The Witching Hour- Celibacy, Intimacy, Pleasure & Personal Growth
Celibacy didn’t begin as a spiritual vow or a moral stance. It gradually developed after leaving my partner, and choosing not to reach desperately for another body as a bandage for a broken heart.
I didn’t want to distract what needed to be healed by borrowing validation or attention from another.
Although it is a common practice after a break up, it just felt wrong to outsource someone’s body and potentially their heart to validate my ego.
To me, that feels like a form theft.
Yet, celibacy has not meant the absence of desire and funnily enough, I am writing this whilst ovulating, the fertile and most creative phase of my cycle that is often associated with heightened desire and connection.
Despite what my hormones might suggest, my relationship to sex and pleasure still remains discerning.
From conversations with women recently, I can’t help but notice a shared disillusionment around intimacy.
Not a lack of libido, but a growing fatigue with how connection is rushed and performed.
What many women seem to be experiencing feels less like burnout and more like an epidemic where performance has replaced presence and sex is often initiated before connection has had time to form.
I find myself wondering whether women are gaslighting themselves out of receiving true erotic pleasure, pleasure that is wild, primal and activates a sense of spiritual empowerment.
Or are my standards… Too high?
So here I am… The Witching Hour.
Brewing on celibacy.
Especially after feeling for the first time in years, or maybe even ever, both an emotional AND physical attraction to someone.
What struck me was not necessarily the person, but the presence of what happened in my body. The attraction didn’t live only in my thoughts. I felt it somatically. A genuine sexual charge and a desire for physical closeness.
It was unfamiliar, and it carried a trace of anxiety, the kind that often accompanies novelty and arousal.
I could sense how easily attraction might tip into a chase for validation, driven by adrenaline and the pull of a dopamine loop.
But that didn’t matter. What mattered was recognising the sensation without converting it into actions, performance or behaviour.
My validation did not come from two bodies meeting.
It came from realising my body was responding to safety and understanding that the action of attraction was not something to be claimed.
It functioned as information about myself. A signal that my nervous system has healed and has settled enough to register desire and deeply crave intimacy.
It felt like a high five from within.
Simply there to say, good job.
I felt it in the depths of my body, not just my mind.
I recognised something and someone healthy.
And I stayed within myself without crossing someone else’s boundaries or my own.
Forming connections like that has often felt overwhelming.
Intimacy with another was and in many ways still is, no easier.
Being “demi sexual” is probably somewhat linked to my trauma, but it means I might meet someone and not feel sexual attraction at all initially, even if they are physically attractive.
After spending time forming emotional trust and closeness, I might then feel sexual attraction toward that person.
Traditional dating in Western Culture actually gives me a form of panic and has rarely felt like two people meeting.
More often, it has felt like being absorbed and then expected to perform into someone else’s unmet needs.
I write that sentence and wonder, am I being pessimistic?
But in a culture that glamorises casual sex and rushes towards instant validation and gratification of being chosen, intimacy is often lost and what we miss, is the lead up, the subtle, regulating moments that actually make connection feel alive and ignite the spark of desire.
An energetic tango of two souls sensing whether they wish to step into entanglement.
The eye contact that lingers.
A shared sense of humour or values.
The pauses that invite curiosity and allow two nervous systems to sense safety before bodies ever meet.
When this layer is bypassed, sex may still occur, but something essential is absent.
When intimacy becomes performative, it often ceases to be connective.
Our presence is often out of balance with performance and the body learns to comply rather than participate.
What looks like freedom often conceals a subtle form of dissociation.
Many people learn to override their own signals in order to be wanted or chosen.
Over time, this self abandonment is mistaken for empowerment, when in reality it erodes trust in the self.
Casual sex with someone I barely know has never felt natural for me, and that caution likely comes from my own experiences and history around safety.
This is also not a judgement or statement to those who find pleasure or freedom in that space. We are all beautifully wired in different ways and I respect that.
Although, with casual sex and people’s horrible lack of communication, it feels easier to slip into someone else’s hunger to be chosen, and just as easy to be discarded once that hunger is satisfied.
That kind of transaction may be common, but it isn’t casual to the brain or body.
It has the potential to linger on the border of being de-humanising and goes against our physical biology and spiritual essence.
There is also a personal contradiction I live with.
I often come across as flirty when I am simply being kind.
Kindness is then mistaken for availability or interest.
Yet when I genuinely like someone, I tend to do the opposite.
It’s almost like I freeze.
I’m working on that one!
Even writing this feels like an invitation to meet myself with a little more confidence.
I’ve made many jokes that, with my neurodivergency, I need a support worker for intimacy.
Although I’m much better than I once was, I can still become awkward or more reserved. Perhaps that’s just shyness.
What I’m learning is to not guilt trip myself for it or spiral into the question of “why the hell can’t I just be normal.”
Eye contact can become difficult and I hesitate to put myself forward, unsure whether the connection I feel is mutual or imagined.
Having been sexualised from a young age, I am acutely aware of how kindness or first hand physical attraction can be misread, and I make a conscious effort not to sexualise others.
It can be annoying, even for myself in this day and age and maybe I am just lazy, scared, simple or value platonic relationships.
In saying that, I am often more than content with just a friendship.
Although I value the art of discipline and surrender, it further complicates attraction because restraint and respect can be misinterpreted as disinterest.
There has been something unexpectedly cathartic in letting go.
I made peace with the possibility that I may be alone for the rest of my life. Instead of shame or sadness, what arose was peace and acceptance.
Loneliness frightens many people, yet when reframed as inner peace rather than lack, it becomes more welcoming.
I am not alone from my capacity to love or be loved.
I do believe I have a big heart and being a women, it is not rocket science to attract a man, but as someone who deeply cares about humanity and the wellbeing of others, it began to feel like a disservice, to myself and to those in need.
I cannot afford a leakage of energy toward intimate connections that could not meet me with genuine care and pleasure and I have realised that my energy and heart is better off directed elsewhere.
I do ponder in the depths of the night, is this shutting down?
Am I punishing or numbing myself to connection or releasing the belief that worth is contingent on being chosen?
However, I think there is a difference between emotional collapse and emotional surrender.
Perhaps they can co-exist.
The capacity and craving for intimacy still exists, more than ever and currently nothing excites me more than possibility to feel desire and to love and feel pleasure.
Since my sacral activations in Hathor Temple, Egypt, I have had a profound and deep need for it, but it is simply no longer demanded from the world as proof of value and with Western morals I find it hard to navigate this deep longing.
A random segue and fact (that I will explore in another post) is that over the past twelve months, I genuinely believed I would die, I felt and accepted that my time was up and every day I wondered is this my last?
I called my trip home the good bye tour and wanted to see all my loved ones overseas and I visited the last place on my bucket list in Peru.
I made sure to tell people I loved them, cherished them or missed them.
I made amends with people who hurt me and I lived each day genuinely believing it could be my last.
It was and still is, truly humbling, but in that head space, relinquishing fantasies of future love or connection felt eerily similar to accepting death, not with despair, but instead with clarity.
A willingness to be seen by myself, fully. To be okay with who I am at my core, if everything were to end today.
From that place, solitude stopped feeling like absence.
It became integrity and brought forth compassion and desire for myself, my business and my service to others.
I guess, in the end, I am simply guarded and protecting myself after a tumultuous relationship that broke me down and left me fractured.
I am using celibacy as a tool to sweep up the broken parts, to rebuild and to safeguard this new version of myself.
In saying that, please be gentle with one’s heart or their bodies. It is literally our greatest gift and tool we can give one another.