How to Unpack your Sexual Shame & Turn It Into your Greatest Teacher

Once I was riding in a car back from Joshua Tree with a few progressive people whom I love. It was a long car ride, and the conversation turned to sex. A friend mentioned that the man she was dating loved blow jobs. Then I said something about having a mind-blowing orgasm when a yogi filmmaker and I were engaging in conscious kink, playing with pain, and that I was in an altered state of bliss for three days after. The car went quiet.

What did I say? Was it the trance of bliss or…the kink? It was consensual, of course, but I had crossed some sort of invisible line. I wondered: “How come blow jobs are OK to discuss, but a spanking is too hard-core for conscious folks? Couldn’t conscious spanking exist? And where is safe to talk about real sex if not with people we love?”