These recordings took place over the first couple of the Pandemic. They are in chronological order
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The simple and short answer: The body! What is the body capable of experiencing? How does your body want to feel? What does your body love? These are questions that matter in the face of a massage session and sexual inquiry.
I love what happens to a person between arrival and departure of a massage. Right before they leave, the face is soft, their bodies relaxed and open, and a substantial difference in their sense of well-being. Well: Opportunely. Being: Existence. The idea that I might help people access “opportunely existence” lets me breath a little more deeply and joyfully into my own body. Reciprocation at my finger tips, quite literally. I have always felt connected to spirit, yet a need to be in the body. To be here. To surrender to the ground. Both giving and receiving massage brought this idea home. Massage became a career and then something else happened. I started to wonder about sexuality. An experience in my body, with life, other lives (people), and the intricacies and nuance of relationship. It has been a vast portal of mystery, and ultimately, a lot of unlearning. Becoming a sex educator really means becoming someone who wants to demystify the mixed messages we get from our cultures, families, religions and otherwise, and begin to build back up the wisdom, health and the confidence of the BODY. The individual and the collective BODY. So having a body and taking care of it, and honoring its needs and wants is both part of massage therapy and part of sex education. They actually are a perfect pair. We can use the body to bring us into the present moment. We can also use the body as a portal to the universe. Massage and Sex (all the many ways to define sex), are access to the one vessel that carries us through experience. Sex education and massage together is utilizing the body for its wisdom as a means to get closer to accepting, and embracing ourselves as sexual beings. Allowing the body to be the guide versus our ideas and conditions given to us. The idea of providing these services in tandem is to magnify the potential for “opportunely existence.” This, I hope we can see in each other as a real possibility. Some people know me as a massage therapist. Other people know me as the go-to person either to ask questions about sex or to reveal truths about their sex life. To really know me is to be aware that at the center of all I love is my most reliable gift: my life force, my imagination. It is with the worlds we do not see with our eyes but feel with our being that I am most intimate, and most in love. Without imagination I could not receive the unseen reality that is so longing to be known and expressed. It is this that lives at the center of the Somatic Sexuality Session, a process that is about experiencing your sexuality as a vital puzzle piece to your humanity and to your living more fully. Imagination is my biggest asset in my work. The imagination is where everything begins, and moves and shape-shifts. More personally, my imagination is access to my psychic and intuitive process with my clients. I see the metaphors that one's body speaks. When my hands touch a body and my mind begins to engage with images, words and ideas, it is like being in a cafe and overhearing multiple conversations. I have to feel out what wants to come through the most. Repetition and density are the qualities that I follow. For instance, in one recently divorced client who was struggling with trusting in new sexual partners, I continuously saw children while I was working on the left leg, then the image came in clearly of desks and children hiding under them for a drill. Her nervous system was feeling in flight or fight like it was not a drill but a real emergency. In the right leg there was a strong angelic presence that could see that it was merely a practice and that there was no real threat. In reporting back to this client I validated her confusion around trust, and began to peel back the layers of where this issue with trust began. These images helped her recall that her younger self was interrupting a process of trust in her sexual relationships as an adult. We were then able to open a more direct conversation about how these two parts could better communicate in order to resolve her unmet sexual needs in future relationships. Imagination is not looked at with as high regard as, say, fact or empirical data in our culture. It is seen as a lesser truth. I do not want to confuse imagination with “making it up.” Imagination is an extension of curiosity which is required when helping someone move out of a state of mind, a belief, or an unwanted circumstance in their sexual life. Another client came to see me because the chaos in her life was outweighing her ability to look at her sexual needs and pursue them. Between her grief of her family dynamics changing and accumulated years of avoiding her sexual relationship, she was feeling the propensity for hopelessness and overwhelm. My hands contact to her sacrum would share something different. The peace and the buoyancy I felt in her body was like telling her that the water she is drowning in is as salty as a float tank and as shallow too. The body has another story sometimes and in this case it’s the one that knows that it is all going to be ok. The realness of imagination lives in the ability to accept it as a true and direct experience. Imagination can be a tool, a vehicle and an art to living more deeply. A somatic sexuality session involves hands on bodywork and focuses on this strength. It is a process oriented to how one’s body can communicate and evolve through the complicated and rich terrain of sexuality. |
Ideas and musings:This is a place where I may reflect on matters of my work, my imagination, my process... Archives
March 2020
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