Everyone has a collection of stories about their intimate life. Some happy, some painful, some old, some current.
These stories are alive inside of us. They have incredible power to shape how we perceive our world, how we feel and how we act. Mostly this happens automatically, outside of our awareness and control.
In essence, our stories are telling themselves all the time in the way we are being.
When I work with my clients on all the nuts and bolts of sensual intimacy, tangible things like body image, establishing and maintaining consent, communicating desires, and giving and receiving touch, these stories speak loudly.
For example I might ask a client, “How would you like to be touched?” Her old story might create feelings of sadness or confusion because she’s never been asked that before. She’s always just endured whatever touch she got.
This is a moment of potential healing if we work slowly and mindfully with compassion.
First we welcome those emotions and let them be felt in a way that isn’t overwhelming. Then we do something nourishing and loving. We create a novel experience that she didn’t get when the story was first written.
In this case new experience might be as simple as a pause that allows her to connect with her body’s own desire for touch that would feel safe, sexy and delicious. If she doesn’t know what that touch is, because she’s never had the chance to find out, then I might offer her a selection of different types of sensual touch. A soft caress of the inner forearm. A firm massage of her scalp. The whisper of warm breath on her neck. There are endless ways to delight the body.
Soon she learns what her body likes and develops a vocabulary of pleasure. These acts of embodied learning, or somatic education, are healing.
When these novel missing experiences and moments of learning are repeated enough times, the old painful stories are replaced with a new ones of choice and pleasure.
