Rewilding Eros: Healing Shame, Grief & Reclaiming Your Erotic Nature

 

Welcome to your Body. Remembers pleasure. I'm your host, Rahi Chun. This podcast is devoted to sexual embodiment, intimacy, and the body's innate capacity to heal, feel, and remember pleasure. If something here resonates with you, you're welcome to explore more writings and resources@rahichun.com. And now let's begin.

 What if the grief you've been avoiding is actually the doorway to your most profound pleasure in today's conversation? Somatic Sexuality, coach Victor warring shares how his experiences sitting with death in the AIDS epidemic. Taught him that grief and aeros are inseparable cousins. And why?

Reconnecting with your innate erotic intelligence requires grieving the decades spent living in black and white when full color was always available. Victor explains why healing isn't about fixing what's broken, but removing layers of cultural conditioning that have buried our birthright. And how even small acts like keeping a book of vulvas on your coffee table become radical activism when you refuse to dim your aliveness.

I am very excited to have Victor warring to the podcast today. Victor, hold space for a really incredibly. Somatic transformative experience that is called Rewild Eros, or the Rewilding of Eros, and I find that his background is really fascinating. It's a combination of hands-on sexological body work and trauma-informed sexology.

He has a past career as a psychotherapist and also a background in theater improvisation and movement, as well as cultural anthropology. So really understanding the scope. How past societal oppressions historically and culturally affect our embodiment and our current erotic expression. Victor, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Thank you for having me. It's always interesting to hear the reflection of who you are from someone else's mouth. Oh, that's, that sounds pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a really interesting weave and it makes sense to me. It's really interesting, this cultural anthropology background. Along with understanding how that lives in the body, both individuals and as a collective.

Now I really want to get into that and what IL Rose is. I always love as a jumping off point to ask guests like, what for you, what you hold, the way you hold space and what you hold the life force that you are holding space to. Be released and unleashed and really reconnected. It's a very unique thing and I'm, I want to ask, what have been the pivotal events or experiences in your journey that have informed what and how you do this now?

Great. Yeah. Let me see. Maybe I'll start with my time at Ropa University. Ah, yes. Um, that is where I did my, my master's work in somatic psychology. And I don't know if you're familiar with Naropa at all, but for me, yeah, it was definitely, uh, I won't say it, it didn't give me something brand new. I think it just nurtured something that was already there, which is a very mindful and engaged way of sitting with people and sitting with.

Big things sitting with grief that we didn't talk about that much about aeros in my graduate program, but sitting with Aeros when I graduated from Naropa and I first started being a therapist of some kind, my first work actually out outside of that was working for an AIDS project. And that was a pretty profound experience of working one-on-one with clients who were living with HIV and sitting with death.

Wow. And not death that was imminent necessarily because at that point in the epidemic or the pandemic, people weren't dying as much, but sitting with the death as a, as an ever present. Possibility. Yeah. So there's a lot of other things that feel really formative to me, but that's definitely one that's really fascinating and significant because I recognize that on, on your website you shared something and it involved the role that grief plays.

Yeah. In Rewilding Eras, heroes and erotic embodiment. And I'd love for you to, if you can speak on the significant role that. Metabolizing and feeling welcoming. Our grief, uh, the role that plays in the rewilding process. Yeah, absolutely. Um, oftentimes I, I will speak of grief and arrows in a similar way that, um, maybe astronomers or astrophysicists talk about space time.

So grief arrows, it's almost like. They're the same thing in some ways, or they're so tightly woven together, or sometimes I describe grief and aeros as cousins that kind of hold hands, walk around together. So oftentimes one is the window into the other and vice versa. At least that's been my experience in my own body and also working with people.

And there's a lot of ways that this comes up in the work. That I do, but, but only one, one way that comes up a lot and that is when people are rewilding the arrows. Yes. In other words, re reconnecting to this piece of them that is, it's their lineage, it's their birthright. It is intrinsic to who they are, to who we are.

Mm-hmm. While we're reconnecting to that, but we've had a lifetime of. Disconnection from that waves of grief will come up for people. Mm-hmm. And sometimes the words are something like, it's like when you'd like discover this thing that you could have had and tasted for your entire life and you're not tasting until why now.

And so that's grief. Grief. It's grief. So anyway, that's one way that it comes up. And many other sides. Yeah, it's really fascinating because it's, if you've only seen, if your orgasms have been in black and white, let's say, and then you mm-hmm. Experience it in color for the first time, the grief of recognizing, right, like what one perspective can be, I've missed out on this for 40 years and it's a necessary kind of grieving or moving through the emotional material in order to fully embrace.

