Crossing Thresholds: Revealing the Intimate in Public Writing
My journey from tech leadership to open discussions of sexual intimacy, shedding light on the unspoken, and transforming my work.
This week, I crossed a big threshold.
For much of my career, I’ve kept it safe. I kept my work life separate from my personal life — and I translated much of my what I learned in my personal world into things that I deemed “work-appropriate” or “work-safe.”
The choice kept me protected, but a part of me always felt like I was holding back so many of my deepest learnings.
That wall of separation between work and life dissolved this week.
A few days ago, I published my first piece of writing ever about sex and shared about an intentional 30-day sex container that my wife and I had designed for ourselves. It’s the first time either of us has written publicly about sex or our sex lives.
Even six months ago, my body would’ve frozen at the idea of writing so publicly about something so intimate. That’s crazy, I’d think to myself. I can’t do that.
This week, as I hit “publish,“ I felt nervous excitement and a strong clarity that sexual intimacy was something I needed to write about.
This snippet from the piece explains why:
Sexual intimacy isn’t talked about enough, let alone written about. It’s worked out in the darkness of the bedroom, frequently without support. It’s often shrouded by shadow and hidden by shame.
And shame, particularly sexual shame, is a powerful silencer.
In my first marriage, it took me over 16 years before I felt safe enough to open up about my sexless relationship to my best friend and ask for help — and by then I was already moving toward separation.
I know I’m not alone. According to Newsweek, psychologists estimate that up to 20% of American couples live in sexless marriages. The numbers go as high as 47% in countries like Japan.
And yet, despite how hidden the experience is for most couples, we believe sexual intimacy is critical to the health of a thriving partnership. It needs to be talked about.
Our deepest wounding is often the source of our greatest gifts.
Sexual shame, particularly in my first marriage, is one of my deep wounds. I’ve been opening up the past few years about my journey of sexual healing with both friends and acquaintances — and I’ve seen how much it’s permissioned them to share about their own pain and struggles and how it’s shown them that more is possible.
And that gives me hope. As frightening and unconventional as it might be to open up about my sexual journey online, I know it’s an important and valuable conversation with the potential to help so many people out there.
And so, we’ve made the bold decision to start talking about our sexual journey and to shed some of the societal shame around sex. Read the full piece on our Awakened Partnership blog.
The Thresholds We Cross Transform Us
If you’ve been following my work since the early days of The Effective Engineer or my work on tech leadership, you’ll know that this is a big shift for me.
Becoming someone who is willing and determined to add to the public dialogue around partnership and sexual intimacy represents a major crossing of a threshold.
In his book The Journey of Soul Initiation, author and wilderness guide Bill Plotkins explains the idea of “Experimental Threshold Crossings,” or ETCs.
“When you enact ETCs… you place yourself in circumstances you wouldn’t have been in otherwise, and whatever happens and whatever beings you meet there will provide your next opportunity to converse with the world from and with your [new] identity.“
These threshold crossings push you to your edge. They challenge you. They require more from you and call forth parts that may have been dormant. They grow you.
Plotkins further adds:
“[T]his changes you, and then the way people and the world respond to you further changes you, confirms your mythopoetic identity, and enables you to more easily and fully embody that identity.“
As we cross more of these thresholds, our identity shifts. And we become more of the person we need to be to fully embody our life’s purpose.
I’m in the journey of transforming my identity: from someone who used to be author of The Effective Engineer and the founder of a tech leadership company — to someone who’s now joining forces with my wife to teach about one of the most important relationships in our lives: our intimate and romantic partnerships.
The two identities seem radically different on the surface.
And yet, the common thread running through it all is a quest on how to be more of yourself and to let your life become a deeper expression of what you truly want.
That theme was initially expressed as being effective at translating your desires and goals in engineering into actions that actually got things done.
Now it’s being expressed as how to be authentically yourself in your most intimate relationship — and that includes the desires that you might have in the bedroom and that people rarely talk about.
And because of my engineering and systems-oriented background, I’m excited to systematically break down models and frameworks that create more freedom and intimacy in our partnerships.
Running Our First Workshop on Desire
A few months ago, I announced that my wife and I were teaming up to build Awakened Partnership. We want romantic partnerships to become powerful containers for transformation and to awaken more love, safety, and freedom as a result.
Part of what we’re aiming to do is not only teach through writing but also to create deeply immersive experiences — workshops, programs, and retreats — to share what we’ve learned with the world.
And the other major threshold we crossed this week is that we held our first Awaken Your Desire workshop at our home in Boulder. Getting in touch with our desires across all areas of life and across our important relationships is the key to creating a truly fulfilling life.
We created a beautiful embodied journey — rooted in solid emotional and somatic models and informed by the decade plus of leadership training and psycho- and neuro-somatic training we’ve had.
I’m feeling proud that here’s what participants have had to say already:
“An embodied exploration of desire, skillfully guided, that creates the conditions for powerful and unexpected insights. A permission slip to feel the sensations of desire without expectation.“
“At once informative, explorative, and engaging.“
“Like looking along another axis that I wasn’t able to see before.“
“A somatic dive into the subtle art of desire.”
We’re excited to expand our body of work both in-person and online.
If you want to be notified of future events, join our Awakened Partnership community here.
P.S. I have a couple spots opening up for new coaching clients. If you’re interested, apply here.
Smiling and inspired.
Well done, Edmond. You are free. Truly free. And you’ve earned it :)