EP : S02E06 - What if having Authentic Conversations about Sex & Trauma Could Heal us?
Show Notes
What if candid, open, vulnerable conversations were encouraged, would our healing journeys be more tender and gentle?
In this session, I address the cultural taboos around sex and intimacy for Asian and Southeast Asian women.
I also provide tools for navigating fear, anxiety, and shame, particularly around sex and intimacy, using music as a method to regulate emotions and enhance self-awareness.
What if candid, open, vulnerable conversations were encouraged, would our healing journeys be more tender and gentle?
In this session, I address the cultural taboos around sex and intimacy for Asian and Southeast Asian women.
Here are the highlights from this episode:
02:11 - Navigating Discomfort and Personal Boundaries
04:28 - The Importance of Neutrality and Integrity
05:13 - Exploring Intimacy: Self-Awareness and Communication
06:58 - Addressing Fear, Anxiety, and Shame
07:33 - The Science of Emotions and Frequencies
10:08 - Tools for Navigating Emotions: Music and Authenticity
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About Me:
I help you lead with fearless authenticity by smashing the self-imposed heteronormative stereotypes that keep you playing small through emotional healing inner child and inherited intergenerational trauma. Create a purposeful life of your unique design by disrupting societal norms and expectations of who you should be. Explore mindfulness, fearless curiosity and loving kindness through the lens of Human Design to thrive as the person you are born to be.
Learn more about my coaching method and join my emotional healing, mindfulness, and music community at melissaindot.com.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Melissa: From my experience, sex and intimacy is something that our culture as Asian, Southeast Asian women, generally does not create safe spaces to encourage conversations around sex and intimacy. In fact, they are very taboo topics. Whether we are consciously aware of that or not, it definitely exists on an unconscious level.
[00:00:19] Any opportunity to create conversations and safe spaces to talk about sex, our bodies, women's bodies, pleasure, desire, self satisfaction, self service, whatever you want to call it I feel is really important. I'm glad for this opportunity.
[00:00:33] I facilitate transformational experiences in conscious community to support the sustainability of living a devotional life on purpose. I am a trauma informed certified life coach family consolations facilitator shamanic sound healer, as well as an emotional healing guide, and I specialize in self
[00:00:51] awareness. Now I stress the trauma informed part because we live in a day and age of coaches yoga teachers, counselors, therapists, facilitators, you throw a stone and you'll find one . I think it's wonderful humanity is going through a great awakening. However, more and more we're learning that trauma awareness is very, very important because trauma is something that exists within all of us and it exists on a spectrum. The use of the word trauma in and of itself can be activating and triggering. Appreciate that. I want you to know that this is a safe space and even the word safe can be triggering for people. So I want to define what safe means.
[00:01:31] This is a container, meaning that whatever happens here stays within this circle. That is the intention we set, although I cannot hold any of you to it. I have faith that whatever it is that brought you into this space is something you honor for yourself. If you honor for yourself, you honor it for your fellow. That makes it a sacred space. And as a trauma informed coach, I'm reminding you that you are here out of your own personal authority. What that means is you are activating your free will. You are here out of choice. If at any point in time you decide this is not for you, or you don't like it, or something in your body feels uncomfortable, you have pain, you have discomfort in any shape or form, please know that you have the right to leave. Leave the session, switch it off for a few moments, grab some water, take a few breaths, come back in, or don't come back in because I put this together for you .
[00:02:28] So if it's not for you, please leave. You don't have to feel bad. You don't have to worry that we're going to get offended. This is not about us. This is about you. So that is your reminder because only you know how you feel and therefore you know best what you need to do, how to take care of yourself.
[00:02:47] Now, if you are at any point in time, I say anything , you see anything that activates you, that stimulates you in a way that You don't like as a trauma informed coach, I assure you that I have the tools necessary to guide you through this, even within this live session. That's what being trauma informed means.
[00:03:05] The intention is to employ curiosity as a guide towards resilience and adaptability to create awareness about our thoughts, mental, which is our mental wealth and our emotions. I am going to bring some music in later because music is a fantastic tool for regulating our emotions and cultivating broader self awareness.
[00:03:25] I'm going to teach you how to use music as a joyful and Vehicle for discovery and expression to awaken and ignite our confidence, especially in the, in the topic of sex and intimacy and personal leadership skills and why personal leadership is because we start, we learn to take up space. We learn to discover who we are, what we love, what we enjoy, how to pleasure ourselves, ourselves, and how to meet our desires, to establish a consciously calm foundation.
[00:03:50] So if we get nervous, we learn how to get nervous. If we feel embarrassed, we get. Used to feeling embarrassed, we don't shame ourselves and so on. And finally to grow beyond limiting mindsets and outdated belief systems, heal trauma whilst honoring the changing tides of life .
