by Tom Kovach
Andrew Willett, Editor

Below are two accounts of recent workshops where we continued the Celebration.

What We Carried Home

Reflections from Roxy and Kristin, two assistants, on the drive away from Body Electric’s Erotic Nourishment retreat

We had barely pulled away from the retreat center before we started talking, and what we kept coming back to was the women. Each time we have been part of this retreat, a group of people with different ages, bodies, histories, and reasons for coming becomes a warm and loving community so quickly. This year was no different.

One woman’s words in the closing circle stayed with us all the way to the airport. She said that women have always supported one another. We support each other when we give birth, when we cook, and when we have to bury our children. And here at the retreat, she said, she had watched women supporting women in reclaiming their pleasure.

“That almost made me cry,” Roxy said in the car. Pleasure is one of the places where so many of us have been left on our own. We are supposed to somehow know what we like, how our bodies work, and how to ask for what we want, without anyone ever teaching us.

Someone always knew

The same woman told a story about a sex toy. She mentioned in it that she had a question about how to use one, and later that evening, as she walked past another participant’s room, the woman inside asked if she still wanted to know. She did. So the other woman showed her. What delighted her most was how natural it felt, as if of course, this is what we do for each other.

That spirit was everywhere. One evening we sat together and asked all the questions we would never ask anyone out in the world, and everyone answered openly and without shame. Someone always knew. Someone knew how to find community, or how to get on an app to meet play partners. Someone had tried the thing you were wondering about and could tell you both an embarrassing story and an empowering one. And someone else could say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” and that was welcome too. As Kristin put it, innocence and experience were in the room at the same time, and everything felt normal.

This woman is going home wanting to be that resource for her own community: for young women in marriages who suffer through bad sex because they don’t know anything else is possible, and for everyone who is curious and has no one to ask. “I’m going back with actual skills to offer other women,” she said.

Not knowing was welcome

Some women arrived saying, in one way or another, “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I need. I just know I needed this.” Some wondered out loud whether they were numb, or shut down, or simply unfamiliar with the erotic part of themselves. The retreat didn’t ask them to have an answer before they belonged. Their not knowing became the place where discovery could start.

One of the elders spoke about this in the closing circle. She kept noticing a look of complete astonishment on her own face, and at first it surprised her that someone her age could still feel so amazed. Then she decided it was actually really cute. She is embracing her not knowing, she said, and it is inspiring her to go out and ask for exactly what she wants.

Women who had come many times said something similar. “I’ve been here three times,” one said, “and I still learned something about myself.” Another said she becomes more herself every time she comes. Kristin noticed how spacious that felt: there was nothing this woman had to do or prove in order to belong and keep becoming.

Women teaching women across generations

As we drove, Roxy remembered an afternoon from last year, sitting outside above the hot springs with women from their late twenties to their seventies, talking about everything. “I went home thinking about my own kid, and about me,” she said. “No one ever talked to me about menopause. No one talked to me about sex after this change or that one. We don’t have circles of women learning from each other anymore. My fifty-year-old friends are going through it with me, so they can’t tell me what’s on the other side.”

At Erotic Nourishment, the ages mix. Younger women can see a future they have never seen modeled. Older women can look at younger ones and think, “You’re doing now what I’m only discovering at fifty. Imagine where you’ll be.” Kristin noticed that none of it felt exclusive. No one’s stage of life was treated as the most important. It was simply sharing, with knowledge moving in every direction.

Making the mundane spectacular

In the last circle, Kristin was paired with a woman who said, “I think I’m going to put on my lingerie when I’m sweeping the kitchen floor.”

We loved that, because it captures something about erotic nourishment that can be hard to explain. As women, many of us are taught to be wary of eros and to connect it only with sex. We learn that we can feel only so much excitement, passion, and zest for life before we become improper. At this retreat, eros showed up in taste, touch, and smell, in the wind on our skin, and in floating in the hot springs held by another woman. All of that is life energy. Putting on lingerie to sweep is one way to weave it into ordinary days and make the mundane spectacular. Or, as Kristin said, “Girlfriend, sweep that floor.”

Claiming what we want

One exercise had the whole room vibrating. We each wrote down things we wanted and put them on the wall. Then a basket went around, and women read each other’s wishes aloud with no names attached. Many of the wishes had nothing to do with sex. People wanted to be touched, to be held, to be whispered to. Kristin called it “inhabiting ourselves with company,” and that feels exactly right.

Near the end, each woman had the chance to stand and claim something, or let something go, and to hear the group respond, “We see you.” How often do any of us get to stand up, say what is important to us, and be fully received?

Kristin also loves the small moments of witnessing. A woman tries on a playful piece of clothing and hears, “Oh, look at you!” You don’t need an Academy Awards dress to be delighted in. That delight was real, and it carries into daily life: people take real pleasure in watching each other simply be themselves.

Seeing each other’s beauty

People come expecting a sex-positive retreat, and they find one. They also find themselves doing deep healing work: work with their mothers and ancestors, and so much work on shame.

One woman, confident and very sex positive, said that if she had known what this retreat would bring up, she might not have registered. She carried messages about fat from her mother, who got them from her mother, and from her mother before that. Then she found herself in a room where women were taking off their clothes, and there was not one bit of shaming or judgment. What struck her was that the different body sizes in the room did not seem to need explanation or qualification. She experienced them as genuinely beautiful.

Another woman talked about a part of her body that had carried deep shame for her, so much that she couldn’t imagine anyone seeing it. She had made a surgical change, and she spoke about the painful feelings that choice had brought. Watching her in the circle, we could see something shift toward a simple, spacious truth: I get to decide for myself what pleases me.

For Roxy, one moment stood out. “A woman stood up and took off all her clothes as she told us what she wanted us to know about her. I looked at her and thought how beautiful she was. Then I realized she had the same shape I have, the body I used to think was so horrible. We see each other’s beauty so much more easily than our own, and seeing it in each other gives us permission to see it in ourselves.”

Taking it back into the world

One of the leaders called herself an erotic disruptor. She said she knows that each time she does this work, she leaves the world a little better than she found it, and that all of us at the retreat were doing the same.

When she said that, Roxy thought about the question we ask at the close: what are you taking back into your world? Women answered: being a resource to my community. More joy. Meeting everyone in my life with more spirit and connection.

As we sat in the car remembering, Kristin found words for what we had seen. It was something like empowerment, she said, but really it was blossoming, in ourselves and in each other. And that blossoming makes the world feel less threatening.

We think that is what the women carried home.

New Beginning: Creativity, Ritual, and the Erotic Impulse

Lui Gervais

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