Kimberly Ann Johnson: But none of these systems exist independent of any other system. I’m also doing that very thing by hyper-specializing hormones. I think living in a female body that has a lot of hormonal fluctuations, and then learning even more about it, is like we realize the extent to which we’re getting moved around, and we’re not in control of those hormones.
Tami Simon: In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Kimberly Ann Johnson. She is a mother, a sexological body worker—which is a type of somatic sex educator—a yoga teacher, a postpartum advocate, a somatic experiencing practitioner, and a birth doula. She helps women heal from birth injuries, gynecological surgeries, and sexual boundary violations, and she helps us claim—and this is a phrase from her new book, which is going to be the focus of our conversation—she helps us claim our erotic sovereignty.
She’s the author of the early mothering classic The Fourth Trimester, a previous book called Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power, and Use It for Good, and Reckoning, which she co-authored with Stephen Jenkinson, an audio series with Sounds True on reclaiming the feminine. And now a new Sounds True book. It’s called Erotic Seasons: Tuning In to the Rhythms of Women’s Sexuality and Spirituality. Kimberly, welcome.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Thank you. Thanks, Tami.
Tami Simon: Erotic sovereignty. Let’s start there. What does that phrase mean to you?
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Great question. Big question. I think it has to do with our relationship to our own life force and our own specific seed that’s particularly ours, and how we live out that seed that’s ours and only ours to live out. And I think sovereignty is a hard word these days. It’s being used for a lot of different things.
But for me, it means a connection to our sexuality in ourselves that stays with us throughout our lives and includes the people that we might relate with or relate to, but is inherently what we take with us throughout that journey.
Tami Simon: And tell me what you mean by the word erotic right here at the start.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Erotic—I feel like I can’t even go too much farther talking about it without referencing Audre Lorde. I didn’t want to over-lean on that as a white woman, but also it’s Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic” from Sister Outsider. I don’t know if anyone’s ever written it better than she’s written it.
But what I mean is something that includes sex but is not limited to sex. The life force—life force is incomplete in English, and I don’t know if qi or prana does it better either, importing it—but the thing that animates us, the thing that includes the breath but is beyond the breath, the thing that moves us, and that it’s our responsibility to figure out how to unclutter and potentiate that movement within us so then we can connect to what’s around us.
Tami Simon: And this connection between our spiritual journey and our journey with sexuality—I noticed at first I was asking myself that question as I was reading your new book. And I was like, huh, it’s clearly not like spirituality’s over there and sexuality’s over here. And then I was like, Tami, what do you even mean by spirituality?
Your company is dedicated to the spiritual journey. Of course, people ask a lot, and it’s hard to define. But Kimberly, here you go. I’m just going to go straight to what I felt was a mic drop moment, and it happened at the end of your book. It was the very last sentence. Sometimes people write these opening sentences that you never will forget. In your case, for me, it was the ending sentence. And you wrote, “The female body is its own spiritual path.” That, to me, is the banner really for our conversation. Tell me what you mean by that, how our body is a spiritual path.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: This is the crux of the book, the hardest part to write, because also in language, just like mind and body, we have to pick words to define things that then make them seem separate, and then figure out how to relate to them separately or together. And so many people, I would ask them, “Have you ever had spiritual sex?” And then their answer to me would be, “Well, first I have to figure out what spiritual means and what spiritual means to me before I can answer that question.”
The female body is its own spiritual path means that the thresholds that we move through in a female body that are inherent to it, the cycles that we move through—whether that’s menstruation or birth or perimenopause or menopause—have inbuilt rites of passage.
And the current culture is all oriented towards comfort and towards youth, and it really predisposes females and women to negatively bias towards the aging process. And so my suggestion, my experience, is that there’s something to be devoted to, rather than our body being something that is an obstacle because of its changes and because of its cycles and confusing symptoms and things that feel like they’re taken away from us.
There was a point in my menopausal journey where things that I loved weren’t good for me anymore, and I had to figure out, “But I love this—how do I still love it and evolve it, or do it in some way that is good for my body as well?” I think both in spirituality world, a lot of times there’s the thing about the body is the meat suit, and the body’s going to be discarded, and then the spirit will remain.
But what is it to become devoted to what our body is telling us, asking of us, moving us, compelling us? I think we distrust instinct. How do we reclaim our instinct? How does that instinct become something that we find trustworthy, that we’re willing to risk for?
Tami Simon: Really, by saying the female body is its own spiritual path, you’re defining in a way what embodied spirituality might mean for someone in a female body. Because, as you were saying, asking people to define what is spiritual sex—well, then you have to define spiritual. And so many of the ways I think that I define it, actually, when I think, what’s spiritual? Oh, it’s the timeless. It’s what I’m going to discover when I’m not in a body, mind—I don’t know if I would, I would never use a phrase like meat suit, but I’m not this incarnation. That’s the spiritual I want to discover. Yet you’re directing us right into our incarnational form as our spiritual journey.
So I just want to underscore that for a moment, and why that emphasis—this is my question to you—is so important to you.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Oh, that’s such a good question. First of all, while we think about the transcendent, and I also love to be in relationship to the transcendent, there’s no way to relate to that without the body. And also, there’s no limit to how much we can incarnate, and I think that that’s something that we have a bit in reverse.
