The Power Of Self-Seduction: The Cycle of Disconnection and How to Reclaim Your Pleasure
The Power Of Self-Seduction: The Cycle of Disconnection and How to Reclaim Your Pleasure
by Taylor neal
When we think of our sexuality, we often think of it in relation to others.
We think of how attractive we might appear to others, the people we might be attracted to, the ways we can seduce, or pleasure, or service, or provide for, other people, how we are seen and perceived by the world around us. Our understanding of, and experience of, our sexuality then, becomes largely contingent on the feedback we receive from the outside world; our sexual self and worth becoming rooted in bodies and experience other than our own.
Many of us have become disconnected from sensuality and pleasure as a concept outside of sexuality, from pleasure as our Birthright, due to patriarchal societal conditioning, capitalism, and sex (mis)education that teaches us little about the potential of our pleasure and much more about the dangers of it. When we aren’t taught that pleasure is something we are capable of, and built for, without contingency or cost or proximity to another person, sensuality and pleasure often become inextricably linked to our sexual self; this sexual self that we believe exists only in relation to others.
When we are disconnected from our sexuality as our own, by us and for us, our sensuality, our pleasure, is then also not our own. Our sexuality often feels like it is not for us, but existent for the enjoyment and service of others, validated as real and functioning only through the engagement of someone else.
The Unplugged Light Display
Without connection to our innate sensuality and pleasure as completely and solely our own, created by us and available to us at our own will, we become somewhat like an elaborate, sophisticated christmas light display unplugged in the daytime; a complex, functional system of wonder, though muted and unalive on our own, waiting for the electric charge of another source to fulfill our purpose and become our most vibrant self when the time is right.
The largest impact of this system, though there are many, is that in believing our sexual/sensual energy source is external, we end up feeling muted and unalive in the tenderness of the moments of mundane solitude speckled throughout our days and weeks and years; when we stare at ourselves in the mirror while we brush our teeth, or catch our reflection in a shop window as we make our way into work or finally make it out of the house after a strenuous bought of deciding what to wear on a first date. Those delicate moments when we are alone with our body, pulling on our underwear or noticing new hair growth or cellulite or a new wrinkle, become moments when we struggle to see our bodies as a sensual body, a sexual body, or a body capable of pleasure, but rather a body waiting to be validated to come alive.
If we believe that our sexuality only exists in relation to others, and it is through our sexuality only that we experience sensuality and pleasure, our bodies as they are when we are not actively being desired or validated do not feel deserving of our time, love, and energy, so we don’t invest our time, love and energy into the possible pleasure of being with ourselves in these small moments. We aren’t nearly as tuned in, or connected, to the pleasure available to us in our own bodies if we believe our pleasure, our aliveness, comes from other. We don’t feel it, and then it’s simply not there.
In being alone with our body without feeling the aliveness of our body (unplugged light display), the body can quickly become something to resent, to avoid, to criticize; an appliance that never quite worked the way the advertisement promised.
The Cycle
The reality is that we’re more often alone with our body before we’re with another with our body, and we will again be alone with our body after we’re with another, so our body then often feels unplugged and unalive by default between the glimpses of it’s potential that we see only when plugged into the validation of another.
When the body becomes reliant on external sources to feel fully alive, any flaw, imperfection, or divergence from what we’ve been conditioned to believe is a worthy body, becomes seen, and felt, as an obstacle or barrier to our pleasure and sensuality.
If our aliveness, our pleasure/sensuality is reliant on our sexuality, which is reliant on others, then anything we perceive as a threat to the possibility of connection with others becomes something to fear, to fight, or to avoid. Our body then becomes the enemy to fear, fight or avoid, as we strive to believe we are worthy of connection, and those tender moments alone with our bodies become harder and harder.
Furthermore, when we find ourselves disbelieving in our own worthiness for the pleasure that comes with connection with another, it becomes increasingly difficult to practice the intimacy required to share ourselves with others. Without belief in our own capacity for pleasure and sensuality as an inherent quality of our being, as deeply a fact of our existence as breathing without the validation of another, we doubt our worth as though it is not also as innate as our breath, and we slowly forget, one solo moment at a time, what that state of turned-on-ness feels like, and we grow further from our vibrance, our aliveness, each day.
