My Personal Sexual Harassment & Groping Score: What’s Yours?

October 15, 2016/in Blog, In The News, Sheri Winston Blogs, Thought Pieces/by Sheri Winston

All this talk of groping and forced kissing got me thinking. What’s my count of unwanted sexual encroachment? What’s yours?

I consider myself a woman who has not been sexually assaulted. Not in the ‘classic’ sense of being raped or sodomized. I wasn’t incested nor have I experienced date rape. And yet, as the cultural conversation turns to the topics of harassment, groping and unwanted kissing, I started to think about my list of negative sexual experiences that do actually constitute sexual assault. My list was surprisingly (and yet not surprisingly) long. My first unwanted experience was with the milkman (yes, in the old days when someone delivered milk to your door!). I was seven and he grabbed me and tongue-kissed me! While it never occurred to me to tell my parents, I did have the good sense to never go near him again. In fact, one day my whole family visited him at his farm and I distinctly remember being very careful to not be alone with him all the entire day despite his efforts to ‘show me the hayloft.’

I’m not counting any of the incidents that occurred in my sexual explorations with boys and men because I was freely participating (albeit from a sometimes ambivalent place).

Next stop: I moved to New York City right after high school. I was an innocent (in the ways of the street, at least) young ‘hottie’ roaming the wilds of New Yawk, dressed in my artsy thrift-shop vintage slutwear.

There I had a variety of unpleasant, infuriating and sometimes scary experiences.

The first shocker was the catcalls and commentary from men on the street. No one in the suburbs where I grew up had ever screamed lewd remarks about my boobs, described the things they wanted to do to me or the ways in which I could be of service to them. At first, I shot back nasty comments and put-downs, but that just seemed to fire them up to assault me with nastier words, including, of course what a bitch I was for not swooning at their feet or dropping to my knees. I soon learned that ignoring them and swallowing my rage was a safer approach and likely to end the verbal assaults more quickly.

There was the creepy guy who followed me on the street muttering about all the things he wanted to do to me. There was the silent hoodie guy who followed me out of the subway at the mostly deserted hour of 5 AM and stalked me through the streets. Both times, being in neighborhoods I knew, I headed for an open deli, went in and told the men working there that a creepy guy was following me and got their support and protection until the predator went away.

I was groped on the subway a number of times in the rush-hour packed car, unable to know where the offending hand was coming from. I saw several flashers and a few causal subway masturbators.

There was the guy on the street who grabbed my ass. I spun around and kicked him the kneecap with my pointy-toed boot. My friend was worried that he was going to knife me or shoot me, but I was still young enough to feel invulnerable and pissed-off enough to want to hurt him. So I did.

And then there were the clubs and bars. Another guy grabbed my ass and got kicked in the kneecap, too. There was the man who grabbed me from behind while I was dancing—he got an elbow in his solar plexus. The next one grabbed me on the dance floor (a stomp on his instep for that one). The one who glommed onto my girlfriend got my fist to his solar plexus … and so on and on and on. I guess I’m lucky that none of them hit back, stabbed me or shot me.

I believe my impulse to hit back came from having an older brother. As little kids we sometimes fought, winding up rolling on the floor in an all-out brawl. He was older and bigger, but I fought back with whatever I could. I fought ‘dirty’ when I needed to, kicking, punching, pulling hair and even biting when he was overpowering me. I’m grateful that I learned to fight back—and also grateful that my fighting back against the gropers never got me injured. Again, I now realize how lucky I was.

Don’t forget the landlord, who after fixing my toilet grabbed me and laid a slobbery gross tongue-kiss on my unsuspecting mouth. He was a big strong guy and I was a small woman, alone in my apartment. So rather than hit back, I threatened to tell his wife if he ever did anything like that again. (That definitely scared him!) I still made sure never to be alone with again.

As far as bosses or co-workers, I was very lucky to never have a predatory guy at a job, but then again, I’ve been in business for myself for most of my work life. So, while I can certainly be a bitch to myself, I never created a self-hostile workplace vibe.

So, to add up my creepy guy score: Gropers: A dozen or more. Flashers and public masturbators: Five or six, as near I can recall. Unwanted kissing (plus extra points for the first guy because I was a child): Two. Overall, my physical harassment score is over twenty.

If I were to include all the men who cat-called me on the street, the count would soar. That number seems endless, a multitude of rude aggressive harassment from countless men.

In sum, I’ve encountered lots and lots of sex-related boundary violations. Fortunately, they were mostly relatively minor. I consider myself blessed to have been spared more aggressive and invasive sexual assault. I don’t believe my experience is unusual. As a midwife and gynecology provider for over twenty years and as a sexuality educator for 17 years, I am well aware of how often women are violated.

But as I ponder my own, relatively benign history, I have to reassess my earlier statement that I haven’t experienced sexual assault. While the violations were ‘minor,’ the effects on me were not. I have lived, as I think most women do, in a culture that has made it necessary for me to be on alert every time I walk out my door. A culture where the so-called ‘locker room’ has potentially invaded every space and created a need to be vigilant in an environment that feels unsafe.

Has the time finally come where a culture that creates such a hostile and threatening environment for women will no longer be tolerated?

As I pondered these issues and I started counting, I recalled more and more incidents that qualified as sexual assault and harassment. The final score: hundreds of men.

