Part of the theme of this blog is how my professional and personal life intersects with my spiritual life. Professionally, I'm a somatic sex coach. I help people learn how to give and receive more pleasure from intimacy. My clients work on how to get out of their head and into their body, what it feels like to be emotionally open and in physical flow with someone else, and reducing shame and inhibition around pleasure and fantasy.
While none of these skills is explicitly related to spirituality, morality, or personal growth, I nevertheless consider myself to be acting as a kind of spiritual leader when I work with someone in this capacity.
That's because anything you do to work on self-discovery, inner healing, and expanding your awareness beyond a self-absorbed ego is spiritual growth. In my experience, learning how to be better at sex or have more fulfilling relationships is an excellent way to achieve it. Here's why.
What makes sex good, fulfilling, and arousing? In order to really enjoy sex, to really feel intense, pleasurable connection with another person, you have to feel safe enough to really open up with someone.
You have to feel safe first — safe in your body, not just knowing logically that you're safe. If you're feeling anxiety, unhappiness, or insecurity, it makes it very hard to be relaxed enough in your body to feel touch as pleasurable.
When you are tense, holding your muscles tight and blocking yourself off from your partner, your body can't feel as much sensation as it can when you are relaxed. When your brain can't shut off, there's no room for input from your body.
You also have to work to understand yourself. You have to get past the internal shame you may carry around sexuality and your desires. You have to be empathetic, compassionate, and non-judgmental toward other people and toward yourself — treating others and yourself with love. These are all things you need in order to create a situation where two people can feel safe, open in their bodies, and ready to connect.
No wonder so many people are having unfulfilling sex. Getting to those places is hard. Most people don't receive a lot of feelings of safety, openness, and acceptance — of who they are and of their desires. We didn't get it from our childhood, we don't get it from our day-to-day lives in work or relationships, and we don't get it from ourselves. So of course we all struggle with love and intimacy.
If somebody comes into my office wanting to work on being a better lover, we'll work on breathing, on slowing down the breath, on noticing what your body is feeling. We'll notice the sensations — what sex feels like, what touch feels like, your own pleasure, your own anxieties as they arise.
And you'll want to be able to move in sync with another person — to flow together, to move sensually in concert without having to think about each step, like dancers. When you're "trying" to dance, you often aren't dancing very well. You have to practice, get comfortable making mistakes, and try new things with a partner who won't berate you or make you feel stupid or ashamed if you get a step wrong before you can dance in flow with someone else. It's the same with sex.
So you can't unravel any part of your sexual response without also getting into how you are in relationships — which in turn means getting into your relationship with yourself. Being able to fully express yourself, feel a lack of shame in who you are, and actually like who you are. So anything somebody wants to work on in the realm of sexuality will by default lead to some kind of personal growth or spiritual growth.
That's good news because the pleasure you feel from this kind of connection is a great motivation to do that work. The bad news is that it's very difficult to do it alone.
We learn the "rules" of love and intimacy from our family relationships in countless ways as we grow up — from the way we are treated. Those rules live in your body. If you learned that being honest about what you're feeling will make people upset, your body will feel fear or avoidance when your partner asks how you are feeling. If you want to rewrite those rules you can read books or watch videos, but that message only gets to your brain. To help your body understand the new rules, you need to experience a different kind of relationship with someone else. This is where I come in.
As a sex coach using the Somatica Method, what I'm doing with my clients is standing in as a partner for you to do that growth work with. I help you see the places where you struggle in intimacy and help you try responding differently. Because I am not your actual partner, the emotional stakes are much lower. We can work on things that would feel really painful, even debilitating in your own intimate relationship.
Working on attachment, security, attunement, and the ability to feel safe being open — with a real partner, your actual attachment figures, that can be overwhelming. It's easier with me because I'm not trying to get my emotional or sexual needs met from my clients. The only purpose of our relationship is to help you grow to where you want to be.