The color of what your orgasms are like now on an ongoing basis. Yeah. I love that analogy of color. I was thinking about the Wizard of Oz and Yes. Stepping out. Yes, yes. But yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We have a very, we, me, you, our culture that's as a very narrow window, a very narrow per perception of what we see our heroes and our sexuality as, and what we allow ourselves.

To, to have, and when we start broadening it out, it's, it's incredible. It's incredible. It's incredible. And I would say also, I recognize that in, in some clients who are in orgasmic or are, have a block towards surrendering fully to their pleasure and orgasm, oftentimes there's like a series of grief in their young years that they haven't metabolized.

And it's almost like. Um, there's one client that comes to mind who lost her grandfather, her horse, and her dog before she was age five. And because she hadn't grieved, she hadn't moved through that grief, she was afraid of feeling too good again because it, it was followed by some sort of profound loss.

Yeah, absolutely. So all of that lives in the body. I wanna read a quote from your website. Oh. And then ask some questions about it. Yes, yes. Here's your words being reflected back to you. Yeah, I hope. I hope they're good ones. Yes, they are. So on your site, this particular sentence jumped out at me. So Madox Sexuality Coaching can help you reconnect with your innate erotic intelligence.

Support you in crafting a more erotically inclusive ecosystem and help you live a more embodied, playful, and pleasurable life. So I wanted to, for our audience members Yeah. I wanted to invite you to invite to, to define or share for you what is innate erotic intelligence. Yeah. And especially with it, especially within the context of how we've evolved and devolved evolved as a species.

Yeah. Yeah. Two, two things here. One is at the sort of per, I'll say the personal level, the individual eye level. Yes. In innate erotic intelligence, we, since conception, we are, we are these erotic creatures. In utero, we are, we're alive, we're seeking pleasure. We move towards pleasure. We typically move away from pain.

We know, or we tend to know what we like and we're moving and squirming and all of that stuff. So that, that is, that's when I say that's your birthright. It's like that is in us and it's in us from the very beginning. And it's not until we, until we come out into the world and have a lot of other forces working on us, and especially in a culture like ours that's erotiphobic, that we start to get that squashed.

Squashed down. So when I talk about in innate erotic intelligence, it's really going, this has been with you from the very beginning. From the very start of, and it's still there. You are intelligent in that way. Mm-hmm. So when we are working together, the process is usually a subtractive one. It's moving things out of the way.

Mm-hmm. That interfere with that rather than adding something into something that's broken. That's how I put it with people. So that's on the individual personal level and then on the species level, on the, on the evolutionary level. Yeah. We are primates, we are one of five ex extent species of great apes on the planet.

Yes, yes. And our particular flavor of Great ape is very communal, very, very social. Very sensual and erotic and uses connection and eros and sexuality in, in very pro-social weaving kinds of ways. And so, mm-hmm. That is our innate intelligence as well. Mm-hmm. And that has been interfered with, in my opinion, by the way, we have chosen to do.

Society, our culture right now, which is very separate and very afraid of Eros. Mm-hmm. And has turned that fear into, or actually eros and sexual energy can actually be dangerous. Not because it's innately dangerous, but be be because we turned it into a dangerous thing. Yeah. It's been weaponized in a way, again, like our very primal nature.

Has been shamed and I don't know, rigidified like com. Yeah. Compartmentalized and punished on in a lot of, by a lot of societal forces. But I love, I love that you really are chipping away at the conditioning that has restricted or limited one's organic life force to have the space to breathe and to attune to itself again.

That's what it sounds like. Yeah. I love seeing these ultrasounds where they showed the, in the womb babies are pleasuring themselves. Oh yeah. You know that is, yeah. Yep. We're touching genitals. We're having fun. We're right. We know it's nothing we know. We know. Totally. And I love seeing infants just like preschool or kindergarten and they're just crawling all over each other just for connection and aliveness and joy.

And it's really odd, isn't it? As a society, if you think about our primal nature that does. Lean and move towards connection, pleasure, joy, aliveness. Mm-hmm. When you look at all of the societal kind of day-to-day ways that we compartmentalize ourselves and separate ourselves and formalize connection, it's really almost against, it is against our nature.

