I am going to be pesty to one of my pals because they do not like the term energy because it is excessively woo. I have no idea if this essay will get published because the last few days I have been dropping posts into drafts without posting.

Let me start by saying that I am not an initiate witch. I am not real into being told what to do and while I love working with teachers who share what they know/experience I don’t deal with being told what I have to do/experience. So I figure shit out as best as I can on my own. I learn from a lot of different sources. I am probably one of those shitty Americans who are appropriating from everything under the sun. Guilty as charged. I think every faith contains elements of truth and I want to follow truth wherever I can find it.

I was noticing this today while I was running. Your moue of distaste at the contemplation of woo was on my mind while I was noting a paradox in how I’m experiencing running this year. For a bunch of good reasons I want to mostly focus on a 5k. I don’t really have it in me to be going a lot further than 3 miles because it takes too long and my childcare is being pushed to the limit. The thing is, I don’t really turn on and fully engage for the first two miles. I can feel it. There is a difference in my pelvis.

For the first two miles I can feel my pelvis being cranky and critical of my efforts. It sends many strongly worded letters of complaint about what a horrible bitch I am. It’s not a lot of fun. I call it “running” but I start going up a really fucking big hill for the first 3/4 of a mile. Right now I am super fucking happy with myself if I can beat 16 minutes for the first mile. Like, 15:55 means I give myself literal pats on the back. Maybe I am less of a “runner” and more of an enthusiastically lurching jogger. The second mile I can usually knock down to 13 minutes, even though it’s still a bitchy amount of uphill. By the third mile, which alternates a lot of down and bits of uphill I feel different.

I can feel heat and openness in my pelvis between the cradle of the bones. It’s when I feel like I could climb up a telephone pole then sit on the top and take the whole damn thing. It’s an amazing feeling. It’s where I feel the forever place get started and I can drop to 12 minute miles and keep going for another 10 miles without feeling much of a problem.

I don’t have the kind of time it takes to be running half marathons on a regular basis this year. It’s just not on the table. So even though I know that this magical sensation of wanting to take the entire world in through my vagina is living there, curled up and waiting to be accessed I don’t have much time to explore it this year. Not really. I get like 12 minutes of this glory then I stop and have to go on with my day. It honestly kind of sucks.

This specific feeling inside me is different from most of the other kinds of feelings I have. There is no anxiety in it. There is only intense ravening need to be filled. Is this just a “I want something in my vagina”? No, not even a little bit. I don’t actually need to put something inside my vagina after this to find satisfaction. The wanting is deeply satisfying. It makes me want to create, deeply connect with people, and it makes me want to run forever. It’s energy. It’s a connection to the energy that shivers under the top layers of the planet. You want science words for these things but I’m just some California woo whack job. I cannot give you that explanation. Bark up a different tree.

I can only tell you that there is a feeling of being connected to the earth, to the soil, to the magma at the core of the planet. It burns in a chain up through the ground into my legs and up into I’M GOING TO JUST SAY IT, OK the root chakra. Go ahead and be mad at me. I don’t have better language for this. Do I feel a bit like a person who should shut the fuck up? Yes and no. You have asked me how to understand this and I feel a lot of responsibility for answering questions long past when the asker is satisfied. This is one of my fatal flaws.

Running is one of the best ways I know to raise this energy outside of sex, for me. I can get there with meditation stuff and breath work with enough work. The best/fastest/quickest way to get there is ritualistic sex.

I feel like a giant dipshit. I went and saw a neighbour recently. She is a Reiki practitioner and she’s mentioned before that she’d be happy to do work for me since she knows what has happened. I demurred for a long time but eventually it seems like a good shout seeing as we share a fence and all.

I’m really amused by two specific comments, one was just telling me that my solar plexus is incredibly hot (linked to chronic pain and historical trauma, naturally), and that she was shocked by how open my entire channel was. She doesn’t usually see something like that.

I really do feel like I am mostly living at the self actualisation level of Maslow’s Hierarchy so that makes sense to me? I do speak my truth. I do take action to be the person I want to be in the world. I have a level of safety that feels utterly impossible to me.

This feels connected to me.

That energy I feel in my pelvis, it’s hotness, it’s both a new kind of tension and a release from the old/standard unpleasant painful knotting. It’s the difference between activating your core muscles and sucking your stomach in but it’s happening lower down in my pelvic girdle. I can feel it in the viscera. My body feels like it is all of a sudden slightly less weighed down by gravity. It just turned down by .5% or 1%. Not a lot, just enough to make everything feel able to twist and wiggle and undulate in ways I usually couldn’t quite manage.