We think, oh, we’re born, and then we’re incarnate right when we’re born, and I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think we’re fully incarnate from moment one. And my experience is I’m only getting more and more and more incarnate as I get older. And to me, that’s feeling more and more relational, more and more connected to the world around me, more and more capable of inhabiting what it means to be in this place at this time.
So I feel like incarnation is its own devotion or its own call, its own project in a way. It’s important to me because for several years, I worked almost exclusively doing internal pelvic floor work. I’m a body worker. I’m a Rolfer by trade. I’m also a sexological body worker, as you mentioned. And so we work inside the pelvis. We work vaginally and anally.
So I saw hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of women, and the disconnection from the pelvis, the disconnection from one’s own ability to speak when they’re—not even hands in the pelvis, just hands holding a pelvis—is so extreme. Our normal training, at least mine, in terms of my spiritual practices, which were Buddhist-derived and Krishnamacharya yoga lineage tradition-oriented, was all moving energy from the pelvis up to the head and circulating it, but primarily bottom up.
Then I had a baby, and I got pulled into my pelvis. It wasn’t a choice. I didn’t decide to do it. The act of birth pulled me into my pelvis in a completely different way. And inhabiting my pelvis, and the journey of recovering from birth, which I didn’t even know was a thing at the time, then working with so many female pelvises, brought me to this—I’m not going to call it a conclusion, because for me, inquiry is one of the highest values that I have in incarnation and humaning.
What a project it is for us to come into our pelvic bones. What a tremendous—how many things are incentivizing us to be outside of that. And then the potentiation of my, let’s put it in quotes, “spiritual practice,” but let’s call it my meditation practice, went up tenfold when I actually learned how to locate myself in my pelvis and my legs.
Tami Simon: There’s no limit to how much we can incarnate. I love that phrase, and it brings me directly to something I really wanted to talk to you about. I pulled this quote out of Erotic Seasons—and there’s a lot, Kimberly, I want to talk to you about, so stay with me here. “Contrary to a lot of what’s written about the nervous system, our goal is not trying to develop a more regulated nervous system.” I was like, “Ah, this is intriguing.” “We are trying to develop a more responsive system so we can have a deep sense of okayness even when the waves of life are big and unpredictable.”
You’re teaching people—one of the many things in Erotic Seasons, and this is your language now—how to run more charge in our body. You could say how to incarnate more erotic life. And I thought I really need to understand more about this, and I want our audience to understand more about this view of the nervous system.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: That’s a great question, and it just spans out in so many different directions. So yes, the idea of a regulated nervous system oftentimes dovetails with sort of a meditative affect, or, nothing’s really going to bother me. I sort of did that for my twenties, and I became quite good at having a witness awareness, and I think I was a bit annoying. Like, I think I was annoying to my parents, because I think I thought I was like, oh, I’m just witnessing this. I’m not actually a part of it.
And so I have experience of what it was like to try to only observe something without having a preference for it. And also, there were things I loved, but I would have never associated pleasure with. I loved going to practice, and I was disciplined and devoted, but pleasure wouldn’t have been something I would use to describe that.
I feel like even the word regulation has almost like a defensive stance. It’s like the world is coming at me, and then I’m going to try to figure out how to regulate myself to deal with the world. Whereas holding more charge is: I’m an active participant in the world and what’s around me.
Yes, things are alarming, things are threatening. We all know what all those things are—AI, environmental collapse, so many things that people throw in there. But what is it to be able to not handle it? Because I have that section that’s called the gift of diminished capacity, because I didn’t want women to think this is about you just taking on more and being able to handle more, because most women are already doing that.
That’s not what it means. It means, can you literally physically run charge through your system that also helps you develop an emotional range, and has to do with that instinctual drive where you can feel an impulse? You can feel like, I am drawn to this, and I know that I have the capability to go towards it without losing my focus, without getting pulled off track, without somebody else deciding where my attention or my body goes.
It’s something that I can feel through myself. And this is what the whole past ten years of my coursework has been about, which I call Activating Your Inner Jaguar. It’s how do we come into healthy fight response, which is healthy aggression, desire. A lot of the tropes out there, like what came through Fifty Shades of Grey—oh, women want to be ravaged, and they want to surrender, and polarity work. And I don’t know much about polarity work. I haven’t deeply studied it, but I know the superficial parts that everybody sees online.
But what I found is it’s really different. It’s about, instead of, I already feel I’m in control of everything, I already feel like I’m overwhelmed and overridden, and I have all these roles, so let me just go into the erotic or the sexual and be taken—what is it to still locate your own desire and act on it and know that you can have agency?
And to me, this has been a huge discovery for me in the last three to four years, because I think the population is changing a lot post-pandemic, and what’s happening in the collective is different. People think that more rest, more surrender, more letting go is the thing that’s going to get them closer to the erotic. But it’s actually the input. What is the passion? What is the drive? What is your true desire? Can you follow it? Is there something that you’re meeting with that?
And it’s really body to body. People say the psychological terms, “I want to be seen. I want to be met.” But that can happen relationally, and someone is still very unsatisfied, because we’re craving body to body contact, something to push against, something to literally meet. Like, our heads are bumping each other. So that’s what I mean by holding more charge.
