What is Holistic Sexuality?

Contrary to popular belief, sexual wellness isn’t defined by how much sex we’re having, or how high our desire is for sex. Holistic sexuality and sexual wellness also encompass our beliefs, mindset, and feelings around sex and our relationship with pleasure.

Societal and religious conditioning, pressure, expectations, performance anxiety, and shame can all hijack our pleasure- it’s almost like we carry invisible knapsacks into the bedroom, and unfortunately for many people, trauma, grief, disconnection from our bodies, or general lack of awareness and education around pleasure and intimacy can cause emotional and relational distress, dissatisfaction, despair, and grief.

Examine Your Beliefs Around Sex

Considering what you were taught around sex can be a helpful place to start in examining some implicit barriers or emotional wounds. Let’s face it. We live in a sex negative society and very few of us receive comprehensive, consent, and pleasure-based education. Many people carry shame and stigma around masturbation, and pleasure, or limited frameworks of what sex should look like. Examine your negative beliefs around sex or intimacy. What do you know or want to be true, and how can you recenter pleasure in your life and with your body? How can you prioritize care, compassion, and commitment to yourself?

Build Trust and Safety with Your Body and Pleasure

People can feel betrayed by their bodies or feel like their bodies actively betray them. We come to resent our bodies when they don’t look as we think they should, or do what we want them to, or age as gracefully as we imagined. People come to mistrust their bodies, disconnected from its wisdom, its consent. And so, we betray our bodies. We ignore our pleasure. We repress our needs and silence our voices. We learn that presence and embodiment mean danger. We self-protect and avoid.

How can you begin to teach safety to your body? How do we rewire our nervous systems for safety, and give ourselves permission for pleasure, presence, relaxation, and relief? Practice cultivating safety through breathwork, mindfulness, self-pleasure, nonsexual touch, or other forms of loving affirmation. As we rewire our nervous systems for safety, we expand our capacity for presence, pleasure, and connection.

Reclaiming Pleasure as A Source of Power

Pleasure isn’t frivolous. Capitalism thrives on collective anhedonia, and when we allow ourselves to experience pleasure fully, we activate creativity, aliveness, and authenticity. Many see pleasure as selfish or undeserved, yet it’s not only our right but a path to empowerment to know what we like and ask for what we want in the bedroom and beyond. Reclaiming pleasure means giving ourselves permission to feel good, to take up space, and to know that our joy matters, and committing to the practice of engaging in the moments, spaces, places, and with the people who bring delight to our lives, so that we can also be a conduit of this power for others.

Holistic sexuality is a container of your mindsets, beliefs, values, and practices. It’s the emotional, physical, relational, spiritual, intellectual, connective experience we have with ourselves others. It’s defining sex positivity on your own terms, and which also celebrates the ways others wish to express and explore pleasure on their own terms. It’s centering consent, safety, and care within yourself and with others. It’s honoring that sex and sexuality can exist on a beautiful spectrum, and there is no “one size fits all.”

Are you curious in exploring or expanding your relationship with pleasure, sex, or intimacy? What does holistic sexuality mean to you? Our diverse therapists and coaches at LAST are here to guide you in the various facets of sex and sexuality, whether you’re in a relationship or not. Your pleasure matters, and we’re here to support you on your unique journey.

Jamie Azar is former graduate of the Pleasure Psychology and Sexology Certification program, a sex, relationship, and intimacy coach, educator, writer, and mindfulness practitioner based in South Carolina. She offers 1-1 coaching with singles, couples, throuples + to co-create a safe, sex-positive, transformative, liberating, and empowering space that fosters personal and relational growth. She specializes in dismantling limiting beliefs, deconstructing, and destigmatizing harmful narrative constructs, to help clients reframe and redefine their understandings of selfhood, sex, sexuality, and relationships. To work with Jamie go here!