It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen pussy before.

To the contrary, having dated women throughout graduate school, I was definitely more familiar than most with being close to another woman’s body. So it couldn’t have been just the mere fact of pussy that made that spring morning in Austin in 2012 so impactful.

Looking back, I think the reason it shook me down to my bones to see her pussy that day was that I had never really seen a pussy for the sake of just seeing a pussy.

For the sheer purpose of being present with another woman’s sexual body.

But, really, no one does this.

In my experience, just “being with” someone else’s body is unheard of. It’s way more the norm that we go to other bodies to “get” something, for example, to get pleasure, to feel release or to derive comfort. Or to “do” something “to” them, for example to make them feel good, to get them off or to turn them on. I hear both men and women talk about “giving her/him an orgasm”. Which is different than just being in connection to another body for the sake of connection, for the chance to notice what’s there and for the moment of wonder without getting or going anywhere.

Yet that’s what we were there for that day. To not go anywhere, together, with her pussy.

There were three of us. Me, Donna and Kalen (names have been changed).

We were in Donna’s backyard in east Austin. It was mid-morning.

And her yard was wild, just like her. Tufts of flowers and tangles of weeds carpeted the ground. We were up on a hill so the vista over the fence included green lots where schools and churches covered only a small portion of the rolling landscape. I felt like I was on a perch looking out over the neighborhood. A vacant vintage jet stream trailer marked one side of the yard. An outdoor bathtub, a bird feeder, wind chimes, and sundry art fragments were strewn over the rest. It was peaceful there in the green chaos.

Two months before I had learned the practice of mindful pussy stroking called Orgasmic Meditation, or OM for short. In the practice, a stroker (who can be a man or woman) lightly strokes a woman’s clitoris for 15 minutes with no goal but to feel the sensation in both their bodies (if this sounds wild and weird it’s because it’s wild and weird. But keep reading). OM opened the possibility that I could take all of the personal growth work I had deeply committed my life to and add my sexuality to it. It was a mind-blowing revolution for me at the time. OM was re-organizing everything in my life.

I found myself in Donna’s backyard that day because she and Kalen were going to have an OM. And they had agreed I could witness their practice.

In OM, both partners sit in a designated, comfortable space called a “nest”. Where there are blankets and pillows arranged to support both their bodies. Usually all of this happens indoors. But we were Austin hippies who did it our own way. And that day, we lay the yoga mat down on the grass.

She took off her panties, lay back in the nest and butterflied her legs open. I could see her pussy with her lips curled inward, peach toned around the edges and caramel colored towards the middle. She was dry. I sat on the edge of the nest at her feet. Her toe grazed my knee as she got into position. A small skin-to-skin acknowledgement that we would be sharing the experience. And that she trusted me. I could feel the light breeze as I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

He sat to her right, left leg over her waist and started the first grounding step where he massaged her thighs gently, like kneading dough. I remember thinking how fleshy her legs looked, all that smooth creamy white skin rippling under his steady touch.

After he put on the gloves and applied lube, the next step was for him to spread her lips so that he could expose her clitoris, that tiny bud of flesh at the top of her lips where all the nerve endings are concentrated. I remember feeling nervous, my chest slightly tightened, with a sense that I didn’t know what was ahead, only that it would be momentous.

And it was.

It was when he opened her labia and I saw her spread wide that I cried.

It’s called the “lube stroke”, when the stroker spreads her lips with his middle and ring fingers and glides a lubed finger between her from the base to the top to land on her clitoris. Up to that moment, her pussy had looked inanimate, two lovely, peachy brown-toned folds that were still and silent. When he spread them apart for the lube stroke, it was like the earth beneath us split open. I remember feeling mildly dizzy. Suddenly a symphony of color emerged. Through the opening in her lips were hues of crimson, burgundy, magenta and garnet. She was immediately glistening, reflecting the morning light. And even though he was stroking her, her pussy did not look still. It was as if her genitals were breathing, gently expanding with her exhales as he lightly and steadily stroked the tiny bud at the top of her lips.

This was pussy. Not pussy for the purpose of making me feel a certain way. Not pussy that I needed to make feel a certain way (and I always felt clumsy at that). It was pussy just on her own terms.

I thought of my mother immediately, who died when I was young. Something about her visited me in that moment. I thought of the idea of the spirit Mother Earth, some maternal presence that is always with everyone and as gentle as she is fierce and merciless. And then I didn’t think at all. I just watched while the thoughts in my head evaporated and stroke by stroke her pussy changed hues, from terra cotta to shades of ruby and violet red.

I can’t tell you why I cried. It was a totally involuntary moment. But I do know that my experience of sitting there in the face of a pussy being stroked into fullness during those 15 minutes in Donna’s backyard changed me.

Pussies are wild creatures. There’s no way around that. I felt the full impact of that truth that day. They change shape right under your nose, especially the clitoris, darting and dancing. Their smells range from sweet, tangy and mild to musky, sour and strong. They are layered like strata of the earth and crinkly like the leaves and petals of flowers. No two are identical. And yet they all share in common an extreme sensitivity to attention. Under the light of approving, reverent attention, they turn on. Under criticism or when neglected, they turn off.

Most people, women and men alike, don’t have a practice of just looking at a woman’s pussy. I hear women say, “I’m afraid to look” or “I’m embarrassed by how I look there”. I hear men say, “I’m not used to the smell of pussies”. Or “I don’t know how to find her clitoris”.

Pussies are messy business. They leak and they smell, they swell and they drip, they bleed and they stretch and especially when they are happy, they gush. To love a pussy is to love the mess. To surrender to chaos as a part of life that brings with it consummate beauty. A different kind of beauty than the kind that is tidy and angular and predictable and sanitized and uniform. Pussy is none of these. She is unruly and asymmetrical and unexpected and inconsistent and changing. And when I pay attention without asking anything of her, she teaches me.

My experience over the past four years of practicing OM, teaching OM and now teaching a related practice I call Conscious Orgasm, is that the ability to just “be” with pussy in all her glorious mess and infinite unpredictability directly translates to becoming a better human. That’s the simplest way I can put it. What I have seen in myself and others who have committed to the path of pussy stroking is the capacity to get present to our deepest fears, the courage to feel our most expansive joys, the sensitivity to hear and listen to our most subtle of internal truths and the generosity of spirit to support others in their varied vulnerable humanness to find their greatest gladness.

Learning how to accept, love and trust my own pussy – and to celebrate other women’s pussies – has been a portal for me to growing myself up into a better, wiser, kinder, more sensitive, accepting, savvy, intuitive and powerful version of myself.

This Saturday, I am waking up early to bring the force of all that my pussy has taught me to Austin for the Women’s March in solidarity with the March on Washington. Over 600 sister marches will be held worldwide in a glorious, unified, international statement of protest of Donald Trump’s presidency.

It seems right to stand with sisters in my political “no” in opposition to a President whose public comments about women have me question his ability to understand, revere and listen to pussies. My pussy wants to be listened to. OM has given me the tools to do so. And this weekend I stand for that. For a world and a governance that would help us all listen and lift up the wild, messy and infinite variety that this life comes in. From gay to transgendered to straight, from dark skinned to red and yellow and white, from differently abled to able bodied, from Moslem to Pagan to Christian. I march this weekend in protest of politics that would denigrate and divide and in celebration of the wisdom I learn from my pussy that teaches me that beauty comes in endless hues and changing shapes and that to make change I must reverently pay attention.

Photo by AJ Colores on Unsplash