It feels like freedom and strength and savage need to stay alive. It’s different than the kinds of energy feelings that I get in my chest. Amusingly, a lot of my drive towards being a whore comes from the heart chakra. I don’t feel drawn to hurrying out to find new people to connect with when I’m running. It’s not the same kind of energy. They feel differently.

I don’t want to whore because I want to acquire numbers. I am out of that game. For me (I don’t apply this to anyone else!) if I were to feel like I really wanted to go out and start hitting swingers parties a lot because I wanted a lot of variety that would feel like being slutty. I’m enjoying rereading The Ethical Slut because they are very clear that it’s ok for someone to be slutty while only masturbating. They are not saying that slutting is chasing numbers. This is about me and my body and how I feel when I use words.

I love being slutty, don’t get me wrong. That season of my life was pretty fucking epic and I’m glad I have all the stories in the hopper. I haven’t felt slutty in a long time. I should feel like last year when I was hunting on Fab was being slutty but I don’t. In retrospect I can say that in a way I was less looking for pleasure in all the slutting than I was speed running looking for someone to give me enough sex to not lose my shit in my life. I wasn’t looking to explore and enjoy variety for the sake of variety. I was a woman on a mission. I have a quota of fucking to fill or I am hard to live with.

Just getting up to functionality doesn’t feel like being slutty. Even though it meant auditioning more folks than many have sex with in ten years.

This energy that I get in my pelvis, this intensity, this feeling of heat and force towards life allows me to get a lot more done. It improves my ability to perform work for my life. It makes me feel alive and ready to show off how awesome my big mammal meat sack is as it does ALL THE THINGS. Can I enjoy it through fucking? Enh? It’s always worked better in theory than in practice. When this energy comes from ritualistic sex it still isn’t about fucking, it is more related to intense bdsm energy–I can be sadistic or masochistic either is fine. It’s about creating an energy loop with another person and the genitals are slightly a distraction.

The urge to connect emotionally, the need to whore comes from my heart. It comes from the centre of my being. I feel it as heat and also I see savagely bright white light radiating out from the core of me. I know this sounds fucking insane. I’m sorry. You want to know what it feels like. This feeling makes me want to meet every person I come across during my entire life with my entire full self spread open. They can take the parts that are appropriate and move along. I will never run out of self. The more they take the more I grow. Sometimes this is about sex but it doesn’t have to be. I really do walk up to strangers in public and start conversations. It’s how I make a lot of my friends.

“Hello. My name is Krissy. I am sorry to be so forward but I’m still working really hard on meeting people. Even from across the room something about you strikes me as interesting. I had to come say something to you or I wouldn’t forgive myself.“

That’s actually how I met Bike Lady, and the Coyote, and Vicki and… a lot of people. All through my whole life. I’m a forward motherfucker. At some point in my life my social feed got turned to permanently at full blast. I want far more connection than I can actually sustain. The way I do this is to make very careful tiny deposits in lots of buckets with deep apologies for being unable to promise when or if I will return. We will see how the wind takes us. I will turn to you with joy whenever I see you again.

I can’t promise much more.

This energy fuels me through a social life that looks more like a full time job. We are still getting back up to speed after Noah’s death but it is looking a lot like by the time we hit the 18 month mark we will be back to full schedules. It’s feeling kind of intense lately. We’ve added a lot.

The more contact I have with people, the more this energy in my chest grows. It’s really not all about sex. I get a lot out of teaching children. I get a lot out of being a good neighbour and I sure as shit am not hunting on my block for sex. That would be unthinkable. Boundaries, bitches.

Different kinds of energy in my body grow from different sources. These are the two, for me, that feel both life giving and related to sexuality even when no sex actually happens. I don’t have another way to describe the way these manifestations feel beyond energy. It feels like the raw energy of life. It feels like the heat that comes from a compost pile while it breaks down. It feels like raw potential energy that drives me through life. It feels like energy the same way lava streaming down a mountain feels like energy. Energy is about potential.

When I run I feel full of potential. I feel strong and capable and full of drive to succeed. When I allow my heart to be at the forefront of what I do every day I feel embiggened. I feel increased in space and time and potential. I feel like I am manifesting everything in myself.

I need to feel allowed to love. I need it or this energy hurts me. Trying to contain the force of an exploding volcano is incredibly painful. It is energy. It is energy that has to go somewhere or it breaks the container.

I don’t know what to call it if not energy.