BY ANNA SANSOM
The fear of intimacy manifested in an assortment of ways for the clients I worked with, everything from ejaculating too soon to not being able to orgasm; and having meaningless, superficial sex with people they didn’t care about to never having had sex at all. The commonality among them all was a difficulty in staying present in the moment. That’s what intimacy needs: presence. One of the first techniques we learned and shared was how to stay present to the situation and the feelings created in a session, how to notice when we were no longer present, and how to bring ourselves back from wherever we’d spun or drifted off to. I use my breath. Focusing on the in breath and the out breath, the feeling of air moving through my nose and mouth, and the sensations in my chest as it rises and falls. I am here. I am present. Presence and awareness went hand in hand. “Are you present? Where are you?” I would gently ask myself and the person I was with.
The sexual healing programme progressed intentionally slowly to enable presence to be learned way before genitals or sex were involved. If a person couldn’t stay present while we were taking turns at caressing each other’s back, what would happen when we moved on to touching even more sensitive and emotionally significant areas? Dissociation is a coping mechanism of the mind to protect the individual from stress or trauma. This was an opportunity to learn to relax and trust in the safety of love and pleasure on one’s own terms. Another early exercise was to learn to say “stop” and know that this would always be honoured. “Stop” could then lead to coming back to the breath and presence, a conversation, a change of position, slowing down, or whatever else was needed in that instance.
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May 2020
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