How to Have a Sexual Awakening (And Why You Can't Wait for One to Happen)
Mine started with a Christmas tree.
December 2024. Brittney and I were taking ornaments off the tree, which is one of those tasks that gives you just enough to do with your hands that you end up saying things you wouldn't say across a table. I don't remember how it started. I remember that at some point we were no longer talking about the tree, and that I said something true about what I wanted out of our intimate life — something I had been carrying around unsaid for probably a decade — and the floor didn't open up.
That's it. That's the moment. No retreat, no plant medicine, no dramatic rupture. A conversation in a living room full of boxes.
I bring that up because people tend to imagine a sexual awakening as something that happens to you. A thunderbolt. An affair. A book that rearranges you. Some external event that arrives and cracks you open. And occasionally it works that way. But in my experience, and in the experience of nearly every person I've coached, the awakening isn't the lightning strike. It's the decision to stop waiting for one.
What a Sexual Awakening Actually Is
Let's define it, because the phrase gets used loosely enough to mean almost anything.
A sexual awakening is the process of moving from an inherited sexuality to an authored one.
Inherited sexuality is everything you absorbed without choosing it: what your family modeled or refused to model, what your church taught you, what the first porn you saw taught you, what your peers made fun of, what your culture told you was normal and what it told you was deviant. You didn't pick any of it. It installed itself before you had the capacity to evaluate it, and then it ran quietly in the background while you assumed it was simply you.
Authored sexuality is what you get when you go back through that inheritance item by item and decide what you actually want to keep.
That's the whole thing. It's not about becoming more adventurous, though that may happen. It's not about having more sex, though that may happen too. It's about the shift from running a program someone else wrote to writing it yourself. I've written before about becoming the author of your own eroticism, and this is the practical front end of that — how the authoring actually starts.
Which means an awakening is available to anyone, at any age, under almost any circumstances. It doesn't require a new partner. It doesn't require a crisis. It requires an audit.
Why Waiting Doesn't Work
Here's the trap. Most people are, consciously or not, waiting for permission.
Waiting for their partner to initiate something different. Waiting to feel desire spontaneously so they'll know it's real. Waiting until the kids are older, until work slows down, until they lose fifteen pounds, until they feel less ashamed. Waiting for the feeling to arrive first, so that the action feels authentic rather than forced.
I waited until I was almost forty. I grew up in the Churches of Christ, went to a Church of Christ university where the dorms were separated by gender and chapel was mandatory every single day and there was a curfew, and I absorbed a version of sexuality that was essentially a list of prohibitions with no corresponding instruction about what to actually do with desire once you were allowed to have it. By the time I was married and permitted, the machinery of shame was still running. Nobody tells you that the switch doesn't flip at the altar.
So I waited for the feeling to change on its own. It didn't. It never does. This is one of the places my sport psychology training turned out to be weirdly useful: in performance work, you learn fast that you cannot think your way into a state. You act your way into it. You build the behavior and the state follows. Waiting for motivation is how athletes stay mediocre, and waiting for desire is how couples stay dormant.
The awakening starts with an action taken before you feel ready for it.
Step One: Name What You Absorbed
You can't choose what to keep until you can see what's there.
Sit down — actually sit down, with paper, not in your head — and answer these:
What did my family communicate about sex, including through silence?
What did my religious or cultural upbringing teach me about desire, pleasure, and my own body?
What was the first sexual information I received, and from whom?
What am I ashamed of that I've never said out loud to anyone?
What do I believe about my own desirability, and where did I learn it?
Write it down without editing. You are not building a legal case against your parents or your church. You're taking inventory. Some of what you find will be good — I kept plenty from my upbringing, including a real and still-living faith. Some of it will be junk that got installed because nobody knew better.
Most people discover in this exercise that their core sexual beliefs were formed by about age fourteen and have never been revisited since. You're running a fourteen-year-old's operating system on a forty-seven-year-old's hardware.
Step Two: Separate Shame From Conscience
This is the step that trips up people with religious backgrounds, so I want to spend real time on it.
Shame and conscience feel identical from the inside. Both produce a sinking sensation and a strong impulse to stop. But they are not the same thing and they do not deserve the same authority.
Conscience says: this would violate someone. It's about harm. It points outward — at a person, a promise, a consequence. It's specific, and when you obey it you feel settled.
Shame says: you are wrong for wanting. It's about identity. It points inward, it's diffuse, it attaches to the wanting itself rather than to any act or consequence, and obeying it doesn't produce peace. It produces numbness, which you mistake for peace because you've never felt the real thing.
My somatic coach gave me a version of this test, and it has done more work in my life than almost anything else I've learned: when the sinking feeling arrives, ask what specifically is being harmed. If you can name it — a commitment, a person, a boundary you agreed to — that's conscience, and you should listen. If the only answer is me, for wanting this, that's inherited shame, and it has no standing. You are allowed to want things.