And thus we enter the cycle: we are systematically disconnected from our pleasure as it exists outside of sexuality from a lifetime’s experience of societal structures and learnings, we learn that our worth is measured by our sexual attractiveness/desirability to others, we are taught that our sexuality is not our own but exists in relation to others, we marry our sexuality (and therefore our sensuality and our pleasure) to being in relation to another and to being desired and validated by another, when we are alone we are then disconnected from our sensuality and pleasure, we grow to fear anything about ourselves that we perceive as a threat to our desirability, we lose belief in our worthiness for connection with others, our bodies become sites of resentment, we lose connection with our pleasure.
Of course, there is endless room for nuance within this cycle, and I’d like to stress that this is a very clinical, sterile, linear depiction of this particular cycle. But it is a common cycle nonetheless, and one that becomes very difficult to break once we find ourselves in it.
As Audre Lorde said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In order to break the cycle, to reclaim our sexuality, our sensuality and our pleasure, as ours, we must find ways to cultivate our sensuality and reconnect to our pleasure in ways that do not depend on external sources or people. We must reframe our relationship to our pleasure and reclaim our worth.
Breaking The Cycle
Something many of us have seldom been told (mostly because it doesn’t support capitalism or patriarchy) is that we actually don’t need anything in order to become a sensual being.
We are sensual, sexual beings, with immense capacity for pleasure and innate worth woven between the molecules and tissues and organs and muscles and ligaments that make up our extraordinary bodies as they are. We already are desirable and vibrant and plugged in and turned on just as we are; we don’t require any electricity or specific external sources to access our sensuality, our sensuality exists in our having of a body alone. It’s already there.
What we do need however, is to remember this fact again and again, because we have been sold the notion that our sensuality/sexuality/pleasure comes from products and abs and the like-count on our Instagram pictures. When we depend on the surge of energy that comes from these external places to make us feel alive, to make us feel worthy, we will always be chasing that fleeting feeling, because these will never be sustainable sources to fuel our light.
When we set out on this journey to connect with our sensuality and our pleasure on our own terms, for ourselves only, the question becomes: “how can I seduce, pleasure, service, or provide for, myself? What does my sensual self look like?”
Our sensuality, our worthiness of pleasure, has to come from within, and in order to adopt this belief, we have to show ourselves we are worthy of energy, love, care, and therefore our own seduction.
Seducing Yourself
This is why it is so important to direct our attention and energy back to seducing ourselves, to romancing ourselves, to being sexual, sensual, playful, romantic, vibrant and curious, for ourselves and with ourselves, to remind us that we are all of these things as we are, without any need for being plugged in or validated by any other.
If your sexuality, your sensuality, your pleasure, exists only in relation to someone else, you will never get to access the full, unfiltered, most authentic version of you, because you will always be influenced by the other.
To get closer to your sensuality and your authentic power, you have to start by seducing yourself, solely for the purpose of giving yourself pleasure, and witnessing yourself experiencing pleasure, learning what it really feels like to be the fully functioning, whole, worthy, sexy, version of you, so that you can then use that understanding of your own pleasure to measure your experiences with others. Rather than your pleasure being measured by what you are given by the world, your pleasure always being in relation to the world, when you become your own seductress, the world and what you experience becomes measured by your pleasure.
The people you meet, the environments you find yourself in, the sex you have, the activities you do; it all becomes measured by your pleasure, by how much pleasure you’re experiencing, because you know what your pleasure can feel like and you know that you can find it yourself, and all the rest is just extra toppings.
When you invest your energy in seducing yourself, caring for yourself, offering yourself pleasure and romance and lust, you then go out into the world looking for others who compliment your sensual self and your pleasure, rather than going out into the world looking for others to be your sensuality and pleasure. It is absolutely game changing.
