been responding to the meaning you’ve given the situation. And that meaning is something you’ve been participating in creating.

Now here’s where I want to invite you into something especially interesting. Let’s return to the unanswered message one more time. Only this time, I want you to choose the experience you want to have. You don’t know why the person hasn’t responded, and there are countless possibilities.

So what would you like to feel while you’re waiting? Trusting? Curious? Excited? Maybe you’d prefer to feel amused by how quickly your imagination can run away with you.

Choose something that appeals to you.

Now, what might you imagine or remember or believe that would help you experience that feeling? If you’d like to feel trusting, maybe you remember the affection this person has shown you in the past.

If you’d like to feel amused, maybe you imagine yourself smiling at the elaborate little drama your mind was just preparing to unleash.

If you’d like to feel peaceful, maybe you recognize that there’s nothing you need to do about the unanswered message right now. You can allow yourself to just enjoy whatever you were doing before you checked your phone.

See what happens when you choose an interpretation that supports the experience you’d like to have. Notice your body. Your breathing. Your face. Your belly.

Did something shift? Is there a little more room around it? Did one interpretation feel more familiar than the others? That can tell you something, too. This is where the exploration becomes particularly valuable because sometimes a thought arrives with so much familiarity that we don’t even recognize it as an interpretation.

It feels like the truth, and our bodies respond that that interpretation. A small sensation becomes an emotion, an emotion gathers a story, and before we know it, we’re responding to something that hasn’t actually happened.

Now, I want you to think about an ordinary moment in your own life. Something recent. Maybe someone said something that irritated you. Or you felt misunderstood or disappointed. Choose something relatively small—an experience you feel comfortable revisiting. You don’t need to summon up your most painful memories to learn something useful here.

Let the moment come to mind.

So… what happened? What did you see or hear? And what did you make it mean?

Take a little time with that last question. What did you decide was happening?

Now notice what happens in your body as you remember. Maybe the feeling returns immediately. See whether you can recognize the relationship between the story and the feeling. You may even notice that your body begins responding before you’ve finished remembering the experience.

Now I’d like you to become curious about the interpretation itself. What do you actually know about what happened, and what did you assume? Is there another plausible explanation? Maybe one you never even considered?

You don’t have to decide that your original interpretation was wrong. We’re just making room for possibilities.

And now, what would you like to experience in relation to that moment? Compassion? Confident? Curious?

What happens when you entertain that possibility? Does your body respond?

Does the memory feel any different? Are you noticing how you can change your relationship to the experience just by changing how you’re looking at it.

And of course, it’s possible that the original interpretation has a powerful hold on you.

If so, you’ve found something you may want to explore further, which is perfect because the more familiar you become with the ways your experience takes shape, the more opportunities you have to participate in shaping it.

Now let that memory drift away and bring your attention back to your body.

Feel the support beneath you. Notice the air against your skin. And take a comfortable breath.

Consider what we’ve just explored. A finger moving. A touch you anticipated before it happened. A lemon that made your mouth respond without ever even touching your tongue. An unanswered message that could awaken entirely different feelings depending on what you imagined it meant.

All of these experiences reveal something fascinating about your Console. Your body is continually responding to what you’re perceiving, imagining, remembering, and believing. And most of that activity happens so quickly that it can feel as though your responses simply appear.

But as you become more sensitive to what’s happening, you may begin catching yourself earlier. You might notice a little contraction or a story before it becomes something bigger… and when you do that, you realize that you have more choices available than you initially realized.

This is where I find the experience of being human so deliciously interesting because every time you catch yourself in the act, you have an opportunity to learn something about how your own Console works. You can become curious about what you’re creating. You can experiment with a different interpretation. You can discover what happens when you consciously choose the experience you’d like to have. And over time, those choices can become more natural.

The old story may stop arriving quite so quickly. A familiar emotional response may lose some of its intensity. You may even discover that certain experiences that once seemed inevitable no longer show up in the same way.

There’s so much room to explore.

Before we finish, I’d like you to imagine yourself moving through the rest of your day. Imagine noticing a little response beginning inside you. A flicker of irritation. A rush of excitement. A subtle contraction. A warm sense of anticipation.

And imagine yourself becoming curious before the experience has fully taken shape.

What’s happening inside me?
What am I making this mean?
What would I like to experience?

Give yourself a moment to enjoy the possibility of having those choices available.

Now begin bringing your awareness back to the room. Feel the support beneath you. Notice the sounds around you. Take a comfortable breath.

And when you’re ready, open your eyes.

As you move through your day, see if you can catch yourself in the act.

Your Console has been responding to you all along. You’re learning how to play…

Take It Into Life

Over the next 24 hours, see if you can catch yourself forming an interpretation before you’ve fully settled into it.

Perhaps someone takes longer than expected to respond to a message. A stranger gives you an unexpected look. Something doesn’t go quite the way you’d hoped.

Notice the first story that appears.

Then get curious.

What else might be true? And what would you like to experience?

See whether choosing a different interpretation changes anything about what you feel.

You may discover that you have more influence over your experience than you realized.

And if you’d like to share what you discover, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Have you ever caught yourself creating a feeling through a story you were telling yourself? What happened when you recognized it?

Until next time…

I’d begun sharing publicly about my experiences of childhood sexual abuse and incest. It had taken me years to find the willingness to speak about what had happened, and sharing those experiences was an important part of reclaiming my life, and my pleasure.

One day, my mother said something that landed like a stone in my chest.

“I don’t know why you tell people these things.”

I knew exactly what she meant. Or at least I thought I did.

When I was seventeen, I finally found the courage to tell my mother about the abuse I experienced at 5 and 6. I blurted it out one day about a year after my oldest brother, one of my abusers, had died unexpectedly in a car accident.

She listened. About a month later, I returned to her and asked if she would help me find a therapist. I wanted her to come with me, to help me get the support I needed.

She pretended to not know what I was talking about.

I can’t adequately describe what that experience did to the girl I was, but I can tell you that when my mother questioned why I was sharing my experiences publicly decades later, I became that young girl again. I wasn’t remembering the experience as an adult who could examine it from a distance. I was in it.

The moment felt like an echo of that earlier moment, and it hurt, the feeling of being disbelieved. The terrible loneliness of having something happen to you that the person you most need seems unwilling to acknowledge.

I was straddling two worlds in that moment: the present and the past. I didn’t think to question my interpretation. I knew what she’d said. Knew what she meant.

And the distance between us grew.

It would be years before I realized that I had misunderstood her entirely.

My mother had grown up in a family where painful things were kept secret. Her own mother’s violent behavior, alcoholism, and schizophrenia were part of a family history that was carefully concealed from the outside world.

The family dirt stayed in the family.

And it dawned on me that when my mother said she didn’t understand why I told people these things, she actually meant: Why would you share such intimate family experiences with people outside the family? From within the world she’d been raised in, the very act of telling was difficult to comprehend.

I’d heard an accusation of dishonesty, but she was been expressing bewilderment at my willingness to expose what her family had always hidden.

I don’t know that I was capable of understanding that distinction that day when she spoke those words. I was carrying too much of my own history into the conversation to recognize how much of the past was participating in how I heard her words. And the consequences were enormous. We lost years of sharing our lives with one another.

I also believe that the separation and everything we eventually came to understand through it made possible the closeness we have today. There are ways we know each other now that I don’t think would’ve been available without that journey.

Both things are true for me.

And I’ve thought a great deal about what that experience taught me because it made me wonder how much of my life I was still experiencing through stories I didn’t even realize I was telling.

Go Slow Enough That You Can Sense It

I was in my morning yoga practice recently (“Yoga with Adriene” on YouTube) when she offered a simple instruction. Something along the lines of, “Go slow enough that you can sense it.”

I knew immediately what she meant. There’s a difference between moving your body through a posture and actually experiencing the movement as you do it.

When I slow down enough, I can feel the subtle shift of weight through my feet, the changing relationship between muscles as they lengthen or engage, and the tiny adjustments my body makes to find balance. Sometimes I discover that I’ve been moving through a familiar posture for years without ever noticing a particular sensation.

It’s been there all along, of course. I just hadn’t been moving slowly enough to feel it.

And as I continued practicing, I found myself thinking about how much this applies to the rest of Life. How often are we moving through an experience without really sensing what’s happening? How much of our own aliveness passes beneath our awareness?

If you know anything about me, you know I’m interested in the extraordinary experience of BEing human—the thoughts and feelings moving through us, the subtle sensations of attraction, anticipation, discomfort, and delight.

The stories forming in our minds, the imagination that can turn a single possibility into an entire future, and the little currents of pleasure we barely notice before our attention moves elsewhere.

How Much of Life Are We Tasting?

Consider the last truly delicious thing you ate. Perhaps it was a perfectly ripe piece of fruit or something warm and buttery. A bite of chocolate that seemed to melt into every corner of your mouth…

[I curated this moment for myself, just before writing that last paragraph…]

Now consider how often you eat while doing something else. Talking. Reading. Thinking about what needs to happen next. You taste the food. You even enjoy it. But what happens when you give yourself a little more time? When you let the flavor fully unfold before reaching for another bite…?

There’s the first bright arrival of sweetness. The texture against your tongue. The warmth or coolness—perhaps a hint of spice that only becomes noticeable a moment later.

And then there’s the pleasure of noticing how good it feels. You might find yourself closing your eyes or smiling or making one of those involuntary little sounds that escapes when something is particularly delicious.

The food isn’t any different than it’s every been. Your intentional presence is the difference.

There’s often so much more available within an ordinary experience than I initially perceive. I wrote about this recently in The Art of Being Turned On, exploring how I’ve learned to enjoy the sensations of arousal awakened by attraction and allow that pleasureable energy to enrich the rest of my life.

It begins with noticing what’s happening.

And I’ve discovered that the more intimately I become acquainted with those sensations, the more possibilities I find within them.

The Stories We Don’t Know We’re Telling

Of course, some of the things happening inside us are considerably less delicious. Sometimes we feel a sudden tightening in the chest, maybe a rush of heat or a contraction in the belly.

And almost before we’ve registered the sensation, our mind has supplied an explanation.

Something’s wrong.
They don’t like me.
I’m going to lose this.
I shouldn’t have said that.

We begin responding to what we believe is happening. And the body responds right along with us.

When my mother questioned why I was telling people about my childhood, I didn’t recognize that I’d stepped into an old experience. I felt the hurt, and heard the accusation. I responded to the meaning I gave it. It never occurred to me that there might be another interpretation.

I wonder what might have happened if I’d possessed enough awareness in that moment to recognize the young girl who had suddenly come alive inside me. If I’d been able to ask my mother what she meant.

I can’t know how that conversation would have unfolded, but I can recognize the possibility that wasn’t available to me then.

Learning the Language of Your Own Experience

When I first began exploring my inner world intentionally, I often recognized an emotional reaction only after it had already taken hold. I’d find myself irritated, frightened, or deeply uncomfortable, and then begin investigating what had happened.

Over time, I became more sensitive to the earlier signals—the little tightening that preceded a familiar fear, the first flicker of resistance, or the peculiar mixture of excitement and apprehension.

I began recognizing experiences while they were still gathering momentum, and eventually I discovered that because of that, I could participate more intentionally in what happened next. I’ve released emotional patterns so completely now that the thoughts and somatic responses simply stopped showing up at all… there was simply nothing to manage because the old response was gone.

The Console Has Been Responding All Along

There’s a framework I’ve been developing in my writing that I call You Are the God of the Game. The premise is wonderfully simple. Your body is the console through which you experience life. Your sensations, emotions, attention, imagination, and awareness are all part of how you participate in the extraordinary experience of being human.

And you’re the one learning how to play.

Think about what happens when you begin to recognize the relationship between your attention and your experience… you notice a pleasurable sensation and you give it a little more attention. Perhaps it becomes more vivid. Or it spreads. Or perhaps you discover that you can allow that sensation to enrich the next thing you experience.

