questions & answers …
You will be guided through what we call ‘Somatic Assessments’ for enhancing your confidence in intimate decision-making. These include enhancing your somatic recognition of yes and no, and how to tell the difference.
These are invaluable practices that support learning to recognise and represent our limits in life and relationships before it's too late.
You will be guided every step of the way into experimenting with new ways of being and revisiting old ways of being that you want liberation from.
What is Embodiment?
Our ability to come into a relationship with ourselves requires finding ways of connecting to, feeling and expressing what is happening inside our body. The embodiment can be understood to be this symbolic relationship with our feeling states, senses and how we create meaning from these experiences.
Discovering and gaining access to symbols and language can help us self-reflect, communicate and integrate the visceral responses from our bodies and embody these.
This work guides us into an exploration of embodied states, enhancing our capacity to be intimate with ourselves and with each other. This supports co-creating relationship agreements with conscious awareness and integrity.
When we are touched or we touch another, we are touching somatic memory channels from this lifetime and lifetimes that have gone before us.
- generations of unintegrated aspects of humanity emerge out of the soup of the collective conscious to be witnessed and accepted.
Questions & Answers
What is Body Mapping?
What we feel in each part of our body is with a biofeedback loop.
Sometimes we have an inaccurate map of our bodies in our brains which makes it impossible to know where and when to touch. Imagine if you never touched or looked at yourself;- you would not have ANY maps to guide you. This means that you would NOT be in consent in intimacy with yourself or with another. It would be the blind leading the blind!
Body mapping offers an opportunity to discover the maps of your body integrating the subjective and objective sense of self and identity with understanding and healing the parts of you that went underground that become silent drivers in your life. This can release buried feeling states repressed and held in the body tissue.
When we are touched or touching another, we are touching memories.
The brain maps the body from the outside in and from the inside out in different neural networks in the brain. Body mapping engages the circuitry of the internal visceral landscapes of the body and the external landscapes of the body through the senses and sensations in a dance between the felt senses and the mind’s categorisations. Most of us have at least a sketch available, but that leads to hit-and-miss intimacy, and body mapping literally gives us more detailed maps to navigate intimate territories with.
What is the Wheel of Consent?
“The Wheel of Consent is a model of consent based on, but not requiring, exchanges of touch. The Wheel notes the distinction between the ‘doing’ aspect of the touch dynamic — who is doing — and the ‘gift’ aspect — who it is for.” - Betty Martin
Touching and being touched awakens complex biofeedback loops between the sensory receptors of your hands with the part of the body that is being touched. When we are being touched, we are touching memories and also when touching, we are awakening memories of where our curiosity might have been interrupted. In repeating these simple exercises, we are coming home attending to aspects of ourselves that need care and attention and learning to trust our spontaneity and confidence with attuned curiosity.
As well as touching and being touched soothing and restoring emotional equilibrium offering somatic messages of self-directed care and repair from times we have felt alone and done to or from the isolation of no touch, there are possibilities for curiosity and pleasure that is both in the touching AND in the being touched.
“For example, you may be touching another person for their enjoyment, or you may be touching them for your enjoyment.
Both of those dynamics are welcome and needed in different situations, and once the distinction is clear, the entire touch dynamic becomes clear, which brings ease, confidence, self-responsibility and freedom to the interaction.” - Betty Martin.
Dr Betty Martin has informed the foundations of my practice with her profound and simple teachings that support an easy, safe, step-by-step route into embodiment and living a consensual life by opening the direct routes to pleasure. These are called direct routes to pleasure and intimacy as they are engaging through the senses rather than purely through imagination associations.
I am a certified Wheel of Consent Practitioner with many years of practice applying the dynamics of the wheel in thousands of hours of clinical practice and participated and assisted in many “Like a Pro” training for practitioners learning these essential skills of how to serve without taking.
I currently teach the Wheel of Consent as part of the Institute for Relational Harmony Studies Sexological Bodywork and Somatic Sex Educators professional practitioner training.
'It's over with before I've felt it”
This is a very common problem and you’ve come to the right place to support you in overcoming this often embarrassing and disappointing experience. I do not just teach pelvic floor control of ejaculation which is just another control route to what is a deeper body motivation. I teach step by step re-firing new neural pathways to increase the body’s capacity to feel intense feelings and states of pleasure and ecstasy without it blowing a fuse.
There can be many reasons why a person’s body takes them out of the feeling before they've experienced enough of the pleasure in the experience. One reason could be that the body hasn't adequately accessed the parasympathetic nervous system, which is necessary to feel. This is common among people living busy lives, where high demands and stress are associated with achieving goals.
Another common reason is that your body might be used to masturbating quickly in private from a young age, and the same neural pathways are established when you want to be close to another, witnessing your pleasure. It’s as simple as creating new routes to achieve this capacity, thereby overcoming the shame inhibitors that many adolescents develop, which interrupt confidence in being witnessed in aroused states in intimate relationships.
Another reason can be developmental changes in your life and body, which require you to re-discover new connections inside of you from the ones that have stopped working.
Another reason may be fears that have no specific name silently interrupting the surrender into pleasure and intimacy. I support you in easily uncovering these to increase your confidence and kindness with yourself, so relaxation and intimacy become easy and pleasurable.
I guide you with easy, step-by-step guidance that supports your body to have an increased capacity for pleasure and feeling.
What is Scar Tissue Remediation?
Scar tissue remediation, developed by Ellen Heed, is taught in professional Sexological Bodywork training to heal the scars of healed-over wounds from operations or accidents where function has been impaired.
We all carry scars, some small, some big, and very few of us get away without any injuries in our lifetimes. They are part of our vintage and require radical acceptance, like any wounds, emotional or physical, that have impacted our body.
Healing the contracted tissue of scars with Body Poem coaching can transform physical scars and liberate the contracted, restricted skin and flesh, increasing sensitivity with feelings flowing again.
Scars from injuries can affect body image, causing emotional or physical pain and limiting function, eg, vulva scarring from childbirth, penis scarring from circumcision, scarring from prostate operations, mastectomy scars, caesarian section scars, gender reassignment scars, etc.
When the body has been impacted, the body’s defence mechanisms activate fibroblasts to knit the wound rapidly with collagen, which can carry on attracting this repair mechanism, causing inflammation over time and affecting other parts of the body in a chain reaction, leading to what is sometimes called referred pain.
Engaging in focused touch with specific massage techniques using organic castor oil can deepen your receptivity to sensation. The practitioner first demonstrates scar tissue remediation, and then you, as a recipient, take your wounds into your own hands to heal what can be reached easily in complex biofeedback loops between the sensory receptors of your hands and the part of the body you are touching. The remembered physical impact of the injury can be liberated, relieving emotional and physical pain that has been held in the scar tissue. Healing scars is like taking your heart into your hands and giving the message to your immune system that care has been taken, and the body can restore equilibrium and relax again.