Yeah. Yeah. We've, we. We've done a number on ourselves. Yes. And, and so when I started talking about this, then I started talking about the realms of, because I also use the words decolonizing. Mm-hmm. And it's really acknowledging that Yeah. A again, we have come to a place, many of us as humans, where who we are as animals has been, has been very truncated.

And so there's a part, there's part of a sense of yearning that's like really pushing for. What we know to be true, but in pushing for that, yeah, we, there's a lot of social rep social repercussions for that as well. So at my best, when I'm working with folks and with myself, because I'm, we're all in this, we're all in this, yeah, it's.

It's a gentle, as gentle as possible practice of leaning into those places where we have been truncated and not blowing off the line. Mm-hmm. When people hear the word wild and rewild wild. Yeah. But hopefully it's gentle so that people can then titrate and discern what aspects about who I am. Do I want to take more ownership of and weave into my life?

More, and I really honor the fact that not, sometimes people do this work and they don't, there's like mm-hmm. Some aspects of them that are like, oh, this is actually a really true part of me, but I'm too scared, or I don't want, or it goes against my values about what I learn sexuality is, and I try to honor that too.

It's balance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a balance. I love that you're underscoring this because it's true. The term rewild looks like someone, like a line that's been in a cage and you're opening the cage door and it's going crazy. Right. And I love that. Yeah. To really integrate more and more aliveness in the body, there needs to be a titration and a safe space and a leaning in, and it, it's a really, it's a sacred process that that requires a sense of safety and moving slowly.

As slow as the nervous system can handle, right? Yeah. The way I think of it sometimes is we, another word to put in here is domestication. We have domesticated ourselves. Yes, we are. We are different than wild humans. If you look at wild humans around the world. Under gatherers, village based people, uhhuh.

And so if you think about it, like other animals that we have, domesticated like livestock or, yes dogs. Dog dogs used to be wolves, uhhuh. But if you just take a dog and throw it out into the wild, it will die most likely. Or have a really hard time because that process is, it's a slow process or a cow.

Mm-hmm. Go, Hey cow, you are free. Be wild. They're not gonna make it. So for we humans. It's a similar thing. You can't just do it all at once. So it's, let's move slowly and feel into what's possible. That's great. That's so great. The other term that stood out from what I read on your site was an erotically inclusive ecosystem.

And so I wanna, I'm wondering, I want, I was curious whether that reflects the role community plays in an erotically vibrant society or tribe and, 'cause you mentioned community and connection before. Can you speak a little bit to the role community plays in nourishing an erotically inclusive ecosystem?

And what actually do you mean by that? The ecosystem. Yeah, so ecosystem, or ecosystem. So what I mean is since we, since we take Eros and we take sexuality and we put it into these like small little compartments in our life and go, this belongs here, and it, it comes out when, when we're done raising kids.

We've done our yoga practice and after work and blah, blah, all the things. Yeah. So since we've truncated it so small, we tend to live in ecosystems in our homes, in life, at work or whatever, that are pretty empty of the presence. Mm-hmm. Of, of heroes. And so when I talk about Eros inclusivity, I talk about.

Let's play with that. So what's it like to live in a home or have a home space where aeros is included in your space? So that could mean a lot of things. I love going into people's homes, uh, and coaching and be like, okay, let's eroticize this place, whatever that means to you. So it could mean having like.

Colors and textures and things that are vibrant and tasty and alive, like more available in space. It could mean having your sex toys or things that are more erotic out and visible and available rather than hidden away. In some drawer, it could mean. It could mean books. Mm-hmm. It could, I mean, and that's a physical environment and it really challenges people in that way because again, we think this should be hidden.

Oh no, I kids, my kid sees my vibrator sitting out the, what were they? What will they think? Probably think you're a sexual person and Right. And if you have a good enough connection with them, they'll know. Leave mom or dad's things alone. Sure. So and so anyway, that's the physical environment and then on the emotional connective level.

Yeah. An erotically inclusive environment means starting to have to invite in community to invite in connection, where all that stuff, where all that stuff is live, where Aeros is actually welcomed. Yes. Not as a threat. But actually as communities, so what I'll say often is that is actually the glue of community.

Mm-hmm. If you have a community that doesn't have eros flowing through it, it tends to feel more like a neighborhood or apartments or Yeah. Or whatever. How we typically live and eros that is allowed to flow in community. It doesn't mean that, and this is where people get scared. They're like, do you mean everyone's having sex with everyone?