Here’s another one: You notice a thought beginning to form, you recognize the familiar story attached to it, and suddenly you have an opportunity to become curious about that story before allowing it to make decisions for you.

You discover that you have more choices than you previously imagined.

The more intimately I learn to recognize my own experience, the more skillfully I can participate in shaping that experience. And the more I practice, the more possibilities become available.

I can cultivate pleasure. or explore desire. I can become curious about the beliefs shaping my perception. I can learn to hold experiences that once felt overwhelming, and discover new capacities on the other side. Sometimes I can even recognize the beginnings of an emotional response and choose how I want to engage with it before it’s fully formed.

Of course, I don’t control everything that happens in the world around me. Other people have their own experiences and choices and lives. But I’ve discovered an extraordinary amount of creative possibility within my own participation, becuase becoming the God of the Game is a practice of authorship, of learning how your own experience works, and discovering how consciously you can participate in creating it.

The More of Being Human

I keep returning to Adriene’s invitation.

Go slow enough that you can sense it.

The more I sit with those words, the more I appreciate their generosity. There’s no prescribed pace suggested—no requirement that we spend our lives moving slowly. I’ve had extraordinarily alive experiences while dancing, creating, laughing, making love, and becoming completely absorbed in something that fascinates me.

Sometimes life moves quickly, and the experience is delicious precisely because of its momentum.

What matters to me is how much of myself I’m bringing to it, how intimately I’m acquainted with what’s happening inside me, and how willing I am to notice the subtle things that might otherwise pass unnoticed. The more I learn to sense my own experience, the more I discover what I can do with it. And the more I discover I can do with it, the more of “capital L-Life” becomes available to me.

There’re still moments when an old story catches me before I recognize it, edges that surprise me, feelings that ask for my attention, and experiences that reveal something else I hadn’t known about myself.

I expect there always will be. I rather hope so, actually, because I’ve come to love the discovery. The moment I realize there’s another layer of pleasure available in something ordinary, or when an old belief loses its hold. The moment I recognize a possibility that wasn’t visible to me yesterday, or the moment I find myself experiencing life with a little more of who I am.

And most of the time it begins with something as simple as slowing down long enough to notice a breath or a sensation. A thought beginning to form or a little current of pleasure… something that has been happening inside me all along, of course, waiting for my attention.

Perhaps that’s an invitation worth carrying into your own day.

Go slow enough that you can sense it. See what becomes available. And then see what happens when you begin to play.

In sensual sovereignty,
-Sharon Marie

That was it. A perfectly ordinary request. He’d been working hard, wanted a break, and thought it would be fun to spend some time gambling with his buddies.

And I felt panic settle into my bones.

I remember how completely disproportionate my reaction seemed to the circumstances. He wasn’t threatening to leave me. He wasn’t doing anything particularly unusual. He simply wanted to go somewhere without me.

Yet my mind was already racing.

Why doesn’t he want me to come? Shouldn’t he want to spend his free time with me? What if he starts having more fun without me? What if he realizes he doesn’t need me? What if he eventually decides he doesn’t want to be married anymore?

I could feel the fear spreading through my body while my mind busily constructed a future in which my husband’s afternoon at a casino somehow became the beginning of the end of our marriage.

And then something extraordinary happened.

I recognized what I was doing.

I could see the stories forming. I could feel the panic they were creating. And for perhaps the first time with that kind of clarity, I understood how much of my life had been organized around fear. How many decisions had I made to avoid an imagined outcome? How many things had I wanted but talked myself out of pursuing? How often had I allowed some inherited belief about what was safe, appropriate, or possible to determine the boundaries of my life?

I couldn’t tell you exactly where every one of those fears had come from. But I could see that they were operating inside me, and that I’d been allowing them an extraordinary amount of authority.

I remember making a decision that day: I was going to become conscious and intentional about my choices.

All of them. Including my thoughts and feelings.

That last part raised some eyebrows. People argued with me about it. You can’t choose your thoughts, they insisted. You can’t choose how you feel. But I’d already begun to suspect otherwise. And I wanted to find out just how much influence I could have over my own experience.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just begun making the edge a craft.

I want to return for a moment to that decision I made when my husband wanted to go to the casino. Because I really did mean that I intended to learn how to choose my thoughts and feelings.

And I still mean it.

Over the years, I’ve become increasingly familiar with the experience of identifying a belief or emotional pattern that has been operating beneath my awareness.

Sometimes it’s something I can recognize intellectually long before my body catches up. I can understand that a fear is irrational and still feel my stomach tighten when the circumstances arise. But I’ve also experienced what happens when I work with that pattern deeply enough that something genuinely releases. The old thought stops appearing. The familiar feeling no longer arrives. The somatic response that once seemed automatic simply isn’t there.

I can encounter circumstances that previously activated an entire cascade of fear or shame and discover that my body is quiet. The story has lost its charge. I sometimes describe this as releasing the frequency from my field. That’s the language that best captures my experience of it. I can’t tell you precisely what’s happening physiologically, but I know the difference between managing a reaction and discovering that the reaction no longer arises.

And that distinction has become enormously important to me. I don’t experience myself as permanently beholden to every thought or emotional response my history once taught me to have. I’ve learned that I can participate in changing them.

Of course, I still discover old patterns.

I wrote about one of them recently in The Girl Who Made a Feast From Crumbs, where I explored how an adaptation that helped me survive emotional scarcity as a child continued shaping what I was willing to accept in my adult relationships.

I had become extraordinarily good at making very little feel like enough. And recognizing that pattern presented another edge. What would happen if I allowed myself to want more? What if I stopped finding ways to feel satisfied with less than I actually desired?

Even after all these years of exploring my inner world, I still encounter places where my capacity is waiting to expand. I rather love that. There’s always more to discover.

When the Edge Became Delicious

Somewhere along the way, my relationship with the edge began changing. I’d already spent years learning to recognize discomfort as an invitation to become curious. I knew the peculiar sensation of standing at the boundary of something I hadn’t yet learned how to experience.

And then my erotic explorations began teaching me something extraordinary about that same threshold.

I became fascinated with the edges of my own pleasure.

During intimacy, I would sometimes find myself approaching a level of sensation I wasn’t entirely sure I could hold. The pleasure could become almost unbearably intense. Sometimes there was a quality to it that bordered on pain. My instinct might be to pull away, to interrupt the experience, to give my body a moment to recover.

But I began wondering what would happen if I stayed with the sensation just a little longer. If I softened around it. If I allowed myself to experience the intensity without immediately deciding I’d reached my limit.

And sometimes, something remarkable happened.

The sensation changed.

What had felt almost overwhelming would open into another quality of pleasure, an intensity I hadn’t known my body could experience. It was as though I’d discovered another octave.

And once I’d experienced it, I knew there was more available than I’d previously imagined, and I began exploring that threshold deliberately. I learned to recognize the nuances of my own responses. When I wanted to linger. When a sensation was inviting me deeper. When my body was asking me to ease back.

Over time, I became more skillful at playing with those edges. Sexual edging became a craft.

And eventually, I began exploring something beyond conventional edging.

Rather than remaining on the approach to orgasm, I became curious about what happened on the other side of orgasm. I would allow myself to climax early in an experience, then explore how long I could remain with the extraordinary sensations that followed.

Instead of treating climax as the conclusion, I began experiencing it as another threshold. I experimented with staying present in the intensity, allowing the waves of pleasure to continue, discovering how the sensations changed when I remained receptive to them.

I came to call this overstimulation, although I’ve never felt that word quite captures the experience. For me, it became another exploration of capacity. Another opportunity to discover that what I’d assumed was the limit of my experience might simply be the edge of what I’d learned to hold.

Of course, the body has real limits, and pleasure is something I want to remain in relationship with. Part of developing this craft has been learning the difference between an intensity that invites exploration and a sensation that asks me to stop.

And I’ve found that sensitivity matters just as much when I’m creating an experience for someone else. In BDSM and other forms of intentional erotic play, I’ve learned to become attentive to another person’s thresholds. Their breath, their responses, the subtle ways their body communicates. The conversations and agreements that allow us to explore intensity together with care.

Holding an edge for someone else requires a different kind of awareness. There’s an art to recognizing when an experience is opening into something wonderful, and when it’s time to ease away.

All of this deepened my relationship with the edge because I was learning something through my body that I had already begun discovering in the rest of my life. What feels like the boundary of my capacity today may become familiar territory tomorrow.

And the possibility of discovering what lies beyond it can be exquisitely exciting.

An Appetite for Expansion

I think this is why the edge has become increasingly pleasurable to me. There’s a particular sensation I recognize now when I encounter something that might expand my understanding of myself.

A little charge of anticipation. A flutter of excitement beneath the uncertainty.

Sometimes there’s still fear, or resistance. Occasionally there’s an unmistakable internal groan because I can already tell what life is inviting me to examine, and I would very much prefer to be doing something else. But more often than not, curiosity wins.

I’ve become deeply committed to discovering how much of life I’m capable of experiencing. And I’ve watched that commitment change what becomes available to me. My capacity to experience intimacy has expanded. My relationship with desire has become more playful and abundant. My willingness to tell the truth, to explore unfamiliar territory, and to let my understanding of myself evolve has grown.

Even the way I experience pleasure has changed. In The Art of Being Turned On, I wrote about learning to enjoy the erotic energy awakened by another person without needing to pursue that person or turn the experience into a story. That’s another expression of this craft. I’ve learned to become curious about what my body is experiencing and what else might be available within the sensation.

And sometimes that curiosity leads me into astonishing new territory. Other times it simply makes an ordinary moment delicious. Both are worth enjoying.

Bringing the Edge Into the World

There’s another way this craft has shaped my life.

I’ve spent much of my career exploring subjects that people tend to approach with a great deal of discomfort. Sexuality. Power. Taboo. Shame. Desire. Relationships. The ways we construct our identities and the rules we inherit about what we’re allowed to experience. I’ve written books about these things. I’ve built communities around them. I’ve created experiences that invite people to become curious about parts of themselves they may have spent years avoiding.

And I’ve done much of that exploration publicly. There’s an edge in allowing yourself to be seen while discussing something that carries so much charge for other people. There’s an edge in speaking openly about your own experiences, knowing that someone may misunderstand you, judge you, or project their own fears onto what you’re sharing.

I’ve become increasingly comfortable there.

I enjoy approaching subjects that make people squirm a little. I enjoy discovering what becomes possible when we bring curiosity, empathy, and even a little delight into territory that has traditionally been surrounded by shame.

And I care deeply about how I hold those conversations. Because I’ve learned that the edge is personal. Something that feels playful and exciting to me may be profoundly uncomfortable for someone else. What matters is the opportunity to approach our own thresholds with enough curiosity and care that we can discover what becomes possible.

I think that’s part of what I’ve been developing all these years. The ability to recognize an edge, remain present with the experience, and create enough room for something new to emerge. Sometimes for myself, sometimes alongside another person, sometimes in a room full of people who have gathered because they’re curious about what else might be possible in their lives, and sometimes through a piece of writing that reaches someone I’ve never met.

Life Expands With Your Capacity

I still think about that afternoon when my husband wanted to go to the casino. The panic that settled into my bones, the stories my mind constructed, and the moment I realized how much authority I’d given fear over my life.

I couldn’t have imagined then how far that realization would take me. I didn’t know I’d eventually become fascinated with the thresholds of erotic pleasure, or that I’d learn to hold sensations I once thought were beyond my capacity.

I didn’t know how much of my work would involve helping people become curious about the very experiences they’d learned to fear or judge.

I certainly didn’t know I’d come to experience the sensation of approaching an edge as something delicious.

