*Warning: a few naughty words. 

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I am a woman who has not been in the driver’s seat of my own life.

Yes, I’ve traveled. Yes, I’ve left my comfort zone to test my limits and boundaries. Yes, I’ve educated myself well and accomplished a few things that I have been proud of.

But I have not been empowered in who I am.

I have not loved myself with an awakened and devoted heart. I have not credited or rewarded myself for the fierce woman that I am today.

I have allowed myself to remain unseen to myself for far too long.

So when I suddenly decided that I wanted to celebrate the legacy of my humble little life by posing nude, and I was met with judgment and criticism, I realized that the reason why I have not seen, loved, and celebrated myself for 37 years is because I was programmed to believe that I didn’t deserve to.

After all, I don’t match the criteria of a commercial sex symbol. I don’t look anything like those Instagram girls. I haven’t started a movement. My accomplishments haven’t made me rich.

I don’t tick any of the boxes.

There is nothing about me, through what mother nature has given me or what I’ve achieved in my life, that gives me the right to raise my hand, to speak up and say, “I do what I want, because it’s fun.”

I am nobody, except a woman who has been operating outside of societal standards long enough to ask herself: “Why does this construct exist in the first place? Why are so many of us voiceless? Why do we keep agreeing to this? And why would I let any of that stop me from deciding what I can and cannot do?”

You see, this isn’t about my mother not loving me, my father not raising me, or my teachers not praising me. It’s about the patriarchy that has dominated, overpowered, and controlled our collective mind for thousands of years. This hegemon of a system has taught us to be apologetic, tamed, and complacent.

It has hierarchized the feminine according to some sort of collectively agreed-upon standard of beauty and desirability. It has cut us off from our birthright to free bleed, to breastfeed publicly, to live according to our own rhythm, to prioritize our pleasure, and to contemplate the art of simply being.

It has turned the female body into an object of entertainment and pleasure for the masculine, and it has robbed us of our sovereign right to know the purpose of our life on this planet, to seek pleasure for the sake of pleasure, to cultivate our womb wisdom so we can merge with our souls, to find respite in community, and to live in an expanded sovereign state.

It has controlled the minds of our parents, our grandparents, great grandparents, and so on—all the way back to 5,000 years ago, and we are now the ones carrying this fear in our bones.

We have been reared in a global civilization diseased by confusion, pain, repression, violence, and sexual trauma; and all of this is currently being purged out in the most grotesque and sinister ways—through octopus sex, pedophilia, S&M, pornography, and whatever other sick shit is out there that I have gratefully forgotten.

This construct has conditioned us humans into farm animals and plugged us into a rat race of survival and competition, where everything we can and cannot do is based on the social conditioning and tacit agreements we made long ago, to fit into an industrial system, to censor ourselves and our sacred right to exist as free beings on this earth.

It has destroyed some of the most exquisite and pristine corners of our planet, pillaged our rainforests, fed garbage to billions of people, and left us to fight amongst ourselves on a war-stricken and poverty-stricken planet with a dying ecosystem.

I’m not even that mad at the patriarchy. I’m just in the mood to finally complain and say, “No.”

Personally, I’ve gotten so used to this sick world being the norm that I forgot: I actually do have the right to claim my space on a new earth and I have a role.

To liberate the oppressed, disempowered, disassociated, and fragmented feminine. To awaken the hearts of my sisters so they can awaken the hearts of my brothers and build an empowered global tribe that is woke AF and refusing to live by rules and conditions that limit, dictate, and define who we are allowed to be in this life.

More and more of us around the world are saying “fuck this shit” but not from a place of anger and hatred. We are saying no from a place of sacred rage pulsing from our hearts and we are emerging to liberate us all from the programs that have kept us small and disconnected from our souls for far too long.

The way of empowerment is through love. It’s in building unshakable bonds with women, it’s in remembering a different time in history: a time when female sexuality wasn’t shamed and controlled, because sexuality was a form of prayer and the female body was revered as sacred and holy.

So if you ask me why nudity? Why art? Why now? It’s because I have the right to exist in my sacredness, wholeness, and beauty.

It’s because these mediums speak to the feminine. They trigger a deep knowing in our wombs that we are wild and free, and no one, not a man, a dogma, a concept, or a commercial standard of beauty, should have any rights over our self-expression.

The remembrance of our sacred sexuality is the reclamation of our sovereignty as gods and goddesses on this planet. Birth is sexual, pain is liberation, and truth is orgasmic. We don’t need to consent to anything less.

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