I posted a piece yesterday that I wrote a while ago, about how difficult it is for many women to let go into pleasure.
And my lover said to me, ‘I get this, about women, but where are the men in this? Where are the men giving this pleasure, helping women to go to these deeper places, where are the men who are curious, and know about their partner’s bodies, where are the men who give time for pleasure, who are present during pleasure, where are the the men who get the power of slow, where are the men who ask what their partner’s want? We’re all connected in our pleasure, giving and receiving?’
Recently we went to a dance experience, Cacao and a fire.
There were some men who came for the first time, and all they could do was sway a little, tap their hands.
I was like that.
And it brought to awareness how many of us men are like that, and what it represents in so many of us men.
It’s something I’ve been talking about for a long time, and recently something’s come to awareness for me.
From a surprising source, dancing.
Why surprising?
Because for so long I thought I couldn’t dance. I felt so awkward as a teenager, I’d look around at parties and thought that everyone else had been taught how to do this, and I didn’t. My body felt stiff, I felt uncomfortable.
This continued over the years, and every time there was a dance thing I felt awkward and weird.
My friend Christos, (Daskalakos), is a Biodanza facilitator, a fantastic teacher, and I’ve been going to his classes for years. We’ve taught workshops together, with very clear roles. I do the touch, he does the movement.
Over time I’ve felt, and seen, my body loosen, soften and open.
And how this opens my heart, my mind.
Now when I dance, almost every time I find new space in my body, new movement, new softness, new expansion.
And on my own workshops I add more and more movement and dance.
A while ago, during dancing, I had a fascinating insight.
If you can’t move your body, you can’t massage amazingly.
And if you can’t move your body, you can’t f**k amazingly.
This is a work in progress, and I’m bringing more of that into my work, and workshops.
What’s also so important, from a healing perspective, is that literal movement is metaphorical movement, is energy movement, is emotional movement.
Touch does this, dance does this, breath does this, sound does this.
Embodied practices move us, move what’s within us.
There’s a stiffness in us, a rigidity, of our bodies, our hearts and our minds.
It’s a stiffness of performance, of judgement and comparison.
It’s a stiffness of holding on, of how we’ll look if we let go, of what will happen when we drop the masks and armour, of how we’ll be.
It’s a stiffness of jobs, of corporates, of money, of boardrooms and constricted neck-ties.
It’s a stiffness of not crying, of not showing emotion.
It’s a stiffness of anger, and disconnect and separation.
It’s a stiffness of patterning and conditioning about fighting to achieve, breaking ourselves to succeed.
It’s a stiffness of conquering, of what we’ve been conditioned to believe a man is.
It’s a stiffness of not knowing what will happen if we let go and soften, of the mystery that awaits us.
It’s a stiffness of fear of revealing ourselves, our feelings, looking deep into who we are, of being more free, more open, softer, of stopping, being still, flowing, intimate.
It’s a stiffness in the way we look at pleasure and sex, with the perspective of performance and goals.
It’s a stiffness that keeps us from our wild, from our spontaneous, from our creativity.
It’s a stiffness that keeps us from connecting deeply, in intimacy and love.
I heard one of the guys say something after the dance.
‘There was a part of me that just wanted to let go, and there was another part of me that just said no, no way.’
That’s in all of us.
And so many men are stepping out of, and into, a different way of being.
So many of us, in many ways, are dancing, with ourselves, with our lovers, with life.
This is where it shifts for us, in our bodies.
The mind has all the resistances, the judgments, the comparisons, the how I look, the what will they think, the I can’t do this.
It’s in our bodies, in touch, in movement.
It’s in connecting with ourselves, intimately, with another, intimately.
Letting ourselves go.
It’s in learning to dance, literally and metaphorically, in touch, in pleasure.
And together, men and women, giving ourselves, and each other, the space to share ourselves, our desires, our fears, our tears, our joy, our moans and shouts of pleasure.
It’s dancing in the fire of the heart.
It’s dancing in our caress.
It’s dancing, in love, with love, in life, in all the ways we do.
It’s dancing with possibility.
It’s dancing with pleasure.
