Here is the link to the guided meditation. I encourage you to first read through the description and the meditation transcript below prior to your practice.
Pre-Meditation Description and Preparation:
Please read through the following description and the meditation transcript below prior to your practice.
If you do not feel ready to connect with yourself through this meditation, please honor that.
Please respect your present capacity to engage in opening your body, heart, and mind. Our capacity for openness, receptivity, and mindfulness is cyclical and ever-changing, just like every other experience and energy in our lives.
If, in this moment, you do not feel resourced, prepared, or ready, please respect this and wait for a more auspicious time to engage in mindful awareness.
This guided meditation is a practice created to help soothe and heal sexual shame.
Our sexuality is a key pillar for our overall well-being.
When sexual health, well-being, positivity, pleasure, and satisfaction is available and present in our life, we feel more alive, more confident, more joyful, more connected to self and other and more connected to the erotic life force itself.
Our sexuality and sexual experiences are powerful portals to opening, receiving, giving, loving.
Sexual shame can be an obstacle to creating these kinds of opportunities and experiences.
Sexual shame can result from:
- Negative messages about sex or one’s body.
- Toxic patriarchy
- White supremacy
- Heteronormativity and cisnormativity
- Judgment around sexual identity and/or gender.
- Negative, harmful, or traumatic sexual experiences.
- A lack of accurate information around sexuality; poor sexual education.
- Sex negativity in the form of rigidity, exclusion, pathologizing.
- Judgement around desire; beliefs that wanting (or choosing not to want) and receiving is selfish. Or that one’s desires are “weird”, “too much” “not normal”.
The first step in healing sexual shame and embracing a positive sexuality and sexual practice is acknowledging the pain held in our bodies, memories, and belief systems.
Once acknowledged, we can tend to the shame and pain like a loving mother would tend to a wounded child. We can o er compassion, acceptance, empathy.
In addition, we can replace shame and pain with positive messages, beliefs, and actions that celebrate our sexuality and our desires.
This guided meditation is a practice to help you get started in healing your sexual shame. If you find that it is too overwhelming or flooding to practice this, please reach out for help from a therapist.
As stated earlier, please pay attention to what you feel resourced for; listen to your body, heart, and spirit. Trust yourself.
One of the keys in healing from trauma is re-establishing CHOICE. Honor yourself and your right to say “yes”, “no”, or “maybe” at any given time throughout this meditation practice.
> LINK to the Healing Sexual Shame Meditation
Transcript of the Meditation:
Come into a safe, comfortable space. You can sit or lie down either on the floor, a chair, or a bed to do this meditation.
Close your eyes.
And begin to pay attention to your breath. Breathe in for a count of 5; Breath out for a count of 5.
With each inhale, imagine that your breath is coming in through your nose, down your throat, bathing your lungs and filling your diaphragm and belly with healing, nourishing light, and energy.
With each exhale, imagine that more and more, the breath carries away pain, shame, trauma, hurt, suffering and fear.
Keep breathing. Allow yourself to settle. Tell yourself that you are safe. You are free. You are allowed to take this time to care for yourself. Your wanting matters. Your body matters. Your responses, emotions, thoughts and sensations matter.
Invite into your space a protective presence. This could be any spiritual being or guide or an angel. It could be an ancestor who feels safe and protective for you. It could be an animal presence. Or it can be a warm, healing ray of light.
Imagine this protective presence surrounding you now. Supporting you, soothing you, protecting you.
Very slowly and with intention, begin to think of an event, an experience or a message that has resulted in feeling shame in your body or in your sexuality.
Try not to choose the most harmful or painful thing for now. Just start with something less intense. The more you practice, the more you will be able to address more intense experiences and feelings with effectiveness and care.
For now, choose something that has some emotional charge, but isn’t the worst experience you ever had. Bring that experience or message to your mind. Remind yourself that you are safe. Held in divine love and protection.
Picture yourself at the age when you had this experience or received this message.
