Editor’s Note: This week’s sex-and-relationships guest-post comes from Christina Louise Dietrich. You can read more of her writing at her own blog; we plan to feature her in this slot again, and welcome your comments on this piece. — Amanda

By Christina Louise Dietrich

The last couple of weeks I’ve been having powerfully synchronous experiences with the women in my communities and it’s not coincidence. I’m sensing a convergence of divine feminine energy growing and coalescing not only in the women I speak with, but also inside my own body. It’s actually there that I’m feeling it the most intensely and I gotta say, it’s throwing me for a loop. Shaking me up. Blowing me open.

I knew that was the point when I started seriously investigating Stuff About Women Living Under Patriarchy about 18 months ago. Actually, I think it started four years ago when I gave birth, but I wasn’t really present to what had been seeded by that experience. That a key had been turned deep inside my pelvis. I hadn’t really grokked that the women who prepared me for and were present at Avery’s birth—all of them healers, activists, lovers, and teachers—were helping me set my feet on a path to Self/Goddess discovery.

The thing about getting blown open, shaken up, and grounded down is that all those things require a vast amount of personal surrender and trust. Two things I had literally zero experience with before that 14-inch head opened up my center and really began the process of identity dissolution.

Because there’s nothing like being a new mother to get a taste of surrender.

A little context before proceeding: I was born in 1971 America to an emotionally unprepared mother, raised by a fundamentally Christian family, and was thoroughly indoctrinated by our public schools/religious institutions. I have been thoroughly steeped in patriarchy. As a consequence of that and early-childhood family trauma/violence, by the time I reached my mid 30s and began psychotherapy, I had no idea what the Divine Feminine was. I’d been taught to believe God was a man with a lot of unfair rules and stipulations about achieving, well, anything of real value.

My Divine Feminine had no voice and I sought no female voices to encourage me. In fact, I actively avoided women because I’d never gotten along with them, didn’t trust them, didn’t want to deal with them. They were illogical, manipulative bitches and I had better ways to spend my time.

I had stopped listening to and trusting my intuition around the age of 5 because God and Men told me she wasn’t worth heeding; that she was a liar and a danger to my spiritual safety. I derided witches and crones and healers with a vigor that would have made the patriarchy proud. I laughed at the notion of stones vibrating or plants communicating or people living peacefully. All my therapy to date had been conducted through an inherited lens of dismissing and minimizing feminine power, intuition, feelings, and strength.

I was an excellent student.

So, in the context of that—and with enough exposure to powerful women/witches under my belt I began to think they might be Onto Something—I started by reading Clarissa Pinkola Estés and Riane Eisler. I deepened my commitment to and practice of Holistic Peer Counseling (HPC) and started counseling with more people; women, to be precise. I continued my focused psychotherapy work around my mother and the maternal ancestral patterns I’d been handed unconsciously. Things continued to shift and unfold; snarls were being picked apart, hurtful patterns received the loving attention they needed to integrate, and my ability to stay present with difficult feelings (mine and others’) continued to grow.

And then Shit Got Real.

My husband and I brought HPC into the bedroom after having avoided it on numerous levels for a couple years. Primarily because of my wounds and their armoring. Because of my inability to trust that any man truly wanted to love and see Me. That any man could want to go slowly and carefully and give me the space I needed to feel safe before having sex. That I had actually married that man and he was standing in front of me, begging me to let him in so that he could help give Her (that terrified little girl/woman who felt like a non-consensual whore) the loving attention and care she needed to Be Seen.

I started to feel safe during sex. Like I could ask for what I wanted and it wouldn’t be laughed at or put down as “romance” or “lame cuddling” or “girl stuff” or whatever the patriarchy likes to label things that aren’t penis-centered and hard-hitting. My husband spent time worshiping my body, honoring my courage, and chose to put himself in a position to wait for my consent, my desire, my demands. He showed me that I was worth waiting for, that who I was mattered, that I was a person of value.

I am blessed and he is amazing, and I can’t emphasize enough how critical this stage was for me. How it was required before I could truly begin to listen and heed Her words.