But that’s the extraordinary thing about capacity. You can only imagine what’s available from the place you’re standing. And when your capacity expands, the landscape changes. You begin to notice possibilities that weren’t visible before. You discover experiences you didn’t know how to want. You become capable of holding more intimacy, more pleasure, more complexity, and more of the astonishing richness of being alive.

And eventually, you encounter another edge.

I still do. Sometimes I recognize it immediately. Sometimes I need a little time to understand why something has caught me so deeply. And occasionally I still decide I’m going to nope right out of there until I’m good and ready.

But I’ve learned to pay attention to that little flutter of excitement that so often accompanies the discomfort. Because I’ve come to recognize it. Something in me is curious. Something wants to know what might be possible.

And after a lifetime of making the edge a craft, I’ve developed a rather delicious appetite for finding out.

Life expands with your capacity.

And there is always more life to discover.

In edgy, crafted sovereignty,
-Sharon Marie

P.S. If this essay resonated with you, you'll likely find a home in my books, Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine and Flesh & Flame: Pleasure as the Portal to Divine Mastery, where I continue exploring self-authorship, eros, and the expansion of our capacity to participate fully in life.

I’ve discovered that I can experience attraction, arousal, and even extraordinary waves of pleasure without needing anything from the person who awakened them. And I’ve learned to play with those sensations in ways that make the rest of my life richer.

Sometimes I concentrate the pleasure. Sometimes I let it spread. And sometimes I simply sit there, smiling to myself, enjoying the deliciousness of being alive.

I want to invite you into that experience.

This week’s Take It to Bed is a guided exploration of your own Console, the extraordinary body through which you experience life.

We’ll begin with a moment of attraction or delight, set aside the story surrounding it, and become curious about the sensations themselves.

Then we’ll play.

You may discover that your body responds in ways you haven’t experienced before. You may find yourself enjoying a subtle warmth, a little flutter of pleasure, or the simple sweetness of being present.

There’s plenty of room for whatever happens.

Find somewhere comfortable where you won’t be interrupted. You can listen sitting or lying down, and you may want to have a little time afterward to enjoy whatever the experience awakens.

The audio is below, followed by the complete transcript.

Let’s see what your Console can do.

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Someone across the dinner table says something unexpectedly brilliant, and I feel it. A little rush of heat. A widening in my chest. The delicious sensation of something waking up inside me.

Sometimes it’s someone’s intellect. Sometimes it’s the ease with which they inhabit their body, or the wisdom they’ve earned through living. Someone surprises me with their cleverness, their courage, or their particular brand of badassery, and suddenly I’m turned on.

If I had to pick a word for it, I’d call myself alma-sexual. I’m attracted to the soul of a person, to the unmistakable quality of someone being fully themselves.

And the more freely I allow myself to experience that attraction, the more I’ve begun to understand something extraordinary about desire.

It gives me access to an astonishing amount of life force energy.

I’ve learned to play with that energy. I can concentrate the sensation, draw my attention toward a particular part of my body, and experience waves of ecstatic pleasure. I can widen my awareness of the erotic current until it seems to fill the space around me, then bring that heightened state into my writing, my imagination, or whatever I’m creating.

Sometimes I simply enjoy it.

The person who inspired the experience might be a friend, a colleague, or someone I’ll never see again. I may have absolutely no interest in pursuing them romantically or sexually.

And still, my body has been awakened.

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What a magnificent thing.

The Trouble With Wanting

Somewhere along the way, we developed a rather peculiar relationship with desire. We began treating it as an instruction.

If you’re attracted to someone, surely you must want to sleep with them. If you experience longing, something must be missing from your life. If you’re married and another person awakens your erotic curiosity, there must be something wrong with your relationship.

We can take a fleeting moment of delicious sensation and turn it into an entire existential crisis.

I have a friend and colleague, , who is currently being shredded on social media because she spoke openly about experiencing attraction to another man after two decades of a monogamous relationship. (See for yourself here, or watch the full interview here.)

Her erotic life with her husband had grown quiet. Then someone else awakened something in her.

She noticed.

She felt it.

And she brought that experience to her husband so they could explore what was happening for her together.

She didn’t have an affair. Yet people are condemning her for having experienced the attraction in the first place.

I find that astonishing.

Here was a woman willing to be curious about her own experience, to tell the truth about it, and to bring that truth into her marriage. She and her husband had an opportunity to explore something that might otherwise have remained hidden between them.

And somehow, the attraction itself became the offense. What would we prefer she had done? Denied the experience? Buried it? Pretended her body hadn’t responded?

I wonder how many people have experienced a sudden rush of attraction and immediately felt compelled to explain it away. Or felt guilty for enjoying it. Or worried that allowing themselves to feel it would somehow threaten a relationship they deeply value.

And I wonder how much pleasure disappears in those moments, swallowed by the fear of what wanting might mean.

The assumption seems to be that if we allow ourselves to experience desire fully, we might lose control of what happens next.

But surely that’s where our capacity for discernment becomes important. We get to feel something, become curious about it, and decide what, if anything, we want to do. We can enjoy the experience of attraction while honoring our commitments, respecting other people’s autonomy, and taking responsibility for our choices.

I think there’s something profoundly liberating about trusting ourselves with that freedom.

And I wonder what becomes available when we stop treating our own sensations as something we need to defend against.

What Shame Taught Us

I remember learning something about this very early in my own life.

My relationship with my mother could be difficult, particularly when I expressed disappointment, sadness, or dissatisfaction with something happening in our family.

My feelings seemed to threaten her sense of herself as a mother. Her affection could disappear when I expressed something she didn’t want to hear.

I learned to feel ashamed of the feelings themselves.

That’s a profound thing to teach a child. When the expression of an emotion threatens your access to affection, you begin to question whether you should be experiencing that emotion at all.

Eventually, the shame doesn’t need anyone else to enforce it. It becomes part of the way you interpret your own experience.

I suspect many of us learned some version of this.

Perhaps we were taught that wanting more was selfish. That anger was ugly. That disappointment was ungrateful. That pleasure was indulgent, or that certain kinds of desire revealed something shameful about our character. Over time, we become remarkably skilled at judging our feelings before we’ve even allowed ourselves to experience them.

And we carry those judgments into adulthood, into our relationships, and into our bodies.

I think about how much energy we spend managing our internal experience and how quickly we can interrupt a pleasurable sensation with a thought about whether we should be having it.

How much of our own aliveness have we learned to turn away from?

Because underneath all those judgments, the body is still capable of extraordinary things.

And I’ve become fascinated by what happens when we give ourselves permission to find out.

You Are the God of the Game

In the upcoming third book of my Hieros Codex, The Temple of I, I explore a framework that has fundamentally changed the way I experience being alive.

You are the God of the Game. Your body is the Console. And your sensations are among the ways you interact with this extraordinary experience of being human.

Think about what that means for a moment. Your body is constantly receiving and responding to life. A piece of music moves through you. Someone’s touch sends a shiver across your skin. A sudden realization makes your whole chest swell. Or an idea arrives and you can barely sit still because something inside you wants to bring it into existence.

We tend to pay enormous attention to the stories we attach to these experiences.

I want him.
I’m angry with her.
I shouldn’t be feeling this.
What does this mean about me?

Meanwhile, the body is doing something fascinating. There’s heat. Pressure. Tingling. Expansion. Contraction. A fluttering belly. A tightening pelvis. The delicious sensation of energy radiating outward, or gathering itself into an almost unbearable point of intensity.

And here’s where the Game gets interesting.

What happens when you become curious about the sensation itself?

When someone awakens desire in me, I can feel the attraction and appreciate the person who inspired it. I can also turn my attention inward and become interested in what’s happening inside my own body. Perhaps there’s warmth gathering in my pelvis, or a pleasurable ache spreading through my belly. My breath changes. My skin becomes more sensitive. I feel a delicious current moving through me.

I can linger there. I can bring my attention more deeply into the warmth, the pulsing, or the little currents of pleasure. I can experiment with my breath, with movement, and with imagination.

Sometimes I concentrate that experience until the pleasure becomes exquisitely intense. Other times I allow my awareness to widen and experience the current of arousal as something expansive, something that seems to radiate through and around me.

And here’s the extraordinary part.

The person who awakened that sensation doesn’t have to do another thing.

The pleasure is already happening inside me. I can enjoy it. I can explore it. I can discover what happens when I give it more of my attention. And I can bring that heightened state into other areas of my life.

I’ve sat down to write in that state and felt my creativity become almost electrically available. I’ve directed my attention toward parts of my body that needed tenderness and care, exploring how pleasure and warmth might change my experience of them. Sometimes I simply lie there and luxuriate in the feeling.

There’s no requirement that I accomplish anything with it.

That’s part of the pleasure of becoming familiar with your own Console. You discover how much influence attention, imagination, and sensation can have over the quality of your experience.

An Astonishing Abundance

Something else has happened as I’ve become more comfortable with my relationship to desire. I’ve begun noticing how many opportunities life gives me to experience pleasure.

A beautiful mind. A provocative conversation. Someone’s laughter. The way a person moves when they’re completely absorbed in something they love.

Sometimes it’s a memory that makes my whole body respond. Sometimes it’s music, or a particularly delicious idea, or a moment of connection that leaves me humming long after the conversation has ended.

There’s so much available to feel.

And the more familiar I become with my own capacity for pleasure, the more I find myself enjoying the sheer experience of being turned on. I can allow a moment of attraction to bloom without wondering where it’s supposed to lead. I can enjoy the ache of wanting. I can savor the warmth of admiration, the thrill of curiosity, or the sweet rush of feeling something awaken inside me.

I think we’ve barely begun to appreciate the abundance available to us when we stop demanding that every desire have a destination.

And I wonder how much more pleasure we might discover if we allowed ourselves to enjoy wanting.

The Innocence of Desire

I think we’ve done enormous damage by teaching people to be ashamed of their own wanting.

Desire is innocent.
Arousal is innocent.
Love is innocent.

What we choose to do with those experiences carries responsibility. Our actions affect other people. Our relationships deserve honesty, care, and integrity.

But the feelings themselves? They belong to the astonishing experience of being human. And as we become more familiar with our own inner world, we gain more freedom in how we choose to participate in it.

This is one of the things I love most about becoming the God of my own Game. I get to discover what my Console can do. I get to experiment with sensation, imagination, attention, and the remarkable capacity of my body to experience pleasure.

I get to decide what I want to do with the feelings that arise. And I get to enjoy being alive while I’m figuring it out.

I fall in love with people all the time. Their minds. Their courage. Their brilliance. The peculiar, beautiful ways they inhabit the world.

Sometimes my whole body lights up in response. And I’ve learned to let it.

The person who inspired it may never know. They don’t have to. What they’ve awakened is already mine to enjoy.

And the more I learn to play with my own aliveness, the more astonishingly abundant life becomes.

[For paid subscribers, I’ve created a new guided experience: The Pleasure is Already Yours, where you get to practice savoring the deliciousness of your own arousal, regarless of where that arousal originates…]

In sovereign desire and arousal,
-Sharon Marie

P.S. If this essay resonated with you, you'll likely find a home in my books, Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine and Flesh & Flame: Pleasure as the Portal to Divine Mastery, where I continue exploring self-authorship, eros, and the expansion of our capacity to participate fully in life.

Not political in the partisan sense. Political in the oldest sense of the word: Who gets power over whom? Who gets to make the rules? Who gets to decide what is acceptable?

And eventually, inevitably: Who gets a vote in what you’re allowed to want?

That question is one of the reasons Forbidden Alchemy was published as the first book in the Hieros Codex.

Because before we can talk about pleasure as a source of wisdom or intimacy or spiritual mastery, we have to deal with all the shit we’ve already piled on top of it.

The desires we’ve classified as embarrassing. The fantasies we’d rather not explain. The things that turn us on that don’t match who we think we are, what we believe, what we would ever want to happen in real life, or the version of ourselves we comfortably present to the world.

