I need to tell you about a woman who was married for 17 years, sexually active throughout, and completely numb.

Not emotionally. Not intellectually. She loved her partner deeply. What she enjoyed about their intimacy was the heart connection—the love they shared, the joy in her partner’s face.

But in her genitals? Nothing. Not a single sensation.

After one session of genital de-armoring with Susanne Roursgaard, she called with a question so innocent it broke my heart:

She was 40 years old. And she’d just discovered what her body had protected her from feeling for decades.

Here’s what I want you to understand: The numbness wasn’t the problem. The pain isn’t the enemy. The disconnect isn’t a malfunction.

They’re the solution your body created when it had no other options.

And here’s the revelation that changes everything: Susanne’s work reveals that approximately 80% of the armor held in the pelvis and genitals traces back to before age seven.

Not sexual trauma. Developmental trauma.

The times you weren’t seen, met, respected, or understood. The moments you had to fragment yourself—shut down parts of who you were—to stay safe, to belong, to be loved.

How Protection Forms in Innocence

Your body didn’t decide one day to betray you. It adapted, brilliantly, to the environment it found itself in.

That two-year-old who reached for their genitals during a diaper change and got a sharp “No!”? They learned: Hands don’t belong there. I’m bad for wanting to touch.

That four-year-old who felt “too much” or “not sweet enough”? That belief took up residence in their pelvic bowl—and it’s still there, decades later, creating tension they can’t explain.

By age seven, Norwegian research shows, most children already carry chronic tension in their genital and pelvic regions.

Not from anything overtly sexual. From the accumulated weight of small moments when their body’s truth wasn’t welcome.

The Three Faces of Armor (And Why You Might Not Recognize Yours)

Your body doesn’t offer one-size-fits-all protection. It customizes its response based on what you needed to survive.

1. Numbness: The Compassionate Disappearing Act

When something is too overwhelming—too painful, too violating, too much to bear—your body offers mercy:

The tissues are still sensing. The nerve pathways are intact. But the signal to your conscious awareness gets disconnected.

You’re there, but you’re not there. A brilliant adaptation when there’s no other way out.

This is the person who can be touched, stimulated, even penetrated—and feel absolutely nothing. Or who describes their genitals as “someone else’s body part.”

Diane experienced this after eight surgeries to remove vaginal mesh that destroyed her entire vaginal canal. Her doctor told her: “You’ll probably never have feeling again. We’ve taken out all the nerves.”

For five years, she accepted that. She’d have sex with her husband occasionally, but she couldn’t feel anything. “I’d get angry because he was enjoying it and I wasn’t.”

2. Hypersensitivity: The Alarm That Won’t Turn Off

The opposite response is equally protective.

When your body learned that what happened before must never happen again, it creates a hypervigilant early warning system.

The slightest touch registers as danger. Pain signals flood your awareness out of proportion to the actual stimulus—because your body is convinced it’s protecting you from something catastrophic.

Susanne explains: “The body gets hyper-sensitive—so alert to not have this happen again that the tiniest little thing will send a signal to your brain like: ‘Danger! Danger! It’s painful!’”

This is the person whose partner barely touches them and they wince. Whose pelvic exams are excruciating. Who can’t tolerate penetration even when they desperately want intimacy.

3. Boredom: The Shutdown You Don’t See Coming

Here’s the one that surprises most people.

You’re being touched. It feels good—at first. Maybe even arousing. But within 5, 10, maybe 15 minutes… you just want it to be over.

Not because your partner is doing anything wrong. Not because you don’t love them.

But because your body has learned to shut down pleasure gradually—a protective mechanism you’ve carried so long you think it’s just “how you are.”

Susanne illuminates this:

Your body isn’t receiving all the expanding pleasure signals. It’s shutting down gradually after you start.

This can lead to performance-oriented sex. Five to fifteen minutes. Get aroused, build to orgasm, release. Done.

Fast food sex. The pattern that protects you from feeling too much for too long.

Which face do you recognize in yourself?

Why Loving Relationships Create Armor Too

Here’s what breaks my heart—and what I see constantly:

Armor doesn’t only form from violation. It forms from violation of your own boundaries.

Even in loving, committed relationships. Especially in loving, committed relationships.