Not all at once, not blow your circuits—that’s not what it’s about. And actually what happens is, as you do the work of understanding your system, the waves do get bigger. People often think, “Oh, I did something wrong, and now life is throwing more at me.” It’s like, no, life’s throwing more at you because your capacity is wider. You’re holding more contradictory opposites. There’s a broader net to hold.
Tami Simon: I’m glad we’re talking about this, because I think there is a sense that there’s so much increasing intensity for many of us in our lives because of what’s happening in the world, with our friends, with our family. And then inside of us, it’s like, “Okay, now I’m going to regulate. Now I’m going to regulate.”
It would be a different question to say, how can I be responsive—and that’s the word you use—and build my capacity for more charge? How will our sexual work specifically help us hold more charge in every way in our lives?
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Well, if a person listening decides to endeavor that work, it’s not dissimilar to something like childbirth, where if you move into that kind of energy, which in this case we can call sexual energy—sexual energy reorganizes things. And it will take you to a place where you feel like you’re losing control.
That loss of control is what a lot of people are practicing in something like shavasana, but you’re still opting into it. But in a sexual dynamic, there’s a place where, for most people, they’re looking for their body to take over, which is why there’s a sense of relief. Like, “Oh, now it’s just not my mind deciding what to do.”
And you toggle back and forth between an idea or an insecurity or a desire that’s in the mental realm, and then there’s a time when your body takes over, which is what many of the exercises in the book are about. How do we prime the pump so that there is a point where the breath is breathing us, the body is leading us?
That body-led impulse that is connected with pleasure, connected with, I have an impulse, I make an action—there’s a satiation there. That iterates in every part of our life. It’s not separate, and oftentimes it’s an inside-out approach. So oftentimes the confidence that’s built there—the very basics that seem basic but are not in our culture—which is, when arousal is present, I’m able to speak a desire.
Just that. I’m able to say, “I like this. I don’t like this.” I’m able to speak to myself, “Hey, slow down,” or, “Pause.” That uncoupling and rewiring transfers. I’m not going to say all the time in every circumstance, but people tend to kind of circle the onion and peel the layers, and this tends to be a core-of-the-onion kind of direction, where we go to what’s essential.
We go to the pelvis, the place where all of us were gestated and many of us were birthed. We go back to this elemental, actually extremely innocent place, and from there, there’s other clarity that emerges, like, this really doesn’t belong in my life, or this really does belong, or I’m running this kind of energy knowing this about myself. These other things don’t really fit with it anymore. And I think that’s why it’s threatening, because the power of it would push you to make some changes or requests or shifts.
Tami Simon: Your new book, Erotic Seasons—I was mentioning this to you right before we started this conversation—for me as a reader really had three books in one, if you will. There’s so much in it. It’s a huge guidebook. And one of the books is in this area we’re talking about right now. And you can correct me, because I’m just throwing this out, and you say, “Tami, I would say it differently,” because I don’t want to presume. But from my experience, this first part is about how do we increase this capacity to hold more ecstatic, pleasurable charge?
Then there’s a whole other third of the book, I would say, that’s really about healing—healing any kind of woundedness from our own personal history or even family lines and lineage. And then there’s this very interesting part of the book that I want to talk about now, which goes with the title Erotic Seasons, and how our blood mysteries actually inform the progression of our life through various thresholds. So talk to me about how you came up with that model, because, to be honest with you, I’d never really heard it before, certainly not the way you presented it with the four archetypes that you offer in the book.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Wow. Well, thank you. Yeah, three books in one. It was a challenge. I feel like this book is almost like a collage in a way. That’s the way I like to teach, is to give people many different places where their own curiosity might take them, and then from there they can put the pieces together. I don’t really like to say, “Hey, this is how you become a sexual alchemist.”
I think the book has the tools for someone to become a sexual alchemist, but by the inquiry of their own about, okay, maybe this place is something that I haven’t touched as much, and this place is something that I have. I’m surprised to hear, and also excited to hear, that you hadn’t really considered this archetypal model of maiden, mother, virgin, crone, because I love—
Tami Simon: I had in a way, but not the way you presented it—with, and you can explain this, the virgin going after the mother. That was where I was like, “Whoa.” I had scratched my head until you explained it, of course. But anyway, keep going and bring all of our listeners with us here, Kimberly.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Yes. So from Marion Woodman—one of my favorite interviews with her ever was the two that you did. I listen to those all the time. Marion talked about the Triple Goddess, and she put maiden and mother together, and then virgin, and then crone. And virgin for her was virgin as in virgin forest, not as in an untouched person who’s never had sex.
So I really like shimming that a little bit, because the word virgin, and giving away virginity or taking my virginity, is such a lens—an other lens, not a sovereign lens, a lens that’s about something that could be taken from you. Jane Hardwicke Collins, an Australian midwife and teacher, sort of said there’s an intermediary archetype now, both because we’re living longer.
And I realize, too, my language of archetype people are going to have to be slightly flexible with, because I’m not coming from a psychological perspective, per se. But what I noticed was, originally the Triple Goddess was defined with women defined as only their child-rearing function, which of course in early feminism got taken apart, and none of us want to be thought of as something that’s an object to possess or something that’s only valuable because of what we reproduce.