And perhaps most interestingly, the stories we’ve created about what those desires mean about us.

That’s where Chapter 10 of Forbidden Alchemy goes.

It’s called When Fantasy Meets Taboo: Owning the Stories That Turn You On, and I chose it to share with you this week because it takes the larger cultural question from the free article and brings it somewhere much more intimate.

Into your own fantasy life.

Into your orgasm.

Into the strange, unruly intelligence of a body that may respond enthusiastically to something your conscious mind would never put on its vision board.

This chapter contains some of the territory that became foundational to everything I’ve written since: erotic imprinting, fantasy, shame, the themes beneath our kinks, and the difference between being unconsciously driven by desire and becoming curious enough to understand what desire is doing.

It also contains some of my own fantasies and erotic wiring, including things that once made me wonder what the fuck was wrong with me.

So I’m giving paid subscribers the entire chapter this week, including the practices at the end, because I don’t want to merely tell you what Forbidden Alchemy is about.

I want you to experience it.

If you’ve been hovering at the edge of becoming a paid subscriber, this is a particularly juicy week to come inside. You’ll get the full chapter below, along with access to the rest of my paid writing and practices here on Life TURNED ON.

And if you’d rather have the whole damn book, you can do that too.

[Buy Forbidden Alchemy]

Either door works.

Just don’t be surprised if what you find on the other side is the recognition of someone inside you who’s been lurking all along, waiting for you to say yes.

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I wrote them in the wrong order.

Or at least, I wrote them in a different order than you’re getting to read them.

Flesh & Flame: Pleasure as the Portal to Divine Mastery was the first book I wrote. It was supposed to be the first book published, too.

Then, while Flesh & Flame was beginning its journey toward publication, I wrote Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine.

By the time I turned in that first draft of Flesh & Flame, GracePoint had decided they wanted to take it through their full trade publishing process. That was wonderful news for the book, but it also meant more time. Trade publishing has a much longer runway, with production and distribution channels that have to be put into motion well before a book appears on a shelf.

Meanwhile, Michelle at GracePoint and I had another finished manuscript sitting in front of us. And we knew its message.

We were also looking at what was happening in the United States around us.

Questions about bodies, reproductive freedom, gender, sexuality, and who gets to make decisions about them were not abstract cultural conversations. They were being fought over through legislation, executive action, courts, elections, families, churches, schools, and communities.

And somewhere in our conversations about what to do with these two books, we kept coming back to the same idea:

Pleasure is political.

Even writing that now, I can feel how easily it could become a slogan. That isn’t how I mean it. The moment you begin asking yourself What do I actually want? you eventually encounter everything you’ve been taught you’re allowed to want.

That’s where pleasure becomes political for me, because none of us develops our relationship with our bodies, desires, sexuality, or pleasure in a vacuum. We inherit rules about what kinds of sex are acceptable, what kinds of relationships count, how much desire is too much, and which bodies are allowed to be openly erotic.

What women are supposed to want. What men are supposed to want. What good mothers do. What respectable people don’t do. What makes someone selfish, promiscuous, deviant, inappropriate, excessive, dirty, difficult, or dangerous.

And most of those rules don’t feel political while we’re living inside them. They feel personal.

I shouldn’t want that.
People like me don’t do that.
What would everyone think?
There must be something wrong with me.

And sitting on my publisher’s desk was a book about exactly that.

The Book About the Things We Aren’t Supposed to Want

Forbidden Alchemy was about taboo.

Not taboo for shock value. I was interested in what happens when we become curious about the desires we’ve learned to judge before we’ve even asked what they mean to us.

Power. Submission. Shame. Humiliation. Degradation. The desires we hide. The fantasies we edit before we admit them even to ourselves. The places where sexuality intersects with power, identity, spirituality, fear, surrender, and sovereignty.

I’d spent years exploring those questions personally and in the communities I had helped create. And the conclusion I kept coming back to was never that every desire should be acted upon.

Of course not.

Desire requires discernment. Our choices affect other people. Consent, responsibility, and the sovereignty of the other people involved matters.

But the desire itself? That belongs to you.

If I can’t even allow myself to know what I want without immediately measuring it against what I’ve been told I’m supposed to want, then someone else is still participating in the authorship of my life who isn’t me.

And that was what GracePoint and I were looking at when we decided Forbidden Alchemy needed to come out first. The world was already having a conversation about who gets authority over bodies.

I had just handed in a book about reclaiming authority from inside one.

So we changed the plan. Forbidden Alchemy would come first. Flesh & Flame, the book I’d actually written first, would take the longer trade road.

At the time, it was primarily a publishing decision made in response to the books we had, the opportunities available to us, and the cultural moment we were living in.

Looking backward, I can see another layer to it now.

What Pleasure Actually Gives Us

My understanding of pleasure has continued to change since I wrote those books.

I’m less interested now in pleasure as something we pursue and increasingly interested in what becomes possible when we restore our capacity to feel it.

Because pleasure gives us information. As does discomfort. And desire. And curiosity. So does the sudden deadness we feel around something that looks perfectly good on paper.

Our bodies are responding to our lives all the time.

Something opens or contracts me. Something feels delicious. Or makes me curious. Something makes me want to come closer or makes me want to leave.

Those responses tell me something. And when we’ve spent years learning to override those signals in order to be acceptable, successful, desirable, good, normal, spiritual, responsible, or loved, we lose access to an enormous amount of information about ourselves.

That, more than anything, is what I mean now when I say pleasure is political. A person who can feel what they want, trust what they feel, discern what to do with that information, and take responsibility for their choices becomes much harder for anyone else to author.

That isn’t rebellion. I’ve done plenty of rebellion.

Rebellion still has a strange dependency on whatever you’re rebelling against. Someone else establishes the boundary and you define yourself by crossing it. There’s still an intrinsic victim/victimizer frequency to that notion.

I’m interested in something much more intimate than that now: What happens when the coordinates begin inside you?

That question is everywhere in my work these days. In the Pleasure Renaissance. In Life Turned On. In the way I think about sovereignty and self-authorship. It’s in my fascination with our capacity to participate more fully in Life.

And apparently, it was already sitting there in Forbidden Alchemy.

Maybe They Weren’t Out of Order

There’s something satisfying to me now about the fact that these books came into the world differently than I expected.

Flesh & Flame begins with pleasure as a portal.

But Forbidden Alchemy asks what happens when the thing that gives you pleasure is something you’ve been taught to fear, hide, judge, or reject.

Maybe that question needed to come first becaise before I could ask readers to trust pleasure, perhaps I needed to take them into the places where they had learned not to trust themselves.

Before we could talk about what desire might reveal, perhaps we needed to look at what happens when desire collides with shame. Before I could invite someone deeper into their body, perhaps we needed to talk about who had been given authority over that body in the first place.

I certainly didn’t engineer the publishing schedule with that architecture in mind. We were making the best decision we could with the books in front of us and the world we were standing in. But one of the pleasures of creating a body of work over time is getting to turn around occasionally and discover patterns you couldn’t see while you were making it.

I can see one now. The Hieros Codex begins with a reclamation.

This is my body.
This is my desire.
This is my pleasure.
I am allowed to know what is here.

And from there, Flesh & Flame gets to ask the much more delicious question: Now that it belongs to you, what might pleasure become? ///what is the “it?”

That question feels even more alive to me today than it did when I wrote either book. Because I no longer think pleasure is simply one of the beautiful experiences available inside a human life. I think our ability to feel it, receive it, listen to it, discern through it, and remain responsible for what we do with what we discover is part of our capacity to author a life from the inside.

And that may be the politics of pleasure I care about most.

Not telling you what you should want.

Making sure you remain the person who gets to find out.

In sovereignty,
-Sharon Marie

P.S. If this essay resonated with you, you'll likely find a home in my books, Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine and Flesh & Flame: Pleasure as the Portal to Divine Mastery, where I continue exploring self-authorship, eros, and the expansion of our capacity to participate fully in life.

Receiving is a capacity.

We can want love and still struggle to let it reach us. The same can be true of kindness, attention, pleasure, generosity, support, praise, affection, or being cared for.

Sometimes something beautiful is already arriving and some part of us is busy deciding what we owe for it. Or wondering when it will disappear. Or minimizing it. Or preparing to give something back. Or simply moving on before we’ve actually felt what we received.

So don’t mistake this practice for being about becoming worthy of receiving.

You already are.

It’s about discovering how much you can actually allow. And perhaps, very gently, allowing a little more.

Below you’ll find the guided practice.

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I was very, very good at loving people. I was a tiny, bumbling, radiating bubble of it. I loved easily. Enthusiastically. With very little concern for whether anybody had the capacity for what I was offering.

How could I have known that was even a thing?

I’ve spent plenty of time understanding the harder parts of my childhood. The sexual abuse. The incest. The things that happened that shouldn’t have happened.

Strangely, this isn’t about those things. This is about something quieter that I couldn’t possibly have understood while I was living it.

A little girl kept offering herself to the people around her with the complete innocence of a child who assumed that love, offered freely, would naturally be received. And when it wasn’t, she tried to understand why.

She didn’t have the perspective to wonder whether the people around her knew how to receive what she was giving them. She couldn’t see their histories, their defenses, or their own complicated relationships with tenderness and affection and being loved.

She only had the information available to her.

I love you.
You don’t seem to want my love.

And somewhere inside that impossible little equation: Maybe I’m not want-able. I’ve carried the sadness of that girl for a very long time. Only now, after spending years learning how to receive love myself, can I see something she couldn’t.

She thought their response was telling her something about her worth. She couldn’t know she was also encountering the limits of other people’s capacity to receive love.

I know that now because I’ve encountered those limits in myself. I’ve had to learn how to let kindness reach me without becoming suspicious of it. How to receive generosity without immediately calculating how to repay it. How to receive support, sweetness, touch, pleasure, attention, and love. How to let something good actually land.

This has been an enormous part of my journey back to aliveness. And perhaps that’s why I can finally look backward and understand something that seems almost embarrassingly obvious now:

Receiving love is a capacity.

We can want love desperately and still have difficulty letting it reach us. Love can be offered beautifully and encounter someone who can’t take very much of it in. Kindness can make us suspicious. Generosity can make us uncomfortable. Tenderness can frighten us. Being loved can touch places inside us we’ve spent a lifetime learning how to protect.

We can want love deeply and still have all kinds of defenses against letting it reach us.

That realization has changed the way I see my childhood.

My camera has pulled back.

When the Camera Pulls Back

For most of my life, I’ve experienced those childhood memories from inside her.

Of course I have.

She loved. She reached. She wanted to be held and delighted in and enjoyed. She wanted the love she was pouring outward to come pouring back. And when it didn’t, she experienced the absence personally. How could she not?

The adults around us are enormous when we’re children. They are the weather. We don’t yet understand that they had entire lives before we arrived. That they were children once too. That they learned things about love and care and affection long before we began offering ours to them.

Now the camera has pulled back.

I can still see her, this little creature radiating love into rooms that didn’t always know what to do with it. But I can see the other people too. As people.

I don’t know exactly what happened inside them, and I don’t need to invent explanations for why they could receive some things and not others. But having traveled some distance down this road myself, I know how much can stand between a human being and their ability to receive love.

And for the first time, that knowing is giving me compassion for them.

To be clear, I don’t mean absolution. There were adults responsible for protecting me who didn’t protect me. There were things done to me that should never have been done. Compassion doesn’t require me to make any of that less true. It simply gives me more information than the little girl had.

She couldn’t know that someone could hunger for love and still struggle to receive it. She couldn’t know that people sometimes protect themselves from the very tenderness they’re searching for. Or that the amount of love a person can receive is not necessarily the amount of love available to them.

She couldn’t know how much of being loved is learning to let love in.

I can.