That got me to thinking, inspired me to write this post and has me wondering: how long is your list, especially once you include the full range of ways you’ve been can violated, trespassed and harassed? What’s your score?

When will the time come when, as women and as a culture, we decide that any number is unacceptable. Are we arriving at the time when we’ve finally had enough?

Wholistic Sexuality: Connection, Power & Passion

September 15, 2016/in Blog, Sheri Winston Blogs, Thought Pieces/by Sheri Winston

Wholistic Sexuality™

A Paradigm of Empowerment, Connection & Passion

Are You Craving Connection?

We all long for a sense of union and yearn for attachment. Everyone craves deep connection. Yet, so many people feel alone, and live shadowed by a sense of disconnection and isolation. Having sex is certainly one of the common practices that people use to feel, at least temporarily, united. Unfortunately, they often don’t have the kind of sex they dream of and wind up feeling even more disengaged then ever. I believe that part of the problem is the way that we think about sex, about connection and about our selves.

I offer you a new way to relate, a new model of sexuality—Wholistic Sexuality™. In essence, Wholistic Sexuality is about connection, beginning with your connection to your Self.

It’s All About You

That’s right. I’m saying that at heart (or perhaps lower) sex isn’t about what you do with other people behind a closed door. First and foremost, your sexuality is about your relationship with your Self.

And, let’s face it, you’re complicated. One way to understand your Self is to understand that you’re made up of interconnected, overlapping spheres, the domains of your mind, body, spirit and heart, which are linked and surrounded by an energy matrix. You are your past, both all that you remember and all that you’ve forgotten, as well as your present and the myriad futures you imagine. Your relationship with yourself is formed by genetics, upbringing, and experiences. It’s an amalgam of your beliefs, assumptions, and values. Your sexuality is composed of fantasy and reality, dancing with your deep desires, permeated by needs and challenges. Your sexuality is an inherent part of who you are, and all that makes you, uniquely you.

It’s About Everything

Your sexuality is also about your connection to everyone and everything. It includes relationships with your intimate partners as well as your friends and family, influenced by media, history and culture. It’s part of all aspects of your life including your work and your play, your communities and spiritual traditions. Like a hologram, your sexuality is a microcosm that reflects and manifests everything from the personal to the planetary.

Lifelong Learning Journey

We’re on a lifelong journey of learning and discovery and that is especially true about our sexuality. Here’s a key fact to comprehend about sex: much of our sexuality is learned, including our erotic capacities and responses. Like learning to play an instrument and make beautiful music, we learn how to play our selves to make sexual magic.

Practice Makes Access!

Each of us comes fully equipped with all the everything we need to access ecstasy. You can think of your self as having tools, of mind, body, spirit, heart & energy. We all have the equipment but not everyone learns how to fully operate it and really make it sing. Just like learning to play the piano, our sexual skills need to be learned, and then practiced if we want to develop mastery. The more you practice, the easier it gets.

How You Learn

Learning is a process of skill-building. First you need to develop a foundation of basic skills. Once you become adept at the essentials, you can go on to cultivate more advanced abilities. The foundational skill set is your solo-skills, that is, the ability to competently play your own instrument. Once you have facility with your own sexual self skills, you can master partner skills and play delightful duets with others. Everyone can learn these skills and become sexually adept. Of course, there’s always more to learn on the journey to erotic mastery. Even virtuoso musicians always continually hone their craft.

Meaningful Models

In order to learn to be a sexual virtuoso you need to know what’s possible, then how to get there. Bad maps, which our culture provides in plenty, don’t get you where you want to go. It’s crucial to have accurate maps, usable guides and true templates for this journey. When you have functional and empowering models of what sex is and what it can be, then you can more easily follow those paths and reach your full sexual potential.

Language License

We need to free our words and discover, create or reclaim luscious, comfortable and hot language to talk about our sexuality, our bodies, and our desires. Only then we can really start to talk about sex, learn about it and consciously create our sexuality.

Genital Reality

Believe it or not, our current understanding of female and male genitalia is incomplete and inaccurate. How you play your instrument or anyone else’s if you don’t even know what’s really there and how it operates? We need to know the whole truth about our bodies. The lack of this fundamental information has myriad serious repercussions.

Erotic Owners Operating Manual

After you get the picture of the basic equipment, then you need to know how it works, and how you can make it work better. For example, once you understand the process of arousal, and learn to fully utilize your innate tools, you can dramatically enhance your sexual experiences. Once you understand the erectile equipment or how our nervous systems are hard-wired for pleasure we have much more ability to utilize our glorious bodies.

Celebrate Sex

We need to reclaim sex from the shame-mongers. Sex is the inherently sacred power that creates life. When you recognize your potential, you are unleashed to explore the vast and potentially transcendent realms of orgasm and ecstasy. Your sexuality is a powerful, transformative gift that’s your personal manifestation of the universal life force. Sexual pleasure is your human birthright. Claim it! Free your sexuality and you’ll tap into your very own vital wellspring of joy. After all, it’s yours!

A Breastmilk Theory of Love

August 8, 2016/in Birth, Pregnancy & Breastfeeding, Blog, Sexual Health, Sheri Winston Blogs, Thought Pieces, Women/by Sheri Winston

The Milky Way by Rubens

A Breastmilk Theory of Love: Relationships, Love and Mothering

Does our infant feeding experience affect how we relate to relationships? Is there a template for love laid down in early life that creates unconscious patterns that lead to either healthy or dysfunctional connections? Hear what a Wholistic Sexuality educator, former nurse-midwife and intimate arts counselor thinks about the deep connections between the breast and the heart.

