Like so many others, for most of my life I didn’t know how to touch my pussy in ways that felt pleasurable, or at least experience a variety in what pleasure could feel like.

Since masturbation was one of my first experiences I had in extreme amounts of oxytocin, joy, and love, I loved doing it.

I’ve been masturbating my whole life the only way I knew how. For me, it was facedown; full, flat palm; pressing sultry against the hood of my clitoris.

My pussy was alive from the very beginning. I remember being four years old and feeling these tingling, almost explosive sensations in my clitoris to the point that I would start wiggling, rubbing, and finding anything to rub against where I could continue touching myself to feel those sensations. It was newly addictive, innocent, and extremely pleasurable. I often wondered if anyone could relate to this as well.

Sometime in my younger life, I had received the message from my schools, peers, and other authoritative figures that it wasn’t okay to be touching myself. From that point onward, I had associated that if it wasn’t okay to touch myself, then it wasn’t okay for me to experience joy. As much as I wanted to be happy, somehow it just felt wrong. I would shut out my connection with my body and to my pussy so that I could feel like I was doing something right.

It is known that we create habitual patterns and beliefs for ourselves from our primary environments and from our primary caregivers. Whether we realize it or not, we self-impose beliefs and ways of behaving that help us to cope for any stress, or emotional state of being that will get our needs met.

My childhood experience was all about overcoming feelings of loneliness. I wanted to feel accepted, to understand what it means to experience true intimacy with the world around me. I often searched for this subconsciously within my connection to my mother, because she was the closest friend that I had and the first place I had experienced love. I thought to myself that everyone else must be right, and if everyone else isn’t accepting of masturbation, then my mother must think the same.

So often I saw the unhappiness in my mother’s face because of the dissatisfaction she felt in life, the overwhelm of stress of having to work two jobs raising me as a single mom and moving around from place to place trying to keep up with rent.

Growing up, I self-inflicted the message that my pleasure and happiness were not supposed to be happening. It not only was wrong in the eyes of society, but I felt like I was robbing my mother’s happiness if I was happy, and it was my responsibility to take care of her and make sure she felt loved first and foremost. This was a subconscious agreement I made with myself—one that I didn’t realize I’d made until later in life, and that affected my relationships.

It translated to the belief that my pleasure and joy were wrong, that I was neglecting my responsibility if I had more joy and love than my mother. That I needed to put other people’s needs first before mine, and if I did end up feeling some form of true, loving happiness that ultimately, deep down, I didn’t deserve it. There wasn’t anything I could do to prove to myself that I was worthy of it.

This was an unconscious belief that I carried with me throughout my relationships with my romantic partners. I would constantly put my partners’ pleasure before mine; all my attention would go to them.

The thoughts that would swim in my head were endless: “Was I good enough or ‘enough’ in general? Others deserve to be happier than I am because they are worthier than I am. I must make others feel happy because it tells me that I’m doing something right. I need to be as convincing as possible so that they will continue to love me. What if my pleasure looks ugly? I must be an ugly human being because I’m choosing myself over others. If I give all my attention to them, they will be too distracted to notice my insecurity and unhappiness.”

This way of being and thinking wasn’t sustainable though. After many failed relationships and dissatisfying sexual experiences because of this underlying belief, I was determined to find a resolution. I was tired of feeling depressed and numbed out from not being able to experience joy. I was fed up with feeling like my body’s pleasure was not owned by me and my experience, and was needing to reclaim this feeling of worthiness so that I could switch the narrative to “If I experience pleasure, then I add to people’s happiness, not take away from it.”

The way in which this changed for me was the exploration of how to fill my life with more self-love. I was determined to be on a path to self-actualize into the most profound ways of love that I could be. My starting point was to discover what pleasure was, what it uniquely looked like for me, and to discover new ways of relating to my body—including my pussy, because it’s one of the most intimate and vulnerable places that we experience within our body.

