Blog

I don’t plan what I’m going to blog about from week to week. Every Thursday or Friday, I go to the mountain and wait to hear Spirit speak, and when I hear something, I start writing it down. That can be a little nerve wracking, because sometimes Spirit seems to wait until the last minute. As of mid-morning today, we still hadn’t really been in touch.

At 9 AM this morning I shared the most exhilarating Touch Practice with a very skillful partner, a friend I haven’t seen in months. While he’s relatively new to the practice, he understands it in his body like he’s lived with it for a hundred years.

I want to blog today about what I’ve learned over the years from working with erotic energy in Touch Practice.  This very wonderful hour and a half I had this morning seemed to summarize all of that well enough that I think I can write about it coherently in the 90 minutes I have to get this blog written. Thank you, my old (new) friend (you know who you are!) for serving as the inspiration for this particular blog.

Those of you who have read any of my writings know that it’s been a journey for me to learn how to channel erotic energy in a way I find satisfying and productive. In the beginning, when I was starting to experiment with being held and hugged by various people, hugging would sometimes turn into sex, seemingly without my awareness or control: it would just happen. And that was frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying in those cases where I set out just to be held, and where I was looking for deep, non-sexual connection to someone.

On the other hand, I went through a period where I tried just ignoring erotic energy, or making it unwelcome in the room. That really doesn’t work either. It’s difficult for two men to hug while both have raging erections they are trying to ignore. It’s physically uncomfortable, and it feels emotionally dishonest. It’s like sitting across from your dinner partner at a restaurant enmeshed in a riveting conversation while pretending not to notice he has a javelin stuck in the side of his head. It’s not convincing.

Of course there are times when someone just has to sit with the fact that he’s aroused: if my practice partner has not given explicit consent for genital touch, or is too uncomfortable with erotic energy to allow us to work with it together, that simply has to be respected as a limitation. What I want to write about, however, is where erotic energy can go when both people want to acknowledge it, both allow it to be in the room, and both make a conscious effort to engage it productively with the goal of a non-sexual outcome.

I can sum up what I’ve learned in four big directives:

1. Find your puppy body
2. Breathe, ground, find your feet, set your intention
3. If it gets erotic, go there first, and fast; and
4. Watch for backward time travel and ride the train

Puppy Body

As adult men we have the capacity to engage each other in the energy of arousal and erection without that engagement needing to be sexual, end in ejaculation, or produce frustration. Most men are completely out of touch with that capacity, but you had it as a little kid, and let me see if I can help you locate it.

Many little boys have had the experience of “playing doctor” or exploring someone else’s body, particularly their genitals, and may have experienced arousal or excitement without the sense of urgency that things had to proceed towards a particular goal or outcome.  It was purely about exploration. That capacity exists. It still exists.

The reason your psychotherapist spends so much time talking about your “inner child” is that it still exists in a very real way. So does the pre-sexual part of your body; it is as real in the here-and-now as your psychological wounds are. It is accessible here and now just like the rest of your inner child.

For some there are challenges. If you had the experience of childhood sexual abuse, as I did, then you may have been “fast-forwarded” past your pre-sexual body by some menacing adult who took you directly into adult sexual experience, so you’ll need to go back, intuit, and reconstruct your pre-sexual body and pre-sexual experience with men. You can do it. I’ve done it. It’s part of what Touch Practice is about, for me. I rebuilt experiences my twelve year old would have had, had he been allowed to have them on his own, by creating them now.

So the first necessity is that at least intellectually or cognitively, you locate (or construct, if necessary) your “puppy body,” that part of you that can have genuinely child-like innocent curiosity about someone else’s body, including their genitals, without being on a railroad track to ejaculatory behavior. That space has to be cultivated, in some cases, as I’ve said, it has to be recreated, but for starters, you have to acknowledge that it exists.

Breathing and Grounding

There are some of you (there are many, actually) who write to me asking, “I tried getting together with someone where we agreed we would do hugging and holding, but it ended up being sex. We haven’t spoken since; we were both so disappointed. What went wrong?”

Without having been there, I can tell you exactly what went wrong, actually, because I’ve watched this happen a few dozen times. What went wrong is (and you won’t believe me, it’s so simple): you stopped breathing. When you stopped breathing (stopped being aware of your breathing) you stopped being aware of your experience. When you did that, you checked out; your plane flew on autopilot, and by the time you woke up, your plane had landed in Warsaw despite the fact that you set out for Paris. The answer is always (and I’m pretty sure of this) “you stopped breathing consciously and intentionally.”

Breathe, feel your feet in the ground, check in with your intention (what are you hoping will happen.)  When you run into erotic energy, check grounding the way a pilot looks over a pre-flight checklist because I swear to you, you will crash if you don’t.

If it gets erotic, go there first

If erotic energy shows up during practice, it is, in my opinion, a big mistake to ignore it, downplay it, or wait to engage it. I go there first, fast, and deliberately. If I have permission and I’m working with a partner who will allow me to engage erotic energy when it surfaces, particularly if we’re doing naked work, then if the penis needs attention, I go there first. If there’s erection I acknowledge it. I typically do this by very carefully and slowly, as though I am reaching for something breakable and expensive, taking the genitals in my hands, breathing into them and instructing my partner to do the same. I just “sit with” the genitals; hold them, pay attention to them, offer them some respect and reverence. Sometimes for two or three minutes. Whatever it takes.

You will find very often, not always, that if you sit quietly with an erection by simply holding it in your hands, it subsides. The energy reallocates itself to the rest of the body and is reabsorbed into the larger energetic body. Often dealing with the need to acknowledge erotic energy allows that energy to move off to the side so that other, and deeper, energetic connections can be engaged.

Watch for Time Travel

My experience of watching men engage non-sexualized erotic energy in a 90 minute window is that we start from where we are now, as adults, and work our way backward in time. So our first engagement of an erection in a partner is likely to be a sexualized adult thought (“hand job?”) and then slowly, as we sit with erotic energy, and breathe, and ground, and relax, over the next hour, people move slowly backward in their time bodies. At some point men are able to engage each other as adolescents, aroused and excited, and at some point beyond that, as men enter puppy body, they are able to be playful and innocently curious about each others’ bodies without any sense of urgency or directive outcome.  In a typical Touch Practice, by the end of the hour, we end up genuinely childlike, filled with wonder and curiosity and a desire to explore these containers we are poured into at birth.

And that’s  all the time I have for this blog. I’ll have to mop up any messes next week.

Have thoughts you’d like to share?

Touch Practice is a sacred practice for me, and part of that is keeping confidences sacred. While a name and e-mail address are required to post a comment, feel free to use just your first name, or a pseudonym if you wish. Your e-mail address will never be seen by or shared with anyone. It is used to prevent spam and inappropriate comments from appearing in the blog. I’d really like to hear from you!