If we’d had our needs met, completely and efficiently, with love, security and nourishment all coming together from the abundant breast of a loving mama—would it be easier as adults to form secure and trusting love relationships? To not be possessive and jealous? To trust in the abundance of love and that our beloved(s) will be there when we need them? To be able to receive pleasure? I believe it would.

The Bountiful Breast

Ah, breastmilk, Mother Nature’s most perfect food, the true nectar of the Goddess. Evolution has developed an exquisite arrangement for nurturing young mammals, perfected through millennia. It is an elegantly simple system, based on supply and demand. A human breast is essentially a milk factory. When a baby sucks on the areola of the breast, it stimulates receptors which tell the breast (via the brain) to respond by producing milk. As the infant grows and its caloric needs increase, the baby gets hungrier and sucks more, producing more milk. Despite myths to the contrary, the breast is never empty. There is an endless supply of milk, always as much as a child needs. As long as the system is not interrupted, and the mother is adequately hydrated and nourished, there will always be an abundance of glorious milk.

Magic Milk

Mammalian milk has evolved to meet the highly specific needs of each particular species. Human milk contains the exact nutrients in the perfect balance to grow the complex brains and bodies of our infants. It contains living immune factors to protect the health of the child. It teaches both our immune system and our metabolism how to function properly for the rest of our lifetimes by mechanisms that are still poorly understood. Children who are breastfed for a year (or ideally two or more) suffer from less of every known disease, not just as infants but throughout their entire lifetime.

Relationship 101

Sweet and plentiful breastmilk is the perfect food, always ready, warm and delicious. And it comes in an attractive and time-tested package, that of the woman’s breast, firmly attached to the warm, soft, breathing, pulsating body of the mother. This perfect food is delivered from within the context of the first love relationship that the baby knows. This is how evolution set up the system. When the baby human feels one of its basic needs, that of hunger, the need is met, not with an external object, but by their own personal Beloved. Fed from her warm yielding body, cradled in her strong arms, enveloped in her scent, her loving touch, steadied by her heartbeat and breathing, gazed at by bliss-filled eyes. Ideally, the human need for food is answered in the context of a relationship, by a person, with love.

Sad Stand-in

For those who truly cannot breastfeed, it’s good that we have a substitute that’s at least adequate to prevent significant infant mortality. And, of course, a bottle can be given while the baby is held lovingly in arms. But nothing from a factory can come close to replicating a system that evolution has perfected.

Unfortunately, many modern industrial culture women believe that they can’t nurse, don’t have enough milk and that their body has failed. The truth is that it is our system that has failed them. In nature, it would be extremely rare for a woman (or any other mammal) to not be able to adequately nourish her child unless she’s starving. In our bottle-feeding culture many women have unsuccessful nursing experiences because the natural process, which certainly begins before and during labor as well as after, has been repeatedly disrupted in multiple ways. The result is that the elegant system is too disturbed to function properly and nursing doesn’t work despite many women’s heroic efforts to fix it. This is more then a shame, this is a tragic epidemic as the dysfunction of this system has so many sad consequences.

The Barren Bottle

Compare the perfect sweetness and ideal nourishment of breastmilk to the synthetic formula given to most of us as children and to many babies even now. Artificial infant formula tastes nasty, like wallpaper paste. It’s often given in a transparent bottle, clearly in a finite amount. When the bottle is empty, that’s it. It’s all gone. There is no more. The need for food is met, not in the context of a warm and loving relationship, from a soft and sensuous mother’s body, but with a ‘thing’, a hard and separate object. This is so removed from the context of relationship that it need not even be given while the child is held. A bottle can be propped up or self-held by an older baby.

Terrible Template

This forms the template for love and attachment that many of us struggle with for the rest of our lives. Is it any wonder that so many people in our culture, as adults, look to consumer goods, to external objects, to satisfy their oh-so-human needs? But more stuff is never enough to really fill those needs. So we go out and buy more stuff, newer stuff, bigger stuff, better, faster, sexier stuff. More, more, more. But it’s really no good. No matter how much we accumulate, objects will never satisfy our needs for love, security and acceptance. Only relationships can do that.

Sick Substitute

Moreover, artificial infant feeding formulas are unhealthy and barely adequate substitutes that can’t come close to Mama Nature’s perfect food. Indeed, they cause innumerable infant health problems, including gastrointestinal distress, allergies, irritability and malaise. Food, nourishment and the associated feeling of love can become deeply connected with feelings of sickness and pain.

Life Lessons

In our first few years we learn some of our most basic life lessons. Is the world a good or bad place? Am I loved? Can I trust that my needs will be met? Is my body a good place to be in?

Should we be surprised that so many people have mixed up feelings of love and desire with pain and dysfunction? After all, for most of us our first model of relationship taught us that food and comfort come from an object that is separate from another body. That satisfying our hunger is likely to make us feel uncomfortable and even ill. We learned that nourishment is finite in amount and unpleasant tasting to boot. It’s no wonder that we feel that love is a limited commodity with only so much to go around. It’s not surprising that we can’t get comfortable and form trusting relationships with others. Is that why it’s so hard for some people to receive pleasure? Scarcity consciousness and bottle-fed limits are deeply ingrained templates. Bottle-contained artificial infant formula, unsatisfying, toxic, and unpalatable has confused us about the nature of love.

