Category: blog

Pleasure during a time of social distancing

As many of us are experiencing the changes required by precautions for COVID-19, it can be easy to forget pleasure, or to use it as an easy distraction or escape. I’d like to offer some ideas for other strategies.

First, I encourage all of us to take universal precautions. Social distancing, washing hands with soap and water, avoiding touching our faces, using the crook of our elbows for coughing or sneezing. Also, keep yourself informed, offsetting panic or fear by gaining knowledge to take into reasonable action. Even if we as individuals feel healthy, there are those of us with compromised bodies or in high risk populations. Check in on those in your circles. We are all in this together and none of us is invincible. Let’s hold each other, all of us, in regard and care. It’s a great starting point for justice in the world.

With these precautions, what else can we do? I love making lists. Here are a few ideas to stoke your imagination.

Find pleasure in the alone time! (I’m challenged by this action in my ambivert ways, needing social interaction as a thread of my happiness. I say these to myself as reminders). Find time outside if you can. Lakes, trees, landscape and animal companions, wild or not, make wonderful companions. Dance in your home. Touch your own body in enjoyable ways. Explore new practices. Set a timer or alarm as reminders to breathe deeply. Sing. Whisper stories to your own body about desire. Paint your body in the light through the windows. Have a skype/whatsapp/zoom/signal date with a beloved playfriend or partner. Make a pleasure activity with a partner that includes anything but kissing or faces touching. Limitations can be hot. Write erotic stories, which can be as simple as lists of what you want to do or have done to you. In a moment of bravery, share it with another who says yes. Feel into your body, asking it to reveal desire to you. Feel your tongue on the inside of your mouth, letting it roll around your teeth. Pat and stroke and scritch and scrub your body in satisfying ways. Do a striptease in the mirror for yourself with an applause sound track. Keep going.

Spend some time in activity and some in reflection or contemplation. Touch into as much playfulness as you can. Use these ideas as an incantation, a map, a starting point.

If you would like support in stepping into these kinds of practices, please be in contact. I am offering coaching sessions online via Zoom. I am happy to hear from you.

all my best, Sasha

Filed under: blog

Website update!

Welcome to the updated version of Integrated Eros (integratederos.com)! I’m updating content, adding easier ways to register for events and classes and telling you more about what I do.

A few recent events I’ve participated in this past month:

Please see the events page for some upcoming offerings, including new workshops on the Wheel of Consent and my regular classes at A Woman’s Touch.

Curious to know more? Please get in touch with me with questions about sessions and how my work can benefit you. I’d love to hear from you!

Filed under: blog

On touch, or why Somatic Sex Education?

Sexological bodywork is a subset of somatic sex education. It is hands-on guidance that allows people to actively learn more about their own sexuality. It is a tool in the toolbox that helps people move to a more embodied sense and knowledge of their erotic self, which we then integrate into the whole self. Touch offered from practitioner to client is the educational and healing tool.

Sexological bodywork is designed and intended to help clients become more in touch with their own erotic self, without the complication of partner engagement or expectation of reciprocation. The focus is on receiving guidance, experience, and on learning how to make direct requests. The hands-on bodywork aspect offers guided touch, consensually agreed upon, to help people create a better relationship with their genitals, tissues of arousal, and sexuality. Information, connection, experience, time to directly experience and metabolize sensation are the first steps towards learning, integrating, and creating new meaning about sexuality.
The key to this touch, as with any kind of touch, is to discern two things: who is the touch for (who acts and who receives the benefit) and what is the purpose of the touch. While it may seem like a false dichotomy in social situations, or in a partnered sexual engagement, in a context with practitioner and client, teacher and student, it is discernment that gives clarity. When touch is unidirectional, for the benefit of the person receiving, it becomes more clear.

It starts with talking. Having a safe place to talk about sex and sexuality, the range of our experiences, question about genitals, health, pleasure, what we actually do, what we think we should or shouldn’t do, is the first offering of spaciousness in a tight world. We then work with the body through breathing exercises, meditation, movement and nervous system self-regulation. These offerings are ways of tuning the instrument of the body. Finding ways to remain present through the cycles of relaxation and arousal are part of the learning, too.

Many of us have never learned to name parts of our bodies. Specificity offers us a freedom. Being able to articulate places that can give us pleasure gives us power. Power over how we access, ask for, and share pleasure with others. If we never learn the names for our parts, some aspect of our power is truncated. Mapping pleasure, through touch and naming at the same time, connecting that cognitive knowledge to sensation, creates new neural pathways. Knowledge, when combined with touch, translates to deep somatic understanding.

Filed under: audio, blog