Consent

Here we can focus more specifically with a lens on sex, physical touch and physical intimacy. Learning how to access your embodied YES and NO is possibly the most important skill to strengthen when learning how to create safe, healthy and empowered intimate relationship.

 A yes is not a yes if you don’t know how or where to ‘feel the yes’ in your body or your felt experience of the moment.

An embodied yes or no is a physical sensation that will help guide you to your authentic desire in each moment. It’s the felt experience in your body that guides you on whether you do or do not want to engage in sexual or touch-based activities with another person.

Many people experience what’s called incongruence when it comes to giving consent.

This looks like your head (thoughts) saying one thing and your body (sensations) saying another. Learning to feel an embodied sense of your yes or no will help ensure you’re fully congruent when giving consent.

There are a few ‘rules’ when giving and receiving consent. I call them rules instead of guidelines because there are many moments inside of consent where grey areas might appear. You don’t want any grey. I’s best to allow these rules to sink into your connections.

Consent must be specific. For example, if someone says ‘can I kiss you on the cheek?’ and you say yes, and they end up kissing you all over the face, or giving you a long sloppy lingering cheek kiss, then they are out of consent.  

Specific consent should be and can be updated and adjusted moment to moment. Sometimes we give consent for a type of touch that might feel good initially but two minutes later it’s become unenjoyable. This is when adjustments can be made. Active, ongoing and updated consent leads to better sex and more pleasure for everyone!

It’s such a bonding and enjoyable aspect of sexual connection when we allow consent to drive a pleasure-positive conversation inside of the physical connection.

As a lover, it’s super helpful (and really sexy) to ask questions.

Does this still feel good?

Do you want this touch?

How can I make this even more enjoyable for you?

Tell me how this feels for you.

As well as verbal check-ins, you can also look for non-verbal signs that give you info about consent. Things like stiffness, stillness or silence for extended periods of time. Scrunched or numb-looking facial expressions. These can be signs that a person you’re engaging with may not be enjoying the interaction and you may not be engaging in consensual touch or interaction.

As you get closer inside your relationships, you can use a combination of verbal and non-verbal consent cues, but for casual play partners and new connections my recommendation is that verbal consent is always used.

Learning sex

Our sexuality is one of the truest, most animal, wild and authentic parts of what it means to be human and of nature. It’s the part that can tether you to something greater than the conscious self; take us into places of bliss, connect us and allow us to create life.

When I tell people about what I do, many of them say something like, ‘We don’t need to learn sex! It’s natural!’

Well, it’s actually both. Sex is absolutely natural and we do indeed learn it.

We’ve been learning sex since the day we were born. We learn from our parents, caregivers and siblings. From our teachers and community, pop culture and the media. Advertising, music and the arts. From friends and lovers. In conversation and through the subtleties of social interaction and through the language of our culture. Through the constant feedback loop of life.

We’re affirmed or rejected, celebrated or shamed, liked and disliked. Through past experiences and inherited, conditioned ways of being. Via all relationships – we’re constantly learning.

Many people I talk to can remember a conversation from the past when they remember being given a belief about sex and their bodies that wasn’t theirs before that moment. Something that had never occurred to them until it was placed in their field by something or someone external.

Before someone coerced you into giving them something they had no right to, before someone shamed you about the smell of your vagina, before a parent or teacher told you to close your legs, or told you ‘that top makes you look like a slut’ before the church made you believe you were dirty, before you learned the insidious habits of comparison and self-degradation and got stuck in the clouds of ‘not-enough-ness’ Before the confusion created by the good girl/bad girl illusion.

You were just free.

Just as you learn how to interact with sex and your pleasure, you can also unlearn. You can liberate, heal, forgive, reset, let go, revolutionise and re-wire. You can set yourself free.

Many of us learn how to access pleasure in our bodies based on the ways we interacted with pleasure in our early life.

For example, if there was a mismatch in power during your earliest sexual encounters or you were in a passive role and felt like sex was something that was to be ‘done to’ you, you can carry that with you. Now, as an adult, you may only feel arousal or pleasure when you’re in a passive role or there is a power dynamic similar to the one that was present in your early experiences. This could show up as the classic ‘I want to feel taken and truly desired by my partner before I can show up for love making’ or waiting for someone else to initiate sex to help you feel safe to engage. You may even struggle to access your full spectrum of pleasure or orgasm unless your body is in a certain physical position.

Your body has learned how to interact with pleasure and built habits that reinforce that learned way of being over and over again.

The thoughts you hold in the conscious mind may be really healthy and free. You might ‘know’ that you’re a confident, capable and loveable person. You might have positive thoughts and ideas about your sex, your body and sexuality – so then why is there a mismatch when it comes to sensation, pleasure and ‘action’? Why then during love-making with your handsome partner that you love so dearly, does it still feel impossible to get out of your head?

Why can’t you ‘let go’ enough to experience orgasm and expansive, blissed out presence? Why then, when you feel a beard scratch along the inside of your leg, do you get flung out of your body and disassociate from the here and now?

It’s because, your body remembers. It remembers in the deepest of ways. It remembers all the details the conscious mind may have long forgotten. It gathers data from past experiences and memories and stores it in its unconscious somatic archives.

How do we live a full and inspiring life that excludes or suppresses our sexuality? I don’t believe you can.

And when we try to, it can cost us access to the full spectrum of our human existence. Taking us further away from the source of life. When this connection point is severed, we are forced further into the mind. Further into separation from our life force, separation from one another and the ways nature intended us to be.

Many people will live their entire lives without learning how to harness the wisdom of the erotic in a way that lets it sing to and deeply satiate the soul.

For those ready to re-claim it, in the next section are four keys you can use to re-acquaint yourself with the current of erotic and embodied aliveness, heal your relationship with sexuality to allow access to the full spectrum of your human nature.

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