Halloween, Permission, and Being Something Else

Halloween was always a thrilling time for me, both as a child and as an adult. It’s not that I was that into being scared; scary things were actually way too intense for me when I was little. And candy was nice, but given the weird scares of the 1980s, I wasn’t allowed to eat

Embodied Consent: Where is your “yes”?

(Part 3 of my series on Embodied Consent, leading up to my talk on the subject at the Bound in Boston: Wicked Women Conference next weekend.) One of my favorite truisms about consent is that a true “yes” is not possible without the option for a true “no.” That being said, one of my primary

What was taken from you? Where do we get it back?

This weekend, we focused on soul: what feeds us, where we feel at home, how we connect to passion, to center, to power, to connection itself. As part of that, we talked about the thwarts to passion: what does your passion call you to do, and what gets our way?

An important learning from this was that most of the time, the thing thwarting us is not of us. We may have internalized it, sure, but it was something done to us. “Something taken out of my soul. Something I would never lose. Something somebody stole.” Or, something somebody put there, something that doesn’t belong, that we should never have been forced to carry.

Hugs, but only if you want them.

More and more articles lately on consent culture and how to raise a generation of people who are secure in their own bodily autonomy, and respect others’ as well. Here’s one I liked this week: Why I Will Never Tell My Daughter to Give You a Hug. In short: forcing kids to hug and kiss or

Come see me give a talk on embodied consent

On Saturday, September 27, my colleague Sam of Safety Beyond Safewords and I will be giving a talk at Wicked Women, the latest iteration of the Bound in Boston conference. Our talk will combine Sam’s expertise as a clinical social worker with mine as a synergist and body nerd to help kinksters listen to the

Childhood, consent, and learning to be human

In anticipation of my talk on embodied consent in September, I’m going to writing a lot about consent in this space. I’m away until August 10, so for the next two entires, you’ll be getting reruns. Here’s an oldy but goody that practically went viral when I first posted it. What imprints do we receive

Come see me give a talk on embodied consent

On Saturday, September 27, my colleague Sam of Safety Beyond Safewords and I will be giving a talk at Wicked Women, the latest iteration of the Bound in Boston conference. Our talk will combine Sam’s expertise as a clinical social worker with mine as a synergist and body nerd to help kinksters listen to the

Stand like Wonder Woman, and change your life

More research, this time out of Harvard Business School, is emerging around the ways in which body language, body position, and other clear, controllable physical actions can not only change the way others think and feel about us, but how we feel and think about ourselves. Amy Cuddy’s research showed a two-minute change in body posture

Fostering consent culture – making touch safe for kids and adults

My friend and colleague Christine Kraemer wrote over at the Patheos website recently about how desperately kids need touch – not just for emotional development, but literally for biological development – and how that touch is being systematically taken away in many school environments and elsewhere. More and more, non-parent adults are not allowed to

The lies we tell girls about sex

This fabulous list/article about the lies girls grow up believing about sex, consent, virginity and agency is frightening and instructive. The scary thing is, I think it was actually better when I was growing up, as bad as it was.