And that changes something.

I’ve written recently about the girl who learned to make a feast from crumbs. I understand more now about why she became so brilliant at it. If you can’t control how much love comes back, you can become exquisitely sensitive to every morsel that does. You can make a tiny kindness enormous, treasure a moment of affection, and become extraordinarily receptive to what is available while learning not to ask too many questions about what isn’t.

That was a little girl figuring out how to stay in love with a world that wasn’t always very good at loving her back.

And somehow, the love survived. That may be what moves me most. There were places I stopped offering it, ways I learned to ask for less, and years when receiving was considerably harder than giving.

But I can see her everywhere in me now. The hunger for intimacy. The enormous appetite for sweetness and pleasure and connection. The fascination with eros. The delight. The desire to know people deeply. The insistence on living a life that can actually reach me.

For years, I might have understood these things primarily as what I built in response to what was missing. I’m no longer sure that’s the whole story. Maybe the little girl who loved that fiercely never actually went anywhere.

I love that possibility because I don’t want to understand the girl I was solely through what happened to her. She existed before the wounds. She loved and delighted and reached and expected sweetness. She assumed her love had somewhere to go. That love was something we were meant to give and receive freely.

Perhaps healing isn’t only about tending to what happened to her. Perhaps it’s also about recognizing what she already knew.

Somewhere for the Love to Go

For years, I’ve carried sadness for that little girl because it felt as though she had all this love and nowhere for it to go. I’m realizing that isn’t true anymore.

After all these years of learning how to receive, her love finally has somewhere to go.

Here.

I can receive her. Her innocence. Her enormous affection. Her delight. Her sweetness. Her desire to touch and be touched. Her ridiculous enthusiasm. Her big, undefended love.

And something about that completes a circle I didn’t know I was making.

The little girl who couldn’t understand why other people couldn’t receive all the love she was offering became a woman who would have to learn, painstakingly at times, how to receive love herself. Kindness. Support. Generosity. Pleasure. Touch. Sweetness. To let herself be cared for. To let something good actually land.

And now that woman can look backward with a kind of compassion the child never had access to.

For herself. And, unexpectedly, for them.

I can’t go backward and teach the people around her how to receive her. I can’t make them give her what they didn’t.

But I don’t need the past to become different for its meaning to change.

Maybe that’s part of what feels so profound about this particular moment. I’ve spent years thinking I was learning how to receive Life. And I was. But perhaps I was also becoming the woman capable of finally receiving her.

So bring it here, sweetheart. All of it. That enormous, radiant, unreasonable love you’ve been carrying around.

I’ll take it.

I know how to receive it now.

In sovereignty,
-Sharon Marie

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P.S. If this essay resonated with you, you'll likely find a home in my books, Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine and Flesh & Flame: Pleasure as the Portal to Divine Mastery, where I continue exploring self-authorship, eros, and the expansion of our capacity to participate fully in life.

Yes, and...

It’s one of the foundational principles of improvisation. Your acting partner offers you something in-scene. You don’t reject the premise. You receive what they’ve given you and add to it.

Yes.

And...

What suddenly occurred to me was: What if my scene partner is me?

My friend and Divine & Dirty co-host and I have been circling a particular question for a while now.

Azaya uses the phrase responsible aliveness in our shared work. She’s interested in what it means to make pleasure and aliveness a way of life while still taking responsibility for ourselves, our choices, and the lives we’re creating.

It’s the responsible part that has generated some of our most interesting conversations because if pleasure becomes a guiding principle, where is the threshold between following what makes us more alive and simply indulging ourselves?

It’s a good fucking question.

“Follow pleasure” can very quickly become permission to avoid anything uncomfortable.

Don’t want to work? Don’t.
Don’t want to have the conversation? Don’t.
Feel terrible? Eat the ice cream.

And yet the answer can’t be returning to the old model in which responsibility means overriding ourselves.

Maybe I don’t want to make the phone call because I’ve decided I no longer need to fight for being right. Maybe I want the ice cream because something happened today that I don’t want to feel. Maybe I want to spend the afternoon in bed because I’m genuinely exhausted. Maybe I want to spend the afternoon in bed because getting up means confronting something I’ve been avoiding for three weeks.

From the outside, those things can look remarkably similar.

From the inside, they aren’t. And suddenly, watching Ted Lasso, I realized we may have been trying to solve a question that already had two tiny words waiting for it.

Yes, and.

Yes

What if the first response to whatever arises inside us is simply Yes.

I don’t want to do this. Yes.
I’m scared. Yes.
I’m angry. Yes.
I want him. Yes.
I want the ice cream. Yes.
I’m fucking tired. Yes.

Not agreement and not permission. Recognition. This is what’s here.

There’s something surprisingly intimate and comforting about responding to ourselves this way. So much of our internal conversation begins with an argument. I shouldn’t feel this. I shouldn’t want that. I should be further along by now. I should be able to handle this. I shouldn’t still care.

Before we’ve even discovered what an experience has to tell us, we’re already trying to get rid of it.

Yes changes the relationship.

Yes, you’re scared. Yes, you want this. Yes, you don’t want to do the thing. Yes, you’re jealous. Yes, you’re exhausted. Yes, you’d currently like to solve your emotional problems with a pint of ice cream and a spoon.

Come in. Tell me what’s happening.

Nothing has been decided yet, and that’s important because listening to yourself and obeying every impulse are not the same thing.

Every part of you gets to belong, and belonging is not the same thing as authority.

And...

This is where the second word makes a difference because if yes allows what is true to enter the room, and invites the rest of you in with it.

I don’t want to make this phone call. Yes. And what else is true? I’m scared of what they’re going to say.

Now we’re somewhere.

I want the ice cream. Yes. And what else is true? I’m hurt. I’m lonely. Something happened today and I don’t want to feel it.

Maybe you still eat the ice cream…

That’s one of the things I love about this. The “and” isn’t secretly a disciplinary trap. We’re not pretending to listen compassionately to ourselves until the responsible adult arrives and confiscates the Ben & Jerrys.

Maybe the answer is: I’m exhausted. Yes. And what else is true? Nothing. I’m fucking exhausted.

Go to bed.

Sometimes the original desire survives the inquiry beautifully intact, sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes something underneath it finally gets a chance to speak.

That’s discernment. And I think this may be the piece I’ve been missing when I talk about pleasure as a guiding principle.

Pleasure doesn’t ask me to avoid discomfort. It asks me to remain in relationship with more of myself while I move through my life.

Pleasure and Relief Are Not Always the Same Thing

I think this is where pleasure gets into trouble. We can confuse pleasure with relief.

Relief says: Make this feeling stop. And sometimes we need relief. There are nights when the kindest thing available may genuinely be ordering takeout, climbing into bed, watching something ridiculous, and letting ourselves disappear for a while. We don’t need to turn every bowl of ice cream into a spiritual inquiry.

But there’s a difference between choosing relief and living in such a way that we continually use pleasurable experiences to avoid contact with our own lives. That doesn’t feel like pleasure as I understand it anymore, because the pleasure I’m interested in increases our capacity to be here — to feel and want and respond and participate.

To let Life reach us and to answer it.

Sometimes being fully in contact with your life means making the phone call, having the conversation, finishing the work, saying no, getting up, staying, leaving, grieving, or admitting that you’re scared and doing the thing anyway.

Aliveness has never promised to feel good all the time. It promises contact with Life.

Responsible Aliveness

I think this is what Azaya has been pointing toward with responsible aliveness. The responsibility isn’t there to restrain the aliveness, and the aliveness isn’t there to liberate us from responsibility.

They belong together.

Responsible aliveness means I don’t abandon myself in either direction. I don’t abandon what I feel in order to do what I think I should, and I don’t abandon the life I’m creating in order to avoid what I feel. I can say Yes, this is what’s happening in me. And then Given everything that’s true, what do I want to do with it?

That question feels very different to me from What should I do? because should tends to arrive with a prewritten answer. This asks me to remain present long enough to discover my own.

And sometimes the answer will require something of me. There are moments when Life calls for action and I would sincerely prefer not to answer. There are responsibilities I’ve chosen, promises I’ve made, things I want to create that cannot exist if I only work on them when working feels pleasurable, and people I love who sometimes need something from me when I’d rather be doing something else.

A life built around pleasure can’t mean that discomfort automatically becomes evidence that I’m moving in the wrong direction.

For me, discomfort is the sensation of meeting the edge of my current capacity. It’s Life saying:

Hey. You.

Get up.

I don’t want to override the child who’s frightened, hurt, tired, or asking for comfort. I want it to be able to hear her. To believe her. To say: Yes. I know. I’m here.

And then, when necessary: And we’re still going to do this.

There’s something profoundly loving about that. Not dragging the child behind you, and not handing her the car keys either.

Walking with her.

Maybe she really does need the ice cream. Maybe she needs to cry, or to be held, or to have a night off. And maybe what she needs most is the experience of discovering that the adult Self won’t abandon the life they’re building every time she gets scared.

It feels like someone inside me saying: I hear what you want. I hear what you’re afraid of. Your experience is welcome here. And I’m responsible for the life we’re creating.

What Else Is True?

The question hiding underneath this entire thing might be: What else is true?

I want this. What else is true?
I hate this. What else is true?
I’m scared. What else is true?
I don’t want to do it. What else is true?
I want to eat the ice cream. What else is true?

Sometimes the answer changes what I do and sometimes it doesn’t, but it changes the quality of my participation because I’m no longer reacting from the first voice that managed to grab the internal microphone.

I’m here, listening, and choosing.

And perhaps this is the distinction I’ve been searching for between indulgence and pleasure as a way of life. The distinction isn’t necessarily in the behavior. Two people can eat the same ice cream for entirely different reasons. I can eat the same ice cream for entirely different reasons on Tuesday and Friday.

The more interesting question is whether I’m present for the choice. Whether I’m using pleasure to disappear from my experience or allowing pleasure to bring me more deeply into it. Whether the choice expands my capacity to participate in my life or repeatedly helps me avoid participating in it.

No Pleasure Police required — just relationship with my desire, my fear, and my body. With the life I’m creating and with the person I’m becoming.

Some nights responsible aliveness will look like the hard conversation and some nights it will look like the ice cream. Some nights it will be the hard conversation and the ice cream.

I find that such a relief because I’m not interested in becoming impeccably self-regulated. I’m interested in becoming someone I can trust with the full range of my own experience — someone who doesn’t have to make an enemy of herself in order to lead herself. Someone capable of saying:

Yes, this is what I feel.
Yes, this is what I want.
Yes, this is what is here.
And I’m still full present and engaged enough to choose what happens next.

I’m grateful to for doggedly holding the question between us, and inviting me to dive deeper into myself for the answer.

In sovereignty,
-Sharon Marie

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P.S. If this essay resonated with you, you'll likely find a home in my books, Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine and Flesh & Flame: Pleasure as the Portal to Divine Mastery, where I continue exploring self-authorship, eros, and the expansion of our capacity to participate fully in life.

It goes something like this:

They like you now. But wait until they find out how weird you are…

Which is ridiculous. Also, apparently, quite sincere.

I spent a recent weekend at a sexy takeover in Palm Springs. Several days of debauchery and snuggling and intimate conversations and play and bodies and laughter and getting to know people I hadn’t known a few days before.

It was beautiful.

What I didn’t expect was how difficult it would be to get through the first day.

I’ve spent a lot of time in sex-positive spaces over the last fifteen or so years. Some of those experiences have been extraordinary. Others left marks. I’ve been touched without my consent. I’ve felt preyed upon. I’ve been in environments where something happening in the present reached backward and reignited much older experiences in my body, including traumatic experiences from childhood.

So when I arrived on Thursday, apparently my body arrived carrying the entire fucking archive.