This might look like gazing at my client with love while we cuddle. It could be encouraging my client to share a fantasy and responding with enthusiasm and excitement. In both cases, my client is getting a bodily experience of a different kind of relationship.
My spiritual beliefs are the foundation of why I can do this work. I believe that we are all connected to each other and to the divine. I feel love for the earth, for humanity as a whole, and for the divine source that connects us. I strive to treat everyone, but especially my clients, in a way that reflects that belief.
That doesn't mean everybody is capable of seeing that divinity in themselves or other people. There are certainly clients I wouldn't work with because they aren't ready to do what's required for me to be useful to them.
I try to see a person's full humanity — not what they did wrong or where they're lacking. Instead I ask: why have these relational patterns developed? We don't choose our relational wounds. They came from the environments we grew up in and the relationships we've already had. Most of our impulses, even harmful ones, developed for a reason — they were needed to survive somewhere. They made sense in the environment that created them. It's my pleasure and opportunity to show people that a different kind of relationship is possible.
I have a great deal of sexual comfort with myself and with others, so it's easy for me to generate a warm, flirty, romantic feeling with anyone I'm working with. I can genuinely feel love for my clients while we are working together. And that means they can learn what it feels like when somebody treats them with love. To me, this is a holy sacrament.
The connection between sexual pleasure and spiritual growth is something many traditions have worked with throughout history, and I think the reason is simple: it works. Our dreams, our subconscious, our fantasies, and our connection to spirit all live in the same universe. They are real things that cannot be physically touched, and that's the realm where this work happens.
A great deal of damage from repressed sexuality comes from how critical we are of our own sexual responses. We think there are things we should and should not find arousing. Many of us don't realize that our fantasies — the work we do internally — don't have to be literally acted out physically. Very often they shouldn't be. But when you allow yourself to go inward, or to go into those places with a lover or partner, you can heal the parts of yourself you are most eager to hide. What Jung called the shadow.
Using fantasy, I've been able to access and work with my own shadow parts. The part that was hungry for love, that felt my worth existed only for other people, not for myself. I craved attention, but believed asking for it was a terrible, selfish thing to do. These parts ruled my relationships, but I struggled to admit they were there even to myself, because I felt so much shame for having them.
When I started to recognize the thumbprints of these things all over my sexual fantasies — which I also had shame around — I was able to read those fantasies as metaphors for my emotional desires.
An example I give often: I'm an exhibitionist. I genuinely enjoy being looked at in a sexual space. If I go somewhere clothing-optional outdoors, I love walking around, feeling the sun on my skin, having people look at me without a top on. It feels arousing, exciting, naughty, and a little shameful.
And as it turns out, that's exactly how I felt about receiving attention. It was something I craved and was excited about, but also felt was deeply wrong for me to want. When I first started exploring spaces where I could be exposed like that, I was doing it because it felt good, not because I wanted to be a better person. But somehow it happened anyway.
Being able to give myself that kind of attention in a healthy, consensual way — and feeling the pleasure of it in my body — feeds that part that was starving for recognition. In turn, that part feels acknowledged and fed rather than pushed down and ignored. So now it doesn't have to come out unconsciously. I used to irrationally dislike anyone who put themselves at the center of attention. Yet I'd insert myself into situations emotionally to get more attention, or stay in relationships I didn't want to be in because someone was giving me attention.
Now that I don't feel as much shame around it, I get to enjoy the pleasure of receiving attention in lots of ways, not just sexually. Being able to look at those shadow parts of me has allowed me to change things I once felt powerless to change.
These are just a few examples of the spiritual growth that happens when you set out to get better at sex. When I describe myself as a sex coach and a spiritual teacher — it's two sides of the same coin. I love having that coin flipping in the air and getting to be both at the same time. It's where I feel my greatest strength, and it's what I am learning to offer the world.
So tonight I'm going to go to a kink space, wear something provocative, and enjoy the pleasure that comes with all this spiritual growth. I hope this writing inspires you to try doing the same.
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