Originally posted April 24, 2014
"From 6 to 9 and Beyond: Widening the Lens of Feminine Eroticism"
A New Book by Candice Holdorf
http://www.from6to9andbeyond.com
Filmed by Find Your Edge Media http://www.findyouredgemedia.com
What is "From 6 to 9 and Beyond: Widening the Lens of Feminine Eroticism"? (Video)
Originally posted April 24, 2014
"From 6 to 9 and Beyond: Widening the Lens of Feminine Eroticism"
A New Book by Candice Holdorf
http://www.from6to9andbeyond.com
Filmed by Find Your Edge Media http://www.findyouredgemedia.com
How I Work With Clients (Video)
Originally posted April 23, 2014
Filmed by Find Your Edge Media http://www.findyouredgemedia.com
How Humility Breeds Confidence
Originally posted March 31, 2014
In my meditation this weekend, I connected to a very young and tender part of myself needing love: the terrible two-year old who is in a constant bratty fit, never likes what she has and feels entitled to her every whim.
I sat with this girl and, in the midst of deep embarrassment, found compassion for her. I discovered that even if no one in the world likes her, there is always someone out there who loves her: myself.
I noticed how she often resorts to emotional violence and acts "smarter than everyone else" in order to mask the deep insecurity that she isn't "good enough."
Meeting her in this way taught me much about the power of humility.
Humility isn't about self-deprecation or lowering oneself: it's about the willingness to say "yes" to whatever arises and surrender to the great mystery of our lives.
This becomes the breeding ground of true confidence--for when we are living in our deep "yes," we recognize that whoever we are now and whatever we have to offer is exactly perfect in the moment. We no longer need to "fix" or "adjust" ourselves in order to fit some pre-ordained structure of how we "think" we should be.
From here, gratitude and wonder become our natural state of being and the unknown no longer represents where we are "lacking," but where we are abundant with possibility.
I’m Married, But I Don’t Believe in “The One”
Photo: GettysGirl4260
Originally posted March 26, 2014
I’ve never believed in “The One.”
Even as a Disney-obsessed kid, collecting every VHS cartoon I could find, I still didn’t believe in “The One.”
Even today, as I sit in my San Francisco apartment married to a man I convinced is my soul mate, I still don’t believe in “The One.”
I’m not a total cynic nor do I think that love always leads to heartbreak and that relationship is ultimately the death of sex and personal freedom and your own vitality.
I think that the notion of “The One” gets wrapped up in the erroneous belief that as soon as we find someone who loves us, all of our problems get solved and all our needs will always be met and we will never go hungry again.
Dude, if you put that much pressure on anyone, you are destined for disappointment and resentment.
Sometimes, “The One” isn’t just about a romantic relationship. How many times have we said, “If only I had that job/money/workshop/enlightenment/award/fill-in-the-blank-craving, then I would be happy.”
Stop looking for “The One” outside of yourself and recognize that YOU are the one you’ve been waiting for.
When you become the heroine of your own story, you become 100% responsible for your own “happily ever after.” You stop chasing this nebulous thing outside of yourself and being a victim of circumstance.
You also invite freedom, play and growth into your life. We often use “The One” to satisfy some personal insecurity that we aren’t worthy of love unless we have something outside of ourselves to reflect our lovability.
We also search for “The One” because we fear change and view it as a threat to our survival. We hope that “The One” will provide the stability we so desperately crave. Sorry kids, but that’s just not how life works. And thank goodness for that, for it is that static way of living which is the true culprit in the death of sex and personal freedom and your own vitality.
When you realize that “Happily Ever After” can often look like “What the fuck am I doing? Help me! I don’t know. Fuck it,” then you are more willing to accept every moment as an opportunity to enjoy the ride rather than check out of life on the hungry-ghost hunt.
So here’s a poem from my upcoming book dedicated to all the princesses who are slaying their own dragons, saving themselves and choosing to grow up into Warrior-Queens. When you live life as your own “One,” whole and complete, you walk into relationships not looking for Prince Charming, but for a mature man or woman ready to share an adventure yet-to-be written.
Fairy Tales
From your perspective
It must seem as easy as
Drawing the sword from the stone
Or soaring on a magic carpet
Or spinning straw into gold
But I know myself
Princesses only stay pure
Through obstinate abstinence
So you’ll find me in the gutter
Cigarette in one hand
Ice cream in the other
And marvel at how easily angels fall
But if you’re brave enough to climb my tower
(And make friends with the sleeping dragon)
Then don’t try to explain me
(Your tongue has better uses)
Strip off your armor
(Women aren’t won with steel)
And succumb to the tumbling embers
From the beast (no longer tame)
As you rouse beauty from her slumber
With a kiss of fairy flame
After all
(As Rilke says)
Perhaps all the dragons of our lives
Are princesses
Who are only waiting to see us
(Once)
Beautiful and Brave
On a Sultry, Southern Sunday
Originally posted March 22, 2014
I’m a Southern girl.