However, in that separation, what I’m trying to do in the book is to come back together with what is really unique as we move through these physiological, biological changes. One of my teachers said to me, “Hormones are gods.” That phrase has just stuck with me and reverberated in so many different directions, as the conversations about hormones in every way—whether it’s menopause or birth control or gender surgery or whatever—they’re just so much in the ethers and ethos at the moment.
So I wanted to reconnect both the phase as far as what happens biologically. For instance, becoming—there’s girlhood before maidenhood. Maidenhood would be when you start menarche. And then there’s motherhood. Now, that’s a little bit challenging. It’s just basically when you come into reproductive peak, but obviously some people do that with children and some people don’t. And then these are around twenty-year marks. Then around fifty is mother to virgin, which is a woman whole and to herself. And then around seventy, a transition to crone.
Now, that was interesting to me, because out in the world right now everyone’s like, “Oh, you’re a crone, right in menopause.” And it’s like, oh, wow, but what if there’s this whole other phase which wasn’t around so much a couple centuries ago, because we weren’t living that long? Most people weren’t living too long past sixty or seventy.
And then I started to think, hmm, well, I’m fifty-two, so I started to think, well, there’s no blood rite at seventy. But when I spoke with many women who are past that threshold, they said, no, seventy actually is a marker where you start to notice that no matter how well you’ve taken care of yourself, your body is breaking down. It doesn’t matter what you’ve biohacked. It doesn’t matter how active and athletic you’ve been. There’s just an acknowledgment that the body is—what do we want to call it—deteriorating. The genetic predispositions show themselves, which I thought was really interesting, because nobody had ever said that directly to me.
So in this arc, why is this important? Well, part of it is important because there’s qualities of each of these phases that are really meant to be uplifted, and then there’s qualities that I call shadows in the book, and they tend to repeat, like a lot of things that are cyclical.
So my work is a lot about rhythms and waves and cycles. And if there’s unmet, unsatisfied things in the maiden time, you might find yourself in another phase of life making actions that are confusing to you, and then you’re realizing, “Oh yeah, this is something that is carried through from the maiden time, or carried through from my mother time,” and it kind of gives you a map to come back to.
It also—because sexuality in general is so maiden focused. This is one thing that just irritates me so much, is that even sex educators—and it’s also why I think it took me so long to write this book, is because I needed to come fully through menopause in order to be able to write it. Because I don’t look at sex and eroticism the same way on this side of menopause as I did before it.
So there’s a lot of people who write books in their thirties and forties about sex. That’s a whole other situation. Not better, not worse—different. And I’m really trying to call people forward to maturation, rather than having a value about each of these stages. It’s a call to maturation, that it’s worth it to go through them, and also that we need each other. Those phases of life need one another.
And something that didn’t end up in the book—because a lot didn’t end up in the book—one thing that maybe isn’t there as strongly as it could be, that came as a really flash revelation for me as a woman in her virgin years now, is that maybe original hormone therapy was living intergenerationally.
Because when I go around mothers and children, I feel totally different in my physiology. And most of the time, I’ve been such a mother advocate, I’ve been like, “Women need elders. Mothers need grandmothers.” And now I’m seeing it from the other direction—oh, grandmothers need mothers. Grandmothers need maidens. When I’m in a car with my daughter and their freaking estrogen’s flying out of the window, something happens to me. And it’s indescribable, but it maybe is in that hormones-are-gods realm of this interconnection. We know nervous systems are interconnected. Everybody knows about co-regulation now, and these are accepted, but nobody talks about a collective endocrine system, that actually we’re also sharing that.
Tami Simon: I’m really glad you’re bringing this up. I pulled this out because I thought it was stunning: “The full expression of each season requires the proximity of women in other seasons,” which is exactly what you’re saying. Now, I’d like you to be explicit about something though. This phrase, “Hormones are gods.” I could imagine someone being, “I think I know what she means. They’re really important, but why is she calling them gods?”
Kimberly Ann Johnson: I don’t know exactly either. It’s a mystery to me what that might mean. But what I make of it and how I regard it is that it’s far beyond—I mean, even if we’re just going to look at allopathic medicine and longer medicine traditions, we don’t really understand the endocrine system, and we tend to have this mechanistic view of the body that is pieces and parts. Well, I can kind of put this little thing in, and that won’t affect everything else, and I can kind of take this little thing out.
And so to me it means that they are—and again, I’m a Rolfer, so for a period of my life it was like everything’s fascia. But none of these systems exist independent of any other system. I’m also doing that very thing by hyper-specializing hormones. I think living in a female body that has a lot of hormonal fluctuations, and then learning even more about it, is like we realize the extent to which we’re getting moved around, and we’re not in control of those hormones. And I would say that gods are entities also that we’re not in control of, that we’re in interface with.
And I would also say that—I can’t call myself an animist, because really I’m a suburban girl. I am married to an animist, and I have been working with an animist teacher for a while, but I think also the plurality of gods is a way of talking about that immanence and not transcendence, that we’re in interplay with forces horizontally all the time.