I wasn’t prepared for that. I had chosen to be there. I wanted to be there. And still, I could feel myself scanning. Bracing. Trying to acclimate to a space my thinking mind had willingly entered while some younger part of me remained unconvinced that I was safe there. It cast a pall over that first day and evening, and I couldn’t quite find myself inside the experience.

Then something began to change.

The next morning, I spent time with some new friends of friends. They asked me about myself. About my story. And as I told them, something almost imperceptible started happening.

I came back. Not all at once. A little more of me with each conversation.

My ground returned. I could feel myself remembering where I was in the space. Who I was.

And with that came an entirely different way of imagining the weekend ahead. I didn’t have to enter the space waiting to discover what would happen to me. All of me was finally there. I could choose, want, initiate, or decline. I could take up space intentionally. I could enter the room as someone with enough presence to affect what happened next.

The rest of the weekend became something I hadn’t realized I needed. I connected — the kind of connected that most people think isn’t available in these kinds of spaces. There was play, affection, pleasure, closeness, snuggling, long conversations, laughter, and beautiful moments of downright debauchery.

And people I found myself genuinely wanting to know.

My body woke up.

And, apparently, so did my heart.

I’ve been writing recently about intimacy with Life. About the idea that intimacy requires enough availability to actually be affected by what happens to us.

Well, I got affected.

These people, the play, the affection, the conversations, being wanted, wanting other people… it all reached me. My body remembered things about pleasure and connection that I hadn’t realized it had stopped expecting.

And I think that’s part of what I’m experiencing now. If I let the pleasure reach me, I also have to live with having been changed by it. These people matter to me now. Maybe some of them will eventually matter a lot. I don’t know yet.

But enough that I notice when they text. Enough that I want to hear from them again. Enough that some newly awakened, astonishingly adolescent part of me has started whispering But what if they stop liking you?

Oh Fuck, I Care

The weekend ended and I came home. There was certainly some drop from the intensity of the experience. That’s not particularly surprising after several days with that much stimulation, connection, energy, sexiness, and very little ordinary life.

What surprised me was what remained underneath it. This strange, low-grade insecurity.

I’ve continued talking with some of the people I met. We’re texting and getting to know one another. Revealing more of ourselves in that peculiar incremental way new friendships develop.

And every once in a while, a little pulse of panic moves through me.

What happens when they find out how woo-ey I really am?

The depth of my spirituality. The oracular experiences. The things I believe because I’ve experienced them. The woman who comfortably calls herself an erotic mystic. Who writes about eros and pleasure and the divine and other lifetimes and the body as a conduit between human and divine…

All the strange and specific things that make my life unmistakably mine.

What if they get to know that woman and decide: Oh. She’s weird. And then they don’t want to be my friends anymore.

I almost can’t believe I’m writing that. It’s so adolescent.

And so tender.

Because underneath the insecurity is something considerably more authentic —

I want them to like me. I want these friendships. I want more of the aliveness I experienced with these people.

And apparently I’d forgotten how vulnerable it feels to meet someone new and sincerely hope they choose you back.

I Didn’t Know I’d Closed That Door

I didn’t know how thoroughly I’d protected myself from this particular kind of wanting.

This is the part I didn’t see coming. I didn’t think of myself as closed. I love people. I have extraordinarily intimate friendships. I tell the truth. I share myself. I’ve built a life with enormous amounts of connection in it.

But perhaps there are degrees of availability. Because something woke up that weekend that made me realize another part of me had been sleeping.

Maybe I’d become more skilled at protecting my heart than I knew. I don’t mean barricaded or numb, exactly. Just less reachable. A little less likely to wander into a new connection with the exquisitely vulnerable admission: I like you. I hope you like me too. I’d like this to continue.

And: You could hurt my feelings now.

There’s something almost sweet about realizing that.

The insecurity isn’t sweet while I’m inside it, necessarily. My body can generate an impressive amount of completely irrational alarm over a simple text message. But when I stand slightly outside the panic and look at what it’s protecting, I feel tenderness.

Something matters. Someone got in. Several someones, actually.

My heart noticed.

Being Known

The timing of this is particularly meaningful because I’ve spent the last several years becoming increasingly unwilling to divide myself into acceptable pieces.

I’ve been claiming more of myself. My sexuality and spirituality. My intellect and my strangeness. My ambition. My tenderness. My appetite. My oracular nature. The parts of me that don’t fit comfortably into anybody else’s system.

I’ve been writing an entire book about what becomes possible when more of the Self is allowed to participate in a life.

And now Life, apparently enjoying itself, has handed me the practical exam.

Because claiming the fullness of yourself in private is one thing. Writing about it is another.

Being fully yourself when you don’t particularly care whether someone approves is relatively easy. Then someone appears whose affection you actually want, and suddenly you can feel every tiny temptation to become more digestible again. Maybe don’t mention that yet. Maybe soften this part. Maybe let them get to know the easier pieces first.

Maybe wait until they like you enough before you show them the really strange rooms in your heart.

There it is. Not some grand spiritual challenge. Just the ancient human vulnerability of wanting to be known and wanting to be loved at the same time, and discovering that you don’t get to control whether those two things will coexist.

The Other Side of Safety

Something else has been striking me.

The fear I experienced when I arrived in Palm Springs and the fear I’m experiencing now are very different. That first day, my body was asking Am I safe with you? Will my boundaries matter here? What happens when other people’s desire enters the room?

Those questions have history behind them.

Now the questions sound more like Will you still want me when you know me? Will I matter to you as much as you’re beginning to matter to me? Will you stay?

That’s a very different kind of vulnerability.

The first comes from having experienced people getting too close without my permission. The second exists because I let people close. That’s the part that makes me unexpectedly emotional. I went into the weekend braced against being touched and came out of it afraid of losing people I had invited in.

Somewhere between those two experiences, I became more reachable.

I Want This Part Too

I don’t know what any of these new connections will become. Some may deepen. Some may remain beautiful memories of one very strange, very sexy weekend in Palm Springs. Some may surprise me, and yes, someone may eventually encounter the full peculiar ecosystem of me and decide I’m too fucking weird for them.

That would hurt.

I’m noticing that I’m willing to let it. Because I’m beginning to understand what the alternative costs. I could keep some portion of myself less emotionally reachable. I could stay cool and wait to see who wants me before admitting whom I want. I could protect myself from the exquisite stupidity of staring at my phone and wondering whether I’ve said too much.

But I would also have to give up something I didn’t realize I’d been missing.

This.

The tenderness. The wanting. The ridiculous insecurity. The pleasure of discovering another person. The startling sweetness of realizing that someone new has begun to matter.

I want the debauchery. And the snuggling. I want the conversations that go somewhere I didn’t expect. I want to play and to want people. I want to tell the truth about who I am and discover who stays close. I want to let people affect me enough that their presence matters and their absence might hurt.

I want my body awake.

I want my heart involved.

And apparently, if I’m going to live the breadth of my own humanness rather than merely write about it, I don’t get to keep only the parts that feel powerful.

I get this tender creature too. The one who sends the text, puts down the phone, feels the tiny flutter of fear, and hopes, with her whole weird woo-ey heart, that they text back.

In sovereignty,
-Sharon Marie Scott

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P.S. If this essay resonated with you, you'll likely find a home in my books, Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine and Flesh & Flame: Pleasure as the Portal to Divine Mastery, where I continue exploring self-authorship, eros, and the expansion of our capacity to participate fully in life.

One of the contestants was talking about this. Whatever the challenge, he said, eventually you have to bring the food back to you.

You can’t “out-Reynold Reynold,” he said, referring to another chef whose desserts are so elaborate, imaginative, and unmistakably his that trying to cook like him would only make you a lesser version of something he already does brilliantly.

Learn the technique. Cook outside your comfort zone. Let other cuisines influence you. But eventually, what arrives on the plate has to taste like you.

One particular chef, Laura, comes from a strong Italian background, culturally and culinarily. Italian food wasn’t simply a cuisine she knew how to cook. It was part of her history. She had flavors and traditions and ways of approaching food that had been handed to her. And then she got to decide what to do with them.

I found myself unexpectedly moved by that because I’ve never really known what it feels like to have something handed to me that way. My mother had my brothers and me memorize our ethnicities when we were children. English. Irish. Scottish. German. Dutch. Welsh. Years later, a genetic test informed me that the largest single ethnic influence in my DNA was actually Ashkenazi Jewish.

Interesting.

None of it felt like mine.

There weren’t recipes passed down through generations in our house. No religious traditions. No cultural practices that told me where my people came from or how they understood the world. No holiday that connected me to generations of people who had celebrated it before me.

I had ancestry, but I didn’t have anything I experienced as an inheritance. And I don’t think I realized until I was watching someone else cook from hers that some part of me had always noticed the absence.

I have, however, spent most of my life developing a very particular taste.

My career makes almost no sense on paper. I began as an illustrator and sign language interpreter. I worked for Disney. I wrote comic books. I created characters and worlds. I conceived and worked on video games. I worked in film and television and publishing. Eventually my life wandered into sacred sexuality. Spirituality. Human Design. Teaching. Speaking. Writing books about eros, pleasure, sovereignty, relationships, and the body.

For a long time, I understood these as different chapters of my life. Sometimes radically different chapters.

One of the surprises of recently completing The Temple of I manuscript — the third book in my Hieros Gamos Codex — has been seeing what happens when I put all of them on the table at once. They start looking considerably less random.

I was making worlds before I was teaching people to understand the worlds they create. I created characters before I created archetypes. I worked with actual game mechanics decades before I started writing about the human being as the player, the body as the console, and the possibility that we participate far more actively in our experience of reality than we generally realize.

I’ve spent an enormous amount of my life fascinated by story, myth, identity, desire, power, transformation, and the moment someone discovers that the world is larger than they thought it was.

And apparently every time I enter a culture or counterculture that becomes too prescriptive about what I’m supposed to believe or how I’m supposed to practice, I eventually wander off and build my own temple next door.

I used to think I was continually reinventing myself. Now I think I may simply have been bringing every challenge back to me. I couldn’t out-Reynold Reynold. Apparently I couldn’t out-anybody anybody. The plate had to taste like mine.

What’s strange is that I found the signature long before I had any sense of where it came from.

The Strange Provenance of a Self

Provenance is usually something we talk about in relation to objects. A painting has provenance. We trace where it originated, who possessed it, where it traveled, and whose hands it passed through.

I’ve been thinking lately about the provenance of a Self. Where did this particular way of being me come from? Why these fascinations? Why has eros followed me through so many rooms? Why the persistent sense that the body knows things? Why myth? Why the oracle? Why ecstasy? Why seasons and cycles and ritual? Why have I spent so much of my life interested in the place where our animal nature and our divinity touch?

I can trace some of it through the life I’ve lived. But there’s another answer that is considerably stranger.

Over the years, I’ve had experiences I understand as memories of other lifetimes. I know that sentence lands differently depending on who’s reading it.

I’m okay with that. You may understand such experiences literally. Spiritually. Psychologically. Archetypally. As imagination doing something particularly interesting. I experience them as memories. And I’m less interested, at least here, in proving what they are than in what happens to me when they arrive.

I recognize myself.

There have been different places, different circumstances, and different roles, but again and again, I have remembered myself in relationship with sacred erotic mysteries. As priestess, acolyte, and oracle. As someone for whom the seasons and cycles of Life mattered. Someone who understood the body as one of the places we commune with the divine.

Some of these memories include erotic experiences of sacred union. Experiences in which sex, pleasure, devotion, power, ecstasy, and the divine weren’t neatly separated into different rooms.

And those memories affect me in a way my family tree never has. Because they’re familiar. There is a quality of: There you are.

Something I Recognize

I’ve spent much of my life feeling strangely culturally unmoored. I wasn’t wandering around yearning for a family tartan, but I noticed what other people had.