That means I always send thank you notes, order white gravy with my biscuits and often depend on the kindness of strangers.
Oh, and I never touch myself (as Anastasia Steele would call it) “down there.”
OK…maybe that last one is a bit of lie.
You see, in the South, that kind of thing was never talked about—especially with girls. Good girls simply didn’t have those urges. It was sort-of “damning by omission.”
Now boys on the other hand: according to the church, they needed to control themselves.
So imagine my confusion at age 12 when I…well…needed to learn to “control myself.” I felt sort-of like a freak. Why I was afflicted with this “boy issue.” And honestly, why was it such a bad thing?
Years later in college I finally realized the truth about female sexuality. The late night chats about what kind of porn girls liked, TV shows with vibrator jokes and the official angsty college-girl icon, Tori Amos, lifted the veil from an otherwise obscured understanding of my own body and sexual tastes.
But the shame was cemented inside of me.
I was, as many would say, a late bloomer. I was 19 when I gave my first blowjob and 21 when I first had genital intercourse. There was no tangible reason for why I chose to refrain from sexual exploration during my teen years other than to say, “I had better things to do.”
But I think some part of me had tamped down my desire as a pre-teen in order to save myself the secrecy and embarrassment I often felt before, during and after I touched myself.
Now, several years later, as I share pieces of my erotic journey through fiction and poetry in my new book, I am reminded of how very innocent pleasure is and how the archetype of the Virgin is a sovereign being, her body belonging to no one but herself.
Below is the Virgin’s poem, based on my own experiences of erotic awakening, my adolescent faith in Jesus (for whom I still feel deep reverence) and the conflict that often arose between the two.
On A Sultry Southern Sunday
On a sultry southern Sunday
Hazy honeysuckle in the heat
Christians soldiers fan themselves
With folded programs for relief
The preacher, collar stained with sweat,
Says, “Turn to Psalm 23.”
Daddy glances towards the acolytes
But I’m not where I should be
I’m lyin’ down in greener pastures
Inviting a quickening breath
Restoring a sad, scarred soul through
My valley of the shadow of death
Bring those quiet waters
To a rolling, raging boil
Let my fingers do the prayin’
Anoint my head with palm oil
Break your rod, keep your staff
Hungry hands need to feed
And your wafer-scrap holy bite
Leaves me writhing in hollow need
And after the shepherd’s spoken
The flock, freshly blessed,
Head to brunch to gorge their guilt
In feasts of righteousness
They’re born and bled to hide behind
The good book of the past
Tissue thin leaves won’t cut their skin
When they turn the pages too fast
But on a sultry southern Sunday
When I’m upstairs all alone
It ain’t no low-swung chariot
Comin’ for to carry me home
Excerpt from The Nun's Story in My Upcoming Book "From to 6 to 9 and Beyond"
The Nun. Photo by Sequoia Emmanuelle.
Originally March 15, 2014
“Help me!” she cried, grief rattling through her. “Help me please.“
Her prayer gave way to jangled sobbing. She placed her hands on her heart, trying to keep her rib cage from shattering. Her heart hammered relentlessly in her chest.
Suddenly she realized that what she was feeling was not grief, but unbearable love. Heart-shattering love. Blind devotion love. The kind of love that rests on the tip of the tongue, but remains indescribable. The kind of love that clangs and bangs within the restrictive confinement of flesh, pulsing at the edges of fingertips, yet can never be fully expressed.
It is the kind of love that only God understands and most humans tragically spend eternities trying to purchase from others.
Why I Don’t Fuck "Spiritual Guys"
Mike Myers as The Love Guru
Originally posted March 13, 2014
I like fucking all kinds of people.
But when it comes to “spiritual guys,” I just can’t fuck ‘em. Or, more precisely, they can’t fuck me.
It’s not that I don’t fuck spiritual guys from lack of wanting. I don’t fuck spiritual guys because they don’t know how and aren’t willing to be fucked themselves.
Let's not confuse a "spiritual guy" with a mature, fully integrated spiritual man; so I'll define what I mean by “spiritual guy.”
It has little to do with whether or not he believes in God and a lot more to do with what he thinks about his own humanity. Many “spiritual guys” come with a belief that they are “better than” their physical selves and should “rise above” their baser instincts.
