I was in the third grade, and I wanted that swimsuit more than anything. My mom had taken me to the Kmart to pick one out for a friend’s pool birthday party, and there it was on the rack: a pink bikini with polka dots and rainbows and sparkles, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I held it up against myself. And my mom said, “Oh no. You cannot wear that. What will people think of you?” I went home with a plain one-piece instead. No pink. Hardly any sparkle.
At the party I looked around, and one of my friends was wearing it. The exact suit. The pink, the sparkles, all of it. She looked so happy, so cute. Then I looked down at myself and could not find myself cute at all, and I did not understand why. We were two little girls at the same pool. She got to shine, and I had already learned that my shining was a problem.
That is how early it begins. Before you have words for it, before you have done a single thing, you learn there is something about your body that must be managed, hidden, kept small. And here is what no one tells you: that lesson does not stay in your mind. It goes down into your body. For me, like for so many of the women I now sit with, it went straight into my hips.
It was never really about modesty
By high school the word for it had become modesty, though modesty was never really the point. I could not wear tank tops. I could not wear skirts. So I went the other way entirely and buried myself in oversized vintage men’s clothes, because if I could not wear what my friends wore, I would disappear on purpose. It felt safer than being seen and found guilty for being seen.
In the religion I grew up in, there was a pamphlet, the Strength of the Youth, that spelled out how a young person from twelve to eighteen should dress and behave and even think. Every family enforced it differently, and mine landed on the strict end. But the message underneath it was the same everywhere, and it was aimed at the girls: what you wear may give boys and men bad thoughts. Sit with that. A child, made responsible for the thoughts of grown men. If a boy said something about your body, it was somehow your doing. Your outfit. Your fault. You brought it on yourself.
And it went deeper than clothes. There was a Sunday school lesson, taught with an actual illustration, that the moment someone touched you in the wrong way, a balloon would pop. That was you. Popped. No longer whole, no longer perfect. Not a metaphor whispered once, but a real lesson, taught to real children, that your wholeness was a thing a single touch could destroy, a touch you may not have even chosen.
This is what purity culture does. It takes the most primal, sacred ground in you, your body, your desire, your worth, and it teaches you to stand guard over it as though it were already half ruined.
Where the shame lives in the body
When I feel this shame in myself, it does not arrive as a thought. It arrives as guardedness. As the old lessons coming alive and telling me to put the chastity belt back on, to keep watch over my own hips, to protect whatever happened there.
Because the body keeps the record. The womb space holds all of it, pleasure braided with fear, curiosity braided with punishment. And so much of what lives down there was never fully chosen. So many women know the particular ache of intimacy, even inside a marriage, that did not feel entirely consensual, and the body remembers every bit of it.
When I begin to work in someone’s hips, I feel tightness. A wall. An innocence still standing guard, because the body has known violation and does not intend to be caught unready again. When old trauma is stored there and intimacy comes close, the body tends to do one of two things. It goes numb, goes a little limp, says “fine, whatever you want,” because softening feels far too dangerous. Or it leaves altogether. Dissociation, floating up and out, going somewhere else while something happens to the body it left behind. For those who survived real abuse, this became a kind of terrible genius, a skill learned so well the body could vacate itself on command. It kept them alive. And it is still running, long after the danger has passed, as a wall that will not come down.
None of this is brokenness. It is a body that was taught its own ground was unsafe, doing exactly what it was trained to do.
The same act, two verdicts
The cruelest part was watching how differently the shame got handed out.
In college I went to confess to my bishop that I believed I had sinned over something small, both of us fully clothed. He asked the kinds of questions no one should have to answer. What was touched, what was not, what came off and what stayed on. My repentance was long. Months without taking the sacrament, months kept from the temple. And because the sacrament tray passes down every row every single Sunday, everyone could see. My mother could see. My neighbors could see. To not eat the bread and drink the water was to announce your unworthiness to the whole room.
My boyfriend at the time went to his own bishop about the very same night. He was told he was a good person, doing a good job, just be mindful with your girlfriend. That was all. The same act. Two verdicts. He walked out whole. I walked out marked.
