asking for help when you believe you ought to know

I know it's been a while since my first blog. My last piece was a rant about my anxieties around some very real concerns that our country is running headlong into Fascism. This post is going to take on a more personal note because I've realized that the only way things can possibly get better for me is if I make a big change, so...I'm going into therapy.

It's very hard to ask for help when you think you ought to know. Ought to know what, you might ask? Well, my friend pretty much everything. I pride myself in being really smart--able to work my brain around problems, especially intellectual and emotional ones. I'm typically the friend people come to for advice, the person who can help parse out the nonsense from the facts and help straighten things out. But i've been having a really hard time lately and it's all snowballed and gone out of control. Endless hours of tv, lots of food, hardly any exercise all the typical stuff you do when you don't feel great. But then recently, in the past few months a fog of hopelessness and cyncism came in so thick I could no longer parse of the nonesense from the facts for myself. 

But the reason why I'm writing this article isn't just to vent about the quiet isolation i've been grappling with but to voice the intense shame I've felt at admitting that I need help. I know this isn't PC but it feels awful. I feel like a big, crazy, messy failure. As I try to build a name for myself as an activist, public speaker and sex educator, increasingly I feel the need to always appear perfect. How can I purport to be an expert at anything if I don't always have it together. You might then ask me another question. But Jazz, you wouldn't expect your friends and family to be perfect all the time now would you? And the answer is, kinda yeah I would. I like people who have their shit together, who are fun, motivated and positive (if also skilled in sarcastic conversation). I can't help but to have been indoctrinated by the Mary Poppins philosophy: she is after all, practically perfect in every way and why shouldn't I be to?!

What it boils down to, is the sense that if I admit that I need help, that I can't keep it altogther for myself, how in the world would any ever listen to me? So yeah, my ego is pretty raw right now and not much of my logical/reasoning brain is functioning.

I don't have a pat ending for this one, just the hunch that it's better out with these series of horrible feelings that keeping them bottled up. Thanks for listening.

Sex: Relaxation and Beyond

When we think about relaxation there many things we think about: a massage, a vacation, a glass of wine and so on. One thing we might not immediately think of is sex. However studies show that sex (and orgasm) reduces stress, pain and helps you sleep better. All things that help you relax, improve your well-being and quality of life. These are great benefits we might not have considered and lose sight of when we are caught up with all the day-to-day concerns. How often does sex get pushed to the back burner? What do you notice for yourself when you have sex consistently and when you do not? I invite you to consider treating sex as a vital part of your well-being. In addition to things related to relaxation, it improves heart disease, burns calories and improves intimacy.

However if we were to boil it down to the simplest thing, sex provides pleasure, which has us feel good and be relaxed. I was just speaking at a conference in DC at the end of March where I heard Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former US Surgeon General say “It’s time to admit sexuality is about pleasure.”

I’d assert for many people we still have a hard time with the pleasure piece. We have a lot of questions, confusion, shame and fear in America when it comes to sex. We get a lot of mixed messages of what’s “normal” and what’s “weird”, what’s too much sex, what’s too little, as a culture we use sex to sell things and yet are often afraid to talk about sex openly and honestly. We let things get in the way of us experiencing full joy and pleasure when it comes to sex.

So what to do about it? One of the first things is to start building some awareness of where you’re at with your sexuality and where you’d like to be. Here are a couple of questions to consider:

1. How empowered are you about your sexuality on a scale of 1 to 10?

1 being I have a lot of fear and shame around sex...
10 being I feel full joy and pleasure around sex

2. What gets in the way of you experiencing full joy and pleasure when it comes to sex?

3. If you were to consider creating three goals for yourself and sex, what would they be?

Now comes the fun part! Are you willing to take some action to create that? Do you need some support?

(This is a repost from Lisa's coaching blog)

Life or something like it...

Hello, my name is Jazz Goldman and I am a first time blogger.

I've been sitting at my computer on and off since 11am this morning, finding myself the victim of yet another round of paralysis of the pen. It's a tricky little condition, greatly aggravated by the internet, facebook in particular. But this post isn't about how effectively facebook saps your focus and energy, perhaps more on that another time. Today, I wanted to write about my life thus far and how it has been intersecting with my career and the world at large.

I am a lapsed performance artist and a budding sex educator, so when I came back from the amazing Momentum conference in D.C., I was buzzing with ideas and possiblity. Shortly after returning home on April 1st, I was hit with a wall of sadness and panic. I returned to see a powerful web of veritable fascism weaving it's way into my life. Another bill has been passed, adding to the nation's race to see who can demolish the Bill of Rights and Constitution the quickest. Now, if you are arrested, which you can be for "suspicion" of being a terrorist or just plain old suspicious behavior--a decidedly broad term, you can be strip-searched. That's right, if you go to jail your bodily autonomy is completely handed over to the state without any checks and certainly not a shred of balance. If you think this law only applies to serious felons, you would be sorely mistaken. Just ask Albert Florence who is currently sueing  after he was strip-searched twice in a six-day period while being imprisoned for an unpaid traffic violation. You know how shifty those folks are who avoid traffic tickets!

