Julie Archambault is transforming lives with her thought-provoking book Sex Up Your Life. Her online and in-person workshops are helping people from all walks of life heal their sexual wounds and open up to a new kind of blissful intimacy and relationship. As this Valentine’s Day may be hard for those who have experienced terrible loneliness these past two years, and need a little encouragement and hope that blissful love and intimacy starts with healing themselves, we chatted with Julie to get some advice, and find out more about her work. —Vita Daily
What is your book, Sex Up Your Life: The Mind-Blowing Path to True Intimacy, Healing, and Hope, about, in a nutshell? What is innovative about this book?
It is a deep-dive into the unconscious and mostly unspoken realms of sex. It goes beyond simply giving advice on how to have a better sex life. It’s a deep dive into the unconscious and mostly unspoken realms about the meaning of sexuality within our lives. It offers a continuum of sexual experiences and personal stories that explore the range of expressions from the darker dynamics involved in sex such as lack of consent, colonial imprints, sexual manipulation, then crosses over into realms of empowerment through play, heart intimacy, authentic expression, and our spirit. At each point along this continuum, the reader is asked to explore within their experiences and beliefs around the topic, and readers are provided with questions to explore undoing harmful, unconscious, and limiting patterns. Most people are unaware of what their bodies carry in terms of blockages and how it limits their sexual well-being. This is why this continuum is so brilliant: it helps the reader to understand what they’ve been unconsciously dealing with, why it repeats itself—over and over again—and gives them the way to free themselves from the unnecessary baggage they are lugging around that thwarts their well-being. Ultimately, this book helps to evolve our heart consciousness and move into becoming our full authentic selves, spiritually, emotionally, physically, and sexually.
What do you think is poorly understood and largely unresolved about sex, both for individuals and as a collective today?
First, we don’t understand how our sexual energy is our life force and carries the imprint of all our good and bad experiences in life. We don’t understand how important it is to experience the power of our sexual life force as a healing modality and its connection to sexuality, both as a symptom and as a vector of healing. If we actually learn the language of our sexual energy, we would understand where we need healing and how to harness our sexual energy to heal ourselves. Basically, we would understand that our sexuality is interwoven with our consciousness and Sex Up Your Life helps you connect the dots in a beautiful and unwavering way. Once you finish the book, notice that your understanding of sex will have changed because “Sex Up Your Life” is a catalyst for consciousness. Your consciousness will have grown as each chapter builds on the previous one.
Why is it important to step back and look at how sex plays out as a whole?
We often paint sex in very caricature ways: it’s either something that everyone wants “badly” with no discernment, something you see on a tabloid magazine, such as “how to make him want you” or “how to give him the best blow job,” or something taboo that can’t be talked about, and so terrible that it puts many to shame, as we’ve seen with the #metoo movement. Sex is much more nuanced and subtle than these simplified caricatures. It’s beyond the stereotypes of the “hooker”, the “slut”, and the “sexless marriage”. To get a full picture of what people are really dealing with beyond the media illusions of it, and beyond the cloak of silence, we must be willing to take on the real conversations, and take an earnest look at some of the absolutely shattering experiences people have, then navigate all the way up the spectrum, by climbing the ladder to cosmic mind-blowing experiences. This may open your eyes to things that are laying dormant in you! And, this is where you need to begin your journey. To get the word on the street, you have to talk to people and ask the deep and hard questions. You also need to talk to people who have become so skilled in their awareness that they point out what is possible in this realm, what can be experienced, and how to get there. This is why it’s important to step back and see it as a whole: many of us are stuck on stereotypes and limiting beliefs about sex, and ourselves, that we miss the golden thread of consciousness and how it weaves into all our experiences of sexuality. By beholding this wide spectrum from completely disconnected sex, to highly attuned sex, we get access to a roadmap that will guide our lives to much higher levels of joy and wellness. This can only be fully understood when seeing the “big picture” and by accessing what we may not have known about ourselves. We are all a mystery ready to be unravelled. Just follow the golden thread.
Why is this book a roadmap that can orient us individually and as a collective—pitfalls and possibilities?
In the era of post “me-too”, we’re now well aware that sex is not as simple as it was once made out to be. This involves a lot of awareness and consciousness to fully embrace our own relationship to sexuality fully, but also be aware of the impact we are having on others. We’ve had many blinders collectively, and many more have been gas lighted of their very unpleasant experiences leaving many disconnected from their bodies and their pleasure. We also have a much greater potential in mastering sexual energy than what we are led to believe, or that the average person knows how to do. We just need to look at conventional “Sex-Ed” to see how limited the ideas are, especially of “pleasure” and how to experience it. Read here —“crickets”. Who would have thought that “pleasure” is a taboo topic, and yet it is! We haven’t even grazed the possibility that sex is in fact an art that involves so many factors to make it a powerful, opening, and connective experience. Through the many stories in “Sex Up Your Life,” we are given examples of where we need to grow, both individually and collectively, so that we can expand possibilities, and avoid the uncomfortable, at times damning pitfalls!
What do you mean by sex is a “catalyst” and an “amplifier” all in one?
Sex is a catalyst because it is like an electric current that awakens the body. Research shows how our bodies collect physical and emotional information and stores it in various energy centers in the body. When sex acts as a “catalyst,” the electric current moving through the body can ignite dormant emotions, e-motion (energy in motion), and physical experiences, good and bad. Sexual energy therefore can catalyze these dormant spots of stagnation, and give the person an opportunity to release what actually needs to be in movement. Emotions need to be “energy” in “motion” as it exists the body, rather than be trapped in the body itself. Sex is an “amplifier” as the sexual energy amplifies the energy currents in the body. This means the more intense the energy the more it amplifies the emotions and the stuck energy. To understand sexual energy, as “amplifier” is to understand that sexual energy will bring your attention to emotions you may, or may not, want to remember. By amplifying them, it is giving you the possibility of healing it, but you have to be willing to deal with it, or you can be amplifying some form a catastrophe!