I'm like, no. But it means people are alive. And they have access to their bodies and they're willing to share that aliveness with other people in that are near them and willing to be loving and willing to have grief and willing to have actual conflict that's repairable. That, that all of these things are available in ways that we often don't do it.

That that in our society, everything's so compartmentalized. It's fascinating. As you're, as you were sharing that, I was just imagining like the workplace culture, meaning like offices or like a law firm where, you know what I'm hearing you share to me it's like allowing your, allowing connection to flow from an embodied place.

I think it is inherently erotic. Yeah, when people are embodied, because that's our aliveness is our life force. And our life force is erotic by nature. And so if you just allow, if you're attuned to it and you allow yourself to connect from that place, doesn't mean you have to act on it. Doesn't mean it has to lead to anything but that authentic connection.

Human to human. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the, one of the, one of the big places that this really shows up and is, I think is really off. Harmful for us, or painful for us is in the realm of relationship, in the realm of, and particularly in di, in diadic relationships. So it's another aspect here where people, we've been trained by our culture that what it means to be in relationship mm-hmm.

Needs to be in a dyad. That's very closed ly, that is very ensconced within itself and basically where whatever we call community is to be met in this community of two people. Hmm. And to me, that is not an erotically sustainable model. And, but it's painful for people because all of our stories about intimacy and what intimacy means is this.

Yeah. And the very thing that we go, oh, this is intimacy, tends to work against intimacy and long-term sex and sexuality. Not all the time, a lot of people do this, and your mileage may there, but another, but another piece of this erotically inclusive environment is going, what happens when you loosen up this and allow energy to move out?

And again, it doesn't, people get scared because, uh. Monolithic monogamy is like what we're, what our culture is based on. And anything that chips away at that, we're like, what do you mean something's gonna happen? Right? N no, but it means having more availability and what does it mean to to, to loosen that up a bit so that we get a lot of different tech connection and the energy and love and touch and whatever from a lot of different people.

Uhhuh and counterintuitive counterintuitively to us. What it tends to do is it makes more arrows available. And sexuality available for mm-hmm. The people in a dyad. So I love what you're sharing here. I wanna explore it a bit further because like when you say this, for people listening, Victor is putting his is together this to, what is this?

Yeah. To reflect a dyad and this, this mon dyad in monogamy is a relatively, when you look at the human species, it's a relatively new concept. It's very new. Uhhuh. I'm, yeah. Like when you look at indigenous societies, how we lived as a species all over the world to not only survive, but to thrive. I would love to, I would love our audience to understand what you've witnessed in how diads are more deeply nourished when the dyad opens up to gotcha.

That ecosystem that is really erotically healthy. Gotcha. Yeah. When we are enmeshed, when we're so close that all we, that we all we see is the other person, or sometimes we barely even feel ourselves anymore, our nervous systems, I think find it harder to like really to feel turned on, to feel alive, to feel like.

As Esther Perel talks about, like there's no distance to cross. And she talks about it in terms of like nerve cells, like literally like nerve cells, if there's a synapse, if there's a little bit of distance, nerve signal will cross. If they were like right up against each other, doesn't work. And if they're too far away, they don't feel each other anymore.

Wow. And so to take that analogy out to our relations Yeah. When we're so enmeshed. Again, we tend to die, not literally, but erotically. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so when there's more space, you literally, you see your partner from different perspectives. Yeah. And the thing, and the things that felt charged about how you connected with them in the first place are more visible.

So for instance, when like you're, you're with your partner. And again, I'm gonna steal from Esther Perel again. Yes. Yes. If you're with your partner and your and your partner's up on stage, giving a presentation or being a musician or whatever, and you can feel how the people in the room, the rest of your tribe, whatever the audience is loving them, is going, oh my God, that is.

That person is giving us their gifts and doing amazing, beautiful things, and it's moving me. And then you go, oh yeah, that's right. That's why I love that person. I'm a little bit further away and I'm available. I'm accepting the love that's coming towards them from other people. Mm-hmm. And then when you expound that and then, then it's all between a lot of different people exchanging, sharing their gifts.

I I, some of this is my conjecture, but I just think it leads to more, more access to arrows. So again, it's counterintuitive for the way that we think, but what we take the relational dyad and we take it off its pedestal as the end all, be all thing of how we ultimately relate and the thing that we just ache for and finally get and hold onto.

