#225 What a Sex Therapist Wants You to Know About Your Desire

Why the Model Wasn't Working

Most of us are just surviving. Getting through the day. And we know that is not a condition for great sex, intimacy, and pleasure.

Kayla Moore spent eight years as a licensed marriage and family therapist and certified sex therapist before making a shift that will sound familiar. The system wasn't built to support humans. People are worked to the bone, in survival mode, without the village they were supposed to have. Trying to treat anxiety, depression, and intimacy issues inside a structure that extracts and exhausts just wasn't working.

And it was burning her out in the process.  She was exhausted, not eating well, not exercising, and feeling like the most hypocritical person because she was not practicing what she preached. If a model has you outside your window of tolerance, it does not work.

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What a Priestess Actually Is

Essentially, a priestess is somebody who walks through the world as love. It sounds simple, but given the chaotic times we are in, it is actually not as easy as it sounds.

Kayla is trained on 13 sacred feminine archetypes. The great mother is the being of unconditional love, simply there to love no matter what. The goddess of compassion is love in action, which is coming up a lot right now, and it really comes into a sacred no. Knowing what is okay and what is not, while loving humanity and ourselves fiercely through it all.

The priestess sits at the center, a zero point of the cosmos and the earth, with a horizontal plane connecting everything living. Her symbol is the solar cross, a traditional cross with a circle around it, symbolizing all the seasons and the cycle of life. She holds the vertical connection between the heavens and the earth and the horizontal connection between all living things. That is what it means to hold center right now.

The Rage and Grief Nobody Is Letting You Feel

If you are not angry right now, filled with rage about what is going on, that is a problem.

High-achieving women are putting out one fire after the next, never stopping to check in, never in their bodies. Zero access to rage or grief. Women have been taught that rage, especially, is not something we are allowed to have. We are supposed to be the good girls who sit pretty and make everybody else happy. We are the regulating system for everyone else. That is not human, and that is not healthy.

From Kayla's perspective, internalizing and shutting down these feelings is creating disease and disorder in the body. Everything happening outside of us is also happening internally. As within so without. If we are able to work with our grief and rage, actually feeling it and not stuffing it down, things we create internally can be projected out into our world as well.

Beauty Standards, Who Created Them, and Why

The idea that women's bodies naturally aging is not okay, not sexy, not deserving of pleasure is not an accident. Clients are going for waxes, laser, Botox, trying not to age, trying to look young. That should bring about some level of grief and rage. The time, the money, the pain. Those beauty standards were created. And it fills Kayla with a lot of rage to think about it. All of the women who developed eating disorders. The women are shrinking before our eyes right now.

We were going in the right direction for a while, seeing more variety in ads and movies, more about strength and being healthy. And now celebrities are shrinking again. Kayla's read: this is the final act of the patriarchy trying to hold onto control. Women participate in patriarchy because we want proximity to power, and most of the time, it is not ego, it is survival. Hiding in plain sight. Being the good girl, we get passed over. Those are the people susceptible to this messaging, willing to go to these extremes with their bodies.

The Ladder We Are All Climbing

Patriarchy creates a ladder that we are all on. The higher we climb there is always somebody behind us. The more you try to lose weight, you are saying I fit this beauty standard, but anybody who does not is on the ladder behind me. We are comparing ourselves to each other instead of seeing the bigger picture, saying, "This is what we think you should do," so we can control you.

When we get off the ladder altogether, come into community with each other, and understand that it is us versus the system, not us versus each other, that is the game-changer. It is never a shame thing. If the Botox truly makes you happy, do it. But there should be some examination. Is this for me? Do I want this?

How to Actually Process Grief and Rage

Kayla is building the Sacred Fire Circle to hold both action and feeling. A space to name what you are feeling, what you have grief around, what you have rage around, to be witnessed in that, and then to move it through the body through music and movement.

Alchemy just means turning something from one thing to another. Fire is a great element for that. You burn a piece of paper, and it turns to ashes. The Sacred Fire Circle is about turning grief and rage into joy and pleasure. There is actually a lot of pleasure in feeling feelings when you can fully feel them. After a good cry, most of us feel so much better. That catharsis is what gives way to joy. Circles are among the most sacred ways people have come together for much of our existence. We have kind of lost that. Being in a room of women who are uninhibitedly dancing, being witnessed, being held, that is something most of us never let ourselves have.

What to Do at Home

Feelings start in the body. Your brain makes meaning of them, creates a story, and labels it sadness or anger. It is really not that complicated. It just feels complicated because we have been stripped of the ability to know what it actually feels like to feel something.

You do not have to do it perfectly. Close the door. Give yourself five minutes. Check in with your body, close your eyes, find some stillness, and see what bubbles up. Whatever comes up is what comes up. There is nothing you have to do with it. If you cry for ten minutes and feel better, great. If you sit there and nothing comes, that is okay too. That frozen numb place is the freeze of fight-or-flight. Functional freeze is where most clients are on a daily basis. It makes sense. The world is a lot right now.

Being in a circle, being in a matriarchal way of relating to each other, what a difference it would make.

Connect with Kayla:

https://sacredfirecircle.carrd.co/

Find Kayla on Instagram at @‌priestessKaylaMoore.

Subscribe to The Pleasure Path on Substack for deeper frameworks, case studies, and diagnostic tools that accompany this work.

And if you want to map out exactly where you are and where things are going wrong, book a Pleasure Path Assessment HERE.

Want to go deeper:

-Ontario Residents can book a clinical appointment HERE.

If you are ready for personalized support and do not want to keep analyzing this on your own, APPLY HERE for private coaching.

1:1 Intimacy & Pleasure Coaching with Dr. Jordin Wiggins

Connect with me on Instagram [@drjordinwiggins]

 Connect with Dr. Jordin on INSTAGRAM HERE @drjordinwiggins 

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