That single distinction is what let me keep my faith and lose the shame. They were never the same thing. They had just been welded together by people who found it easier to control behavior through disgust than through formation.
Step Three: Find Out What You Actually Want
Here's the uncomfortable truth: most adults cannot answer the question "what do you want sexually?" with any specificity. They can tell you what they're supposed to want. They can tell you what their partner wants. They go blank on their own.
That's not a character flaw. It's what happens when a question is never asked for thirty years.
The approach that finally worked for me came out of the Somatica Institute's framework — Celeste Hirschman and Danielle Harel's work on core desires. Rather than asking "what acts do you like," which keeps you in the realm of mechanics, it asks what emotional experience you're after underneath the acts. Their list includes things like being desired, being seen, being taken, being safe, being adored, being in control, being surrendered.
Mine is Being Seen. Once I knew that, everything reorganized. It explained why eye contact does more for me than almost any physical technique. It explained why certain things that looked exciting on paper left me cold, and why something as simple as Brittney watching me — actually watching, not glancing — lands like a physical event. Brittney's are Being Desired and feeling Safe, which explains why she needs a long sensory runway and why too many words pull her out of the state rather than into it.
You will not figure this out by thinking harder. You'll figure it out by paying attention to the moments in your life — sexual or not — when you felt most alive, and asking what emotional need was being met. The pattern is usually sitting right there in your favorite memories.
Step Four: Get Back In Your Body
An awakening that happens only in your head isn't an awakening. It's a reading list.
For most of my adult life I was what therapists call a spectator — physically present during sex and cognitively somewhere above the bed, monitoring, evaluating, managing. Masters and Johnson named this spectatoring decades ago, and it remains one of the most common mechanical obstacles to actually enjoying your own sex life. You cannot feel much of anything while you're grading yourself.
The exit is somatic, not intellectual. You cannot think your way out of a thinking problem.
What worked for me was breathwork — a daily practice I picked up through Somatica's material and have now done for long enough that my body does something it never used to do. My solar plexus pulsates. Not metaphorically. There's a physical sensation in the center of my chest that simply did not exist in my body three years ago, and it arrived because I spent a few minutes a day breathing deliberately into a region I had spent four decades ignoring.
Start absurdly small. Five minutes of deep diaphragmatic breathing with your attention in your pelvis and lower belly. No goal, no arousal target, nothing to achieve. You're just re-establishing contact with real estate you abandoned. Do it for two weeks and you will notice something.
Step Five: Say One True Thing Out Loud
This is the actual threshold. Everything before it is preparation.
An awakening becomes real when it leaves your body and enters the room. One true thing, said out loud, to the person you're with.
It doesn't have to be your biggest truth. Please don't lead with your biggest truth. Lead with something true that you've been holding — a preference, a curiosity, something you like that you've never named, something you'd want to try. The content matters much less than the act of saying it.
What I've learned from both my own marriage and from coaching is that the fear is almost always worse than the event. The scenario people dread — disgust, rejection, permanent damage — is far rarer than the actual common outcome, which is some version of oh, I didn't know that followed by a conversation.
And a related piece of craft that took me years to learn: reveal, don't ask. "I've been thinking about how much I like it when you look at me" is different from "would you look at me more?" The first is a disclosure and it's a gift. The second is a request and it creates obligation. My somatic coach pointed this out to me and it changed how I talk to my wife. I've written about the difference at length, because it's that load-bearing.
Step Six: Let It Take Longer Than You Want
My awakening is roughly eight years old and still going. The Christmas tree conversation wasn't the finish line; it was the starting gun.
Since then: the Erotic Blueprint assessment, body mapping, a somatic coach, daily breathwork, Deida and Wineland and Perel and Morin, building Coelle with Brittney, starting a podcast with her where we talk about this on the record, coaching other people through the same terrain, and writing a book about why we all need a guide in the bedroom. None of that was on the agenda in that living room. Each thing opened the door to the next thing.
This matters because the expectation of a single transformative event is itself a shame mechanism. If the awakening is supposed to be one dramatic rupture, then failing to have one means something's wrong with you. If it's a practice, then today's small action counts, and so does tomorrow's.
The people who change are not the people who had the most dramatic catalyst. They're the people who kept going after the catalyst wore off.
Where to Start Tomorrow
If you want one thing to do, here it is.
Tonight, or tomorrow, do five minutes of breathing with your attention in your lower body. Then write down one true thing about what you want that you have never said to your partner. Don't say it yet. Just write it, and notice what happens in your body when you read it back.
That's the awakening. Not the lightning. The decision to look at what's actually there.
Everything else is just follow-through.
Brittney and I built Coelle because the hardest part of an awakening isn't the insight — it's having somewhere to practice it together. Guided audio gives both of you the same instruction at the same time, so neither person has to direct and both people can actually arrive.
If you want help with the audit — the shame inventory, the core desires, the first true conversation — that's the work I do with couples and individuals one-on-one. Book a free discovery call here.