Tightly when we, when we get beyond that and go, yeah, this connection is important to me. I love it, and it's a connection within another whole network of connections that I have. Yeah, we actually have more of what we want. Yeah. Yeah. I love that, that that representation that, that Esther Perel drew, and also like just the physiological like explanation of how the nervous system responds when there's more spaciousness.

Yeah, and like psychologically and psychosexually, I think it's a lot to rely on one other sexual being's history of experiences to, to stimulate and meet and align and engage with with ours. And this is not to say that you can't have. Really clear. It's important to have really clear agreements in any relationship, but to be reflected and stimulated by different sources of life force in order to bring out the fullness of your authentic life force is really great.

It's similar to being intellectually stimulated like we. As a society, we kind of prize that, oh, this person is so open to different ways of thinking and yet when it comes to embodiment and our erotic energy society has like a different standard. Yeah, we really do and, and I am really part of my activism, so to speak, really going, yes.

Hey, let's, let's challenge this because it's, it, it's really, it's really painful. Actually, it can be fun. Like I can talk about this lightly. Mm-hmm. But it's actually incredibly painful for people. Mm-hmm. And outside of that, it's actually reflective of, it's reflective of cultures, reflective of societies that are actually deep grief and deep pain, and expressing that.

In a lot of ways that I'm an aqua, I'm an aquarium, so I tend to get big. Yeah. Yes. But expressing that grief and that pain and that unmoved grief and pain in ways that we look at with a lot of the things that are happening right now in our world. Yeah. We become acquirers and takers and owners of other people's bodies and all of that.

Yeah. And to me, that's all related. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I'd love to explore that a little bit as a fellow aquarium, the 'cause what you're speaking to, I'm realizing as we're discussing this, that the, that what's now a norm, hetero norm around the dyad being exclusive and the way that norm restricts and represses our erotic aliveness as a society.

There's so many current day systems that repress our erotic aliveness as a individually and collectively, but that seems to be one right that. Heteronormative dyad structure that, I don't know if it comes, I read somewhere that it was a Catholic church that actually created marriage in order to keep property ownership within families.

But there is so much of that. So we touched on that, the kind of workplace culture where people's erotic energy is really contained and disallowed. What are, what are the other ways that you see, there must be so many, especially in the context of how we've evolved as a species where we're really cutting off our erotic aliveness and energy.

Yeah. So, so these are really big, these are really big questions. Yeah. And there are so many, there are so many ways. So a minute ago you were talking about like, when did this happen? Was it the church or the, I, I just think it's older than that. And. So I'm gonna, I'm just gonna speak to something and say that I'm not a definitive expert in this.

I studied anthropology and evolution and all those things, but anyway, there, there are a lot of people that can speak in a lot of different ways about this. What I will say is, generally speaking, we as humans have been genetically modern humans for about 350,000 years. I think now keeps getting a little bit longer.

We've been doing domestication of ourselves for about 15,000 or so years. And by domestication what I mean is starting to get sedentary, starting to grow crops and have villages and cities that were, that became just sedentary. Yeah, and we started owning property and we started having to defend.

Resources that we created, that we had surplus of, and then we started to have leaders to do all that. And then we started to go, oh, whose property is this? Oh, it's mine. How do I ensure that? How do I ensure knowing that, oh, I need to control X, Y, and Z is usually a woman's sexuality in order to ensure where my inheritance is going, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So it's that old. I think, and so what I see is we're never gonna, we're never gonna be hunter gatherers again. Like a lot. I look at hunter gatherers and I look at our cousins like Bonobos. I'm like, oh my God. They have a lot of things right going there. And I think that there are things for us to learn there.

We're never gonna, but we're never gonna be that again. But we're, we can be something different than what. Mm-hmm. What we're doing in a, again, I'll use the word colonized in a more colonized cultural setting. We have learned that the environment belongs to us and resources are there to be taken, and sexuality is to be experienced in very controlled ways.

And we need to control other people's sexuality in order to be safe. And that includes not only sexuality, but includes people that are different in some way. Different. Those are air quotes. So people like who are L-G-B-T-Q, people who do sex in different ways, understanding that there's even something that is called sexual and erotic diversity that we do and want sex in, in myriad ways.

We find it hard to tolerate. And so all of those things are woven into what I would call this domesticated or colonized, or whatever you wanna call it. Yeah. Place that we've. Come that we've come to that is very different than where we come from. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for that. I love that frame because it really does succinctly capture kind of the journey of how we have become domesticated.

