My sense of sex-positivity comes from my meditation practice and no, I don’t meditate and masturbate at the same time. I do practice mindful masturbation but that’s not what I’m talking about here…

The meditation practice I happen to use includes teachings about basic goodness, a quality of life being fundamentally good in the moment. Life is a lot of things and much of them aren’t remotely pleasant, but I do connect viscerally with the notion of basic goodness. Whatever else is going on, I have an abiding awareness that life is good.

It was a short leap for me—a baby-step, really—to connect that to my innate sexual impulse and somehow, that simply locked into place in my consciousness like a key finding its home in the right lock. My sexual impulse is fundamentally good. My sexual experience is fundamentally good. My sexual health is fundamentally good.

When I was 14, I’d been masturbating for five years already and I knew from the start that this was something I needed to hide. This had to be private and I had to cancel it from absolutely everyone. It was for me and me alone and somehow, I knew it was wrong for anyone else to see it or hear it or know about it.

And at 14, after a very brief experiment in fundamentalist Xtianity, I had an awakening about my masturbation experience that set my mind on a sex-positive path that would later mature into that sense of basic goodness.

“Elders” in my troupe of Jesus freaks told me that masturbation was wrong and I had to stop. I didn’t think it in precisely these words, but I recall that my internal monologue was, essentially, “Well, that is total bullshit.” I left that troupe, “fell away from The Lord” and returned to my young life with its rich and joyful exploration of self pleasure.

I don’t think anything sexual is basically good but I think that consensual pleasures that we experience alone, in couples and in groups is absolutely wonderful, wholesome and life-nurturing.

I also recognize that I was born into a vast sea of sex negativity and raised in its depths, as are we all. One of the truly magical things about the basic goodness of sex is that it often survives years of full immersion in a comprehensive web of sex-negativity.