Tantric Touch Work

Originally published in Mindchaotica.

Touch techniques in tantric work at two distinct levels, sometimes simultaneously. These techniques are simple and very powerful. There are a few techniques that I do not write about, reserving them for those who can benefit from them in the right timing, with the right support. There are whole categories that I have explored but never teach because they are ineffective, redundant, disproportionately addictive or outright dangerous.

They work at two distinct levels of capacity and awareness. Some techniques are identical in their “low” and “high” forms.

The low form is where everyone begins. Clearing the weeds to make way for the planting of a garden. Formatting the hard drive before installing a clean system.

Touch work at this level confronts your resistance to experience, to the energies of life itself that arise in you. It challenges you to open to what is happening in this moment, and all that this moment evokes for you.

Everything it evokes.

Feeling into sensation, and having that sensation get quite “loud” in order to help you to feel, is an experiential journey through the feelings associated with every judgement, every resistance, and every denial that you managed in your past – and every feeling that you have about having suppressed those feelings.

The T-shirt slogan is: You will feel every little thing.

Usually in my touch work sessions, I emphasize this from early on: You are here to feel and let go of whatever you found too much to handle at the time. You are here to clear the backlog of the past. You are not here to add to what you currently suppress, so I start with your feelings, whatever you would tend to repress, that is arising right now.

I ask you to stand up, close your eyes and feel your discomfort, nervousness, excitement, fear and whatever else there is to feel about attempting this journey.

I remind you of your normal behavior when in a situation in which you are naked – your usual tendency to suppress your discomfort. While you undress and lie down, naked, on my massage table, I encourage you to feel every little bit of that, including your feelings about whether I am watching you or not.

When you are lying down, I urge you to feel these things in fullness. I might bring your attention to the fact that we have not had candlelight dinners, that we have not complied with your usual conditions for intimate touch. I remind you to not avoid or suspend what feelings you have about that fact. I urge you to a deep, slow firm breath and encourage you to exhale through an open mouth, over open vocal chords. Any sound, tones, sighs, grunts, even words will do. One particularly poignant moment for me in a session was when the woman on my table was moaning the word “yuck” repeatedly for a while.

I too get noisy. I breathe with a tone, vocal chords open on the inhalation as well as the exhalation. Throughout the session, I use the sound I am making to draw energy from my body and to guide your body on subtle levels. Sometimes, my breath, or a rhythm in it matches your breath or your pulse. It may then lead that breath or pulse to a change of pace, or a deepening.

 At my first touch, open palms landing gently but firmly in the middle of your back, you might twitch into tension, relax deeply, escape into numbness … whatever feelings are evoked, I encourage them to be expressed through breath and sound. If I hear you choke up, go silent or gasp, I urge your attention to your exhalation – to making it as open and smooth as you can, letting the vocal chords carry your feelings.

I start at your feet, my touch varying from softly sensuous to deep-tissue-massage-firm. As strong feelings start arising in your body. I watch your breath and keep reminding you to feel and breathe.

Firmly massaging the calf muscles and thighs tend to release a lot of suppressed feelings from your past. Tears may flow, glimpses of childhood fears may occur. The buttocks in particular tend to hold memories and suppressed feelings from your childhood punishments, particularly if that involved spankings.

I help these feelings move up through your body. Using more or less conventional massage techniques, I seek and help the release of whatever tensions I find.

I massage your sacrum, spine and cranium firmly, alternating with a very sensuous touch that reaches from instep through back of knees, over thighs, reaching to your perineum.

My hands come to rest, one with its fingers together, pointing down between your legs, the thumb-side edge of the index finger pressing over anus, perineum and the lower opening of the yoni. My thumb is extended at 90% to the hand and touches the base of your spine. The other hand touches the center of the top of your head, fingers perhaps pulling gently at the hair.

I encourage you to feel your intrinsic vulnerability to life. I will likely point out to you that I am touching the physical centre of your vulnerability, and will encourage you to feel everything (every little or not so little thing) that is evoked by your vulnerability. I might remind you that we live always by the grace of existence, that we can die at any moment – that this is just a fact and that you have feelings about that fact. You might roar, you might sob, you might relax into the sensation of strong energy flowing through you. If you scream with tight vocal chords, I will encourage you to open your throat more, to let the energy through more totally, without the constriction and tension usual to a scream.

