The Sexual Seasons

I’m SO happy to share this with you because I know it can have a game-changing affect on how you understand your body and sexuality.

According to the Taoist tradition, it’s important to see human health and life as cycling through all of nature's seasons. It’s even more important to honor every step of the way.

This concept has greatly impacted how I see myself as a sexual woman but also every sexual encounter.

Sexually, we can identity and honour the four seasons:

Winter

Winter is for resting, integrating, relaxing. Giving your pussy/genitals time and space to just BE, to surrender, to relax.

Nothing needs to be expected from you. Your body can hibernate and that’s okay.

You don’t feel horny. You’re not turned on. You are genuinly not feeling sexy or interested in sex.

The experience of winter includes rest and rejuvenation. It’s an inward movement and a sense of deep, still power. It can include meditation and quiet. It looks still on the outside, but there’s really a lot of rejuvenation going on underneath the surface.

A lot of women feel like they are ALWAYS in sexual winter. That’s because you can get “STUCK” there, if you don’t rest when your body/pussy is telling you to. Or if you constantly judge and criticize yourself when you’re not having the best sex or feeling super horny.

Our crazy modern society puts these impossible expectations on us, we should GO GO GO all the time, make MORE MORE MORE money, be HAPPY all the fucking time and do ALL THINGS. Our society does not respect and encourage being in a state of winter, so I invite you to reclaim it as something positive and very necessary.

Winter holds the key to your greatest wisdom and power. While it looks like death or nothingness, it carries the seeds of life within this experience.

Winter is deep yin.

Spring

Spring is about growth, energy, and upward movement. This is a state of the bubbly, expansive, learning new things, feeling lust and passion and pleasure. Spring represents youthfulness and vitality. There’s so much potential in the air.

Sexually, spring is all about learning new things, like expanding your pleasure, following your impulses, being curious and experimental, playful and adventurous. Being a try-sexual!

Turn-on is bubbling up, you feel pleasurable impulses and a growing appetite for sexual things, encounters and adventures!

But you can get stuck in spring, where you feel like you are building all this pleasure but you never get to the orgasm, or finish a creative project. It’s akin to being stuck in the hamster wheel.

Many women are stuck in a kind of youth-spring because they fear aging. They cling to the idea of how their bodies once looked, or a kind of ideal that is impossible to live up to. There can be a fear of taking responsibility, of maturing.

Summer

The orgasms! Full bloom!!

Summer is about experiencing orgasmic states and strong spiritual awakening or realization. Summer represents achievement, action and getting results.

Summer means mastering the thing/yourself, maturing, and fully coming into yourself. There’s a sense of expansion and fullness, you feel full in your expression.

Summer is fiery yang. You orgasm, you are turned the fuck ON and you want sex and aren’t afraid of asking for it.

To reach summer, you have to accept imperfection.

You can get stuck in summer, as in a false sense of an endless summer. You don’t want the party to end. But eventually it gets hollow.

Summer is an outward movement. Completion. You birth the baby, complete the project, launch the book, have the orgasm. It’s a culmination… and so, there is something final about summer. It's the peak. Naturally, once you’ve peaked, there’s nowhere to go from here but down.

Fall

Fall is about letting go, letting things pass away. Embrace, accept and celebrate change. Grieving. This can be a very healing-focused state.

After the expansion of spring and summer, you again turn inward to cool down and surrender.

This state is about integration and release, but there can be a deep joy and fulfilment in this, in reflection and shedding skin.

Doing deeper sexual healing work, de-armoring, confronting belief systems and old identities and experiences. Doing the WORK so you can move ON.

You can get stuck in fall if you don’t cultivate a willingness to heal, integrate, reflect and learn. If you cling to summer and don’t accept that the party has ended and “winter is coming”, then you’ll linger in a weird fall state.

Applying this to your life

The seasons are applicable to all areas of life, but it’s beautiful to see how perfectly they can describe the sexual states we move through.

You can even put a single sexual experience into this concept and it makes sense. Moving from winter (not in the mood/turned off), to spring (foreplay), to summer (sex + orgasm) and lastly to fall (rest and integration).

I encourage you to look at your sexuality through this lens but also looking at your pleasure as the weather.

Sometimes it rains, sometimes it’s windy, sometimes it’s sunny. You can dislike it, but you don’t judge the weather. It just is. Approach your body with the same acceptance and respect and it will respond to you much better.

This seasonal framework also helps us normalize why we can’t be horny all the time, and why it seems like nothing is happening sometimes and then BOOM you’re sexually alive again. It explains why you need rest, integration, healing, so you can bloom. You can't bloom all year round.

With the right support, awareness and tools, you can learn to healthily move through your sexual season and harness the power and wisdom in each season so that you stay connected to your path of evolution and growth.

Sometimes you just need to honor your current season, and sometimes you need practices and support to move out of it, so you keep rotating through all of the seasons.

No season is “good” or “right”. Just like nature, all seasons make sense and are important for the ecosystem.

However, the sexual season can skip seasons, they don’t necessarily follow nature’s order, so don’t be surprised if you go from winter straight to summer, or from fall to spring.

If you’re in winter, know that this is the perfect place to start...you can gently begin your journey here with so much curiosity about what is there, start slow and feel what’s alive and be open to whatever seasons you will experience as you explore and practice.

Hope this inspired you and gave you a helpful framework to understand yourself better and treat yourself with more kindness and compassion.

Your body is amazing and perfect.

With Love,

Erika