Your partner wants intimacy. You notice they’re getting restless, maybe irritable. It’s been two weeks. You think: Once we start, I’ll get into it. I always do. And I love them. I want them to feel desired.

So you say “yes” when your body is still saying “no.”

Your partner hasn’t violated you. But you’ve invited penetration at a moment when your tissues weren’t ready. When your nervous system hasn’t arrived yet.

And your body—your infinitely wise body—registers this as: We’re being entered when we don’t want to be entered.

Over years, over decades, this accumulates. Contracts. Becomes armor.

Susanne: “These kinds of behaviors that we do ourselves—they can actually create armor as well and can create pain or numbness.”

And this happens regardless of gender. Anyone whose libido is lower than their partner’s, who feels obligated or pressured to engage when their body isn’t ready, can develop this protective disconnection.

Laura discovered this in her twenty-year marriage: “We got together young, and intimacy patterns formed quickly—when I hardly knew what my body was capable of, much less desired. And then sex became something to do efficiently—and for me, to get it over with because I wasn’t feeling much anymore.”

How many people are living in this sentence right now? How many have accepted it as permanent? How many believe their body is broken rather than brilliantly protective?

After her de-armoring work and completely reinventing her marriage from ground zero: “I can stay present during sex now. I don’t dissociate. I use my voice. I get aroused faster. It really feels like it used to. And I had no hope of that. Literally, no hope.”

The Soft Revolution: Why Pushing Harder Makes Everything Worse

For years, genital de-armoring in various traditions involved deep pressure, intense sensation, sometimes pain that left people “yellow, green, black, and blue.”

The philosophy: Break through the armor. Push past the resistance. The body will release.

Susanne discovered something radically different. And it came from the most unexpected place: her years as a midwife, learning to place her hands with presence, to lean in gently until the body lets you in.

“To me, it never made any sense that when you have armor in your body because there was some need or boundary that was overstepped—something was pushed too far inside of you—that you would then use a technique of pushing too far to try to heal something that was pushed too far.”

Think about what armor actually is: Your body protecting itself because something violated its boundaries.

Now consider the conventional approach: Violate those boundaries again, but call it “healing.”

The body doesn’t know the difference. It only knows: I’m being pushed past my limits again.

So what does it do? It tenses. It guards. It activates fight, flight, or freeze.

You’re not releasing armor. You’re creating more.

The Wisdom of Invitation

Susanne’s approach is revolutionary in its gentleness.

Soft touch. Presence. Patience. An invitation rather than an intrusion.

“The soft touch allows the body and the nervous system to not have to go into self-defense against me. If I push too hard, that body is going to start to look at—‘Wow, this person is attacking me. This person is a threat.’ So what do I need to do? I need to tense up even more to withstand that pressure.”

When you push, the body pushes back. When you wait, the body opens.

Sometimes, Susanne shares, a body will even test the practitioner’s patience:

And when the body realizes—Oh, actually I’m still being accepted. My speed is being accepted—something miraculous happens.

The body dares to step into co-creation instead of being done to.

The armor doesn’t have to be broken. It can be invited to soften.

When Medical Trauma Destroys Everything (And Why Restoration Is Still Possible)

Diane’s story is one of medical violation so profound, the system had no roadmap back.

In 2008, she had a “very mild bladder prolapse.” No incontinence. No pain. No real symptoms.

Her doctor—the same doctor who delivered her four children, whom she trusted implicitly—recommended surgery. “You’re young, you’ll heal really quickly. It’s no big deal.”

She didn’t know to get a second opinion. She didn’t know to research. So she trusted him.

And in 2008, she underwent surgery to have a polypropylene mesh implanted to support her bladder.

When she woke up from surgery, she was shocked by how much pain she was in. Then her husband walked into the room holding the New York Times. On the front page: a warning about vaginal mesh.

“I showed it to the doctor when he walked in,” Diane says, “and I asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’ And he said, ‘Well, I thought you’d want to do it anyway. So we didn’t tell you.’”

Eight Surgeries Over Three Years

The pain didn’t stop. Bladder infections. When she finally had sex eight weeks post-op: “My husband came into me and pulled out yelling because the mesh had scratched him. The mesh had already come down through the vagina.”

She went back. He said it was easy to fix—he’d just cut the pieces of mesh coming through.