So How Do I Do It?
There are endless ways you might find to access your own sensuality and pleasure, so it’ll be a process of trial and error and it might take some patience, time, and curiosity. But, as we’re trying to remember, we are worthy of that patience, time, and curiosity. Setting out on the journey can be the first step in reconnecting to your sensual self, you’re already on the path!
One of the most direct routes to cultivating one’s own sensuality I’ve found in my experience both personally and with clients, has been through creativity, and most importantly, slowness.
Creativity
Creativity is inherently sensual, because it requires getting closer to your senses no matter what you’re doing or how you’re going about it.
Some creative practices are more obviously sensual than others, but really, when you boil it down, all forms of creation are sensual in some way.
To create is to hone in on some aspect of your experience and transform it into something new. In order to do this, you must bring focus to whatever piece of the world you’re creating from.
The only way we experience the world as humans is through our 5 senses, so you must channel energy into your senses enough throughout your process, whatever it might be, to feel into your experience of the thing and your vision of what it might become, or, to feel into the thing enough for it to become something, without a clear vision of what that something might be. This process is what we call “creation.”
Some examples of sensual creative practice include:
Dancing
Cooking
Photography
Self-portraiture
Writing
Painting/drawing
Masturbation or self touch
Playing
Having a conversation
Gardening
Noticing
Day-dreaming
Slowness
I say slowness is most important, because sensuality is quite literally the opposite of rushing, and there is no creativity without slowness.
To understand what I mean, picture Edward Cullen running through the forest, when the trees around him are all a blur. Or, if you’re not a Twilight person, perhaps picture yourself rushing through a meal, or rushing to an appointment, or rushing through household chores; the felt, sensual experience is most often lost in the rush. If you rush to shove a sandwich down your throat so you can return to work as quickly as possible, odds are you’ll barely even taste the food in your mouth if you’re just focused on chewing as fast as you can. If you’re rushing down the street or in the car, you won’t notice the landscape around you as vividly as you could at a slower pace. If you rush through your chores, you’ll probably do a mediocre job compared to what a slower, more intentional, version of yourself could accomplish. Rushing hinders sensuality, which then hinders creativity.
Creativity requires time to think and feel and process in a creative way, creativity requires sensuality, which requires a pace that accommodates the felt experience as engaged through the senses.
Slowing down, as well, is one of the best ways to regulate one’s nervous system, which also promotes reconnection to the senses.
Some ways to practice slowness are:
Doing just one thing at a time
Permitting yourself more time than necessary for each engagement throughout your day
Choosing one of your senses to focus on during any given moment (example: really focus on sound while walking through the park, or taste while eating)
Repeating affirmations to yourself such as: This time is my own, I can slow down, I can do it slower, I am not in a rush, I have enough time, There is enough time
Practice saying no to more engagements when you can, so you have more time for creativity
Your Sensual Self
Self seduction can look like anything that brings you into your own sensuality, whether that be wearing lingerie for yourself and taking sexy selfies, or getting covered in flour while you bake yourself a cake for no specific reason.
Your sensuality is unique to you, so your seduction tools can look like whatever brings you pleasure and reminds you that your pleasure comes from you, first and foremost.
Of course, I never intend to imply that there is anything wrong with indulging in the pleasure brought on by being in relation to another, there is absolutely an abundance of pleasure, sensuality, and beauty, in exploring these things with others. What I do intend by saying that our pleasure and sensuality has to come from us first, is that discovering our own innate sensuality and reconnecting to our own pleasure is one of the most powerful, most sustainable, ways to develop more loving relationships with our bodies and to experience our own aliveness.
We might not always feel incredible, or sexy, or in love with our bodies, but by connecting to our sensuality and our pleasure on our own terms, knowing that our worth comes from us alone, we become less likely to fall into cycles of resentment and disconnection from our bodies. We become less likely to measure our worth by things outside of ourselves. We become less likely to mold our pleasure to another, and we become more connected to the sensuality available to us in each moment we have with our bodies.