Because once I felt safe, began to build confidence, and increasingly let Her come out during sex, I felt a powerful shift in my pelvis. She demanded that we get fucked harder and harder, and his fucking me unlocked something primal and deep; a wound so old and so buried that it could only be massaged from the inside. Could only be reached by someone wholly committed to tracking it down and pummeling it. The lock that childbirth began to open was blown apart by his loving attention; the strikeplate thrown across the room, the doorjam exploded, the lock mechanism tangled and impotent.

She had awoken and there was no going back. How could I want to go back when, for the first time in my life, I truly believed I was powerful, trustworthy, beautiful, desirable, intelligent, and INTUITIVE. I was grounded in my root chakra and it was AWESOME. Literally and truly awesome.

The difficulty arose when I would leave the house every day to go to work. I work in tech, which as most of you know is a heavily male-dominated culture, and I was having a hard time staying aware of my intuition while swimming in ManTown. (Disclaimer: I love my job and many of my coworkers; they are truly wonderful and socially/politically active. And most of them are still men. Not their fault.) I started to get worried, to feel off balance, to wonder if I could lose my connection to intuition. How was I supposed to balance The Logic and The Woo? How could I stay true to my chosen path?

The answer came from a woman in my HPC community; a woman I consider to be a powerful witch and seer, someone more spiritually aware in the Ways of Women than I. She and a couple other HPC ladies had begun doing yoni steams, which totally triggered and squicked me for some reason. However, something else she offered completely resonated with me almost like I heard a deep GONG in my core.

Yoni eggs.

*Note on the word yoni; I am not a student of Hinduism and so, being sensitive to appropriation, I balked at using the term. However, when reviewing the words we typically apply to the female genitals, none of them felt respectful/beautiful in the way I was coming to consider my genitals/pelvic parts, and they also weren’t sufficiently comprehensive. I didn’t want to address JUST my labia or JUST my vagina; I wanted to address the WHOLE AREA. So, yoni. And pussy. I like pussy.

A yoni egg is, as you might expect, an egg-shaped stone/mineral, usually 1–2 inches long that’s inserted into the vagina and left there for some amount of time that’s determined by the wearer, her Intuition, or her body’s willingness to hold it. There’s a lot of them on Etsy; you can even get them from Amazon.

I have two: a 2-inch model made of mahogany obsidian and a 3-inch model made of selenite. Every material is purported to have its own healing or meditation properties. I phrase it like that to cover my ass and because I’m not psychically sensitive enough to pick up on the vibrations or properties. This is one of those cases where I’m choosing to surrender and trust that regardless of what they’re supposed to do, they are more than ably providing me with what I needed them to do, which is help me focus. If they also increase my sexual power (mahogany obsidian) or mental clarity/psychic ability (selenite), all the better.

*Practical note: Yes, they can slip out into the toilet, especially if you’re bearing down/pooping. The first time I wore it to work, I dropped it in the toilet and it made a very audible CLANK when it hit the porcelain. I hope the other woman in the bathroom was confused and/or titillated. It’s important to get your Order of Operations right or you’re gonna be fishing.

I currently wear the smaller one all the time because doing so provides me with an ongoing psychic and felt connection to my Intuition/root chakra. It helps me stay focused on who I am while moving through the world getting blasted by violent and abusive messages. It’s also giving me something to share with the other powerful and emerging women I interact with; in one particular case, the woman in question had already received the message from a third party that she needed to begin putting crystals in her vagina.

So, like I said at the start, synchronous things are happening. The women are converging and finding our voices and accessing our power. It feels really big and part of me is so excited to be on what feels like a leading edge of discovery and healing; an edge where regular women from everyday places are tapping their Intuition and speaking their truth.

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Christina Louise Dietrich, a technical writer by trade, says of herself: “I write because I am claiming the voice my family and my society tried to silence, the voice that was my divine birthright. I am a woman, a mother, a feminist, a wife. I am compassionate, judgmental, loving, a bully, empathetic, obstinate, caring, rigid, and creative. I’m passionate about systems, beauty, process, experience, trees, interconnections, transitions, logistics, balance, and clarity. I manifest the Amazon, the Androgyne, and the Mother-to-be-Crone.”