Reframing Scarcity and Embracing Abundance

For myself, I’m trying to re-frame my beliefs about love and attachment, about scarcity and abundance, from a breastmilk perspective. It’s remedial education, to be sure. It’s a process that requires practice and repetition to succeed at changing (or at least influencing) such old core beliefs. I’m rethinking love, in the breast-milk model. I’m granting myself my denied birthright, reminding myself, over and over, and over again that there is an abundance of love, there’s always as much as you need and plenty to go around. And that if you need more, just suck and more will come. The breast is never empty, just like the heart. There is always enough. And my hunger can only truly be satisfied by human relationships, never by things. True milk, like true love is plentiful and nourishing, never finite or toxic. And it tastes really, really good.

No wonder the breasts are right over the heart. It is where love comes from. Endlessly, without limits, because the breast is never empty and the heart can always give more love. Read more

The Ecstatic Journey of Birth and Sex

June 5, 2016/in Birth, Pregnancy & Breastfeeding, Blog, Sexual Health, Sheri Winston Blogs, Thought Pieces, Women/by Sheri Winston

The Ecstatic Journey of Birth and Sex

Sex, Fertility, Bliss, Bonding & Birth—One Elegant, Ecstatic System

Here’s the straightforward (and elegant) reality: women’s sexual, emotional and reproductive structures and systems are one connected, coordinated, integrated arrangement. Sex, pregnancy, birth, orgasm, breast-feeding, bleeding (and not bleeding) — all participate in the same grand system. Science tends to break systems down into their components, in the process often overlooking the fact that the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. It’s an approach that has its virtues, but misses the forest for the trees. While the female sexual system does depend on the contributions of muscles, hormones, nerves, psyche, energy, neurochemistry and more, it’s not just a compilation of parts. It’s a unified, brilliantly designed system, and we’re missing something important if we don’t see it in that light.

Connected Systems

In humans, sex and reproduction, love and lust, and care and connection all overlap and interconnect. There are not three separate systems, one for pleasure, one for reproduction and one for bonding. It’s all one integrated, multi-purpose arrangement. It makes evolutionary sense that this is so. While it’s certainly possible to have unconnected, uncaring sex, we are definitely hard-wired for connection.

The Evolution of Human Female Sexuality

This is especially true for women, for whom sex is a high-risk activity. Female humans have limited reproductive opportunities, unlike males with their unending supply of sperm. Pregnancy and child-rearing are activities that require an enormous amount of time and energy. Since it takes human babies many years to become independent, and since two can raise a family more easily than one, having sex with someone you are emotionally bonded to tends to be a successful reproductive strategy.

Sex and Birth: Joined Journeys

Our culture tends to see birth and sex as unrelated activities. Not that people don’t understand that sex is what gets the baby started, but the subsequent processes—pregnancy, birth and breast-feeding—are generally seen as maternal, not sexual. This is a false dichotomy. The fact is that arousal and labor are very similar, and so are orgasm and birth. While it’s true that sex is intensely pleasurable and birth is wildly intense (and often intensely painful), both are consuming, extraordinary and powerful processes that are similar by evolutionary design, and not by coincidence.

Sex and giving birth are not just two ends of a journey: they are the same journey, an intimately connected system that follows a primal evolutionary template. Evolutionary design conservatively uses the same equipment, energy and biochemical tides in both the sex and birth experiences. Both journeys also involve similarly altered states of consciousness, with the kindred trance states choreographed by the same chemistry.

The Same Trip

Both the first stage of labor and the process of arousal are involve surrender, release and opening. Each requires a person to go with the flow, turn inwards and become entranced. Both orgasm and the decidedly more active propulsive second part of labor involve adrenalin-mediated action.

Also, either process can get derailed by the same antagonists—fear, anxiety, and the inability to trust and to open. Yet another antagonist for both is stimulation of the analytical neocortical brain, which can cause either process to stall. Despite our generalized cultural anxiety, labor and birth have the potential to be powerful, transformative and even ecstatic experiences. Some women actually have orgasms during the birthing process!

Surrender in Safety

As a practical matter, it’s useful to keep the parallels between sex and birth in mind. As a midwife with over two decades’ experience birthing babies, I can say with certainty that, to have the best possible birth experience, you should choose your birth place the same way you’d select a place to make love — where you’ll feel safe, private and undisturbed. Surround yourself with trustworthy allies and people who have faith in the innate wisdom of the natural birth process. Only when a woman feels secure can she open to the powerful tides of arousal or labor and release into orgasm, birth or ideally orgasmic birth in a flood tide of pleasure, wonder and love.

The Milky Way by Rubens

Love Fest at the Breast

Breast-feeding is also part of women’s sexual experience, as it’s designed to be a pleasurable and even ecstatic lovefest between the sacred and intertwined dyad of mama and baby. The hormones of in-loveness and bonding are there to help us survive the exhausting demands of parenting and ensure that we nurture our offspring instead of ignoring or abandoning them, as we’d surely do if we didn’t love them madly.

The Integral Nature of Female Sexuality

All the aspects of the journey — cycles, fertility, pregnancy, arousal, orgasm, birth and breast-feeding — are part of the integral whole that is female sexuality. It is one of the tragedies of our culture that we’ve severed pregnancy, birth and breast-feeding from their messy, earthy, embodied sexual roots. To fully appreciate female sexuality, we must remember these connections, which hold true at a primordial level whether the woman in question chooses to (or is able to) reproduce or not.

