Sexual Energy is Life Force

Not therapy. Not sex. Something stranger and more alive.

After months in quarantine, sated by home-grown tomatoes and freshly baked bread, I felt less certain that divorcing my husband was the right next step. I found more to like and trust about him as his commitment to sobriety deepened and our friendship regained consciousness. My experience with psychedelic-assisted therapy was sloughing off what was dead and dry. Something unnamed was beginning to stir.

Still, the past held its shape, no matter how carefully I stepped around it. Ambivalence about my marriage was easier to live in than certainty. On the one hand, the idea of returning to a conjugal marriage was beyond my imagination. On the other hand, my body hadn’t stopped thrumming since Delta Flight 5643 and my unexpected energy orgasm at 30,000 feet. All that lust had greased the gears and set them turning again, creating a confusing state of affairs.

I began to wonder if there was something else—a third way for our relationship. This was California after all. Many couples we knew were in some kind of polyamorous or ethical nonmonogamous relationship. A spate of new books had popped up in the last few years to help people navigate the growing popularity of “open” relationships. Jessica Fern’s Polysecure made a thoughtful case for consensual nonmonogamy as a path to secure attachment. By contrast, Molly Roden Winter’s memoir More offered a messier, more ambivalent portrait—one that foregrounded the emotional toll of open marriage as much as its liberating potential. The idea of opening our relationship seemed like a complicated solution, yet still one I entertained. I browsed Feeld, billed as “a dating app for the curious,” like an awkward teenager.

I decided to call my ketamine therapist, Julane, to help me understand what was happening in my body. She’d been the first to suggest to me that trauma isn’t just a story to be told but one that lives in the body, where it can remain stuck until it’s released. “Things are moving in me,” I said. I didn’t know how to explain this awakening of my sensual self other than to circle my abdomen with my hand—a motion I might have used to caress my swollen, pregnant belly years ago. I told her about Delta Flight 5643.

“It’s desire,” she said with a wide, comforting smile. “Desire stripped of the stories you’re used to telling yourself about it. Just the raw thing itself.” She spoke slowly, deliberately, allowing for long pauses. “And that’s the scariest part, isn’t it? No one else to deflect to. It’s yours and yours alone.” Her words sparked and caught in me. This was the kind of wisdom I’d long sought but had never found in the older women in my life.

“I think you’re right,” I said. I only knew how to fold desire into neat, manageable packages, how to shape myself into something pleasing to others. How to use desire as leverage. Julane’s dare was to unlearn the expectations and discover something entirely my own.

“Sexual energy is life force,” she told me. “What you’re feeling is your aliveness.”

Sexual energy is life force. A year earlier, I would have written this notion off as new-age babble. But now it struck me as quite sensible: sexual energy generates life. During a woman’s fertile years, this often means generating babies. In later years, sexual energy can be channeled more forcefully than ever into other forms—art, activism, business-building. After years of feeling my life force seeping through the fissures of my fraught marriage, this generative surge felt intense—and, yes, to Julane’s point, self-serving. The future of the marriage seemed like the wrong question to be asking. What mattered was whether I could tend to the quiet fire of my own desire—and whether, if I fed it, the rest of my life would reshape itself around that heat. The key was to tune into what my body was trying to tell me. At long last, I was listening.

I started poking around online with the obvious queries: women; midlife. The results were book titles, articles, podcasts, and videos aimed at navigating the challenges of this life stage for women. The dominant cultural narratives assumed midlife was a problem to be solved. They focused on managing the symptoms of menopause: the physiological and psychological fallout; how to embrace aging gracefully; coping with mood swings and anxiety; sexual dysfunction. There was an anxious undertone to all of it. Fifty may be the new thirty, so long as you don’t look fifty. Whatever delicate embers of desire I expected to fan here were quickly smothered.

I turned to books with bold titles like Cunt: A Declaration of Independence and Pussy: A Reclamation. These works critiqued systems that oppress women, reclaiming language as a tool of empowerment. They challenged societal norms and patriarchal structures that have historically stigmatized femininity, advocating for women to embrace their bodies, autonomy, and sexuality. They promoted radical self-care and the importance of support within communities of women.

Bold manifestos for some, I’m sure. But these were not new themes to me. I’d long called myself a feminist, and not just because I’d taken some classes in college. Politically, socially, and professionally, I was a woman who stood with women. In my twenties, I started a young women’s art collective. I’d been a devoted mentor to young women for decades. Reading these books, I felt I already spoke the dialects of ‘cunt’ and ‘pussy,’ yet somehow, they didn’t hit the pleasure centers of my brain. I was hunting for something for which I lacked the search terms.