That made it worse.

It took eight surgeries to remove the mesh piece by piece. Dr. Ross at UCLA—the only person in the world at that time who knew how—had to reconstruct her entire vaginal canal.

“It was two inches long at that point. I didn’t have a vagina. I had a box that had no nerves, no fat, nothing. Just a box.”

In 2012, Dr. Ross finally got all the mesh. Diane asked: “Will I ever have feeling again?”

He said: “Probably not. We’ve taken out all the nerves.”

For five years, Diane accepted that verdict.

The Four Domains That Brought Her Back

What Diane discovered—through relentless research and willingness to try everything—is what Dr. Ellen Heed teaches: Chronic pelvic pain, sexual dysfunction, and loss of sensation require addressing all Four Domains:

• Biochemical: Addressing the body’s chemistry, blood flow, release of toxins, removal of waste.
• Biomechanical: Addressing physiological architecture, muscular and anatomical alignment.
• Emotional: Addressing how tissues and fascia hold unprocessed emotions, creating safe space to feel and metabolize.
• Scar Tissue: Resolving fibrotic tissues within which old memories and emotions await release.

“There’s a psychological component,” Diane adds about the repair process. “Feeling taken care of by somebody who really understands my body and what it needs.”

Today, Diane’s sensation has returned. “It really feels like it used to. And I had no hope of that. Literally, no hope.”

She’s experienced orgasms again for the first time since before surgery.

“I have so much more energy and joy. Everything’s better. I had no idea that my sexuality could mean that much to me, but it really, really does.”

When Culture Cuts Away Your Birthright (Sophia’s Story)

Sophia’s trauma began differently, but with equally profound impact.

She grew up in a strict Muslim family, immigrants from a country in Africa where female circumcision was—and in some places still is—not uncommon.

Before the circumcision, there had been incest with a cousin. “It set up this whole thing in my system. It feels good. It shouldn’t feel good. Sex and guilt. Not knowing if I could trust my body.”

But the major trauma—the one that severed her from her own pleasure—came during a day spent with her beloved and trusted grandmother.

She thought she was just accompanying her grandmother to run errands in town.

When they arrived to “the place” — “I was swept up onto a table, and this most intimate part of my body that I basically didn’t even know existed was being introduced to a 1920s razor blade.”

She describes it as the worst pain of her life, happening to a part of her body she barely knew existed.

“And then watching this man walk over to the window and throw out a piece of the most intimate piece of my body—the clitoris—out the window. Only to hear the dogs fight over it.”

The message was clear: Your body is not yours.

The Blessing That Kept Her Alive

What kept Sophia going was a profound gift: the ability to orgasm from nipple and breast stimulation alone.

“Because I was so sheltered, I just assumed all women had that ability.”

So when she finally had her first boyfriend at 21, she enjoyed penetration for the emotional closeness, but couldn’t feel much. “But I knew—my body is meant for pleasure. It’s not meant to be constantly on this edge of guilt and pain.”

Still, because of the circumcision, there was scar tissue. And pain.

“Especially in the early days when I would first become turned on, there would be pain as the tissues would stretch. So it was always a matter of getting past the pain into the pleasure.”

One Moment Changed Everything

When Sophia arrived for her first session with me, she was terrified. “When I landed in LAX, it really hit me. Oh my God, this is crazy that I’m doing this. I had so much resistance.”

But she shared that, and I told her: Your resistance is welcome here. You can be scared. It’s normal.

That shifted something. “I think it was the first time I actually felt safe in a room with a man.”

We began with neuroaffective touch—where Sophia would tune into her body and voice what kind of touch and support her body wanted, moment by moment.

But one moment stands out above all others.

“I remember asking that my left shoulder blade wanted support,” Sophia says, tearing up. “And you put your hand behind my left shoulder blade, and I just started sobbing.”

She pauses. “It was literally the first visceral experience of a man having my back. Literally. Of being supported.”

The area she asked for support—just beside her left shoulder blade—is the backside of the heart center.

After receiving that support, Sophia purged—physically and energetically. And after that purging, sensation within her pelvis and genitalia returned.

For the first time, she could feel vaginal pleasure.

Today, Sophia describes feeling “much more at home” in her body. “My intuition is heightened. I have the container for bigger feelings—more grief, but also more joy.”