I wanna ask you, so given all that as a backdrop, I want our audience to understand the process that you guide clients through in the rewilding. Process. Mm-hmm. I, and I love the question that also jumped out at me from your site, which is what will you discover when you allow yourself to be who you actually are?

How do you hold space? If you can give our audience a sense of what the journey is, and of course it's so unique and it's so individual when a client comes to you, but if you can get, give the audience a sense of what, of, of the process, of the transformative kind of journey that that is available. Yeah.

The first thing I'll say, it's a little tongue in cheek, but it's actually true, is that the first thing you encounter when you start to, to do this is shame. Yes, shame. Shame is the constant companion with this. Mm. And I'm saying something across the board that happens differently with different people in different ways.

But so what we're usually invite, what we're inviting in, what I'm inviting in is someone to start pressing against the edges of what they thought was possible for them, or to start to inquire about that. And there can be an, there can be excitement with that. But, but what we often do is we hit our, I don't know if you've ever heard the term, like upper limits.

Yes. But like the upper limits of what our nervous systems will tolerate and the upper limits of what our body considers homo homeostasis, like our erotic homeostasis. So we have the we'll start to have these exciting things start to happen and we hit the upper limit. And how does our body get us back into homeostasis?

It goes, whoa, what are you doing? And it pushes us back down. And so that shame can look like a lot of things. It can look like I'm doing the wrong thing. It can look like you're doing the wrong thing. To me, it can look like, oh, I feel I have a headache so many ways as I, and I'm getting better at this 'cause I don't, anyway, as I invite people onto this journey.

I also really prepare them and name like we're gonna, you're gonna encounter playfulness, and probably pleasure and excitement, and you are going to encounter shame. And just know that and know that we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, now we're gonna navigate this and hopefully we're gonna move slowly enough.

And that's on me. We're gonna move slowly enough that when we start to encounter it, it's a digestible thing. Rather than pushing really hard against it being like, Hmm, and someone doesn't show up again or whatever they have, there's a lot of different things that that can happen and that decreases over over time.

But I'm forgetting the original question, but there's a piece of this that's about shame. Navigation, shame, surfing, or as one of the things that you, I think you saw that shame, whispering. Yeah. It's like staying in people's ears and being like, you're okay? Yes, this is okay. Are you okay? What do you feel in your body?

What do you know to be true? And it's like staying with that. Yeah. It's, it's so valuable and I think so important to safe port your clients to, to let them know that shame is gonna come up. That's really such an integral part of. Leaning past the glass ceiling or the, I call it the pleasure ceiling, that upper limits.

Mm-hmm. Because what is keeping the upper limits in place? It could be a wide range of things, but shame is such a huge reason for a, a lot of us. Yeah. So naming it from the get go. And so when it is face, you can really, you, they know it's digestible and you're moving through it together. Yeah. Oh, here it is.

Mm-hmm. Here it is. Oh, you were, you tried the self-pleasure practice that we talked about for a couple of sessions, and you were bored or angry, or you didn't want to go there or whatever. I don't wanna say definitively, that's your shame, but it's like, here it is. Let's explore that. 'cause maybe you ordinarily said, yeah, I usually masturbate once or twice a week, and suddenly when it's being offered as practice for you, there's hesitation.

So what is that? Yeah. What is that? The irony of shame? I'm realizing as we're talking. The shame is so powerful, obviously, because people, we don't talk about shame as a society, and we don't talk openly about our sexual shames because it's. Too shameful for a lot of people, and yet that is the medicine that allows for those upper limits for the pleasure ceiling to really expand and move beyond.

Yeah. So the original question, Victor, was I wanted our audience to get a sense of how you guide people through clients through the Rewilding process, and so shame is like an integral part of that. Yeah. So. No. And you also mentioned self pleasuring practice. Yeah. Uhhuh great. So I'm wondering what Yeah, please.

I'm like, we're both eager. Yeah. Yeah. I'm mu when I, the first place I usually start with people is understanding and starting to talk about what I call erotic sovereignty. And that is, it's connected to what we were talking about a little earlier, like with the in utero, like the experience of being an animal that knows it's, that knows its eroticism.

So that is like the beginnings of our erotic sovereignty. This under. It's not a cognitive understanding, it's just as knowing mm-hmm. In your se, in yourself that all of this, all of these sensations that you can have, all this pleasure that you like, all these ways that you have that are less adulterated by what our families have given us.

