(Alert: if frank, direct, and cutting-edge are all up your alley, this post will be as well).

“If your vagina could talk, what would it say…?” is a line from The Vagina Monologues, a revolutionary movement, book, and play that is performed all over the world.

It was created by icon Eve Ensler, in collaboration with countless girls and women, to give voice to this essential aspect of our girlhood and womanhood after too long of feeling muted, and to give us a stage on which to stand powerfully in our light after too long of feeling dimmed down.

I say that in addition to vagina monologues, we also need vagina dialogues.  Let me say more.

 

The term “vagina” (as I mean it) refers to the area of your body below your belly button and above your tailbone that holds most of your female reproductive organs; your pelvic bowl.  (I also call it the Oracle Between Your Thighs, and devote several chapters to it in my book).

The term “vagina” refers not just to this area of your body that has too often been violated, shamed, ignored, or exploited, but also to your desires, feelings, raw truth, self-trust, vulnerability, and swagger.

I am willing to bet that at some time in your girlhood — even if we have to go way, way back — you were naturally clear about what you wanted, confident in your body, and sassy (and if you were like me, also bossy).  You knew what you knew, you felt what you felt, and pleasure was everywhere for you, as natural as drawing breath.

And then at some point, your light likely began to dim, or the world dimmed it for you.

Perhaps your body stopped feeling like your own and became a commodity to trade for love, acceptance, and belonging — as long as you became perfect, pretty, and pleasing.

You traded in feeling for thinking, circles for straight lines, intuition for reason, desires for practicality, and inspiration for productivity.

You learned to hold your tongue, close your legs, and do as you were told.  Your girlhood was cut short.  You stopped trusting yourself.  You stopped hearing your soul.

Give your vagina a mic, and I would bet she would have something profound, poetic, and prescient to say, not just to an audience, but also to YOU.

And it is this dialogue between you and this essential part of you that is missing for far too many girls and women, and is a remedy for reclaiming your inner knowing, confidence, creativity, and personal power.

Here are three reasons why:

1.    Your vagina JUST KNOWS.

Much like your head can be a source for intellectual intelligence and your heart can be a source for emotional intelligence, your vagina can be a source for intuitive intelligence.

Intuition is defined as spiritual perception; to understand something immediately and without the need for conscious reasoning. Intuition is a hunch, insight, gut instinct, prescient feeling, or something you just know.

In fact, I think that sometimes “gut instincts” are actually “vagina instincts,” since the contents of your pelvic bowl — your uterus, cervix (top of vagina), and ovaries — if you have some or all of them, are situated next to your digestive tract.

Science backs me up here.  In your vagina, there are pulsations that increase measurably (yes, science has a device for measuring them) when you are moved, inspired, confident, and clear — when you JUST KNOW.

2.   Your vagina regulates your confidence.

When you experience pleasure — whether erotic or platonic — those sensations often register in your pelvic bowl and get relayed through the pelvic nerve, up your spinal cord, and to your brain where they signal the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with confidence and clarity.

Dopamine helps you feel inspired and motivated; it helps you feel happy to say it like you see it, and makes you feel like a million bucks.

So, more pleasure means more power.  Which seems totally antithetical within a culture that rewards your self-sacrifice and hyper-productivity and judges your worth by your resume.

However, your vagina JUST KNOWS that the better you feel, the better you feel about yourself.

3.   Your vagina is sacred.

Just like the Creator says, “let there be life,” this is what your vagina is saying all day long.

This is the area of your body that can literally create life itself, whether or not you have all your lady parts, and whether what you choose to create is a baby, a book, a band, a business, or breakfast.

Creativity, the generative, inspiring aspect of life-force, makes its home in your belly.  In Sanskrit, the word for vagina — yoni — translates as “sacred gateway to life.” The same sacred essence that can make a baby grow also makes the flowers bloom, and makes you grow and bloom.

I know it is scandalous to assert that sex and the Sacred could share a zip code, but it is only in the last 5,000 years that the separation has been made.  Before that, erotic energy was seen as life-force energy, which was seen as divine.

Now that you know the power and intelligence awaiting you between your thighs, feel free to dialogue.  Really.

The way you might ask your head, heart, or gut, “What should I do?  Right or left?  Yes or no?  Stay or go?” ask your vagina.

Assume that, like your mind, heart, or gut, your vagina is a trustable source of knowing and intelligence, and can communicate with you.

Sit or stand comfortably and put your attention on the area above your tailbone and below your belly button, your entire pelvic bowl.  Take a few breaths that are deeper and more deliberate than usual, imagining your breath nourishing and enlivening your insides.  And then ask your burning question.

If you don’t know what to ask, try: “What is important for me to know?”

Listen with what I call your “soul ears;” meaning, listen, feel, sense, and observe internally, the way you would if a doctor asked you to explain the feeling and location of a particular ache in your abdomen without pointing to it.

Your answers might come as sensations, impulses, pulsations, and emotions; as straightforward, straight-talking sentences; as stage-ready sonnets; or as poetry fragments, symbols, images, grunts, and nudges, requiring your interpretation, like dreams.

So, to the question, “If your vagina could talk, what would it say…?” now you can crank up the volume, start the dialogue, and in answer to your biggest questions, you can eventually — confidently — JUST KNOW.

Now, your turn.

Come join the discussion and share with us your responses to the question, “If your vagina could talk, what would it say?”

To this cutting-edge dialogue,

Photo by Wendy K. Yalom Photography