Foods that tasted like childhood because generations of people before them had eaten them too. Religious traditions they could embrace or rebel against. Grandparents who carried another language. Songs everyone knew. Ways of marking births and marriages and deaths. Ways of celebrating the changing year.

I didn’t have much of that. And without much relationship with my birth family as an adult, whatever thin threads were there became thinner still.

I think that’s part of why watching that chef affected me. I saw the confidence of someone who knew what she was cooking from.

And suddenly I realized that perhaps I do too. Just not in the way I had understood inheritance.

When I encounter the erotic as sacred, I recognize something.

When I work oracularly, I recognize something.

When I mark the turning of a season, light a fire, gather people, make ritual, or experience the body as capable of bringing human and divine into startling proximity, I recognize something.

When eros becomes larger than sex and begins to feel like a current running through Life itself, I recognize something.

And when I look at the body of work I’ve created in this lifetime, I can see those same fingerprints everywhere. Long before I had language for any of this or was teaching it. Long before I had memories that offered me any possible explanation for it.

There it was. In the things I made.

The Inheritance I Couldn’t Name

I don’t know what to call this with certainty. Heritage doesn’t feel quite right. Heritage belongs to cultures and peoples and traditions with histories that deserve more respect than my simply declaring myself part of them because something resonates with me.

Lineage comes closer.

Provenance interests me even more.

But perhaps what matters most isn’t what I call it. It’s that for the first time in my life, I don’t feel quite so in the wind. There’s something unexpectedly moving about that.

I can now look backward across a life that once seemed to contain an absurd number of reinventions and see continuity.

The girl drawing alone for hours.
The young woman at Disney.
The comic-book writer building worlds out of mythology.
The game creator.
The leader.
The woman who became fascinated with reverent sexuality.
The oracle.
The author now writing about the body as the console through which we experience and participate in Life.

None of them knew exactly what the next one was going to become., but I can see them passing something between them. And perhaps that’s why these other memories have begun to feel less like strange spiritual curiosities and more like provenance.

They extend the thread.

I can’t prove where it begins. Maybe I don’t need to because the thing I’m discovering about inheritance is that receiving it isn’t the same as reproducing it.

That was what those chefs understood. You take what has reached you. You learn from it. You let it enter your hands. And then you make something only you could have made.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing all along. Taking whatever reached me. Mythology. Art. Storytelling. Games. Spirituality. Sexuality. Science. Mysticism. Human Design. The things I’ve studied and the things I’ve lived. The things I can document and the things I can only remember.

None of them became a tradition I was willing to live inside. Of course they didn’t. I’ve already been told that I’m too counterculture by the very countercultures I longed to belong to. So I keep building the temple next door.

But I don’t experience that as rootlessness anymore. I think I found my signature before I found my lineage. And perhaps the lineage was never going to give me a script.

Perhaps its gift was recognition. A sense, finally, that I didn’t come from nowhere. That there’s a thread that’s been moving through the life I’ve been making for as long as I can remember.

And that after 55 years of following it, even when I had no idea what I was following, I know what tastes like me.

In sovereign provenance,
-Sharon Marie Scott

P.S. If this essay resonated with you, you'll likely find a home in my books, Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine and Flesh & Flame: Pleasure as the Portal to Divine Mastery, where I continue exploring self-authorship, eros, and the expansion of our capacity to participate fully in life.

This week, I wrote about the girl who learned to make a feast from crumbs.

She learned to take small amounts of attention, affection, and tenderness and receive them so fully that they became enormous. She could find the beautiful thing inside an imperfect offering and let herself be genuinely moved by it.

It taught me how to be happy with less than I wanted. But that’s not all it did. That girl became really good at receiving.

I don’t want to heal this trait away. I fucking love this about myself.

Children are astonishingly inventive. When we can’t change the conditions we’re living inside, we figure out how to live inside them. And in the process, sometimes we become brilliant at something.

What was your childhood superpower? And what becomes possible when you get to decide what it’s for now?

You’re about to find out…

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Nothing truly terrible happened, but I can finally see clearly enough to stop participating in relationships that once felt like love.

More than one romantic connection in my life has been organized around a familiar pattern: accepting less than what I actually wanted, then becoming remarkably skilled at experiencing what I did receive as enough.

More than enough, sometimes. I received it as beautiful or precious. A gift.

And today I find myself thinking about the girl who learned how to do that.

I’m in awe of her. She was ingenious. She grew up in a world where positive attention and kind affection were scarce enough that she couldn’t depend on receiving them freely, or at all. So she adapted. She learned to ask for less. Then she learned something even more extraordinary.

She changed the way she received what came. A small kindness became enormous. A little attention became proof of love. A rare moment of tenderness could be held so carefully, and appreciated so deeply, that it almost compensated for everything that was absent around it.

She learned to make a feast from crumbs. And she did it so sincerely that she would actually feel fortunate.

That is a fucking superpower.

I mean that.

There’s something astonishing about a child who can encounter scarcity and somehow preserve her capacity for wonder. She didn’t become cynical or decide that the world was ugly. She found beauty. She trained her attention toward what was given instead of what was missing. She learned to receive imperfect love with a full heart. She learned to survive by making the world more beautiful than it sometimes was.

And in many ways, that capacity served me extraordinarily well. I can find beauty almost anywhere. I notice the small gesture. The flicker of tenderness or the unexpected kindness. The person trying, even when they’re clumsy.

I can make meaning, find pleasure, and even turn ordinary moments into something luminous.

That girl is still responsible for some of the qualities I treasure most in myself.

Every survival intelligence has a context in which it was brilliant, and sometimes we keep using it long after the conditions have changed.

That’s what I’m seeing now.

The ability to make very little feel like enough also made it possible for me to remain in relationships where I was receiving very little. I could find the beauty so effectively that I didn’t always allow myself to register the absence. I could make meaning from someone’s affection while overlooking how inconsistently it was offered. I could appreciate what a person was capable of giving without asking whether what they were capable of giving was actually enough for me.

I could feel genuinely grateful and still be underfed.

That’s a difficult truth to hold because none of the beauty was fake. The affection, the connection, the moments I treasured were all real. My gratitude was real.

And so was the deprivation.

Both can be true.

That may be one of the most important things I’m learning in this chapter of my life. Recognizing the beauty in something doesn’t obligate me to remain inside it. Loving someone doesn’t mean I must accept the amount of love they’re able or willing to offer.

Gratitude doesn’t require self-abandonment.

I don’t have to make someone wrong in order to admit that something is no longer enough for me, and I don’t have to make my younger self wrong for having once believed it was.

Today, I’m sitting beside the girl who learned to turn scarcity into abundance and tell her how magnificent I think she is. I want her to know that her strategy worked. She got us here. She protected our tenderness and preserved our ability to love. She taught us how to recognize goodness even when it arrived in very small quantities.

She kept the world beautiful.

What a beautiful soul she has. What a beautiful heart.

I don’t want to take any of that away from her. I just don’t need her to determine what is enough anymore. That’s the part that’s changing. The woman I’m becoming can appreciate what is offered without shrinking her needs to match it. She can honor someone’s capacity without confusing it with compatibility. She can love generously and still notice when reciprocity is missing. She can even be grateful for what was real and still leave.

This is what deep integration actually looks like. Recognizing the intelligence in the adaptation, keeping the gifts it gave us, and releasing the job it no longer needs to perform.

I don’t want to lose the girl who can find beauty in almost anything. I want her beside me. I want her wonder and her gratitude and her openness. I want her enormous capacity to receive. I simply want those gifts to live inside a woman who no longer needs to survive on scarcity.

Today, that means grieving.

There are relationships I need to walk away from because they belong to a younger understanding of what I’m available for. That hurts.

Some of what I’m leaving is genuinely beautiful. That’s what makes leaving difficult. But beauty is no longer the only question. I’m learning to ask whether a relationship can meet me where I am now. Whether there’s enough presence, affection, reciprocity, or truth. Whether there’s enough willingness.

Enough life.

I can feel the younger version of me watching this. She’s frightened. A part of her still wants to say, But look at what we do have.

I know. I see it too. And I’m grateful.

But we don’t have to turn every small offering into a miracle anymore. There’s more available to us now because we’re finally willing to receive more.

So today I am honoring her. The girl who learned how to thrive on less. Who could make the world beautiful enough to survive inside and who taught herself how to feel lucky.

I will never shame her for that. I think she was brilliant. And I think she deserves to discover what happens when she no longer has to make scarcity beautiful.

She gets to keep the wonder and the gratitude and her extraordinary capacity to love. She just doesn’t have to use those gifts to turn crumbs into a feast anymore.

There is a whole table waiting for her now.

In sovereign grief,
-Sharon Marie

P.S. If this essay resonated with you, you'll likely find a home in my books, Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine and Flesh & Flame: Pleasure as the Portal to Divine Mastery, where I continue exploring self-authorship, eros, and the expansion of our capacity to participate fully in life.

Intimacy isn’t something we understand from a distance, so this practice isn’t about analyzing your life, improving it, or figuring anything out. It’s an experiment in presence and proximity.

Set aside an hour if you can. You don’t need to go anywhere special. In fact, ordinary life may be the better laboratory.

Your kitchen. Your neighborhood. A coffee shop. Your backyard. The grocery store. An afternoon spent doing whatever you were already going to do.

For this hour, there is only one instruction:

Come closer.

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It sits at the center of almost everything I teach and create. I describe aliveness as the fullness of the human experience: our capacity to feel more, notice more, want more, love more, risk more, create more, and remain present for more of what it means to be human.

Lately, though, I’ve been wondering if there’s another way to describe it.

Intimacy with life.

We usually reserve the word intimacy for relationships. We become intimate with a lover. A spouse. A friend. Someone we trust enough to let closer.

There’s a familiar poetic interpretation of intimacy as into me, see. It isn’t the actual origin of the word, but I’ve always liked what it points toward.

Come closer. See me.

There’s vulnerability in that kind of intimacy because being seen requires some willingness to stop managing what another person sees. But lately I’ve been wondering what happens when we turn that invitation toward life itself.

Into me, see. What would it mean to let life see you? And what would it mean to see life with the same intimacy in return?

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How Close Are You to Your Own Life?

There are plenty of ways to live at a distance from your own life. You can fill your calendar, take the vacation, make dinner, answer the texts, have sex, raise children, build a company, go out with friends, finish the project, or watch the sunset.

You can be there for all of it without very much of it actually reaching you.

I know this because I’ve done it. There’s a particular kind of distance that comes from experiencing something while simultaneously evaluating it. Do I like this? Is this going well? What does this mean? What should happen next? Am I doing this right? Sometimes I’ve been so busy interpreting my life that I have barely had time to experience it.

Intimacy asks something different. It asks us to come close enough to be affected.

A sunset you barely notice because you’re thinking about tomorrow is still a sunset. But then there are evenings when the sky catches you. You stop. Something about the color or the light or the sheer ridiculous beauty of this planet gets through whatever you were thinking about.

For a moment, you aren’t evaluating the experience. You’re in it. Life reached you.

That’s the kind of intimacy I mean.

Letting Life Touch You

We tend to associate aliveness with the experiences we want more of —pleasure, excitement, desire, wonder, beauty, adventure, love…

Of course those are part of it. But if aliveness is the fullness of the human experience, then grief belongs there too.

So does disappointment, uncertainty, longing, and awkwardness. The moment someone tells you something you wish weren’t true. The ache of missing someone. The strange emptiness after achieving something you were certain would make you happy. The quiet realization that a version of your life no longer fits.

These experiences aren’t interruptions to aliveness. They are life.

Which means the opposite of aliveness may not be pain. It may be distance.

We create distance in all kinds of intelligent ways. We explain. We distract ourselves. We make ourselves busy. We tell ourselves we shouldn’t care. We turn the experience into a lesson while we are still standing in the middle of it.

