Be Vanilla: What Relationship Exploration Taught Me About Trusting Myself

There is a strange pressure in modern life to believe that more adventurous, more intense, or more unconventional somehow means more evolved. But what if finding yourself isn’t about becoming more of something? What if it’s about becoming more you?

I joke that my motto in life is: “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing”.

Many years ago, I decided to become a certified sex therapist in order to better help the couples I served as a licensed marriage therapist. 

Newsflash: Therapists generally specialize in the areas where they need the most help too.

So, I thought, becoming a sex therapist might also be the answer to the bedroom issues that I had with my own husband!

The Search for the “Right” Way to Live

My sex therapy certification process included spending time in dungeons and at fetish events.

As a woman who believed myself to be “not vanilla” and “open and affirming” to all kinds of lifestyles, I happily planned a number of trips with a close colleague to explore the kink side of All Things Intimate. 

I could write a dissertation on what I learned about myself and the field of sex therapy during those three years. 

• I could write about how what I thought would be a turn on was a big turn off.
• I could write about the energetics of connection, intimacy, and safety that are largely ignored by long-term-married-hetero-cisgendered-couples and in part why so many of those couples lose the luster in their sex life.
• I could write about how the kinky world can quietly mirror the “more is better” ethos common in the consumeristic-materialistic-mainstream – more extreme, more intense, more complicated, more taboo – is ‘better’.
• I could write about the BLURRY BOUNDARIES that can create a kaleidoscope of confusion, self-questioning, and reality distortion in those kinky spaces.
• I could write about the familiar pattern of forgoing my own bone-deep-knowing while walking through the halls and rooms of those dungeons and hanging out in those play spaces trying to fit my somatic intelligence into the accepted kinky ethos.
• I could write about how I felt somehow LESS THAN compared to those colleagues and friends of mine who were rushing to The Lifestyle that was upheld as more evolved-revolutionary-feminist-empowered than my oh-so-boring-vanilla-mostly-missionary-style-marriage.

What Relationship Exploration Taught Me About Myself

It has taken me pretty much 30 years to really OWN my own knowing in ALL THINGS and to trust myself as a woman – AKA THE WISDOM that lives in me – and woman, you have it too. 

(That journey back to self-trust and inner wisdom is one many women in transition quietly find themselves walking too.)

I have invested my entire adulthood trying to achieve, acquire, and attain MORE so that I can feel better, be better, and live better. 

In a world that somehow signaled to me that me just being me would not and COULD NOT be enough, I have been Cookie-Monster-gobbling-up degrees, certifications, books, programs, ideas, and alternative perspectives in order to locate the RIGHT WAY to do life.

Why Women Learn to Distrust Their Own Knowing

I used to pedestalize one guru or methodology for optimal living after another – often actual teachers but also alternative lifestyles or perspectives:

Liberally-informed higher education

Yoga (all kinds)
Feminism
Veganism
Psychology, Shadow-work, Dream work
Raw-Foodism
Mystical Christianity
Goddess and Wiccan Practices
CrossFit
Carnivorianism
Sex therapy, sex coaching, tantra
Marathon meditating (a la Dr. Joe Dispenza)
Natural health ANYTHING
Alternative health ANYTHING
Plant-based, whole food diet
Mitochondrial health

I invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in programs, tools, seminars, books, and gear to gain proficiency in whatever current CULTure that I was a part of.

I was deeply saturated in so much external information that it felt impossible to know what would feel and BE best for ME. Because everything that I was doing was deeply influenced by the modality that I was entwined in.

The Importance of Inner Wisdom and Self Trust

In other words, I found it hard to locate myself in all of the noise, which is often what happens when women spend years adapting to expectations instead of reconnecting with themselves. What I have learned is this:

The most important guide is YOUR OWN INNER WISDOM.

Learning how to trust yourself and listen to your own truth may be one of the most important skills a woman develops.

And given the flood of brainwashing-matrix-supporting-spellcasting that we are all under, divining one’s own knowing in such murky waters is nothing short of almost-impossible.  

That coupled with the epidemic of UNsafety in our world and fear-feasting on MSM and on The Socials creates a shark-invested-like environment where you are supposed to somehow “just” drop into your own inner knowing and listen to your own quiet and subtle truth. ← Yeah, no big deal.

Your inner truth-compass might further be scrambled due to the multitude of ways that you have been conditioned to simply not trust yourself, your lifelong practice of creating confusion or overwhelm for yourself, and that pattern of dismissing your knowing entirely as selfish.

Finding Your Way Back to Yourself

Here is what I know is true for me:

• Not everyone needs to explore BDSM, open relationships or kinky play.
• More intense-extreme-edgy in life is not necessarily better.
• “Vanilla” is not less evolved or less connecting.
• Safety is sexy as fu** in ANY relationship.
• The most important skill to have as a woman is the ability to connect to what you know to be true in your own body.
• The second most important skill to have as a woman is the ability to commit to listening to that knowing and then be responsible for it in the world (that means LIVING YOUR TRUTH FOR REAL).
• The third most important skill to have as a woman is to trust yourself so deeply that you can remain tethered to the truth of who you are even when that puts you at odds with the condoned narrative outside of you.

Living Your Truth in Relationships and Life

Presently, I am obsessed with supporting women in midlife and seasons of transition to create lives rich with nourishment and safety so they can reconnect with their own truth.

I am deeply committed to being a temple-keeper of security and safety for women so you can relax and follow the truth-compass that lives in you.

The answers that you seek are inside of you (they always have been, Dorothy!) and whether your truth is kinky or vanilla, mainstream or radically alternative, locate that truth and be an expression of it in the world.

You be you. I’ll be me. And together we will be free.

xojg

If you are learning how to trust yourself more deeply and create a more conscious, connected relationship, Your Marriage Is Your Ashram offers a deeper path into the practices and conversations that help us come home to ourselves and each other.