Beyond that, we must also bear in mind that the integral nature of female sexuality does not begin and end with the body. The emotions are involved, too. There are not separate processes for love and lust. All these circuits are connected to and by the biggest sex organ of all, the brain. We’re hard-wired at all levels to bond, be blissful and to birth!

Welcome to Erotic U.

May 22, 2016/in Blog, Ideas & Info, Sheri Winston Blogs, Thought Pieces/by Sheri Winston

Welcome to Erotic U.

Many people believe that sex is just something you do, no instruction required. What they don’t understand is that we’ve been learning about sex our whole lives. From how your genitals were handled during diaper changes to your first back-seat fumbles, from adolescent jokes to TV sitcoms, from textbooks to the plethora of porn—you’ve been learning about sex your whole life. You’ve absorbed innumerable lessons about your body, pleasure, relationships, power dynamics, what is and isn’t okay to talk about, suitable language, gender roles, what’s sexually appropriate, what’s hot and not, and much more. Your teachers have been your families of origin, schools (and playgrounds), places of worship, your peers and our ubiquitous entertainment and advertising culture. This is your real sex ed and it’s immensely powerful. You don’t choose to take this class; it just happens. Much of our sexuality education has been unconscious and, for the most part, unquestioned.

A lot of people believe that when it comes to your capacity for sexual pleasure, you have to play the cards you were dealt, good, bad or indifferent—there’s not much room for improvement. People typically believe that learning sexual skills is only about improving your ability to please your partners (like learning to give great oral sex). However, many of your own sexual abilities, including your sexual responses, turn-ons, pleasure pathways and desires, are learned—and therefore amenable to conscious learning. You can learn how to get turned on more easily and in more ways, how to deepen your arousal, and how to become orgasmic (or more orgasmic, or crazy-orgasmic). More broadly, you can learn to become an expert at optimizing your own pleasure.

This is a slightly modified excerpt from Sheri’s award-winning Women’s Anatomy of Arousal: Secret Maps to Buried Pleasure.

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Sacred Sex Starts with Sacred Intention

May 11, 2016/in Blog, Ideas & Info, Sexy Skills, Sheri Winston Blogs, Thought Pieces/by Sheri Winston

Sacred Sex Starts with Sacred Intention

Bliss Dance by Tony Webster

The Sacredness of Sex

All primal cultures recognized the sacredness of sex. After all, sex makes life, so how could it be anything other than sacred? In cultures that especially revered sexuality, Eros was considered a path to connect to the gods and goddesses, to the Divine. Sex was considered a prayer and an invitation to fertility for all life and all beings. Any babies that resulted from sex were an added blessing.

Many of these cultures used similar practices and techniques to draw on the power of Eros in service to the sacred. My approach to sacred sex is drawn from the many paths that cultures throughout time have followed to honor the spiritual in matters of the body and the bedroom.

‘Sacred’ means different things to different people. For our purposes, we can start with the idea that sacredness is what makes things feel special, cherished and unique. For me, it’s more than that, though. The ‘sacred’ is closely related to the notion of ‘spirit,’ which I see as something real and also to be celebrated.

When I refer to spirit, I’m not talking about religion or even spirituality. Perhaps because of my decades as a practicing midwife, I think of spirit as life’s incorporeal aspect, as the part of you that entered your body-mind when you took your first breath. It’s the magic spark that animates you beyond the mechanistic physical plane. But it’s not just in you—it’s in everything. When I write about connecting to spirit, I mean connecting to the sanctity of life, the holiness of all beings, and the sacred fire within you. It’s the Divine not as a separate, superior being, but as the mysterious force that’s manifest in everything. When your sex is integrated with your spirit, it can lead to not just transcendent mind-blowing sex, but a personal and ecstatic experience of the Divine.

Spirit is what the Native American Lakota people call Wakan Tanka, the ‘Great Mysterious Power’ or the ‘sacredness that resides in everything.’ It’s the ineffable energy that, among other things, connects the carnal erotic to the mystery beyond matter.

We have been endowed with tools that enable us to ride sex’s magic carpet into the sacred realm. Some of these are optional—sacred sound, for instance. One, however is not. This is sacred intention.

Sacred Intention

Holding the intention to make something sacred is your most basic spiritual tool. You can use your other spiritual tools to make your intention more concrete (which often helps), but your most essential skill is the intention to have your sexual practice be sacred.

There’s something magical in this. If you hold the intention for something to be spiritual or sacred, that’s what it becomes. It’s a simple yet profound practice. You can use sacred intention whenever you have sex, be it solo or partnered, a quick snack or a prolonged feast. Define a sacred purpose for your pleasure, create a consecrated container, touch on your sacred intention during your erotic activities, appreciate and affirm the holiness of your erotic actions—any of these choices can be transformative. If you wish, you can dedicate your erotic energy and your orgasms to a spiritual purpose such as enlightenment, blessing or healing.

You can practice sacred intention whenever you wish. Depending on the circumstances, it may not take you to the experience of the sacred. On the other hand, it may. One thing is certain—you won’t experience sacred sex if you don’t hold a sacred intention.

You Say You Want an Evolution: Wholistic Sexuality

May 9, 2016/in Blog, Ideas & Info, Sheri Winston Blogs, Thought Pieces/by Sheri Winston

You Say You Want an Evolution

What Is 21st century sex?