Sometimes distance is necessary. Human beings have limits. There are experiences we can only approach slowly, in pieces, when our bodies and circumstances are ready. But capacity changes how much life we can allow to reach us without immediately needing to escape, control, or resolve it.

A person with greater capacity can stay present to more — more sensation, truth, desire, complexity, responsibility, intimacy, uncertainty, and possibility.

When I talk about becoming more alive, I’m talking about becoming more available to the life I am already having.

Into Life, See

But intimacy is reciprocal. I don’t only want life to see me. I want to see it.

This kind of intimacy requires attention. And honesty. Life says: Look. And you stay.

Intimacy with life asks the deeper questions. What do you actually want? What delights you when no one is watching? What hurts? What are you pretending not to know? Where have you become bored? What’re you hungry for? What’re you afraid would happen if you stopped performing the version of yourself everyone already recognizes?

We hide from life whenever we continually edit our participation before it reaches the world. Say the acceptable thing instead of the true thing. Choose what makes sense instead of admitting what we want. We wait to express something until we know how it’ll be received.

We call that prudence or maturity or timing. Sometimes we’re simply hiding.

And it’s difficult to experience intimacy with a life we refuse to let encounter us.

Maybe This Is Why I Experience Life as Erotic

When I describe my relationship with life as erotic, I don’t mean that everything is sexual. I mean that I want to know what happens when I come closer. When I let sensation register before explaining it away. When something catches my attention and I follow it a little farther. When I allow desire to tell me something about myself or when I allow what I encounter to change what happens next.

There’s an erotic quality to that exchange because it’s responsive. I touch life. Life touches me. Something happens between us.

For a long time, the language of creating your reality bothered me for exactly this reason. It can make life sound like an elaborate vending machine. Think the right thoughts. Maintain the right vibration. Make the right choices. Press B7. Receive desired life.

But I don’t experience authorship that way. I have influence. I have desire. I make choices. I initiate. I create. I say yes. Say no. I decide what I will participate in and what I will no longer participate in.

And then life responds.

Other people have desires too. Circumstances change. Bodies age. People leave. Opportunities appear from directions I wasn’t watching. Something fails. Something else works for reasons I could never have engineered.

Life participates.

Maybe mature authorship requires intimacy precisely because I can’t author a life I refuse to encounter as it actually is.

I want participation. I bring myself. Life brings itself. And we discover what becomes possible between us.

A Life Turned On

This gives me a different understanding of the phrase I’ve built so much of my work around.

A life turned on isn’t a life in which everything feels good, or a life of perpetual excitement, perfect alignment, endless orgasms, spiritual certainty, or fabulous vacations. It’s a life you are close enough to feel. Close enough to be moved by beauty or to grieve what mattered. Close enough to tell the truth when the truth changes. Close enough to let another person matter without handing them ownership of you. Close enough to let mystery remain mysterious for a while. Close enough to be surprised.

Maybe that is why pleasure matters so much to me. Pleasure brings us into contact with Life. A taste makes us pause. A touch brings attention into the body. Curiosity pulls us toward something. Desire points. Delight says, this.

Pleasure is one of the ways life gets our attention. And when we increase our capacity for pleasure, perhaps what we’re really increasing is our capacity for contact.

For intimacy.

For life.

I don’t want to stand outside my life continually evaluating whether it’s good enough or spend it trying to arrange every experience into proof that I’m successful, evolved, loved, safe, or doing any of this correctly. I want to be inside it. I want to taste it while it’s here. To let it surprise me, disappoint me, seduce me, challenge me, delight me, and change me.

And I want to let life encounter me in return.

Not the edited version or the acceptable version. Not who I was five years ago or who I imagine I will eventually become.

Me.

Here.

Now.

Perhaps that is what I’ve meant by aliveness all along.

Intimacy with life.

In sovereign intimacy,
-Sharon Marie

P.S. If this essay resonated with you, you'll likely find a home in my books, Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine and Flesh & Flame: Pleasure as the Portal to Divine Mastery, where I continue exploring self-authorship, eros, and the expansion of our capacity to participate fully in life.

The comic book series I published sold more than 300,000 issues. A video game I conceived sold 430,000 copies. I have worked in animation, built businesses, led communities, published books, and helped create thriving spaces where people could talk honestly about sex, power, relationships, desire, and the lives they actually wanted.

For years, those numbers meant more to me than I understood.

They told me I had done something real. They helped me feel that my unusual way of seeing the world had value. I might have been perceived as too unconventional for many of the rooms I entered, but I could point to the sales. I could show that people had bought the thing, read the thing, watched the thing, or played the thing.

Over time, I started measuring my value through the ability to secure attention, approval, sales, legitimacy, and carving out a place in the larger industry.

My work was no longer just something I created. It had quietly become evidence that I was enough.

I can see versions of that pattern throughout my life:

I became a visible leader in ethical non-monogamy, kink, and erotic empowerment. Even within those countercultures, I was frequently considered too counterculture, especially when I suggested that the pursuit of the erotic is as much a spiritual practice as prayer or meditation, and that the kinkier and dirter the play got, the more reverence one should bring to the container.

Again and again, my ideas stretched beyond what the communities I was helping to build could comfortably hold. I was examining my patterns, following my desire, expanding my emotional and erotic range, and taking greater responsibility for the reality I was creating.

Looking back, all of it was increasing my capacity to stay present with life, to tell the truth about what I found there, to love without abandoning myself, and to remain in relationship with reality instead of trying to control it.

That expansion changes what I create because I am no longer creating from the same-sized self.

I have been seeing this clearly while developing the Pleasure Renaissance architecture for what I call High-Capacity Partnership. An earlier version of the framework focused on shared direction, conscious influence, chosen devotion, becoming more fully yourself, and expanding capacity.

Those ideas remain meaningful.

As my own capacity expanded, I stopped asking what makes a relationship work and started asking what a relationship makes possible beyond the bond itself.

The framework grew as my capacity grew. It could only hold what I had learned to hold.

This is true of everything we create.

Before asking what I should build, I now ask, Who am I becoming in the building of it?

People feel when a creation has been lived. They can sense the difference between an idea assembled to sound convincing and one that has passed through the creator’s relationships, body, decisions, losses, contradictions, and actual life.

It asks more of the reader because the creator has already allowed life to ask more of them.

These days, I find myself wanting to build things that increase people’s capacity to participate in life rather than simply consume another idea. Whether it’s a relationship, a business, a book, or a piece of technology, I’m interested in what it asks people to become.

I want prosperity to emerge from genuine value rather than manipulation.

I want my creations to become evidence that vitality is a practical way to organize leadership, partnership, business, and culture.

I have created successful things from many earlier versions of myself and I honor the woman who made them. Each of those creations reflects the capacity I had at the time.

The comic book creator is here. The entrepreneur is here. The mother. The writer. The erotic mystic. The philosopher. The systems builder.

They’re no longer taking turns. They’re building together.

I still care about reach. I want the books to sell. I want the platforms to grow. I want the Pleasure Renaissance to touch millions of lives. Reach allows an idea to transform the people who need it.

I no longer want growth purchased through my own diminishment. I don’t want to make myself easier to consume in order to prove that people are impacted by what I create.

We all measure our lives somehow. The question is whether the ruler we’re using can actually tell us what matters. Few of us ever stop to ask who handed us the ruler in the first place.

Aliveness has become the ruler.

I’m no longer creating to prove that I belong.

In sovereignty,
-Sharon Marie Scott

P.S. If this essay resonated with you, you'll likely find a home in my books, Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine and Flesh & Flame: Pleasure as the Portal to Divine Mastery, where I continue exploring self-authorship, eros, and the expansion of our capacity to participate fully in life.

The Pleasure Pause helps us stop long enough to receive the pleasure already happening around us. A Pleasure Deposit is something we intentionally choose to feed ourselves a moment of pleasure, to allow ourselves to receive enough of it that the experience actually changes our mind/body/spirit state.

The Overflow Practice will give you a chance to feel that change for yourself.

You’ll begin with something real that you’re engaging with today. Then I’ll send you away from the recording to make one Pleasure Deposit. When you return, we’ll revisit the same situation and see whether anything has shifted in the way you think, feel, or respond to it.

This practice works beautifully at the beginning of the day, or anytime you have something ahead of you that will be influenced by the state you bring to it. You may want a journal nearby to capture what you discover, though you won’t need one to participate.

My hope is that you’ll return to this experience often enough that the central question begins following you into your life:

What state am I bringing into this?

Because once you experience how even a few minutes of pleasure can change the way you think, feel, and respond to something real in your life, Pleasure Deposits become more than beautiful moments.

They become part of how you consciously participate in what happens next.

Let’s try it together.

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Life became difficult. I worked hard. I solved the problem. Then I rested or celebrated. Or finally gave myself permission to enjoy something beautiful. That rhythm seemed perfectly normal.

Until I realized I was spending most of my life recovering.

My body became a place I returned to after life had taken something from it.

Today, I relate to my body very differently. I’m interested in feeding it before it becomes hungry.

In my last article, I wrote about the body as the missing piece in conscious creation.

Our thoughts influence the lives we create. So do our beliefs, our choices, and the actions that follow them. The body is participating in every one of those moments, which means it has been participating in the creation process all along.

The way my body feels changes the way the world feels.

I’m not trying to say that life suddenly becomes perfect. I mean that I notice things I would have overlooked before.

An idea arrives while I'm making tea. A conversation takes an unexpected turn because I wasn't rushing to the next thing. Someone's kindness lands instead of passing straight through me.

My experience changes because I'm bringing a different version of myself into the moment.

That realization gave birth to two practices inside the Pleasure Renaissance.

The first is the Pleasure Pause. Many of you already know it. The Pleasure Pause is exactly what it sounds like. You stop for a few seconds and open your full awareness to something beautiful that’s already here like the hand on your back or the smell of the rain.

The Pleasure Pause teaches your nervous system to notice life again.

Lately another practice has been emerging. I call them Pleasure Deposits.

A Pleasure Deposit is intentional. I ask myself a simple question throughout the day:

“What would nourish my body right now?”

Sometimes the answer is stretching. Sometimes it’s dancing while dinner cooks. Sometimes it’s stepping outside to get my feet in the grass for five minutes. None of these moments feel particularly significant on their own. That’s exactly why they’re so powerful.

They accumulate.

That’s the part I had been missing.

One deposit rarely changes your life, but hundreds of deposits change your nervous system. And thousands of deposits change your baseline.

I’m calling this compound aliveness.

Every beautiful moment your body fully, consciously receives teaches your nervous system something about the world. After enough of those moments, it begins expecting beauty and goodness from life instead of bracing against it.

I’m not suggesting that you bypass or escape difficult emotions. Life will continue asking things of us. Pleasure doesn’t erase our humanity. It strengthens our capacity to live it.

But pleasure compounds. That’s become unmistakably clear to me.

One beautiful moment doesn’t transform a life any more than one trip to the gym transforms a body. What changes us is the accumulation.

The nervous system learns from repetition. It learns that beauty is available, that rest is safe, and that affection can be received. It learns that life is something to participate in instead of simply endure.

Eventually, our baseline shifts so gradually that we hardly notice it happening until one day we realize we’re inhabiting a very different life because your body has spent months becoming fluent in aliveness.

And that changes the person who walks into every conversation, every meeting, every relationship, every opportunity, and every ordinary Tuesday.

Later this week, inside my paid membership, I’ll share The Overflow Practice.

It’s the daily embodiment practice that gave birth to everything you’ve just read.

I hope you’ll join me.

Until next time, keep making deposits.
-Sharon Marie Scott

P.S. If this essay resonated with you, you'll likely find a home in my books, Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine and Flesh & Flame: Pleasure as the Portal to Divine Mastery, where I continue exploring self-authorship, eros, and the expansion of our capacity to participate fully in life.