And perhaps most significantly: “Before, when I self-pleasured, I would get really, really sad and have to cry afterwards. After the sessions, this disappeared. Now it’s just pleasure. Just pleasure and goodness in my body.”

Let that sink in.

A woman whose clitoris was cut away with a razor blade. Who was told her body was dirty, shameful, not hers.

Today: “Just pleasure and goodness in my body.”

The Portal Half the Population Doesn’t Know Exists

Let me tell you about the time a man in his fifties cried with grief in Stine Krage’s treatment room.

Not because something had gone wrong. Because something had finally gone right.

“Why didn’t I know about this sooner?” he asked through tears. “This is such a different experience for me.”

He’d just received his first prostate massage—and discovered an entire dimension of pleasure, surrender, and aliveness he’d lived fifty years without knowing existed.

He’d been missing half his pelvis.

Stine—a midwife, sexologist, and tantric bodywork therapist based in Copenhagen—has witnessed this awakening hundreds of times. Her partner Asim SacredFire, also a somatic sexologist and intuitive healer, nods in recognition.

Together, they created The Prostatic Portal, an approach that treats the prostate with the reverence it deserves: as a gateway to health, trauma release, spiritual expansion, and pleasure states most men never even know to ask for.

The Organ Nobody Taught You About

If you have a prostate, you’re walking around with a gold mine in your body that nobody told you how to access.

The prostate sits deep in the pelvis, behind the pubic bone, directly accessible only through the anus. It’s as far from the eyes and the thinking mind as you can get in the human body. Which means, as Asim puts it, “everything that wants not to be found will be hidden there.”

It’s the darkest corner of the male body. And it’s where everything related to the lower chakras lives: issues with survival, with money, with security, with sex, with identity, with unmet dreams.

“The prostate is the same material as the womb,” Asim explained. “It is the organ of life in men. So everything that is related to life or the goals that you have in life—every problem you have related to that will have its backlash on the prostate.”

Think about that for a moment.

Every goal you set in your twenties that you didn’t reach. Every dream you had to release or revise. Every promise you made to yourself about who you’d become. If you couldn’t make peace with that gap between vision and reality—if you held onto “I didn’t accomplish it”—that trauma sticks to the prostate.

The prostate doesn’t just filter toxins from your ejaculate. It filters the emotional toxins of your entire life journey.

What Happens When Men Finally Surrender

Asim’s voice gets quieter when he talks about his own discovery of prostate pleasure.

“It gives a pleasure which is very different from penile stimulation. You have to go much more into surrendering. And when you have pleasure from surrendering, it’s very different and very much more opening up and without a goal.”

Without a goal.

Think about how revolutionary that is for men conditioned to be goal-oriented in everything—especially sex.

Most men’s sexuality is about doing. Performing. Staying hard. Lasting long enough. Making their partner come. Maintaining control so they don’t come too soon or lose their erection.

“With prostate massage,” Asim continued, “you cannot. You have to surrender. You have to surrender and receive that pleasure without doing anything. That is the real eye-opener.”

Stine sees this transformation constantly: “So many men need to feel pleasure through another’s pleasure. But this is surrender. This is not through somebody else’s pleasure. They don’t have to perform. They don’t have to do anything. They just have to surrender and receive.”

And here’s what’s particularly striking: many men receiving prostate massage don’t even have an erection. The pleasure they’re feeling isn’t connected to the familiar arousal patterns. It’s something else entirely.

“There’s so much confusion in the moment,” Stine laughed. “Why am I not having an erection? I’m feeling like I’ve been having sex forever. What is this?”

It’s energy moving up and in instead of down and out. It’s full-body orgasmic states that bypass ejaculation completely. It’s pleasure that doesn’t require performance or even physical hardness.

It’s the integration of the inner feminine—the receptive, surrendering, allowing aspect that most men have been taught to reject or ignore.

The Cervix: The Eight-Month Journey Nobody Told You About

Olivia Naomi Bryant began her cervical de-armoring journey feeling like she was “housing a brick inside my pelvis. Heavy, blocked, painful. No libido. Very limited access to orgasm.”

She’d been a sex educator. Trained in sex coaching. Taken tantric workshops. Almost given up.