To summarize--the government can now imprison you at will and indefinitely if you are suspected of terrorism. You can be imprisioned for up to 10 years if you protest near any person who has a secret-service agent with them, and when you are imprisioned, you can be strip searched--over and over all in the name of safety and security. Let's not forget about the much contested Patriot Act, the expansive legislation that arguably started this horrifying trend (see page 3 for the really scary and relevent segments). You might be asking yourself, how does this tie into sex education and over all sexual freedom? I will answer your question with a different question-why is the sex positive community seemingly unlinked with the larger, more mainstream politically active communities? In the face of current events, in would seem that political liberals should be banding together to stop this stuff, but as far as I can tell they simply are not.

My fear and anxiety over these issues deepened as I realized no one in my sex-positive circles mentioned these terrible pieces of legislation. In my humble opinion, the sex positive community is frightenginly isolated from larger issues and I believe this is to the detriment of sex positive activist goals. These kinds of laws affect everybody, whether they are polyamorous, gay, kinky or straight and married with children-therefore all political activists should be banding together to stop this nonsense. If our bodily autonomy is stripped away in prision, in the doctor's office (if unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds as a pre-requisite for getting an abortion catch on any more), then it's only a little while before the government starts coming after the rest of us, only if we appear suspicous that is. 

I'm putting out a call to action for activists to drop partisan agendas and work together. Get your church involved with your LGBT activism, get your polyamorous group involved with kinky events. Go out and have those sometimes awkward, but incredibly important community building conversations so we can all start working together!

(Ab)using your words...

I just returned from another wonderful Momentum Conference, and I'm digesting all the wonderful presentations that were attended, the incredible people who were introduced, and the amazing conversations that were had and overheard with those incredible people.  Needless to say, I feel more focused and inspired than ever to affect positive change to help move our country (and our world) toward a more positive, personable and personally pleasurable place.  Much of the focus around that already well-established desire came courtesy of some great words from the mouths of two amazing women; Lara Riscol and Esther Perel.

In particular, I've felt helpless as I've watched an energized, well organized, well funded minority of fundamentally religious and social conservatives take control of the narrative around a number of issues (especially around sexuality and gender) and also take over much of the Republican Party in the process...  by carefully and strategically using pre-existing prejudice and anxiety around sex, race, gender roles, social programs, etc to associate negativity with not only progressivist language, but also a number of pretty cool plain English words.

That's how despicable (and extremely clever) culture warriors like Andrew Breitbart, Karl Rove and those in the Fox media empire have managed to redefine and/or stigmatize words like choice and liberalism and progress and diversity.  They all play by the same playbook, they're relentless, and they know how to scare the crap out of hard working Americans who are only trying to make a living and feed and clothe their families.

The most recent proof of the Right's attempts at inciting class warfare were revealed just last week thanks to a leaked memo coming out of the conservative National Organization for Marriage.  The memo revealed a comprehensive and long-term strategy to "drive a wedge between blacks and gays -- two key Democratic constituencies" by helping those communities to orchestrate media campaigns which are intended to provoke hostility between the two groups by preying on long-standing, but relatively dormant, divisions between those groups.

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Basic Indoctrination

This week, we had a movie night here at the Apartment of Abundance.  The pick for the evening was the 1992 hit thriller Basic Instinct, starring Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone, and directed by Paul Verhoeven.  For those of you not familiar with the flick, it's about a police detective (played by Douglas) and his investigation of a terrible murder (in fact, a string of bizarre killings), and his fiery relationship with a woman (played by Stone) who might be involved in the murders.

© 1992 Carolco/Le Studio Canal+ V.O.F.As the movie progresses, we learn more and more about Stone's character, and her relatively colorful sexual history, including sexual relationships with men and women, kinky tendencies, and a refusal to fall in line with the conventional wisdom of sexual exclusivity and male sexual power and privilege over female sexuality.  We also eventually learn that she's a deceitful, manipulative, and murderous nut-job.  A guy friend of mine, who was also watching the movie, at one point excitedly exclaimed something along the lines how empowered a woman Stone's character was, and noted how awesome that was.

Now, I'm all for honest portrayals of empowered women in movies, but my friend's comment left me somewhat perplexed.  Stone's character, while obviously sexually expressed and adventurous, was also deceitful, murderous, emotionally unstable, and used her sexuality to manipulate others into doing her bidding.  In fact, this movie seems to go out of its way to convey the notion that "sexually expressed woman" = "nut-job".

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