That is not an accident. It is the design. Make a girl feel unclean and she will keep coming back to be made clean again. And it lands hardest on the ones with the least power. In the years I grew up in, not some distant past but the nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, the girls who got pregnant were sent away, hidden, made to carry a shame the boys were simply never asked to carry. The body remembers who was blamed.
The wild rose by the river
Near where I live, along the Provo River, bushes of wild roses grow. Hundreds of roses at once, and she is exactly as wild as she pleases. She grows where she chooses. She opens to the sun and the senses and the whole wide day, and asks no one’s permission to do it. And she is not defenseless in her openness. She carries thorns, so that no one can reach for her beauty without being taught to be gentle, to slow down, to handle her with care. There is a right way to come to a wild rose.
And when her blooming is done, she does not become nothing. She leaves behind rose hips, that small bundle of seeds, one of the richest sources of nourishment on the whole riverbank. She turns even the end of her flowering into medicine.
Everything purity culture told me was a lie the wild rose already knew the truth of. That a body can be open and sovereign at the very same time. That desire is not danger. That your thorns, your no, your this-is-how-you-may-approach-me, are not coldness, they are sacred protection. And that the very center of you, your hips, your womb, the ground they taught you to be ashamed of, was never ruined at all. It is where the seeds are. It is where the medicine has been the whole time.
Coming home to your hips
For me the thaw came late, and it came all at once, after I had left my marriage and left the church. I was now dating as a single mom in my late thirties, finally having the conversations most people have in their twenties. About consent. About my own body. About what I actually wanted, in a language no one had ever let me speak.
The freedom was in setting down the words I had been handed. Scarlet. Whore. Slut. Easy. I got to see, maybe for the first time, that whether I said yes to someone or no was not about doctrine or sin at all. It was simply mine to choose. My yes became mine. And my no became a sacred no, not the frightened flinch when someone rests a hand on your back, but a full and rooted no that rises from a body that finally belongs to itself. That is the great reclamation waiting on the other side of a high-control religion. Sovereignty. Your body, your choice, who you love, how you are touched, how you let your creation power move.
And it lives, of all places, in the hips. So that is where I bring people home.
You can begin lying down. Let your knees fall gently to one side, then the other, a slow rocking, side to side, the way you would soothe a child. There is nothing to accomplish. As you rock, you might rest a hand low on your belly or your back and simply say thank you. Thank you for carrying me. Thank you for letting me show up today.
Or you can begin standing, in what I call Shakti dance. You put on a steady beat, because a steady beat is what lets the body remember the very first sound any of us ever knew, the heartbeat heard from inside the womb, the first place we were ever safe. You let that beat rise up through your feet from Pachamama, from the earth herself, up into your hips, and you let the hips move however they want to move. Some days they only want to sway. Some days they want to spiral. Some days they want to go deep and primal. You ask your body what it needs, and for once, you let it answer. That is the whole practice. Your body, moving as it chooses, welcomed all the way home.
You are the wild rose
If you grew up believing your body was a problem to be kept under guard, nothing about you was ever ruined. The shame was placed in you by hands that were not your own, and what was placed there can be set down.
They taught you that a single touch could ruin you. But you are the wild rose by the water, who opens only when she is ready, wears her thorns without apology, and turns even the end of her blooming into rose hips, the richest medicine on the whole riverbank.
A gentle first step
If you recognized yourself in any of this, the guarded hips, the wall that will not come down, the shame handed to you before you were old enough to refuse it, there is a gentle way back, and you do not have to walk it alone.
You can book a free discovery call, twenty unhurried minutes, no pressure and nothing to sell. Just space to be heard, and to begin, as slowly as you need, giving your body back its yes and its no.
A gentle note: I am a somatic and energy practitioner, not a licensed therapist. This work walks alongside healing and is not a replacement for therapy or medical care. If the shame you carry is bound up with sexual trauma or abuse, please be tender with yourself as you read, and reach out to a licensed trauma professional for support. Many of the people I sit with do both, and that is a good and beautiful thing.