And I think something that demands respect. Like, I’m not controlling it. It’s actually working in me, and then how do I co-create? How do I surf with that, rather than trying to dominate it or trying to beat it into submission, or preemptively try to understand it and front-load something because I’m afraid about an outcome?
Tami Simon: Now, one thing I also want to have you underscore is something you write about how these transitions—you talked about how it’s a time of maturation, and you write, “The transitions between seasons include grief and loss. These are times of identity formation and pruning.” And I wonder if you were to talk about each one, if you will—the transition from maiden to mother, from mother to virgin, and virgin to crone—what you think is happening in those transitions that’s asking to be seen and honored?
Kimberly Ann Johnson: I know some of these transitions more intimately than I know others. I like to talk about the transitions like wet clay. So when we’re in a transition of this magnitude, of a huge hormonal transition that also then cascades into other things, it’s as if our system is like wet clay. So if you think about wet clay, you can stamp it and it’ll maybe hold the shape, but if there’s too much water, it’ll dissolve and it won’t keep its shape. Then you have to add more dirt or mud or clay in order to bolster it up. But if it’s too dry, then it won’t take any shape. It’ll just crack or be brittle or break altogether.
These phases, in Chinese medicine they call them golden opportunities. So they call them that because in a wet clay state, you can re-pattern towards more organization. You can re-pattern towards more pleasure. You can heal lifelong things in those times.
But what usually happens is, in these transitions, we don’t have a habit of respecting them at all. We don’t have a habit of slowing down. We don’t really have a longitudinal health consideration, so we get weakened because we keep moving forward and moving on and doing all the things that our agenda tells us to do, rather than listening to, oh, this period of time requires something a little different. What’s being asked of me?
The transition from maiden to mother, I think, is one of the more confusing ones in our times, because we don’t have initiatory rites of passage for youth. If somebody doesn’t have children, what is their initiation to this next phase? How do they know? And I have friends who’ve really apprenticed that—what’s called forward from us in a culture that’s so nuclear family oriented, if that’s not the world we’re in.
Then the mother to virgin phase is just way more distinct because of perimenopause and menopause. So to me—I only had one child. I did have an interesting postpartum time that I was uninformed about, and that’s why I wrote The Fourth Trimester, but it still did not compare with the intensity of the change from mother to virgin.
The main difference for me, I feel—even though intellectually I could have said I’m okay with aging—I would not have realized the degree of attachment I had to being seen as young until it was in a very short period of time that I aged quite a bit, and it was obvious. And it was like everybody says: weight gain without anything changing, and sleepless nights, and hot flashes, and all kinds of—I wrote a list at some point. There were, like, forty-seven different physical changes that I was experiencing, most of which I had no idea would even be remotely related to hormones changing.
And in that time, for me, and for many of the other women I work with, I call it a death rehearsal. It was as if I was having a life review, and I was having to accept the gravity of my choices and realize things like, there’s no do-over. You know, people say, “Oh, you can do anything at any age.” Well, that might be true with college, or that might be true with starting a new hobby, but it’s not true with having more children. I can’t just decide to have another child now.
And I thought I’d already done a grieving ceremony at forty-two, because I wanted more children and I didn’t have any. I’d done a whole thing about that. I thought it was done. But the gravity and severity of the physiological reality was extremely challenging for me. And I got married during that time. I married somebody who’s quite a bit younger than me. And I started to think, “Maybe he should leave me. Maybe he won’t want me.” And it was not rational. It was happening on some other level.
And so that shift, to me, is such a tremendous opportunity, because I thought, wow, if I didn’t do this, and then I get to my deathbed and I have to do this life review, it’s like a domino pileup of everything I didn’t deal with now that then I’m going to deal with then.
The pruning is physiological and neurological. This is all documented. A woman who’s pregnant, certain parts of her brain develop, other parts of her brain diminish. That changes at six months postpartum, changes again. It’s the same thing in menopause. Louann Brizendine wrote a book called The Upgrade, documenting all of the positive changes in a female brain that happen at the menopausal time, in addition to the things that are pruning down.
But it’s also life pruning. What really matters to me? Is how I proceeded to this point how I want to proceed now? And I’ve never been a future-oriented person. I’ve been more of a present, past person. It’s like, oh, I can see the end now, and I need to make some choices about how I might want that end to be—whereas that was not even remotely on my radar four years prior.
Tami Simon: So you’re now, you would say, in your virgin phase?
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Yes.
Tami Simon: Is that fair to say? You’ve entered it.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Yes.
Tami Simon: And the transition from virgin to crone—you’re saying the crone in your work maybe kicks in at around seventy, and so that’s the phase that you’re not—that transition you can’t speak to personally. But what I hear you saying is, because you’ve done this work in these other phases, you’ll be more prepared to meet that transition on its own terms without this big pileup, I’m imagining, of unprocessed transitional insights.
I’m imagining someone listening who’s saying, “I have a pileup of a bunch of—I don’t know if I marked these phases exactly.” What would you say to them?
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Well, two things. First thing is, I have a lot of humility, so I also don’t think that it’s just going to be easy when I get there because I’ve done this work with unprocessed material. That would’ve been my mistake that I made showing up for birth and people saying, “Oh, well, you have a yoga practice and you have this. Birth’s going to be easy.” And I was like, “I don’t think that’s how that goes.”