That that is yours. Mm-hmm. This is my body. This is my pleasure. This is my orgasm. Mm-hmm. This is my. Love of touching soft things. This is mine. Yes. And so we start by there with erotic sovereignty and understanding that it belongs to you. It doesn't belong to someone else. It doesn't mean autonomy. It doesn't mean all the pleasure you're supposed to experience just happens by yourself.

You don't need anybody else. It doesn't mean that, but it means that when you come to the equation to, let's say, a relational equation or. Connecting with another thing that you are bringing yourself to the table versus wanting, needing, expecting pleasure to come from outside of you. Yeah. And to get it from somewhere else.

And that, again, start getting into extraction. If it's outside of you, I need to get it. How am I gonna get it? I'm gonna mm-hmm. Buy it. I'm gonna marry it, I'm gonna take it. Mm-hmm. I'm gonna, but I need it in order. So anyway, we start with erotic. Sovereignty, and that usually comes with owning pleasure and having some sort of self pleasure practice.

And if that foundation isn't in place, then the other stuff that comes from that, like having starting to have an err, radically inclusive environment starting to shift up how you might interact with. Your partner and how you choose to do things, all the other things, it's gonna, it's gonna have a, it, it, it, it may not take hold if you don't have that, that sense in yourself.

So anyway, that's where we start. Frankly, that's where a lot of people end. Mm-hmm. Sometimes I work with, sometimes I work with people and we spend, I don't know, three months, four months, mm. Five months getting there and they're like, okay. And that's fine, but that's the beginning stage. Then, so that's, excuse me, that's where I guide, that's where I, that's where I guide people and uhhuh and within all of that, there's other things included in that, and I know that I'm gonna speak to the choir here, but there's like pleasure education and there's anatomy, education, and Right.

All kinds of practices. There's all kinds of stuff woven into that. But it sounds like the building blocks is really the erotic sovereignty, really having clients not only understand it, but experientially embody their erotic sovereignty through practices. Yeah. And through experiences. Yeah. And then the shame piece is also like a foundational building block as well, because we all have that.

Yeah. But we live in our society. Yeah. Yeah. Who are you as an erotic creature? Who are you? As a sexual creature, how is it different than how you perceive yourself right now? Or how is it different than what you've been taught is true, what you're trying to live up to, or you're trying to like back away from?

Yeah. Yeah. It's so great because I feel like what you're doing in the Rewilding process is you're just really holding up a mirror so people can see themselves in their authentic erotic. Nature and showing them where they're limiting or shaming or blocking their own erotic nature and providing the tools for them to, as you said earlier, to chip away and let go of the conditioning that is restricting their erotic embodiment.

And that is so much of the rewilding process. Great. I, I wanna, I wanna ask you, Victor, because there was something else on your site that I saw. I think it was erotic embodiment as activism. And given what we're discussing about the O we're talking really about the ways in which society and these cultural norms are oppressing our erotic energy.

And certainly there are communities that that, that are more oppressed because they're not welcomed, they're not celebrated as we are. I'm wondering if you can speak to how, like, how do you see erotic embodiment as activism? Yeah. So once you start living in your body in ways that the culture, the society goes, what are you doing?

What are you doing? You're faced with a choice. And the choice and several choices. One is you can let go of what you're doing and go, I'm, I'm sorry, go back to what I was doing before. Or you could hide. What you're doing and go, okay, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it only here. Like I have my little tight community or my, my time with my partner, partners, whatever it is, and I don't have to be out mm-hmm.

To the world at large. Or you, you can be like. I'm living in my body in ways that we're supposed to live and I'm not. And I'm gonna show you that. Mm. And by show you that, I don't mean violate by that. Mm. But I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna tone it down. I'm going to be alive. Yeah. In my body. Uh, and to me, that's where things go over into activism.

When you are challenging the ways in which. The culture, the society says you're not supposed to be that way. You're not supposed to be alive, you're not supposed to cry, you're not supposed to express pleasure. Mm-hmm. In big ways you are not supposed to be naked in certain places. Mm-hmm. Now I was, walk that line, I'm, I'm not saying go to the middle of town and start walking around naked and get a rest now.

But yeah. What are the ways in which you are willing to challenge. This, or at least go, I am. This is what I'm doing, Uhhuh. This is, and this is true, and I'm staying here with it. Yeah. So I think I haven't seen you in public doing your thing, but I'm guessing since we're in the same field, in the same land, I'm guessing there are ways in which you speak.

