And, I remember the summer weekend when at 15 1/2 I finally agreed we could go ahead and have intercourse. I gave up my virginity in my very own bed while my parents were out of town and my younger sister was staying at her friend’s house. It was SUCH a "ho-hum crasher" for me. Despite my anticipation of higher heights of sensual delight, I actually felt very little sensation, pleasurable or otherwise during penetration. I seemed not to have a hymen: there was no pain, no bleeding. I remember asking him afterward if that was "really all there is to it," feeling hugely disappointed.

Of course, in the way of such things in the middle 1950’s (and maybe always!), once intercourse became part of the agenda, our heretofore deliciously sensual erotic play became more and more abbreviated. My young man became less and less available for all the luscious touching in which, before then, I had so delighted. Penetration was now always his focus. There seemed to be nothing I could do or say to bring back the earlier, slower, more interesting (to me) flow.

I wondered why intercourse was so uninteresting, so unexciting to me. I began to worry that there might be something "wrong" with me. Already more sexually precocious than my peers, and unwilling to reveal this new secret, I had only the book hidden in my parents’ dresser to consult. Unlike the later, 1980’s "Hite Report" that affirmed the prevalence of this experience, "Love Without Fear" offered little to help dissuade me from the sense that there was indeed something awry with me. What I read there did lead me to decide to pretend that intercourse was more interesting, more pleasurable to me than it ever really was.

When I went off to college a year later, (the very avant-garde, notoriously sexually liberated Bennington College) a rather insidious process took shape in me. Hating what I saw as the disempowered traditional woman’s role as "seducee," I chose to seduce-before-I-was-seduced. Adopting the persona of a sexually sophisticated, liberated and aggressively exploring woman, I readily began engaging with many different male partners. An avid observer/learner, I became more and more adept at pleasing men sexually. I fancied myself a courtesan.

My sexuality became a mental power and control game. There was little in all this sexual behavior that had any of the delicious embodied sensuality of my earliest experiences. My "pleasure," such as it was, came from the sense of being in control of the sexual "program," from feeling superior to the sex-hungry, unaware young men I "played" with.

This intense focus readily eclipsed my earlier concern that there was something "wrong" with me. For the most part, this "sexuality" of mine was for me utterly disembodied and physically pleasureless. Still, I continued this repetitive, unhealthy behavior with men through most of my years in college and graduate school.

In graduate school my horizons expanded to include many senior professors in my field. With only two exceptions (both adjunct professors), these men were from universities other than the one in which I was enrolled. Most of these were brief, short-lived encounters. Most were, as body experiences for me, joyless. Rather, I enjoyed the "power" I felt over these many men who were so unaware (of anything but their own need) that they never realized how utterly absent I was.

In my last year of graduate school, I did meet a very special man with whom I actually developed a personal relationship. As we dated, then lived together and later married for a time, my sexual life became for a while more embodied, more sensual–no longer a power/control game.

Yet, we had married in the early days of the era of "open marriage," "swinging" (intentional, episodic partner swapping) and the first wave of non-monogamy. And, not long after we began our brief marriage, I agreed to his wish to become involved in "sexual adventuring." For me, it was a whole new season of disembodied, objectified, unsensual sexuality. (Even as our dialogues about the adventuring seemed, uncannily, to deepen our emotional intimacy with each other.)

The "adventures" were mentally rather than physically interesting/stimulating. Again I was living out a persona that was far from what was real inside of me. Sometimes we wound up in scary, unpleasant or vaguely unsavory situations. In the end, I opted out, first of the "adventuring," then of the marriage.

In the years that followed, I began seriously attending to the work of reclaiming my body. To re-embodying myself after years of being so cut-off from myself as a being-in-a-body. The journey brought me profoundly healing experiences with two different men each of whom seemed capable both of truly loving a woman and truly loving making sensuous, attentive love to a woman. The journey further brought me to claiming first my identity as a bisexual woman then, later, my identity as a completely woman-identified-woman. And, the journey has led me, for the past fourteen years, to honoring the self-affirming organic comfort my being-in-a-body experiences from choosing to be partner-celibate. To being in sensual/erotic/sensual relationship only with myself and the natural world.