Then during a healing session: “Can you feel your cervix?”

She could not. Completely numb.

That launched an eight-month journey. Not a weekend workshop. Not five simple steps.

Daily or near-daily practice. Mostly alone. Patient. Devoted.

• Month three: First sensation (just awareness, not pleasure)
• Month five: Energy moving, emotions surfacing
• Month eight: Pleasure. Cervix-heart connection. Full-body bliss.

“I had to release the goal,” Olivia reflects. “How long until I find God? Maybe this life, maybe the next. This is a spiritual path.”

The 30-Day Clitoral Orgasm Fast

One of Olivia’s most provocative practices: The 30-day clitoral orgasm fast.

She’s not anti-clitoral pleasure. She’s pro-discovering what else is there.

“When we rely exclusively on clitoral stimulation, we often do so to avoid feeling. Sometimes we have clitoral orgasms because we’re avoiding our loneliness, our lack of connection, our grief.”

Her first year of cervical work? Maybe four clitoral orgasms total.

“It was really hard. I thought: I’ll never have an orgasm again.”

But on the other side: An entire universe of internal sensation she didn’t know existed.

What the Cervix Actually Is

Here’s what Olivia discovered that changes everything:

The cervix shares an acupuncture channel with the heart. Energetically, they’re intimately connected.

When these two centers come into coherence—cervix (embodying belonging, safety, earth, root) and heart (embodying love, spirit, cosmos, transcendence)—you experience what she calls “the half-human, half-divine nature of cervical orgasm.”

“We’re experiencing transcendent, spiritual magic through the human senses, through our bodies.”

Through her Cervical Orgasm Research Project, Olivia has collected hundreds of accounts. The medical world often says cervical orgasms don’t exist.

But here’s the consistent theme across 95% of reports: Love is present.

Not romantic love necessarily. But Love as force, as frequency, as the ground of being itself.

Your cervix is asking for what you’re asking for: love, presence, attention, safety.

When you give it that—through patient, devoted practice—it gives you back dimensions of pleasure, connection, and spiritual embodiment you didn’t know were possible.

The Four Domains: Your Holistic Roadmap

What Lorraine Pentalow discovered through her own chronic pelvic pain journey—and what she now teaches her clients—is that you cannot resolve genital armoring, sexual dysfunction, or chronic pain by addressing only one domain.

Healing requires all four working together, based on the pioneering work of Dr. Ellen Heed.

Domain 1: Biochemical

What you’re putting into your body and how that’s creating an inflammatory environment where scar tissue proliferates.

Lorraine’s protocol:

• GAPS diet (Gut and Psychology Syndrome) to heal gut lining
• Removing sugar, complex carbs, starches that feed harmful bacteria
• Adding fermented foods (sauerkraut, kefir) for beneficial bacteria
• Daily bone broth to repair intestinal lining and reduce inflammation

“Bone broth is incredible,” Lorraine says. “What it does is help repair the lining of the intestines. It really helps with inflammation and helps stop the scar tissue from getting worse.”

Diane added:

• Stem cell injections (experimental but regenerative)
• Adding blood supply, fat, and tissue to damaged areas

Domain 2: Biomechanical

The structural patterns in your body aggravating the tissue.

This includes:

• How you sleep (curled in fetal position squeezing structures together?)
• How you move at work (repetitive strain, high heels, desk posture?)
• Manual scar tissue remediation (externally and internally)
• Castor oil packs—the ancient, accessible tool for breaking down adhesions

“You soak organic, hexane-free castor oil into unbleached cotton flannel, place it directly on the skin with a hot water bottle, and keep it on for 20 minutes to an hour,” Lorraine explains. “The best way is every day for 21 days.”

Laura’s protocol involved:

• Vaginal steaming before sessions (to increase blood flow, relax pelvic floor)
• Castor oil-dipped organic tampons intra-vaginally (20–30 minutes)
• Self-pleasure practice to increase blood flow (“I think that was critical”)

Domain 3: Emotional

As scar tissue begins to dissolve, somatic memories may arise. Memories that may not be pleasant. Memories that need to be felt, witnessed, and integrated.

Lorraine’s breakthrough: “I was excellent with boundaries at work, but terrible in my personal life. I would say yes because I didn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, even when it was really a ‘no’ inside my body.”