What could it be?

What is Sex?

I’ve been a Wholistic Sexuality Teacher, midwife, nurse and gynecology practitioner and an enthusiastic sexually active woman for many decades and I still don’t have a simple answer to that question. I can tell you what it’s not. Sex isn’t just some brief lusty activity involving your reproductive organs, hidden behind a closed bedroom door. It’s so much more then that.

A Fantastic Fulfilling, Frustrating Force

Sexuality is a force that is colossally complicated and mesmerizingly compelling. It’s an unavoidable part of being human, yet shrouded in mystery. Sexuality is an interplay of desire and denial, fantasy and reality. It’s a complex physical and biological template tangled with an equally elaborate cultural overlay. Sex is powerful and promising, chaotic and conflicted, ecstatic and blissful, frustrating and disappointing. For some it is demonic, for others, divine. Sex is emotional, energetic, and often overwhelming. Its power is personally pervasive and culturally ubiquitous, with messages both hidden and overt. Potentially, our sexuality can be deeply connecting; of us to ourselves, to others and to the great mystery of life. Unfortunately, that potential is never achieved for many people.

Should You Be Ashamed of Yourself?

Currently, sex in our world is based on negative models grounded in ancient history, perpetuated by modern media and the convoluted chaos of contemporary culture. For many, sex is a source of unhappiness, frustration and a deep unsatisfied longing. We live in a unique time and place where sex is overtly in-your-face and covertly in your pants, all the while harboring undercurrents of shame, guilt, fear, denial, lust and self-loathing for our bodies, our desires and our pleasures.

Succulent Sacred Sublime Sex

I believe that we need a new model of sexuality that incorporates a bigger picture of what sex is, of who we are and what we can be as sexual beings. I see a desperate need for a model where sex is honored, celebrated and sacred. So I made one up.

A Sexual Evolution—Wholistic Sexuality

We had a sexual revolution, with its bumpy gains, imperfect progress and some serious backlash. Now it’s time for a sexual evolution that I call Wholistic Sexuality. In essence, my Wholistic Sexuality model is about connection.

This philosophy brings sex back into connection with all aspects of our selves and our lives in a way that honors the power of sexuality. Sexual expression, pleasure, intimacy, fun and joy are necessary to be integrated and whole. In order to be a fully vital human being, we need our sexuality to be intact, functioning and healthy.

Love Yourself As You Love Your Neighbor (or Lover)

This does not imply that in order to be healthy we must be in sexual relationships with others, but rather, we must create and maintain a good sexual connection with ourselves. In other words, Wholistic Sexuality is, first and foremost, about your relationship with your Self. This includes your relationship with your body, your history and experiences, the beliefs that you were exposed to as you grew up, your current and past relationships, your community, the media, your culture, and all other aspects of your world. All of these components and more create your internal sexual relationship. Indeed, your sexuality is a hologram of your inseparable mind, body, heart and spirit. Your sexuality is ultimately, about everything.

A Sexy Healthy Whole

It seems everyone these days is striving to be healthy. Exercise, meditation and healthy eating are now mainstream ideas, supported by countless cultural messages. But sex hasn’t yet emerged from the shadow of repression and shame to become part of what is considered a healthy lifestyle. Only when you connect your sexuality to the rest of your life, will you become integrated and truly healthy.

Conscious Connection

I believe that a sexual evolution is beginning and will continue to occur. It’s a part of the evolution of personal and global consciousness that is occurring planetwide. And since I believe that evolution begins at home, I encourage you to explore and enhance your connection to your own delicious sexuality. After all, without sex, life itself would be impossible. And a whole lot less fun!

Four Lessons Prince Taught Us About Sacred Sex

April 27, 2016/in Blog, Carl Frankel Blogs, In The News, Sheri Winston Blogs, Thought Pieces/by Carl Frankel

(By Sheri Winston and Carl Frankel)

Because Prince was the rare artist-celebrity who was both deeply religious and openly sexual, his untimely passing has placed a sudden spotlight on the topic of sacred sex. His view of the relationship between sex and God provides invaluable insights to people who want to practice sacred sex, but aren’t sure how to do it.

Many religious faiths are vehemently sex-negative—anti-sex and anti-pleasure. You can only get to heaven, these traditions tell you, by transcending the body and its shameful desires. Because these attitudes have permeated our culture, many people see sex as sinful and the farthest thing from sacred.

Prince was the absolute opposite of sex-negative. He believed that sex was one of God’s greatest gifts to humanity. For him, all sex was sacred. He believed that we can have sex that both feels amazing and connects us with the Divine. That’s a pretty radical belief in a world where sex has become deeply associated with sin.

Here are four takeaways from the Gospel of Prince about how to have sex that is both hot and holy.

1. Sacred sex isn’t ‘sex lite.’ It’s not sex with the raw, lewd, hot stuff stripped out. Prince made it clear that sex can be sacred and wildly profane at the same time. Since sexual desire was a gift from God, unbridled lust was one of many possible ways to praise Him. (An especially fun way!)

In Darling Nikki, he meets the song’s protagonist when she’s “in a hotel lobby, masturbating with a magazine.” They go upstairs and have a “funky time.” She’s quite the bedmate: Prince’s body “will never be the same.”