I may use patterns of rhythmic pressure over your anus and perineum. I might send the energy through your body gently and slowly, or I may send it through in powerful bursts. If your yoni opens and more or less grabs the tip of my index finger, I may slide it in along the lower wall, compressing the anus and giving it a gentle feeling similar to penetration – whatever it takes for your body feel its openness, its vulnerability, and for that to become allowed in you.

Before I ask you to turn over, I want to feel the energy between my hands flowing through you. I want to feel some of it getting through completely, even if it is not much – likely if this is your first touch-work session.

Now that you are open to feeling the sensations arising in your body, now that you can feel things more deeply, more acutely, the T-shirt slogan changes to: “How much Bliss can you stand?”

Starting again at your feet, I stroke a similar line from instep, through the back of the knees, lines meeting at the yoni. From there, the lines of touch divide again and continue up the body to the crown chakra (top of the head).

Most likely, I start by touching more or less straight from your feet, more or less straight over yoni, via nipples to your throat, ears and third-eye chakra to the crown. Sometimes I touch in a single movement, both hands in parallel. Sometimes, with both hands working together on on one side of your body and then the other. Sometimes one hand strokes from feet to yoni, the other from yoni to crown.

At some point, I am likely to gather energy and bump the heel of my hand gently into the second and solar plexus chakras. This shows me how severely these chakras are constricted. I might draw your attention to the kinds of restriction they each have, what will have to be allowed/released in your living for them to function as designed. I might use a fairly fancy technique which temporarily bypasses them and let you feel a taste of the sheer deliciousness that happens when strong energies reach to your higher chakras.

I may, if it is very open and well lubricated, enter your yoni with a finger, touching and pressuring gently in the ridged region over the sacred/G/female-prostate spot. I hold a constant and very measured gentle pressure for a while, left hand at the top of your head.

During your first few sessions, a large range of feelings may happen in you – anything from a burning or a stabbing pain to a smooth flowing of orgasmic intensity.

If you are feeling pain or discomfort, I will tell you that I am doing nothing that is intrinsically painful and nothing that is at all damaging. I will tell you that this spot is where your feelings about men – particularly their pestering, their suppressed or explosive urges to enter, to invade – are held. I will encourage you to be brave and allow these feelings, accumulated since you were perhaps 12, to now be experienced and resolved/completed.

That “very measured” pressure is very measured. There is a pulse at this spot in the yoni. I hold firmly enough to feel it, but not hard enough to feel it strongly or stop it. Very measured.

Over a few sessions, as your capacity for sensation increases (usually dramatically), I turn up the volume. This can involve deeper and more pulsating sensations, higher intensities of touch to clitoris, anus and the lines from groin to nipples and powerful bursts of energy sent through previously restricted chakras.

We may dance sometimes over the border between the low and high forms of touch work. Especially when I am touching yoni and third eye, access to things usually unseen may open up. Vivid encounters with the spiritual forms called angels, guides and higher consciousness may occur.

Typically, I end a touch session with an exercise called the “draw”. You breathe in and hold the breath, simultaneously tensioning your PC/pubococcygeus muscles. You hold the tension of breath and PC muscles until you feel a significant – not extreme, just clear – urge to breathe. At that point, you release the withheld breath and the PC muscles suddenly, even explosively. Three or so of these breaths clears any residual energies, allowing your nervous system to return to something closer to what you might call “normal” before you drive home.

If you have been living a sexually constipated life, the permission you have given your body will probably extend to your mind. You may become much more aware of your erotic urges and impulses. You may be less inclined to automatically suppress these urges.

Most of what occurs to you, in terms of things you want to experience sexually, is likely to be met in your life. Some things may not, or you may want to experience them in the relative containment of a sessions context before trying them out in your relationship(s).

If this turns out to be the case, we may be diving deeply into some areas of your eroticism in your next session – but that is a whole other blog post.

If you would like to read more about touch work, check out Chapter 1 of The Rocky Horror Tantra Book