I'm gonna put it in big terms. Speak the power. About the body and sexuality and what's true. And I would call that activism there. And I definitely, I know the ways in which I do that and not, and yeah, so that's what I mean. And in the people that I work with I in, I invite that not everyone wants to do that, and that's, that's fine.

You don't have to go out and be an activist. But I do say to people, if you are going to shift. How you live your life in ways that you say you want to have more access to s and more access to pleasure and sexuality. Chances are pretty good. You're gonna have to stand up to some things that are wanting to default you back into the ways that you were, and it doesn't have to be in a big way, but you're gonna have, you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to do something different to get something different.

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that obvi, obviously we're not saying go to Whole Foods naked, but we're encouraging like the, the evolution of what it feels. Joyful to be erotically embodied and to make that the priority. And share yourself wherever you are in, in your interactions, and slowly and gradually that rewilding will occur and the upper limits or the pleasure ceiling will continue to expand.

Yeah. And you will return to more and more of your natural, beautifully erotic state. Yeah. Yeah, and it can be simple. If you decide to have the big book of the big book of Vulvas mm-hmm. Photographic book of vulvas or genitals and you have that like on your coffee table, you're like, this is one of the ways I'm just like owning this and going, this is beautiful and I'm having it out and it's in my own house, and.

Neighbors come over and maybe there's not a big old vulva right on the cover. I don't know. But they open it up. Mm-hmm. Oh, whatcha doing? And my kids here. And the activism part can be something like this is important to me. Yeah. I'm keeping this book on my coffee table. Do you want to have a conversation about why this is important?

Uhhuh, at least to me, and you don't have to, you don't have to like sum through the book. If you're really super upset, I can, I might put it away for a while, your kids' here, or Uhhuh, something like that. But it's, but it's like challenging that thing of this is wrong, this is bad. What are you doing Uhhuh good.

People don't do this. Whatever. Yeah. I love it. I love it. So for listeners, this is just an encouragement and a support to be your erotically embodied selves as activism, vira. How can people find you and work with you? Ah, yes. So I'm available. Um, I think, yeah, most people either find me on my website, which is uh, re rewild aeros.com.

I'm also on Instagram, and that is Bonobo man. Bonobo man, great. Yeah, on Instagram and I'm on Facebook under my name, so that's how most people. Find me. Cool. And just to be clear, you work with individuals virtually, you work with individuals in person, you work with couples virtually and in person. Are there other ways?

Are there intensives? Are you teaching these days? 'cause I, I know we, you were teaching at Soul Play a couple years ago. Yeah. What are all the ways. All the ways. So yeah, all the ways that you just said. I work with people as individual clients and also couples relationships. I work a lot with people that are not in traditional relationships, non-monogamy, all that kind of thing.

Mm-hmm. I do, I do client work. I also teaching of work workshops. I will be an upcoming thing. It's not completely my thing, but in actually next weekend I'll be in Sebastopol doing a a grief aeros ritual. Wow. Mostly around the subject of race. Uhhuh Uhhuh. Cool. But that's the thing. Upcoming, I, I did a workshop on Rewilding arrows back in June and sel.

Oh, sweet. Yeah. And some of my workshops are more for people that are just stepping into this kind of thing. And I do some things that are more people, for people that are deeper in, that are more experiential, or even some that are erotic inclusive. Cool. So, yeah, I do workshops and I like talking to and working with communities around, around this stuff.

Wow, that's fantastic. So really a wide range of different offerings and op and ways to work with Victor and all of that can be found at his site. Rewild es.com. Victor, thank you so much for sharing yourself, for being an activist for really, I, I feel like the way you. Our holding space, but also educating people around the rewilding process and in the context of who we really are.

Innately a as, as primal beings is really such an important voice and it really needs to get out there. So thank you so much for all the service that, that you're doing for, for our communities and our species. Mm, thank you. Thank you. And thanks for having me on.

How is today's episode landing for you in your body right now?

Who are you as an erotic creature, and are there ways your home, your community, and your nature is waiting? Longing and wanting to be rewelded.

Are you aware of the upper limits of your erotic homeostasis? And what are ways you can bring safety and support in expanding past these pleasure ceilings if they're in the way of embodying your erotic sovereignty?

Links to Victor's work and site, rewild eros.com are in the show notes.

 Thank you for listening to Your Body. Remembers Pleasure If this conversation supported you, the simple way to help this work reach more people is to leave a five star rating or a brief review. You'll also find more resources and teachings@rahichun.com. Until next time, take good care.