So I don’t think it makes it easy. I mean, it’s the gift of getting older to know that what you’re going through is probably not going to take you down. You’re like, “Okay, I’ve been through hard stuff before. I have tools.” But it doesn’t make it necessarily less hard.
The menopausal transition—I mean, that’s what I was telling myself. I was saying to myself, “Why is this so hard for me? I am a sexological body worker. I’ve done all this work in my pelvis. I feel that I have sexual sovereignty, all this. I must have done something wrong, and that’s why this is so hard.”
So I had to undo even that, of thinking, oh, just because I know these things, that my body is going to be different? I mean, there are some things I could have done differently, and I do talk about that, that have to do with my adrenals and how hard I worked as a single mom and things like that. But it was also reckoning with, yeah, but this is the nature of a spiritual path. A spiritual path doesn’t mean it becomes easy because you’ve done the right thing.
But if somebody’s listening and they’re thinking, “Holy moly, whoa, I maybe have a big pileup”—any place is a great starting point. That is the beauty of the cyclical female body. It’s like double Dutch. So you have these rhythms, and they’re iterative. They’re iterative in the moon cycle, they’re iterative in a breath cycle, they’re iterative in a life cycle. And you can slip in, and then it’s like pulling a thread on the string. You just kind of pull that thread all the way out.
So any point is an adequate starting point, and I have worked with women in their mid-seventies, even late seventies, who are like, “I feel more erotically alive than I ever have.” And they do have some sadness about that, like, “Wow, but you’ve got so much time left.” But also some people never get that in their life.
Tami Simon: You talk about how one of the discoveries as you move through the phases—and we get out of this fixation on maiden sexuality as the only kind of sexuality that we’re going to hold up and admire—is that we might move from enjoying only hot sex to hot sex and what you call warm sex. And I wonder if you can talk some about that and how you see that developing through the erotic seasons.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Yes. So hot sex is, I would say, what mostly is represented out in films and ads, and porn clearly, as, in quotes, what good sex is. It’s adrenalized. It’s high charge. There’s usually a power dynamic. It’s the throw against the wall or lose yourself, where nowadays there’s a lot more escalated things that are a part of that based on the mainstreamification of BDSM, and just the intensification of porn because of everything ramping up its intensity.
So that’s how I would describe hot sex—a power dynamic that is really based in adrenaline and some kind of stress. And I’m not putting it down. Like, I like to have hot sex. I love that people have a wide range of how they experience sexuality. So it’s not a ranking, except to realize what the culture is showing, so that what is, quote unquote, the other seems derivative or not as good. Because just like with maiden sex, being available all the time and being super hormonal—that works for the culture. Having limits, having cycles, having times when you’re in the cave and out of the cave, that doesn’t work so great for male gaze, for what we’re even expecting of ourselves when doctors are like, “You just need to have more orgasms.” And everybody’s saying, “More orgasms, more orgasms.”
But warm sex is something that’s slower. It’s something that is more meandering. It’s not as goal-oriented and directed towards an end point. Some people might say, “Oh, that’s foreplay,” but I don’t really like the word foreplay, because it makes that sound like something else is supposed to happen after. So it’s a widening and a teasing apart of what is just on that buffet of what sexual connection could be like.
And warm sex is more oxytocin, less dopamine. I would say hot sex would be more dopamine. Warm sex would be more endorphin, downregulation. In some ways you could call it more relational. I think both can be relational. It’s just that our systems are so primed towards adrenaline and dopamine now that pulling ourselves back and training ourselves to be more patient, to have more ebbs and flows inside of arousal, to learn the language of the pause—
So people are afraid to say pause, because then they think that the other person’s going to stop, or the other person does stop, because it’s like pause. But learning how to protract something, and that a pause can really be that—a pause to check in, to settle in, to feel it out, to know what comes next.
I think that with queer sex, a lot of people—this hot sex, warm sex framing might be very heteronormative, but I think because heteronormative sex is what is mostly out there, with some changes nowadays it’s getting a little better. Like, I have queer friends that are like, “Uh, duh, we already know this.” But as far as how people are considering what’s valuable, what’s sexy, what’s interesting to explore, the warm sex is widening that.
Tami Simon: Something I want to check out with you, Kimberly. I imagine in your work and in your groups you’ve heard the full range of what people want and desire. Hot sex and warm sex probably doesn’t even come close to covering all of it, from asexual to the whole entire range of—
Kimberly Ann Johnson: And having a teenager, yeah.
Tami Simon: Yeah, whatever. And I wonder if you could just speak to that, because the reason I’m asking is because I want to make space for whatever somebody’s true erotic sovereignty is, and that we’re not putting anybody in any kind of anything here.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Definitely. Yeah, the labels like warm sex and hot sex are really just to provide frameworks so that people can locate something and then decide if they want to have a fuller range. Even what I said about wanting surrender—everybody gets to have their season. And I named those maiden, mother, virgin, crone, but I also, just prior to that, asked a bunch of people, “If you had to name right now what your season was, what would you call it?”
