Touch has a memory longer than language. I just watched a woman orgasm, tears streaming down her face, as her body remembered what joy felt like without permission from her mind. I was reminded of how much is possible when we make space for our bodies to be in their truth.

But how do we trust a body that society has told us to silence? A body that has learned to hide from itself to survive and to belong? How do we experience pleasure without approval?

The body knows what the mind forgets.

Before language could shape your understanding of pleasure, before any outside messaging told you what desire should look like, before sky daddies could shame you into silence - your body knew how to feel joy. It knew how to arch toward pleasure, how to melt into touch that feels like home. And it didn’t have to abandon the mind to do so.

But somewhere between trying to be the one someone loves and trying to love ourselves, we learned to frame that knowing with doubt. We started treating our bodies like they were unreliable narrators in our own story, like they couldn't be trusted to know what they need.

We didn’t do this on our own. A good friend and teacher has always told me, if you want to find the root of the problem, follow the money.

Today there is no shortage of influencers masquerading as healers, teaching that our bodies are like machines that need fixing — another system to optimize, another problem to solve, another trauma to process. With healing becoming such a hot commodity, even those of us working in the sexual space have to be mindful not to turn pleasure into a product.

Your body doesn't need optimization — it needs your attention.
Your pleasure doesn't need a program — it needs your presence.
Your power doesn't need unlocking — it needs acknowledging.

I am really struggling to find spaces where the conversations around our body and pleasure use language that considers the energy exchanged when we pretend to be powerless. Even the saying “the body keeps the score” implies that my mind and body are two different poles, one capable of remembering and the other falling away from the experiences that have shaped me.

Framing our body's wisdom as "score-keeping" strips it of its sacred role as storyteller, as pleasure-keeper, as truth-speaker. We turn our erotic wellness into some kind of trauma Olympics, where the goal is to somehow win against our own flesh.

What if instead of tallying score, we simply acknowledge that our bodies are a treasure trove of memories? What if remembering wasn't about reliving pain but reclaiming pleasure?

Because here's what your body knows: every sensation, every memory, every moment of pleasure or pain isn't a point on some somatic scoreboard – it's part of your story, written in a language older than words. And when we learn to listen, really listen, to these stories, there are no tick marks to count. Just a way home.

Liberation is often hidden in our words, and we could all take to a closer look at what language is actually doing to our relationship with our bodies. Remembering is a whole body experience, this is our ancestral truth. It's white supremacist delusion that invites the age-old Cartesian split into our wellness spaces.

When my client felt joy move through her body, she was remembering. Her body wasn't holding onto old wounds like a grudge; it was speaking its truth in the language of sensation, of breath, of movement. She started noticing the difference between the tension she had held like a shield and the pleasure that was possible in its absence. There were no points to keep, there was simply a reclamation of the divine right to feel everything.

Trauma, stress, and societal conditioning can create patterns of tension, bracing, and even numbness that directly impact our sexual response and limit our capacity for pleasure. Transformative sex work is "somatic-imaginal" — inviting clients back to their bodies and that space between thought and sensation, between memory and possibility.

And there is space for us to allow both the mind and the body to be in the remembering of pleasure.

And you too might find that there is more pleasure and there are orgasms in that space.