A Candid Conversation About My Controversial New Website

Below is a recent e-mail exchange that I had with a longtime member of my online community. I decided to share this publicly, with her permission, as one other woman voiced a similar concern about this previously. So, upon receiving the note below, I realized that there are most likely others of you out there who share this view but aren’t speaking out.

While I have also had a huge positive response to my new website and rebranding, it seems that there’s still more to be said on this topic.

Please take the time to read this carefully. It’s not so much about me as it is about you and your (and us and all of our) relationship to your own feminine sexuality.

After that, you’re welcome to take your own stance and to voice it below in the comments.

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Hi Sara,

I have been following you for a while now.  I have seen you grow and change. It is inspiring.  I write you with risk and with heart.  I had commented a few months back on your blog about sexiness, shortly after you launched your new website, SaraAvant.com. 

I hope I speak from compassion in saying this, but I have had a really hard time visiting this site.  Seeing you crouched down low, yet in heels, with so much skin showing is difficult to see because I respect you greatly and know you are so much more than your body.  I know you have expressed that women show their sexiness in different ways, but the way you are showing up is a common representation of an objectified woman.  You look so small and vulnerable and demeaned.

I haven’t been opening your emails for months ;(

UNTIL – I recently heard your podcast on The Divine Feminine Yoga Telesummit. I was again inspired as I had been when I first came across your on-line presence.

(Sara’s note: You can download this talk by clicking on the title here SA-DivineFeminineYogaTeleSummit9_11.mp3) 

This is just one voice, but I feel strongly enough to reach out to you and share.  I think you rock!  You are gorgeous and brilliant and have amazing things to share.  I want to hear them and I want all our sisters to feel open to hearing you.  

I’ve signed on for your upcoming call because I know it will be great.

Thank you for your work.

 ~Anonymous

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Dear Anonymous,

Thank you for having the courage to reach out and share your feelings and for having the heart to express them skillfully and compassionately. I appreciate it!

I hear and receive your concerns; and, while it’s not important to me that you agree with me, it is important to me, as a teacher, that I give you as big of a picture of why and what I’m doing as I can.  My intention is to share something that’s of benefit to you and all women, by sharing my own path and vulnerability.

As a young woman I suffered from excruciating self-hatred and body-based shame. I was smart and thin and frequently told I was beautiful. But I was also anorexic and bulimic. I ran 6-10 miles a day, even when I had a knee injury. Even when I was on my moon cycle. I had a flat belly and thin thighs, but I never wore figure revealing clothing. Every time I looked in the mirror I saw an ugly, fat, detestable person. I had zero sex drive and my idea of sexuality was looking pretty for a man and focusing on whether or not I pleased and sexually satisfied him.  (Side note: As I have grown older, I find that most women I speak to have had a similar relationship–or lack thereof–to their own sexuality.) I was deeply disconnected from any source of pleasure—or, in turn, personal power.

While I began to heal from my eating disorders in my twenties, my fervent pursuits of yoga and meditation reinforced an estrangement from my sexuality (holding mula bandha–or contracting my pelvic floor muscles– for a ninety-minute yoga class doesn’t help to wake up feeling and life force in a woman’s pelvis and gentials!).

Luckily, in the midst of that, I met a couple of female yoga teachers who started to teach me how to practice yoga as a woman. And all of tension I had been holding in my body—and in my genitals—which kept me from feeling a connection to my own vitality/libido, started to unravel.

I share here the story of  how one such teacher instructed me to have a “self pleasuring practice” and how uncomfortable it was for me to touch myself and relate to myself as a sexual creature. Yet, the willing student that I am so long as the promise of freedom awaits, I faced my edge. And soared over it.

On the other side I found a stronger, yummier, more vivacious, more empowered, more sexual being. I found a fuller expression of me. And I liked her. A lot.

Shortly after that, I had a series of profound realizations—on my yoga mat, my meditation cushion, and in visions—of being the Goddess. The BIG She. The one who is birth and death, creation and destruction, beauty and terror, Kali and Laksmi, Mary Magdalene and Mother Mary. I was huge, fluid, indestructible, and undeniably erotic. At the heart of these experiences was a nearly unbearable current of blissfully pleasurable and intense fire in my genitals and womb. In those moments I knew, undeniably, that my power, my creativity, my life force, my own divinity, the essence of all that is and all that I am… is my sexuality.

And with this insight, I knew there was no turning back.

Sexuality—mine and yours—is not something separate from life. It’s not what happens “in there” or “down there” or only up until a certain age.  It’s the root of everything everywhere. And when we cut ourselves off from it, we cut ourselves off from the mysterious, magical, insanely beautiful flow of life as it wants to live us and for us to live it.

As I started to integrate these revelations into my life, women seeking the same insights and breakthroughs that I had had started to flock to me. They came to my workshops and retreats, sitting front and center, with big questions and blockages around their sexuality.

Suddenly I had new eyes (and tools) to see them and help them through. I realized that when these blockages moved, the wellspring of who they were could emerge, just as was true for me. I began exploring more and more how to integrate teachings on feminine sexuality into my existing yoga, meditation, and lifestyle practices.

As I was doing this, I began to feel a divide between what I felt passionate about teaching and what my online presence was. I felt like it was time for my teaching to evolve alongside with me.

Some of you have been with me through a few different incarnations—from Four Mermaids to The Way of the Happy Woman to Sara Avant.

My first two websites were wholesome, simple, elegant, modest. These were authentic representations of who I was and they felt very right. Until they didn’t. I was growing tired of being safe, and I realized that the term I heard people use most with me was, “Sweet Sara”.  Sweet and Safe Sara is a great part of me, but she couldn’t take me or my students any farther. It was time to grow.