Because we could be in virgin season, where the culture’s saying, “Unless you take hormones, and unless you do this, you’re just going to shrivel up, and you’re never going to want sex again, and you need lube all the time.” And you could be having a sexual awakening, right? There’s so many different configurations of how one person’s erotic life develops, and I love that. I mean, it’s like our blueprint.
Also, what I noticed is that for females, it tends to be running parallel with their soul’s journey. So they’re getting information from their eroticism, from their partnering, about their soul’s path, more than I’ve noticed that with men. But I haven’t made a study of men.
I hope that this book is an offering of unshaming, an offering of reviewing and being able to also put in context some things that we’ve done in our life that maybe have been really confusing. Maybe some things that we like but we’re not sure we want to like it, or we need context for some things that have happened to us.
I’m hoping that this book also provides that, and that was my hope with all the stories that are in the book—that people would also be hearing phrases from someone’s story here or there that would then allow them to situate themselves and not feel—because most people feel very alone in their erotic desires, feel alone in something that happened to them in the past that they feel renders them unlovable or renders them damaged.
And you can’t really work in female sexuality—I really didn’t want to write the chapter on the sacred wound. I really didn’t. I’ve already written a book on trauma. But I sat with myself and it was like, but this is just an ubiquitous part of being in a female body. And then I had to reckon with my ideals of utopia and moving the culture forward to something that I feel is more human, but at the same time acknowledging that these things happen, and what do we do when they happen?
So, yeah, I in no way want to uphold that. Like I say, is the book about you having more sex? No. But if you want to have more sex, or better the kind of sex you want to have, then hopefully this book is also part of how that happens.
And the integration—because in the sex world, it’s really separate. And I know, because I was in it, not as a sex worker explicitly, but as a sexological body worker. But in that world, it’s like set aside your biology and only go towards pleasure, when really these biological times, they’re determining a lot of what people can feel in terms of pleasure. If you’ve got scar tissue in your pelvis, if you’ve had endometriosis and you’ve had a long fertility journey—there’s just so many variations that end up imprinted in the body and impact our willingness and our ability to communicate from our pelvis, that are physical.
Tami Simon: You said at one point that really this book teaches you how to become a sexual alchemist. And I thought, sometimes I ask what these phrases mean because, to be honest with you, I’m not sure and I don’t want to assume. But also to clarify it—I’m the listener advocate.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Yes, you are.
Tami Simon: I always want to clarify.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: You’re an epic listener advocate.
Tami Simon: Well, yeah. So I want to clarify what you meant by that.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: What I mean is that sexual arousal energy is healing energy, just like birth energy is arousal energy. So it’s liminal space convergence. Now, does that mean every sexual experience? No, because just like birth and just like death, there’s hormonal configurations that happen and don’t happen depending on the presence, the engagement, the context.
But when we know we’re in that zone, we’re in the wet clay zone, alchemy is possible, and we can call forward the highest in ourselves, in someone else, and in the meeting between two or three or four, or however it’s configured. There is information available there that might not be available outside of that space.
There is potentiation for rewiring for this amplitude of experience, and it’s powerful, and it doesn’t have to be filled with love, but the love chemicals are involved. So I believe that one thing that’s a basic prerequisite is care. So I think it’s kind of anything goes while care is involved, because to me, that’s what ethics is—that we would like to leave everybody in the dynamic better as a result of the encounter than before. And I think that that’s so reasonable as an expectation. That’s so doable, to come to something with enough humanness that you really know, “I will leave this situation, and myself or another, better as a result of it.”
Tami Simon: And then just to be very clear about how we can alchemize pain. You said, “I didn’t want to write the chapter on the sacred wound”—all of the sexual wounds that people have, whether it’s from trespasses or self-trespassing by having sex with people we really didn’t want to have sex with but we acted like we did, or whatever it might be, the whole range of wounds.
Because part of the offering of erotic sovereignty is—and you say this—you can actually alchemize pain by engaging in the type of, I would say, conscious sexual encounters that you’re helping people with. So tell me a little bit more about that.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Part of it is personal. My early wounding is sexual wounding, and when you write something, you have to go back into it if it’s going to be good at all. You can’t write it from a theoretical perspective. So there’s a part of me that doesn’t associate much with those ruptures anymore, and so it’s harder to go back into them.
Part of it is because when somebody is so generous to really open themselves up to you and tell you this trajectory that’s happened in their life that includes early sexual abuse by family members, or just things that you wish didn’t happen, you wish weren’t happening, seem like they shouldn’t happen—there’s a responsibility in that.
There’s also—people think, because I’ve worked with trauma for so long, some people think, “Oh, that’s super heavy and that must be really heavy.” But in general, it’s actually very redemptive, and most of the time I’m feeling quite victorious with the people that I’m working with. But when I’m listening to someone’s sexual history, of course, there’s—usually people are coming to me on the other side of having dealt with much of the wounding, and yet there’s still things that you hear that are extremely troubling.
And it’s part of a full human life to take our life and to not decide what’s good, what’s bad, I’m going to carve that and excise it and extract it, but I like this part. It’s the inhabiting and the incarnating of it together, with the fact that many of these women felt extremely honored to have a listener for it. And that was also very moving, to know this person knows this is going to end up in a body of work probably, but they want it told because they know that somebody else needs to hear it.