I often see this kind of man in “conscious communities.” He’s all about being “heart-centered” and having “slow, tantric sex.” He walks around with a glassy stare, never gets angry, talks in a creepy whisper and greets every hot woman he meets with the ubiquitous “spiritual guy” pick-up line, “Namaste.”
He professes that money is evil, believes that commitment robs him of his enlightenment and prefers eye-gazing over hair-pulling. He is a participant in a kind of “spiritual sexism” that we often see in “conscious communities,” i.e. reaching for the ethereal stillness (masculine) while rejecting the material chaos (feminine).
While I have nothing against heart-centeredness and eye-gazing, a man who prioritizes “higher” virtues ends up disconnecting himself from his lower three chakras and committing the equivalent of energetic castration.
Imagine a car with no engine or gas. No matter how “loving,” “nice” and “sweet” it looks on the outside, without the raw material to fuel it, the car won’t run.
However “spiritual guys,” tend to demonize and negate their own “fuel.” Then they use the name of tantra as a tool to bypass the “nasty” work of being human and try to get laid by pretending that their cocks have magical, healing “spiritual” powers.
Traditional tantra teachings believe that everything is fuel for awakening. Looking at tantra from an etymological perspective, tan means expansion and tra means liberation. (UPDATE: A Sanskrit scholar has informed me that tra is actually closer to the word "means;" so tantra is literally "a means of expansion").
So rather than excluding and rejecting the coarser parts of ourselves, we expand and liberate ourselves through alchemy, converting megalomania (third chakra), lust (second chakra) and anger (first chakra) into purpose, desire and power, respectively.
In order for a man to fuck, he himself must be willing to be soul-fucked by Spirit. He must fall on the ground in love with surrender. He must expose and accept every part of himself while in connection with his partner. Only then can he hold a woman in total presence and approval of everything she throws at him. The combination of compassion and animal-power is what pins a woman down and penetrates her to her aching core.
To be fair, a more “worldly” man in our society, i.e. one who is open in the lower chakras and closed in the upper, cannot truly fuck either. His lack of emotional connection, unwillingness to speak vulnerably and dependency on linear scripts of relating prevent him from deeply feeling a woman and earning her trust. His material merits may win him points in the immediate “pick-up” game, but he will lose out in the long-term.
Not to say that every sexual encounter needs to be a step towards a long-term relationship. This is where we women often to lie about their own desire, using the old excuse “I’m waiting for “the one” as a shield against feeling the magnitude of animal hunger that lives within us.
The feminine fable about “the one” is what makes men more apt to don the “spiritual guy” mask. He thinks if he acts humble and nice and safe and “conscious,” he can win the prize (her pussy). But ultimately he is cheating himself (and women) of an opportunity for awakening.
By acknowledging our shame, rage, greed, lust, victimhood, hatred and addictions, we get to know and love the human parts of ourselves and learn to work with these pieces as allies, rather than having these shadow bits secretly run the show and hijack our power.
When we courageously allow our soul-fucked selves to show up sexually, it invites the people we love to expose their blessed and wounded parts and sets the stage for trust, connection and intimacy. Then we come to know the true essence of tantra: that there really is no separation and that everything—divinity, humanity, ordinary, mystery, light, dark, earth, heaven—is a vital and necessary ingredient on the spiritual path.
Article adapted from its original appearance in Corset Magazine
And just so we don't forget to have a sense of humor about this whole crazy journey called life:
Woman: Opening Poem from "From 6 to 9 and Beyond"
The Queen. Photo by Sequoia Emmanuelle.
Originally posted March 3, 2014.
What does it mean to be Woman with a capital W?
What is it like to pass through the ritual of childhood and squirm down the birth canal, both birthing and being birthed into an expression of mature femininity? What is it like to release our mothers and become our own parents/gurus/mentors/teachers/midwives? How do all these aspects reveal themselves through our own erotic awakening? How do their shadows show up and unconsciously hijack our lives if we are unwilling to visit the basements of our souls?
These questions circle around me as I put on the finishing touches on the first draft of my book, From 6 to 9 and Beyond: Widening the Lens of Feminine Eroticism. In the book, I share the erotic awakening of six feminine archetypes. And while the stories are fictional, many of the events within them are based on my own journey into Womanhood—a journey that is still unfolding.
The process of writing itself is teaching me more than any workshop I could take. My own life has become a crucible for honest self-reflection and growth. These archetypes grab me by the pussy and demand that if I am going to tell their stories, I better damn well love and integrate them into my own life.
And while six archetypes (virgin, whore, warrior, queen, nun, grandmother) is not enough to capture the magnitude of Woman, it is a step towards widening our perspective on how Womanhood, female sexuality and feminine eroticism can express themselves in our world.