When I was developing my new website last spring I was very clear that I wanted it to have an edge—a sexy edge. Because that was the edge I was playing in my own life, and the edge that I knew other women needed to play, too. I had just published my book, which wrapped up the previous 12 years of my life and work. New frontiers beckoned me.

I have no regrets about my website or the photos of me in them. I am proud of them. I feel stronger, wiser, and more effulgent than ever. I feel like I am now living as the woman I’ve always wanted to be, and it’s only getting better.

Many psychics and astrologers have told me over the years that my job in this world is to heal by being a leader of innovation for women. My last name (formerly my middle name) “Avant” suits me in that it constantly reminds me that what I do is avant garde–ahead of the my time. Sometimes that means when I have a vision and share it, the masses might not be ready for it. But one day they will be. One day all of this will be embraced and accepted as a given and we’ll be onto something new that seems risqué and taboo.

What’s most important for you to know is that how I share myself on this new site, and in all that I do, is my most heartfelt offering of my deepest revelations of what it means to be a woman today—in the most ordinary and exalted ways.  I have tasted the truth and nothing can shake me from this stance.

I hear you when your judgment comes forth: “…but the way you are showing up is a common representation of an objectified woman.  You look so small and vulnerable and demeaned…”

But I don’t share that judgment.  I’m no longer hiding my sexuality from the world, and me showing up in this way is the most empowered I’ve yet been.

Yes, I’m wearing heals (my favorite ones) and black sequined hot pants (also my faves) on my website. To me that feels fun, sexy, alive. This is me kissing my edge, owning it, and moving on to explore the next edge. This has nothing to do with me feeling small, selling out, or demeaning myself. This has nothing to do with objectifying my body. This is me celebrating and sharing myself as a Goddess. Period.

Just as my online image changed from my early twenties to early thirties, it will continue to shift as I grow through my forties, fifties, sixties. Thank goodness for change!

My invitation to you is that you do the same. You name your edge and meet it.  Dress how you want, do what you want, but if you are on this site and reading this, you are called to let the Goddess live through you, too.

What is emerging now is a new signpost of women with power. And we’re the leaders at the head of that curve. No longer masculine or gender-neutral, these truly empowered women are alive in their purpose and embodied in their experience, so that their femininity is a reflection of their power, not a detraction from it.

How do you know one of these women?  She looks sexy (think Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, Arianna Huffington). She feels her feet on the ground and the breath in her belly. She flaunts her curves and the sashay of each step; and her confidence and sexuality make her dress size irrelevant. She smiles brightly and doesn’t apologize for her fullness, for she sources her vitality, her creativity, and her vavoom from her sexuality.

She is a woman: passionate, emotionally insightful, in-tune with larger currents, caring, rooted, sexual, powerful.

Who she is in the world and how she expresses her sensual, sexual self are not separate. They are intertwined and interdependent. She is powerful because she has fully embraced the wild power of her sexuality, not in spite of it.

So, my friend, thank you for reaching out and speaking up. This is my truth, and whatever yours happens to be yours after reading this, I bow to it, and to you.

With love and respect,

Sara

 

Got questions too? I’ll be taking more questions about all sorts of things on my Girls’ Night Out Tele-Q&A next week. 

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Some past entries in my journal on women’s sexuality:

• How to Turn on the World
• You Can’t Be Sweet and Sexy
• What Meditation Retreats and Burning Man Have Taught me about How to Be a More Radically Radiant Woman (and what they have to teach you too) 

 

Some inspiration for me on my path to live my truth, even when that means taking the road less travelled:

 

“Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals.
Once you have determined the principles you wish to exemplify, abide
by these rules as if they were laws,
as if it were indeed sinful to compromise them.

Don’t mind if others don’t share your convictions.
How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be?
Your noble self cannot wait any longer.

Put your principles into practice-NOW.
Stop the excuses and the procrastination.
This is your Life!
You aren’t a child anymore.

The sooner you set yourself to your living with integrity,
the happier you will be.
The longer you wait, the more you will be vulnerable to mediocrity
and feel filled with shame and regret,
because you know you are capable of better.

From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself.
Separate yourself from the mob.

Decide to be extraordinary and do what you need to do – Now!”

- Epictetus

 

 

“Would it be okay if your gravestone read: “She was an exceptionally mediocre woman”?

 If your eulogy went something like: “She followed every rule with precision. She rarely made a mistake and was a great champion of the status quo. She never ruffled any feathers, took any great risks, suffered any great loss. She always operated within the bounds of appropriateness. She had the love and acceptance of her community, family, and friends, though no one knew her. Her life was smooth sailing because she never rocked the boat. She contained her passion, her dreams, and her danger enough that they could call her a good woman”?

For some, that would be enough. But not for you.

Your epitaph will begin: “She redefined what it meant to be a good woman.”

It will say: “She scaled mountains, in hiking boots and in heels. She started in her own backyard and then went all the way around the world. She accepted challenges with curiosity and determination. She emerged victorious regardless of outcome, knowing both the pleasure of success and the grace of failure. She tasted long hot days and cool still nights, at home wherever she found herself. She wasn’t always popular, but she was always true. She wasn’t always comfortable, but no one can say she didn’t enjoy her life. She explored her edges, increased her capacity, and lived as big as she could dream. Moved equally by bliss and pain, she played her heart out one moment at a time. She was dialed in. She was courageous. She was turned on.”

If this sounds more like you, what are you waiting for?”

Epitaph to The Turned On Woman Manifesto