The Hunger

"Your heart is yearning for a man to meet you - that's different from lonely. Lonely you can fix with a cat and a few friends...See me, feel me, come and get me, meet me, be with me, penetrate me, play with me, dance with me... its never-ending by the way... because when you have a man you want more, you always want more because you intuit, as any woman does, that there's more, there's deeper, fuller, there's wider, there's wilder, there's softer, its never ending." Michaela Boehm - The Wild Woman's Way

To hear this as a woman and as a single woman, I feel a quickening in my heart, a lightening, an opening up. This heart yearning is joyful. Our hunger for more, our yearning for intimacy as a natural state of being. Its taken me a long time to learn that no amount of yoga, dieting, self-development, meditation, time with family and friends will ever fill this hunger for intimacy. We don't get to hear this very often. We most probably didn't grow up hearing it either. We learn that sex is not a very noble pursuit for a woman and that we aren't really that sexual anyway. We learn how to be good enough. We learn that we get what we want when we are good enough. We learn that if we don't have what we want we need to be better, (not more, more good). We learn that if we could just be good enough, thin enough, trendy and bendy enough, sexy enough, clever enough, (fill in the blanks), that we will be rewarded with a perfect whatever to complete us.

Allowing ourselves to want, allowing ourselves to surrender to our own desires means letting go and diving in to the vastness of ourselves. It scares us. Jumping off that edge into the felt knowing of our bodies, our longing, our hunger. To let ourselves want, we stop hiding, we stop deferring, we stop denying who we are. Sometimes it takes courage, that hungry heart, to burn through our shame, our not-enoughness, our stories, to get to this place of wildness. And sometimes all it takes is noticing. As women we are wired to feel and be in our bodies and in our desire. We were made to feel pleasure, from the sensitivity of our skin, to strength of our orgasm. Where desire and pleasure meet, something opens up in us that is both hungry and full. A place of "I'm enough as I am" and "I want more". A place of being here and being open. When we can be hungry while being present to our body's experience, there's no grasping and no pushing away, just the felt experience. Its in our bodies, our senses and our sexes that we find hunger and its here also that we find fullness, the fullness of life experienced viscerally in each moment.

So while I'm waiting for this man who can meet me, see me, penetrate me and be with me, its my daily practise to come back to my body and ask myself "what do you want?" again and again and again and again. To keep asking, to stay open, to keep listening. Not because it will get me something or somewhere or make me more loveable. I do it because then I have intimacy with my self and my body and my connection to my body is my connection to life.