I am my own religion.

That didn’t come from faith; it came from exhaustion — from learning that no god was coming to protect me. I grew up in a country that confuses discipline with dignity, silence with virtue. I learned too soon what violence can do to a child’s sense of belonging. I learned that pain has witnesses who stay quiet, and that quiet can hurt more than the wound itself.

For years I lived as if the safest thing was to disappear — to keep the body polite, contained, grateful. I studied, I worked, I smiled in all the right places. But underneath, something kept breathing. Even in the middle of fear, there was a pulse that refused to die.

That pulse was my body asking to be returned to itself.

When I began to reclaim pleasure, it wasn’t easy. Desire felt dangerous, almost illegal. But when I stopped performing and started listening, I realized that the body doesn’t lie. It remembers the truth even when the mind can’t. Sometimes my arousal lasts for days — not frantic, just alive. It hums quietly under everything I do. I don’t always reach orgasm; I don’t need to. Sometimes I leave it there, suspended, like a flame that keeps the room warm. To me that’s freedom: to choose when to open, when to wait, when to let desire simply exist.

I’ve had moments of intensity that felt almost supernatural — five orgasms in a day, once, until my nose bled and I laughed instead of stopping. My body was saying, I’m still here. That day I realized orgasm isn’t about pleasure alone; it’s about the return of life.

Bodysex helped me understand that. In that room, surrounded by women breathing, laughing, trembling, something sacred happened — not religious, but human. We were each mirrors for one another. We didn’t need to be perfect, or silent, or fixed. We just had to be present.

Pleasure, for me, is no longer a secret or a symptom. It’s a form of intelligence. My body speaks in sensations the way poets speak in metaphors. Sometimes through laughter, sometimes through tears. Sometimes through stillness so full it hums.

After an orgasm, I don’t feel emptied; I feel rewritten. Softer, clearer, like the world just changed colors. It’s not redemption — it’s accuracy. My body correcting its own story.

It took me years to unlearn obedience — to stop making love like an apology, to stop asking permission to feel. Now I understand: I don’t need to be healed to deserve pleasure. Pleasure is the healing.

I was violated as a girl, insulted as a woman for demanding truth, and dismissed as difficult for insisting on my voice. And yet, my body remains alive. It carries both memory and miracle. I don’t forgive easily, but I keep breathing. I keep inventing ways to live.

Sometimes I climax. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I just stay in the warmth that doesn’t need an ending. I no longer chase the peak; I inhabit the path. Excitation itself is enough — a kind of prayer that reminds me I exist.

Because I am not what was done to me.
I am what survived, what transformed, what still feels.
And that, for me, is divine.

Raffaella is a certified Bodysex Coach

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