[00:04:07] focus, you've made a choice to be here, get everything the best you can out of this and remove all distractions. That's my recommendation, which means putting your phone on silent or maybe even switching it off. And if you own a house full of people, say, Hey, please leave me alone, quite simply.
[00:04:23] Neutrality. Be conscious of being neutral. And what that means is just take notice of I say something and you go, Oh, that's stupid. Or I'm rubbish or I'm silly or she's silly. Or that's a stupid comment, right? Just notice the judgmental voices you have.
[00:04:38] We're not going to shame them or push them away. Be aware of them and try to stay as present as possible. Judging is normal. That's what we do as humans. And finally, integrity.
[00:04:49] What I mean by integrity is to be honest with yourself. So when I ask questions, when I give you a prompt, as we take you through processes, be honest with yourself because this is for you, the more open and honest you are with yourself, the more effective the results, like a delicious cake. The outcome is based on the quality of ingredients.
[00:05:07] Let's get started. Intimacy, first of all, intimacy. If we desire intimacy in our relationships, we first have to be able to be intimate with ourselves. We have to be able to see into ourselves, look into ourselves, because once we are able to see what we need, see what we desire, meet our own needs, meet our own desires.
[00:05:30] Then we're able to communicate to our partners, husbands, wives, or lovers, or friends. Whatever you want to categorize them, you're able to communicate to them what it is you desire and what it is you need. And if you need to, you could even guide them . How, what intimacy looks and feels like for you, because intimacy again, exists on a spectrum.
[00:05:54] What is intimacy? I like to break it down into-me-see, it starts with you. You desire more intimacy. You got to give that to yourself first. Addressing fear, anxiety, and shame, because often that's what shows up when we are desiring to be intimate or having sex, whether with someone else or even. Maybe we don't go there, maybe we don't explore our own bodies because we're afraid and the fear could come from what we've been told, what we've read.
[00:06:21] Perhaps we don't even know where it comes from, but we just know we feel fearful or we have an anxiety over it. Or perhaps we feel ashamed from what we've read. The concept of being intimate.
[00:06:31] Self awareness is the gateway to your personal freedom. Just being here, simply by being here and receiving and listening to my words in and of itself It's opening a great wide pathway for you towards your personal freedom.
[00:06:47] There's nothing more you need to do at this point in time, because everything you need is already here. You have showed up. Let's go into the first topic, addressing fear, anxiety, and shame. Emotions and thoughts are frequency, they're vibration. We're going to go into a little bit of science. I'm going to encourage you to get out of your heads . Receive this information as vibration. We listen to music, we listen to sound. It's all frequency and vibration. Get a feel for my words, take it in on a cellular level and let just be with it.
[00:07:17] Just ride with it. You can leave the cognitive, the mental understanding to later for now tune into my frequency, get really comfortable and just simply listen. There's a part in our brain called the amygdala and that basically scans for dangerous situations. It's, it's the most primal part of our brain. And when that part of the brain is activated, the frequency of fear within our brainwaves is a 4 Hertz,
[00:07:45] Anxiety is an extension of our fear, but if we have extended fear, we have a buildup of fear that we don't have the tools to navigate and we hold that within our bodies that can be expressed as anxiety. So first of all, I need to define what fear and anxiety is.
[00:08:02] So if in the scenario where you want to have sex, or you're about to have sex, or there's a buildup to having sex, or you're even just wanting intimacy, but you're fearful and you're anxious, know that your brain frequency is dropping to four Hertz and anxiety is literally an extension of your fear.
[00:08:20] Now, where do we feel on a physical level, fear and anxiety typically? Is our throat, could be the neck and jaw. Now how that relates in day to day terms would be, you're afraid to say no, or you're afraid to say, yes, I like this. Or you're afraid to even say, touch me here, kiss me there, right? The fear and anxiety literally causes us to freeze up. We go into fight or flight or freeze. So fight would be maybe saying the opposite of what you want. Flight would be literally just getting out of the room or freeze, not being able to express what we need. Fear and anxiety can also exist on a physical level in our heart and lungs.
[00:09:05] So you could feel a tightness in the chest, which is very common for anxiety. Shortness of breath or palpitations, rushing, a racing heart. And a trigger warning, a trauma informed warning, if just me saying these words, you're feeling it, just a reminder for you, this is simply a description of what can happen.
[00:09:26] And it's also a reminder of your aliveness as a human being. We are here to feel. And the intention and purpose of the session, is to give you the tools to navigate these feelings and emotions. Take a few breaths if you need, and I'm going to continue. Fear and anxiety can also express itself in the stomach and the intestines.
[00:09:44] If you get gastric, if you get a tummy ache suddenly, maybe, you're going to about to go on a hot date and you're like, Oh my God, I've got the runs. All that is your body in fear and anxiety. That's it. That's all it is, but see how when we don't know how to navigate fear and anxiety, it expresses itself on a physical level in our bodies.