With gentle tenderness and without judgment, simply acknowledge this past experience or message as something that has brought you shame and sffering. Something that you have carried for way too long.
Connect with the emotions that might be arising. Remember you are held in loving compassionate protection. Name your experience or feeling of shame if that is surfacing now and any other emotions that might be surfacing.
Name the emotions with nonjudgmental compassion.
Be curious. You are safe now to explore the shame and any other emotions.
Where are the emotions held in your body? Are they concentrated and stuck in one specific area? Or are they more like waves flowing throughout your body?
However these emotions are surfacing, acknowledge them with the utmost tenderness and compassion. It may even help to put your hand gently on your heart as you do so.
Take a moment to imagine that these emotions are being released through your exhale. Exhaling all the pain and shame that these emotions have held. Your breath is cleansing you of all negativity and the emotions are flowing away like waves leaving the shore.
Even if they return, as emotions do, they will not stay. They will not become stuck. You will be able to observe them with tender compassion and watch them flow away into the ocean of healing waters and consciousness.
Now connect with any bodily sensation that is associated with the shame or any of the other emotions.
Again, name the sensation with tenderness and without judgment. Allow the sensation to be just as it is.
Return to your breath as your anchor, if you feel the need to do so. Remind yourself that you are protected and held in loving compassion.
Now, imagine a warm, healing light shining in this part of your body. Soothing the sensation, healing the pain and shame. Imagine that the shame and any other emotions or sensations are being released, soothed, healed by this loving light. All the shame, all the emotions, all of the sensations are fading as the light is healing you.
Take a moment to connect with any thoughts associated with the shame.
Any negative, harmful message or script have you told yourself. Or a negative, harmful message or script others have told you. These thoughts maintain the shame and keep it alive.
With gentle compassion, acknowledge the pain and suffering these thoughts have brought you.
Set an intention to release the thoughts. State out loud or silently, “I am ready to release these negative thoughts. I no longer align with these messages. I am freeing myself from the pain and shame these messages have brought me. I am releasing these thoughts or beliefs or messages that have kept me imprisoned with sexual shame and negativity.”
Picture the healing light infusing your entire being. Imagine the negative messages being released. Leaving your mind, your memory, your cells, your entire body, and being.
Now take a moment and create a new, positive, affirming message. It can be anything that feels loving, positive, celebratory, honoring of you and your sexuality.
Repeat that message out loud or silently to yourself three times.
You are now free. Breathe deeply. Feel the potency of your breath. Confirming your healing, your release, and your freedom.
From this point forward, anytime you get stuck in a negative emotion, sensation or thought that results in feeling sexual shame, you can repeat the positive mantra you just created for yourself and you can return to this practice.
With this practice and with your positive words of affirmation, you are empowered to create a positive sexual identity and practice that brings you freedom, pleasure, vibrancy, belonging, and well-being.
Return to your breath. Take a few deep inhales to the count of 5 and a few deep exhales to the count of 5.
Slowly transition back to the space you are in by wiggling your toes, gently stretching and rubbing your hands together.
Slowly blink open your eyes.
And just name 5 things that you can see right now in your field of vision. Look around the room and name 5 things you can see.
Name 4 things you can touch. You can touch the chair, your body, your hands, your hair. Maybe you have a dog sitting next to you or a cat or a blanket.
Name 3 things you are hearing right now, including my voice.
Name 2 things you can smell.
Name 1 thing you can taste.
When you are ready return to your day with confidence and joy.
Post-Meditation Suggestions:
If it feels good and relevant to you, please journal after this meditation. Write about what this meditation experience felt like. If you would like, you can briefly journal after each meditation and track the changes you experience.
You can also journal after your sexual experiences in which you practiced mindful awareness and using your breath to anchor you into the present moment. Write about how you are cultivating a non-attachment to any anxiety, thoughts, or emotions that may surface.
Making sure as you journal you do so with compassion and non-judgment.