Sounds like quite the delightfully raunchy encounter, right? Only the song ends with a surprise—these words played backward:

“Hello, how are you? I’m fine, ‘cause I know
That the Lord is coming soon, coming, coming soon.”

Prince is suggesting that no matter how hot and dirty the sex gets, God is fine with it. Although Nikki turned him into a “dirty little Prince” whose one desire was to “grind grind grind,” that didn’t make him a sinner. He was “fine.” His journey into lust wouldn’t keep God from “coming soon.”

Great news! You can get down and dirty and still have it be sacred.

2. There’s a big gap between Prince’s view of sex as inherently sacred and the notion many people have of sacred sex as a sort of special sauce that elevates the usual sexual experience. Although many people associate sacred sex with ancient erotic traditions like Tantra, that’s not required. In Adore, Prince writes:

“When we be makin’ love
I only hear the sounds
Heavenly angels cryin’ up above
Tears of joy pourin’ down on us.”

There’s no mention here of special breathing techniques or any of the other sacred-sex moves you can study up on in the esoteric traditions. Prince and his partner were madly in love and making love. That was good enough to make it sacred. How do we know? Because the angels wept with joy for them.

Special techniques can help—a lot, actually—but sex doesn’t become spiritual just because you paint by the sacred-sex numbers. Sex is sanctified by what your soul brings to it.

3. Prince believed that the body is inherently sacred—both a gift from God and a path to God. In The Human Body, he writes:

“Can U get me excited?
Excited enough 2 thank the God above 4 the human body.”

Here, too, we see him making his familiar sex-and-God connection. If you turn me on enough, he’s saying, the spirit will come over me and I’ll cry “Hallelujah!”

We can follow Prince’s lead on this one, too. Sacred sex transmutes physical arousal into powerful feelings of gratitude to God for giving us hearts that can love as intensely as they do, and bodies that can experience such amazing pleasure.

4. For Prince, sex was right up there alongside salvation as part of God’s grand plan—so much so, in fact, that the Second Coming, as imagined by Prince, sounds suspiciously like a sex party.

From Sexuality:

“Stand up everybody, this is your life
Let me take u to another world, let me take u tonight
U don’t need no money, u don’t need no clothes
The Second Coming, anything goes
Sexuality is all u’ll ever need
Sexuality—let your body be free.”

That’s right, folks—Prince basically had his God presiding over an orgy. A holy orgy. Talk about radical sex-positivity!

Which brings us to our fourth takeaway: If you want to practice sacred sex, be like Prince and be sex-positive.

Prince left us many gifts, including his vast musical output and his amazing performances. Perhaps his greatest gift, though, was his unshakable belief that sex didn’t cause our downfall. Quite the opposite, actually—it’s what brings us back to the Garden.

Why Learn to Squirt? The Pleasures of Female Ejaculation

March 25, 2016/in Blog, Sexy Skills, Sheri Winston Blogs, Thought Pieces, Women/by Sheri Winston

Why Learn to Squirt?

The Pleasures of Female Ejaculation!

Whenever I talk to a group of people about female ejaculation, someone invariably asks, “Why would I want to learn how to gush?”

It’s a fair question. For a lot of people, squirting conjures images of mess—a flood at best, pee at worst. It makes sense to wonder, ‘Why bother?’ Or even to have a ‘yuck’ response. Who needs more laundry to do?

So let me tell you—it’s worth it. Believe me, it’s worth it!

Simply put, female ejaculating wildly expands the experience of orgasm. Each spurt of hot fluid brings a delicious and intense feeling of release. It’s a form of ecstatic liberation. When it’s happening, I feel like a goddess—powerful, ecstatic and beautiful. It’s like you’re connected to the universal life force and it’s flowing through you.

It also has a deep emotional component for me. I feel like a fountain of love juice. “The fountain of the goddess,” they call it—for a reason. This is only my experience, of course, but other female ejaculators describe gushing similarly.

It’s also fabulous to be with a gushing goddess. In a recent class, my partner Carl was asked the benefits of being with a female ejaculator. His answer: “It tastes delicious, it’s emotionally empowering, and it feels yummily squishy. It gives me immediate feedback that I’m giving my partner amazing pleasure. There’s nothing better!”

In ancient India, this fluid was called amrita, the nectar of life. It was collected in sacred rituals and used as a blessing. I totally get that—amrita feels blessed to give and to receive!

Female ejaculation—it’s a complete win-win!

It goes without saying that you can have fabulous sex and wonderful orgasms without gushing. As an enhancement, though, there’s nothing quite like it. Female ejaculation feels amazing (sacredly amazing!). It taps into deep wells of emotion. It feels profound, like a delirious, wild, primal force that erupts and spills you into a state of blessed-out bliss.

If it leaves you with some extra laundry, that’s a small price to pay for a ‘fountain-load’ of ecstasy.

To learn how to facilitate your hot wet pleasure, ‘attend’ my recorded online course The Learnable Art of Female Ejaculation.

You get three class sessions, special yummy home play assignments, resources and more. For all genders!

Connection: The Prime Directive of Sex

October 30, 2014/in Blog, Relationships, Sheri Winston Blogs, Succulent Sexcraft, Thought Pieces/by Sheri Winston

The following is a collection of excerpts from Succulent SexCraft: Your Hands-On Guide to Erotic Play and Practice.