[00:10:03] Now I'm going to take you through a process today that's going to support you in moving through fear and anxiety as well as shame, which we'll come to, but before that, I want to let you know that the Htz, the different frequencies that release fear is, one is 396 Hertz, which you can literally go on YouTube and Google 396 Hertz.
[00:10:24] And they have like loads of YouTube videos and meditations that are attuned to this frequency you can listen to that will help you release your fear. There's also the 432 Hertz frequency, which is a healing frequency that resonates with the frequency of the earth.
[00:10:38] The earth itself has its own frequency, like the earth's heartbeat. It's also known as the Schumann resonance. As a resource for fear and anxiety, Google a 396 Hertz or 432 Hertz and listen to those recordings to support you in navigating, regulating the frequency of your fear anxiety within your body.
[00:10:58] Now, interestingly enough, Mozart music was tuned to the frequency of 432. The benefit of listening to 432 is that you will feel more relaxed and calm.
[00:11:12] I talked about fear, anxiety, and of course shame is next. Shame is the lowest frequency emotion, 20 Hertz.
[00:11:20] We feel shame in the chest that can often feel like a collapsed chest, can feel like heartbreak and feel a little bit like grief. We can feel shame in the throat, again, freezing up, not being able to speak up. And we can feel it in the stomach too, very similar to anxiety. And this is something I believe often shows up in the topic of sex and intimacy, because especially as women, we don't have a great amount of body awareness and because of media and conditioning, if we don't have a perfect body, perfect breasts, perfect shape big breasts, small breasts.
[00:11:56] Great textured breasts, a good bum whether or not we decide to keep our hair on our body or remove the hair on our body, whether we have wide hips, narrow hips, all those sorts of things, just generations of conditioning and how women's bodies have been capitalized on when it's convenient and shamed when it's convenient, has left us,
[00:12:17] in a state of confusion about our bodies. So often with sex and intimacy, just being okay, being naked is already a big hurdle to overcome. When we feel shame, this can show up this way in our physical body, right, how we feel. For me, the greatest nurturing tool is love. It's the greatest tool for everything, but really for shame, which has the lowest frequency of emotion is love.
[00:12:43] But how do we love ourselves when we're feeling ashamed of ourselves? And this is the beautiful thing. AUTHENTICITY is 4x more powerful than love. So if the frequency of shame is 20 Hertz, and I'm saying to you, one way to regulate our shame is to LOVE ourselves. The frequency of love is 528 Hertz.
[00:13:03] Being authentic is 400 times. The very fact, if you can just be present with your shame, if you can own that and say, you know what, right now I FEEL shame, that is an expression of authenticity, that is you being authentic, showing up, owning , speaking truth to yourself.
[00:13:24] You are NOT shame itself. You FEEL shame It's a beautiful way for you to shift your frequency of shame. Authenticity. You can literally increase your vibration by being true to yourself, by speaking truth to yourself. Being authentic, we can say is the optimum self care practice. Now, being authentic is about showing up as you.
[00:13:49] So again, I just want to remind you, you being here in this session and maybe acknowledging some of the words that I'm saying, kind of like nodding your head or saying to yourself, or smiling, or maybe even tearing. Allowing yourself to be seen by these words is a practice of authenticity. It's you pouring love into yourself.
[00:14:11] It is the optimum self care practice. So thank you for showing up. Now, the tool I'm going to use with you today, I want to teach you to use as music, because music has, is an incredibly powerful way of getting you reconnected to your bodies. Connection keeps us in the present moment. Being fully present and grounded allows you the space to create solutions instead of being overwhelmed by your problems. So when you're in fear, when you're anxious, you're feeling shame, it's easy to go into a downward spiral of be feeling trapped and feeling like there's no way out, right? You just focus on problems.
[00:14:41] What's wrong. But problems are what we perceive to be beyond our control. Problems happen to us. Solutions are what we create. We make them happen for us, but we can be in the present moment when we create space for ourselves to feel our feelings, to be authentic, to pour love into ourselves. We have a greater ability.
[00:15:03] To see the possibilities in front of us, not the problems. I've developed a modality called intuitive music programming. It uses the power of music to reconnect us with who we are, reconnect us to the present moment, whole space for us to feel our feelings, get out of our thoughts and into our feelings.
[00:15:21] It's a very simple set of tools and processes that provide a great container for transformation to move you from one emotion to another. It's me using my intuition, picking specific songs, to provide you a landscape to surf your emotions, fearlessly. Allows your thoughts to stand aside.
[00:15:41] When we can be fully present with ourselves, when we can own our truth, when we can hold space in the present moment, then whatever is in the subconscious mind can also come forth. We can witness it and pour love into it. I'm going to put this in the circle platform, a short video on the power of intuitive music programming, the impact music has on us and our nervous system.
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