I liked intentionally doing the breathing exercise with the thought of expanding the pelvic bowl and contracting it. It was centering kinda just connects you right to your core and that feels good. It also kinda brought to kind something I read years ago that's a little different but similar, and that was to think of your vagina like and elevator going up or down and trying to contract those muscles up like an elevator going up floor to floor. That's not so much a breath exercise but also good.
I appreciated hearing part of your back story and thinking about what it may have been to grow up like that and with those feelings. Yours is very different from my own which I don't typically share a lot about. I feel like my mother wayyy overshared about sex things in not the most positive of ways when I was a young child, +plus grew up with a sister about 4 yrs older. She put alot out there at us that I'd consider inappropriate at this point in my life. Always cosmopolitan magazines laying around, Jerry springer playing on tv...TV.... just a lot of filthy junk pretty tasteless. She'd go into an adult store leave us in the car for 30+ mins. So definitely from an early age we had a lot of exposure and not a lot of guidance unfortunately. I was 11 yrs old having my 1st sexual experiences with a boy in my neighborhood, by the time I was 12 my mothers live in boyfriend was molesting me, this went on the better part of a year intermittently, and when I finally got the courage to tell my mother she immediately made me go to the police and stranger after stranger is interviewing me at 12 about so many things I was so uncomfortable with, the child services coming to my house to interview, therapize whatever their point is, then to top all that uncomfortability my mom never believed it would tell me everyday i ruined her life, that she hated me, had my little sister telling me that I told a lie that made her dad go away, guy wasn't even her dad and i wish it was all a lie. All those layers of messed up at such an early point in life, I feel like have been something that's hard to get past in terms of accepting pleasure when it was all so wrong even if any of it ever felt physically good, and living with all that aftermath, made to feel guilty for being forced to endure something I never wanted or asked for. I feel like i do pretty good accepting pleasure at this point in life.... but that having that in my past as an undercurrent has certainly left its mark on me in many ways including my sexuality and sexual freedom, and ability to accept pleasure without guilt. I know that's a lot and I've considered whether I even wanted to share this for a few days but you put so much of your truth out here for us I wanted to get on an equally real level.