So I think it was part of resistance, of doing something that—I wish it wasn’t part of the world. I wish this wasn’t such a common female experience, and it is. And so as we’re maturing, how does this become part of our maturation? And I think it’s also why I then started thinking about erotic legacy, partially because I have a child, and also because it’s like, okay, well, how do I hold both of these things? Bad things happen, and then what is the rest? And then does that detract from the beauty, or does that actually sometimes become even more spectacularly beautiful?
Tami Simon: You mentioned that often people who have had early sexual wounding of some kind end up with sexual superpowers, and I wanted to hear more about that.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: When the veil’s been torn, a lot of times people go to a place where they cannot be overpowered. It’s usually not in their body. It’s usually somewhere else where they connect with God consciousness, and they realize, “In this place, nobody can take anything from me. In my human body right now, this is intolerable. It’s beyond what I can handle, so I can go to this place where I’m not touched.” And they have that as a reference point, and some people take that God consciousness or source awareness, and that transmutes into alchemy.
I heard stories of women who initiated many boys in their high school after the transgression, and later understood that to be protecting other girls, because at least if she got to them first, they would have a positive imprint to begin with. I heard versions of that story in different ways.
And so like any experience that tears fabric, the sexual one specifically, because of this sexual arousal potential there, it tends to be those are the people that have kundalini experiences. Those are the people that understand the information that can come in in that liminal space, and actually know what to do with it, to not be afraid of it because they’ve experienced it before.
I also just don’t want people to think that I’m glorifying sexual abuse, or that I am recommending that for sexual superpowers. It’s not a prerequisite. I’m not justifying or spiritually bypassing the damage that’s done through transgression. I’m just situating something that in my work has become so common that I wanted to bring it forward in the book.
Also, as a way of reframing—because I had one person tell me she has so much shame about her sexuality, and I said, “But it’s also a place where you’re so adept.” And she was like, “Oh yeah, you’re right. I am really adept.” So I don’t want people to feel hopeless, no matter what they’re bringing, because some people have religious abuse and all kinds of really super hard, what I call big lifes, like big stuff on their plate to try to alchemize. But it’s possible, and I want people to continue on knowing that, rather than staying in like a shame hole.
Tami Simon: So Kimberly, I just want to say a couple things to you personally here directly. First of all, I think you’re really brilliant. You have done a tremendously brilliant job of bringing so many different strands together into a—you called it a collage-type word. I would say a tremendously interwoven braid of coherent teaching. So I just want to bow to you and thank you for all that I’m sure it has taken to be able to teach and write in the way that you do. It’s really inspiring to me.
And the second is what I’m inspired by with this whole notion of how much can we incarnate spirit through our bodies. How much can we be here with it, not in the transcendent there? And you mentioned just briefly kundalini energy, and I think a lot of times people associate kundalini awakening with an up and out movement. Like, it starts down at the base of the spine in the yoga tradition, and it comes all the way up, and now we’re out and we’re free. And yet the emphasis of your teaching on erotic seasons is what you call down and in. So I wanted to end in this integrative moment with how you bring together, in a living kind of felt way, up and out and down and in.
Kimberly Ann Johnson: Well, thank you. Thank you for saying that. It means a lot—your opinion means a lot to me, and reflection. I train. I dance, I train martial arts, I train mythopoetic qigong, and I train collectively and collaboratively. That’s mostly how I do it. I do it through physical practices.
I’ve always loved practice and yoga practice, and I still do love it. But figuring out what my body needs now at the transition that I’m at—and then also, in my earlier days, there was huge importance on self-practice, personal practice. It was kind of the gold star, like if you have a personal practice, you’re better. It’s great you go to yoga class, but do your personal practice.
And a real settling into how much I love group devotional space and how much I need to be body to body with other people, and also how important that is when I’m teaching. So I’m creating as many environments as I can where there’s a lot of cross fibers in the web. So I’m leading, but the work of the other individuals that come, and what they’re bringing into the space, is also supporting one another.
And then I’ve been working on a practice that’s called Mothering the Bones, which is teaching people how to hold each other’s pelvises, so that we’re not having to do all the work therapeutically, and we’re not doing all the work sexually either. We’re coming into the pelvis, one with another, in a non-sexual, non-diagnostic way, but through touch—because touch is becoming something that we’re so much more, we were already distant from it, but now we’re getting more distant from it. So bringing touch back into things, and that includes myself. I need a lot of touch in terms of locating myself and landing myself.
So I get that through—I don’t think of it linearly. I don’t make a list and say, “Where am I getting touch?” Although maybe some people do. But I just am aware of the circumstances that I’m in, where I am getting body to body proximity with peers. Women don’t tend to train engagement as much, and contact, and so really noticing that and bringing myself as much as I can into environments where that’s happening.
Tami Simon: Coming down and in as well as up and out, with a circle of humans, person to person, touch to touch. I’ve been speaking with Kimberly Ann Johnson. She’s the author of a beautiful new book. It’s called Erotic Seasons: Tuning In to the Rhythms of Women’s Sexuality and Spirituality. Thank you, Kimberly.
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