Some dozen or so years ago, after years of ignoring those earlier painful years of my sexual history, my journey brought me to looking back on all of this from my newly embodied, more conscious self. I was horrified, mortified and devastated to realize how terribly I had mistreated my being-in-a-body! I could barely take in the extent to which I had misused my body, violated and degraded my precious self. I was completely overwhelmed by memories that filled me with disgust and intense self-loathing.

All my practice of being loving, gentle and tender with myself went out the window. I raged and ragged and yelled my distress at myself: "How could you do such hideous, unconscionable, disgusting things to/with yourself?!!!" "What on earth were you thinking?!" "How could you give those people permission to use and abuse you?!" "How could you even believe that you were ‘in control?!’"

I would feel sick, nauseated, filled with revulsion for myself. I could barely tolerate the remembering, the flashbacks. I couldn’t stop hating the me I had been that had let all of that happen. I felt totally flayed, raw. It was so awful to feel it all, I had to push it back and away, had to try to close the door on it all again.

Of course, the door wouldn’t stay closed. Periodically, visual or body memories continued to pop out and overwhelm me with pain, despair and disgust.

Then, slowly, as I continued deepening my practice of loving myself all the ways that I am, I could gradually bring the loving mommy into those awful moments of remembering. The mommy-inside held me lovingly in the midst of the memories. She reminded me that I had done the best I could with the awareness, the consciousness I had in those difficult times. That what I did then–regardless of how it felt to my now-embodied self, regardless of how misguided it was–I had done in an effort to help myself heal the woundedness in me.

The mommy-inside helped me to feel how confused, how damaged that poor young woman was. How much pain she had lived with for so long. How profoundly she needed my love and compassion to help her to heal from her terrible wounds. How alone and abandoned she had been for so long.

Slowly, I could begin to embrace that earlier broken me, to feel compassion and love and sorrow for her in her pain. I could begin to forgive her/myself for what she/I did to herself/myself, to remind her and myself that we truly did the best we could at the time.

As I could hold my earlier self with compassion, I could find room to ponder some about what may have created the foundation for her wounded and self-wounding behavior. There is certainly a lot in all of the particulars that speaks to my having had sexual abuse in my history. The one vivid conscious memory I do have of being molested is of being finger-penetrated by a stranger in the hallway of our apartment building when I was between 4 and 5 years old. Remembering how I dealt with it at the time leaves me uncertain that it in itself was "enough" to account for what followed. Yet, no other memories have yet surfaced. So perhaps it was "enough."

I hold that brave, strong and smart little 4 1/2-year-old close to my heart. I wrap her in all the love, all the celebration of her feisty courage and all the protection that she didn’t have back then when she needed it.

And, these days when those still painful flashes of remembering come up yet again, I’m able to lovingly soothe and gentle myself. I acknowledge how terribly hurtful and sad it was to have subjected myself to such dishonoring of my precious body. I remind myself to remember that even so, that was the best I could do for myself in those earlier days. I remind myself that I won’t ever need to do that to me again.

As always, I find the power in opening our hearts to ourselves endlessly awesome and compelling. It is always in finding the generosity and compassion to embrace our less than perfect selves that we grow ourselves. That we open ourselves to deeper knowing. That we begin to heal ourselves.

Closing our hearts to ourselves–hating, disowning and distancing ourselves from that which offends us about ourselves (the generally accepted cultural "prescription")–always and only stunts us, deepens our woundedness and stifles all opportunity to heal.

Consider being more loving, generous and compassionate with your tender, delicate, less than perfect self,

P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!

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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.

If you'd like a deck of your very own to support you in your journey, click here to download Order Form.

Please feel free to e-mail me at rposin@hotmail.com. to share your reflections and responses to any or all of what you find here . I'd really like to hear what touches and nourishes you!