It wasn’t until later on that I realized that the more I grew love for my pussy that it was also a direct correlation to the love I felt for myself in my heart. My heart and pussy are linked together. I began to feel into what my heart needed. Forgiveness, compassion, acknowledgement, attention, safety, and to be valued and appreciated were all qualities of my heart that I came to notice needed nourishment in my life, as well as for my pussy. The sheer recognition of this and that it took me so long to realize was not only embarrassing, but humbling.

Recognizing the ways in which I gave my power away helped me to see how I could reclaim it.

There is a lack of guidance in society about how we can feel empowered in our sexuality. The lack of awareness, let alone education, around our sexuality is horrendous, and often results in a lot of people (women and men) seeking therapy or healing in order to feel safe in their pleasure.

Opening up to my pleasure was awkward and embarrassing for me, because it meant that I needed to come to terms with being able to see myself and my pussy as beautiful, powerful, loved, and valued. Qualities that were completely far from my beliefs that I could ever imagine being able to feel for myself. I made myself the commitment, though. I needed to understand myself, who I was. I needed to be able to love myself completely if I was at all going to be happy in this life, in this body.

So what did I do?

I grabbed a small mirror and sat naked, looking and acknowledging my pussy as a part of me. I had feelings of disgust and curiosity. She looked far from the pictures in the clinic office or the magazines. Nonetheless, I would attempt each day to look at her and find some form of appreciation for her, some form of compassion, forgiveness, and overall connection with her.

I hadn’t realized that I couldn’t feel much sensation except only in a few areas. Was I so disconnected from her? Was I numb? I hadn’t realized how putting others pleasure and needs before my own disconnected me from my body so much.

Afterward, I began to form a relationship with her, willing to explore what felt good for her. I learned that knowing my pleasure, having pleasure, was, in a way, getting to know the map of my heart as well. A soft activism for all women. I translated that into the idea that by reclaiming my pleasure and believing that loving myself is the key, that perhaps I could generate enough love in myself to transmit to my mother. Healing my personal wounds would heal my mother’s wounds, and my mother’s before her, a healing of my maternal ancestral line, and even perhaps for many other women.

For a long time, I felt barely any pleasurable sensations in other parts of my pussy aside from how I was used to. It wasn’t until I combined my feelings of love within my heart and my pussy that I started to feel in more places.

This was confirmed for me one day during a meditative state when making love with a past lover by tuning inward to myself instead of outward to my partner. The more I felt my heart connected, the more my pussy felt alive, full, orgasmic, beautiful, and powerful. I also realized that the more I was connected to my heart while I was masturbating, this also awoke the same beautiful and exhilarating sensations. It awakened this familiarity I had felt when I was young, that addictive sensation that was connected to all the goodness in my life. I had such an amazement that my pussy was capable of feeling so much when all I needed was to recognize and feel love in myself.

I started to take the mirror and explore what it felt like to touch other parts of my pussy in different ways when connecting to my heart. I would dance in front of the mirror, touching my body, trying different motions, pressures, and speeds. Each time, I discovered a broader capacity to feel more sensations.

This was it, this was me awakening to my sense of aliveness, to a sense of worthiness of my life, to knowing more of who I am, and a sense of love and appreciation for myself and my body, especially my pussy. The thoughts that swirled around in my head switched into, “I am love. My body is important. My pleasure is meaningful and worthwhile.”

I started noticing shifts in my relationships, too. My partners were feeling so much deep pleasure and love through me being able to know my pleasure, and me knowing the meaning of what love is through the essence of me.

All my relationships around me started shifting. Whenever I would talk with other women openly about my experience with pleasure, it would inspire them and allow them to venture into the unknown, past their fears and into more self-acceptance and self-love.

My relationship to the deepest, hidden core part of myself in becoming more self-loving started to reflect to me what was important to have as a reflection in my environment and relationships.

This was the beginning of my journey into self-love and reclamation of pleasure, and how vital it is to experience because it brings healing in so many ways.