She learned that when her mind said “yes” but her body said “no”—especially during sex—her pelvic floor would tighten, creating a physical wall.

“Every time I would have sex when it was a ‘no’ and my mind was saying ‘yes,’ my body would close up. And my pelvic floor tissue was hardening against the pressure. That’s causing injury and inflammation, which adds to the scar tissue.”

Learning to feel the difference between an embodied “yes” and a mental “yes” was life-changing.

Diane reflected: “From 2009 to 2017, I was just going through the motions. There wasn’t that spark or joy. Colors weren’t as bright. I had lost a part of myself.”

No doctor had asked about the emotional component. But when she finally addressed it: “I have so much more energy and joy. Everything’s better.”

Domain 4: Scar Tissue

The adhesions, the tendrils, the webbing formed over time in response to injury, inflammation, surgery, or emotional holding.

Lorraine’s discovery: During Ellen Heed’s workshop, Ellen placed hands on Lorraine’s pelvis and felt it immediately.

“She could feel this huge lump of scar tissue sitting behind my left ovary. And as she placed her hands on me, she was describing all the different layers of tissues this scar was interacting with.”

Suddenly everything made sense. The constipation. The painful menstruation. The radiating pain during sex.

Over time, with all four domains addressed, the lump dissolved. The pain stopped. Digestion improved. Sex became pleasurable again.

“I remember the day when entering my vagina didn’t hurt anymore,” Lorraine says with wonder. “For a long time, it hurt. And then one day, it didn’t. And it was like, Oh my God, this is so amazing.”

Your Armor Isn’t Your Enemy

Every numbness, every contraction, every shutdown—it’s not your body betraying you.

It’s your body doing exactly what it needed to do to keep you safe when no one else could.

That three-year-old whose hand was slapped away from their genitals learned: Touch there equals danger. I’ll make you numb so you don’t get hurt again.

That teenager who was violated learned: Sensation in this area means pain. I’ll disconnect so you don’t have to feel what’s being done to you.

That adult who kept saying “yes” when their body said “no” learned: Your desires don’t matter. I’ll make intimacy boring so you stop trying to feel something that’s not safe to feel.

These aren’t malfunctions. They’re adaptations.

Your body’s infinite intelligence, doing its best with the resources it had.

And now—with awareness, with safety, with the right kind of attuned presence—you can thank these protective parts for their service.

And when you’re ready, you can invite them to soften.

To remember that expansion is safe now. That your boundaries will be honored now. That your body—in all its history, all its armor, all its hunger for wholeness—deserves to feel again.

Not because you have to perform. Not because you owe anyone pleasure.

But because sensation, pleasure, and aliveness are your birthright.

It’s Never Too Late

Diane was told by a doctor: “You’ll probably never have feeling again. We’ve taken out all the nerves.”

Today: Sensation restored. Orgasms returned. “I had no hope of that. Literally, no hope.”

Sophia’s clitoris was cut away with a razor blade and thrown out a window for dogs to fight over.

Today: “Now it’s just pleasure. Just pleasure and goodness in my body. Expanding and beautiful.”

Laura spent decades dissociating during sex, believing she was irreparably broken.

Today: “I can stay present. I don’t dissociate. It feels authentic instead of performative. I had gotten access to my full humanity.”

The man in his fifties who didn’t know his prostate existed.

Now: Full-body orgasmic states. Surrender. An entire dimension of aliveness he’d lived without for fifty years.

It’s never too late to come back into your body. Never too late to learn what your boundaries are. Never too late to release armor. Never too late to discover the portal you’ve been carrying all along.

But it requires what none of these stories could skip:

• Safety. A nervous system resourced enough to feel without seeking protection.
• Patience. Allowing your body to set the timeline instead of forcing it.
• Skilled support. Practitioners who understand how to listen to the wisdom of your body and invite the armor spaciousness.
• Willingness to practice. Daily. Weekly. For months. For years if needed.
• Self-compassion. Deciding you’re worth the care and the healing.

Your body has been waiting—patiently, wisely—for you to create the conditions where it’s finally safe to come home.

Place one hand on your genitals. One hand on your heart.

Breathe.

Listen.

Welcome home.

In reverence,
Rahi