How can sex be a destructive force on one hand and a healing force on the other?
Sex that traumatizes people and sex that heals or empowers people remains “sex”! We have the responsibility to learn how to navigate this energy consciously, as to bring well-being to people. Sex can also leave trails of pain, and pain begets more pain. This is why understanding the shadow of sex is important: what is driving the pain, and why is it showing up in sex? “Sex Up Your Life” explores the shadow of sex with the purpose of liberating people from their unconscious patterns. If we are being driven by our unconscious, we are not the captains of our ship and who knows on what rocky shore we will land!
When you look at sex as whole, like you did in your book, what new perspectives emerge?
The biggest thing that emerges is that sex is a path of embodying consciousness. This embodiment involves learning about free will in all its subtleties, learning to love your body and be present to it, allowing yourself to experience pleasure, while also learning to open your heart, and un-shield it. It also requires the skills of expressing boundaries and voicing requests through authentic expression, pleasure, and self-reflection. This list makes it sound easy: but each one on its own is a path of mastery and requires much attention and honesty.
Why were you fascinated by this topic and why did you write a book about it?
I personally felt stuck in my life and I had a feeling my body was carrying a lot of unprocessed emotions that were affecting my sexual energy. I discovered that all our experiences, not just sexual trauma affect how open and fluid we feel about sex. I also felt as an educator that our Sex-Ed was very limited. I wanted to expand the picture of sexuality, into a multi-dimensional one. If we want to expand our Sex-Ed, we must first expand our understanding of the holistic human being as a society. We need to grasp the depth of this powerful force by not reducing it to such a simple two-dimensional experience. It is the core of life wanting to express itself and most of all respect itself. This life force wants us to embrace our inner-sovereignty and is here to lead us to it, regardless of all our resistance!
Who did you interview in your book and why? Are there any public figures?
The way that I approached interviewing was in the spirit of getting to the bottom of the real experiences. That means the people I was interviewing were asked to dive deep and do a lot of soul searching, which isn’t always comfortable. Telling the truth at times is very edgy. For those that were not ready to have their names disclosed, I gave them a pseudonym and kept the power and thrust of their story. There are public figures that are open with their story and educators and experts in the space of sexuality. These people are Devi Ward, Destin Gerek, Seani Love, Nathan Marcuzzi, Maria Palumbo, Hasina Juma. Other public figures preferred to be given.
What kind of colonial imprint can we find on sex? How does that play out?
The colonial imprint involves any historical and economic system that embeds some form of power dynamic, whereas some people are deemed more valuable and more important than others. This is where dynamics of entitlement and internalized poor self-worth play out in sex. To start seeing how the colonial footprint plays out in your life is very liberating and empowering. You learn to identify where you give your power away, where systems of power take it, or erode it, and how to take it back. The goal is to become a fully sovereign human being fully in your power. Devi Ward and Hasina Juma’s story illustrate this process very well.
What does sovereignty have to do with sex? What do we discover about being human, from a mind, body, and spirit perspective?
Sovereignty is a state of empowered consciousness. It means you start seeing where you lose your energy, where you gain it, how to replenish it, and how to establish boundaries and actions that are in alignment with your greater good and well-being. It’s a deep awareness of what’s truly in energetic alignment with your becoming. It’s essentially a fine-tuned awareness of self within a multi-dimensional context. Since sex is pure energy, we must learn to understand this heightened energy exchange and make sure we are attentive to how it wants to express itself, and what it needs to fully respect ourselves in our becoming. If we don’t, as an amplifier, it can leave some wreckage behind!
When you talk about healing our sexual wounds and opening up to a new kind of blissful intimacy and relationship, what do you mean?
Most humans walk around with various wounds: some could have actual physical traumas, but most if not all of us, have emotional wounds. These wounds can block us from speaking authentically, example people pleasing, and stop us from opening our hearts to another, or letting someone love us. These wounds can affect our capacity to play and enjoy ourselves, driven by a fear of being seen. Most people have some form of criticism for their body, which makes it difficult to let someone truly cherish them. Many people have experienced their sexual boundaries not being respected. So, there are many hurdles to having a fully expansive sexual encounter if you harbor any of these dynamics. In “Sex Up Your Life” I make the case that when we take care of these various challenges, we incrementally make ourselves more available for true physical, emotional, and spiritual intimacy that is nourishing and empowering. When we engage with sexuality from a truly empowered place, on all these planes, sex dips into the blissful.
Plenty of us have experienced loneliness in the past two pandemic years and, for that reason, Valentine’s Day may be tough this year. Any advice?
Yes! It’s like if we have all been children sent to our rooms to reflect alone. We were grounded! So, yes, this would involve feeling isolated and thwarted in our joy. This is a moment to really understand the importance of cultivating intimacy in our lives, whether it is with an intimate partner or friends. It’s also a time to really come to peace with ‘self’. That being said: it’s time to take action. It’s time to put the fun hat on and reach out to others to create intimacy. The best way to create intimacy is by being transparent and sharing who you are. If you’re feeling insecure, this is a great moment to notice where that insecurity comes from, and if you still need to “clean up your room” so to speak: Do it! This will only allow in more quality into the bedroom. The more you’re confident, the more you can wield fulfilling experiences in the bedroom.
share:
Be the first to comment