The Prime Directive: Sex Is About Connection

At root, sex isn’t about what you do erotically with another person. It’s not about getting off or getting it on, scoring or hooking up. It’s about connecting, first with yourself, possibly with others and ultimately with life.

Your sexuality is first and foremost about your connection to yourself, your whole self.

More than anything, your sexuality is about your relationship with yourself. By ‘self’ I mean all of you: your body, mind, heart and spirit; your past, present and future; your genetics and your environment—everything that makes you uniquely and completely you.

Your sexuality is about who you are, not about who you do (or don’t) have sex with. Your sexual activities don’t define your sexual identity—they emanate from and are expressions of it. Your sexuality is an inherent, inseparable and essential aspect of the complex person that is you.

You can break up with other people. They can die or go away. You can’t leave or be left by yourself, though. Wherever you go, there you are. You are your primary partner, the only one who has been and always will be with you.

What this means is that if you want to have better sex, start with yourself. If you want to have better relationships with other people, start with yourself. If you want more love, connection and pleasure in your life, the place to start is, you guessed it, with yourself.

There’s a straightforward reason for this: Your foundational relationship to yourself is the basis of all your other relationships (not just the sexual ones). All your other connections are shaped by your relationship with yourself.

Your Sexuality Is About Your Connection to Others

Naturally that includes the people you have sex with—partner sex is fundamentally about connection. And it’s also about your connection to everyone and everything, including all life on this planet.

Because your sexuality is an integral aspect of who you are, Eros shows up in all your interactions and relationships, including the many that aren’t sexual. All your other relationships are influenced by your core connection with yourself, just as you have been shaped by all that surrounds you. You’re at the center of a great web of connection. This includes your relationships with partners, families, communities, culture and ultimately the whole wide world. Whatever you do, however you’re connected, your sexuality is part of it.

Sex is Both Natural and Learned

The story that ‘sex comes naturally’ is only partly true. While much of our sexuality is derived from our natural animal templates, an astounding amount of human sexuality is learned. You learn sex, including not just what goes where, but more significantly, your erotic capacities, responses and pathways to pleasure. You are an intricately interwoven combination of hardware and software.

Your hardware is your genetics, the factory-installed equipment that is the unique result of millions of years of evolution. It’s your inborn instincts and aptitudes. You can’t change your hardware, but you can learn to understand and work with it. And learn how to make it work for you.

Unlike your hardware, your software is the programmable, learned part of who you are. You’ve been absorbing things like a sponge your whole life, starting with your prenatal environment and continuing through your birth journey up to this very day. You’ve been shaped by your experience and environment.

Much of our sexuality comes from the software side of the divide. You learned to view sex as sinful, sacred or something in between. You learned your concept of foreplay, your beliefs about who is and isn’t appropriate to have sex with, and much more. Some of this education has been conscious. Much has been unconscious.

Your ability to learn is innate, while what and how much you learn depends on your social and cultural circumstances. For instance, you were born with the inherent ability to learn language, but your proficiency with your native tongue or how many languages you speak depends on your environment. Another example: Every baby loves music and responds to rhythm—but whether or not you play an instrument depends on what you learned to do with your intrinsic musical aptitude. Essentially, you learn sex the same way you learn to play a musical instrument, dance or become fluent with a foreign language.

We all come equipped with a starter kit of basic capacities such as an inherent sense of rhythm, a body that loves to move, and a brain primed with the ability to learn words and grammar. Our natural aptitudes provide the foundation for learning essential skills. We then build up our skill sets by layering on increasingly complex competencies. While much of our learning is unconscious, it’s through conscious learning that we achieve proficiency and ultimately mastery.

You Need Accurate Maps

To fulfill your sexual potential, it helps to have structure, support and guidance–and, more specifically, accurate and effective maps and models. Anything short of that is like trying to find a special spot in the woods without a map (or with one that’s just plain wrong).

It’s not easy to learn complex skills on your own—it helps to have a guide. A teacher can share their knowledge base of accumulated information, wisdom and techniques, offer logical sequences for learning, organize information, provide structure and clarify confusion. A mentor can encourage you on your journey, and also share useful, accurate maps that show you the easy routes and warn you against pitfalls.

Good guides are especially necessary when the maps you’ve been using are inaccurate or outdated. Bad maps get you lost! Unfortunately, this is what we get from our mainstream culture, which seems to specialize in offering flawed maps about relationships and sexuality.

To make matters worse, many people don’t realize they’ve been working with faulty maps and instead believe there’s something wrong with them. Bad maps about sex, bodies, desire and relationships often leave people feeling broken or like failures.

For all their value, though, it’s essential to remember that the map is not the territory. It’s a representation of reality, not the actual thing. That’s why you can have many maps of the same thing, with each one emphasizing a different perspective. A street map, a population map and a topographical one can be simultaneously true yet all look different and be useful in different ways. That doesn’t make one right and the other wrong—they just offer multiple lenses so you can get a bigger and more multifaceted picture.

The important thing to ask about a map or model is if it’s useful and true. Does it confirm or invalidate your experience? Does it get you lost or help you get where you want to go? If you want to find a special swimming hole you’ve heard about, you’re much likelier to get there if you’ve got an accurate trail map that has a big ‘X’ marking the sweet spot.

Of course, you’ll only know if it’s correct if you actually take that walk in the woods and find out for yourself if that idyllic place exists.

Maps are a supremely useful tool for getting where you want to go. Without them, you’re just fumbling in the dark.