Altering my tack yielded more pleasure-forward themes. There was OMGyes.com, an interactive platform that educates users on women’s sexual pleasure through explicit video tutorials on various techniques. Developed with researchers at Indiana University and the Kinsey Institute, it’s clinical in its approach—sex ed for grown-ups. Useful, yes—but more about mechanics than mystery.

When I landed on an online quiz to determine my erotic blueprint, my unique patterns of sexual arousal and expression, I knew I was getting warmer. One day, after yet another masturbatory sneeze facilitated by my expert vibrator, it occurred to me … maybe I needed a sex therapist? This is how I discovered a lesser-known field called sexological bodywork—tucked into the margins of conventional sex therapy, but offering something far more expansive. Sex therapy is mostly talking about your sex life, while sexological bodywork gets you out of your head and into your body—literally, through touch. Sexological bodywork practitioners go by many names, as I learned: Sacred Intimates, Somatic Sex Educators, Intimacy Coaches, Sexual Surrogates, and Tantrikas. They are not sex workers, although money changes hands for their intimate services. They’re energy workers, providing happy endings of a different sort. “Sexological bodywork is a sacred return to the body’s wisdom—where touch becomes language, sensation becomes truth, and pleasure opens the doorway to wholeness,” read one website. OMG, yes! I thought.

Diving deeper down this alluring rabbit hole, I learned that these practitioners are part of the broader field of somatics, a term rooted in the Greek word soma, meaning body—not just as a biological structure, but as a sentient, intelligent system. Somatic practices use the body as a gateway to healing, engaging physical awareness, movement, and touch to help process and release emotions while building new neural pathways in the brain.

Somatic sex practitioners take this a step further, using sensual touch to explore the link between sexuality and well-being. They support clients in releasing shame and reconnecting with their desires in a grounded, embodied way. They honor erotic energy as a life-giving force in ways that called to mind, the more I read about them, the sacred practices of early civilizations. This wasn’t just therapy. It was ritual, remembered—or maybe repurposed. What moved me wasn’t the promise of better sex, but the recognition, by my body more than my intellect, that these practitioners were tending to something I had long forgotten: my spirit. Or as Julane had put it, my aliveness.

On social media, I found an entire coven of women who called themselves “sex witches”—mostly under fifty, lit always by the golden hour, practicing what they called “sex magic.” They offered intimacy coaching from their LA home offices and manifesting workshops in Costa Rica and Mexico. Media savvy and entrepreneurial, they had omnichannel platforms—video podcasts, online courses, and retreats. The promise was one of abundance. You can have it all, they said, once you’re vibrationally aligned with your desires.

Robyn was a local sex witch whose quiet practice sat on a tired commercial stretch in San Rafael, a few doors down from a Taco Bell. I liked the headshot on her About page. She had a soccer-mom vibe—crisp white collar shirt, toothy grin. It reassured me she wouldn’t be too out there. When stepping into the unknown wilds of sex work, that mattered to me. Her site described her practice as “erotic embodiment,” a way of using touch and breath to cultivate pleasure and erotic energy.

When we spoke by phone and Robyn shared her story, I knew she was the guide I’d been looking for—a woman who had lived deeply, lost profoundly, and made her way back to herself. Someone skilled at naming what others work hard to ignore.

The screening process was thorough. Robyn doesn’t see anyone in person until boundaries and intentions are clear. We had four hour-long video calls, where she explained her work and asked detailed questions about everything from my exercise habits to my sexual history.

I told her about the psychedelic medicine work I’d been doing. “It’s like it woke me up from a trance—from a coma. Now I feel called back to my body.”

She wasn’t surprised. “The integration of mind, body, and spirit is the key to your vitality,” she said. It didn’t sound like a slogan. It sounded like something she lived daily. “Talk therapy gives you one kind of understanding. Psychedelics give you another.” She spoke with the ease of someone who had nothing to hide and nothing to prove. “Now your body’s saying, ‘My turn to teach you a thing or two.’”

There was a steadiness to Robyn that made me trust her. I bought a package of sessions and committed to weekly work—this wasn’t going to be a one-and-done experience. When her appointment confirmation arrived in my inbox, it felt like an invitation to the inner sanctum of the goddess Isis herself—minus the sacrificial cow.

From the kitchen came the hiss of the kettle. My husband poured the tea. I sat there, wondering how exactly one introduces the concept of a sex witch to one’s husband.

Join me next week in Robyn’s inner sanctum.

I love you.

Juliette

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