Below is the opening poem from the book. This piece emerged recently as I sat in deep meditation with these women.
Whether you identify as predominately masculine, feminine or gender-neutral (for we have all of it within ourselves), I invite you to investigate this question as you read the piece: Who are you as Woman and how does that show up in your own life?
For when She is loved and accepted, all parts of ourselves have space to heal and shine.
Woman
I looked into the mirror today,
Focused on the mystery
Waiting patiently behind the ocular aperture;
Quieted the voices that told me
I should have a smaller waist
And a smoother face.
I asked the question,
“Who is Woman?”
And awaited the ineffable reply.
She first came to me as a dragon’s eye.
“Beware the lower depths,”
She counseled.
I flashed a bravado smile
And asked again,
“Who is Woman?”
Then came the hummingbird,
Flapping her wings
At my arrogant back,
And cautioned,
“Those who ask this question
Must be willing to die.”
Steeling my jaw,
I did not heed her warning,
But demanded once more,
“Who.
Is.
Woman.”
A silent scream ripped though my ears
As her thick-bitter tea joined
My lips in holy prayer.
A face, too beautiful to bear,
Delicate features contrasting my own,
Slashed my vision.
Crumbling to my knees, I cried,
“No! Please! Spare my life!
I will give you anything.”
Hoisting me to my feet, She growled,
“Wake up, Girl. Do not bow to me.
Remember: True Service is not Sycophancy.”
The black blood, pooling between my thighs,
Now rose above my chest,
Flooding my frozen throat.
She whispered, “Your hard heart
Is still learning to let the love in.
Drown the Child and your freedom begins.
The men, they are calling,
Aching to suckle
Your milky breasts.
And when they are grown, they will call,
Aching for you to suckle
Their milky heads.
You can not blame them.
You can only love them.
As I love you.
Surrender.
Surrender.
It is the easiest thing in the world.
It.
Is.
Woman.”
The balm of healing seared,
Ice cold, through my heart,
And panicked blindness gave way to simple sight.
The Virgin appeared before me,
Her innocent gaze teaching me how
To see with fresh eyes.
Next the Whore,
Celebrating her body,
A vessel for divine inspiration.
Then the Warrior,
Bloody blade at her side,
Dripping with uncompromising truth.
Followed by the Queen,
Glittering in gold,
Her power unapologetically adorning her throne.
Afterwards, the Nun,
Prostrated, her twisted fingers
Spelling out her memoir of devotion.
Finally, Abuelita herself,
The Grandmother, wise and wizened,
Birthing and destroying all of creation.
As the riddle unfolded and the veil lifted,
My choked voice gave way to breath
As I inhaled her final words:
“Only trust the bearers of light
Who have also fallen in love
With the dark.”
Salty-sweet tears of recognition
Slid down my mottled cheeks,
Cleansing my bitter soul,
Until I was met,
Once more,
With my own solemn reflection.
I looked into the mirror today,
Focused on the mystery
Waiting patiently behind the ocular aperture;
Quieted the voices that told me
I should have a smaller waist
And a smoother face.
I asked the question,
“Who am I?”
And what I saw was simple:
I am Woman and She is Me.
You are Woman and She is You.
We are Woman and She is We.
Finished The Queen...finally on to The Nun
The Nun. Photo by Sequoia Emmanuelle.
Originally posted February 21, 2014
I finished the Queen's story last night. What a wild roller coaster that was. I felt like she pulled me up by my lapel and told me to "Grow Up" *several times* during the creation of her story. The fact that my husband and I still love each other, want to be married to each other and enjoy sex together is a testament to our love and the positive learning and growth I experienced during her creation.
The final story I have left to write is the Nun's, which for me is very personal. She is a woman who devotes her erotic energy in service to the divine. God is her lover. This can show up many ways, not just in the celibate renunciates we see in various religious institutions. She the part of ourselves that easily connects with Spirit and uses that orgasm for her creative expression.
Her shadow shows up when she denigrates all physical life and chooses only to chase the spiritual realms. We can see this in severe religious and cultural leaders who warn us to beware the "pleasures of the flesh." We can also see this in anorexics and certain "hippie" people who would rather "breathe in nourishment" than go sit down and have a filling meal. People who hate or cannot hold or handle money, i.e. physical expressions of energy, also fall into the shadow side of this archetype.
In my story, I will share an experience I had that connected me to my spirit and my sex after several years of severe anorexia. The framework will be fictional, but the experience will be my own.
Time for the deep dive once more...at least this time my husband has had some warning.