A rocky weekend
Genre: Personal, self-development case study. light nsfw.
Epistemic status: Based on personal heuristics
My towel has a nice fragrance to it. The fragrance originates from a jar of homemade body scrub. I didn’t make the scrub. I didn’t make the towel either. But I still get to enjoy the fragrance.
The towel picked up the fragrance in a sauna located at the edge of a rocky island. I’ve just spent four days on the island, participating in a “sacred kink” burn.
I was unusually attracted to one of the participants. I handled the attraction by being shy, suppressing sexual tension, and mixing avoidance with proximity-seeking. I basically acted like an infatuated kid.
And I owned it. I accepted my reactions without judgement. I told my sharing group about the process. I also told the person I was attracted to. And now I want to tell you.
Story Time!
During my stay on the island, I felt tired.1 Instead of psyching myself up, I decided to accept the tiredness, and explore the situation from a state of slowness and receptiveness.2 This made it clear that I've relied on high-energy states to "carry me" through intimate/erotic meetings.
Without being psyched up, I couldn’t handle rising attraction. Instead, I continuously suppressed feelings of attraction as soon as they arose. The subjective sense was that of sexual tension starting to form3, followed by an immediate disengagement where I looked away to break any connection.
I think of this as a struggle between different parts of myself. One part wants to do fun stuff and engage in hedonism.4 Another part(s) is not really up for it, blocking actions that might lead to intimate meetings. The blocking part is most likely connected to a stored traumatic memory5 related to my sexual history.
The suppression is really noticeable when it prevents me from even engaging with people. But it might be acting as a slight inhibitor even when things are working out okay-ish. Either way, I’d like to get a grip on the situation.
A skillful grip
The stored traumatic memory needs to be handed in a skillful way. The problem is not logical in nature, it’s emotional. It doesn’t matter if I understand rationally that shying away is counter-productive.6
As such, I will try my best to not speculate on the exact event that laid the foundation of this pattern here and now. If I do, I run the risk of making the emotion less available by hiding it under a bunch of concepts and propositions.
Instead, I have booked a “trauma mapping” session for next week. It’s a semi-scientific hippie thing that I tried out once with great effect. Your mileage may vary, don’t try this at home etc. More about it here:
Practice makes perfect
Kissing for the inner child
Besides the trauma mapping, I’m going to make use of Stoicism.7 Part of my stoic practice is noticing how my actions and ways of relating to the world continuously shape who I am becoming.8 To make sure I move in the right direction, I exercise vigilance9 and adjust my way of moving through the world, in order to gradually act with more skill.
I have come up with a bunch of things that I want to do in order to work on this pattern I’ve discovered. I hastily jotted them down into my todo-list as I got a bunch of insights while struggling to fall asleep on the final night on the island.10
The simplest one was to reduce the threshold for action.
For some reason, my hedonic sub-part picked french-kissing as the goal criteria for expressing attraction. My inhibitory childlike part didn’t like that very much (or at least was very scared to like it). Historically, I’d have used a high-energy state to push myself to overcome the resistance.
Now, I stayed in my low energy and embraced the youthful nature of my inhibitory part by asking people if I could kiss them on the cheek. This allowed me to substitute the “scary” interaction with one that felt less loaded, getting used to engaging in a limited form that felt safe.
Practising being sexy
Saturday evening, as I sat in the play space11, I noticed that I stopped myself from engaging with people using thoughts like "I'm not sure I can follow this up" & "I'm not sure they'd be happy keeping things at a level where I feel comfortable".12
I think these thought patterns originate from trauma13 induced by my lack of social skills during my early years. Trying to be sexy and failing carries a lot of shame. I think some part of me equates an active sex life with social prowess, and want to use intimate “success” as a way to apply band-aid to a fear of not fitting in.14
The key idea here is to figure out a way to get comfortable/practice being sexy in a container that makes it feel safe. I was inspired by the awesome fancy dinner we had on Saturday night. During the dinner, we got served by a group of “kitchen slaves”, that went around whispering hot things in our ears as they served us food.
I’d like to do something like that. Practising being hot as a game takes away a lot of the pressure. If I fail? I’m just practising. If I succeed? I’m just practising, no pressure to engage.
(side note: I know logically that I don’t need to “engage”. Emotionally, I’m raised as a man in a culture that encourages me to always be horny, and fuck at any given opportunity. While being a perfectly celibate Christian... -.-)
The good news is that I’m not alone with these kinds of issues. There are clubs for practising being sexy. It’s called burlesque. I’ve mostly heard of female-bodied people practising being sexy in such places, but they might have room for me as well. Let’s check it out. And if no clubs will take me, I'll create workshops exploring being hot. I have attended one burlesque workshop, which should be enough to host another.15
I’m also considering setting up a container for the next kink/tantra event I’m participating in. I would spend most of my time in the container, and I would explicitly communicate it to people. The container would look something like this:
I’m going to act really seductive towards pretty much everyone.
I will never escalate past light touch and proximity, even though I’ll do my best to create a lot of sexual tension.
If someone else chooses to escalate, I need time to feel into what I want and would like them to take things slowly.
Now let’s see what happens next :)
I usually feel tired during winter. I have a half-written blog post about it. I haven’t finished it because tired. duh.
Peter told me that “receptiveness”s is a better word than ”passivity” due to their respective connotations. I agree.
It’s hard to describe sexual tension just about to form. Maybe a slight pull towards the other person, an opening of the chest, and an intent/focus. I don’t know how other people experience this, since cognition is weird.
I’ve gone fully into this way of being a few times, and it’s a lot of fun.
I use lowercase t here to avoid gatekeeping
Personal development is a lot like luring a monkey to behave by decorating the right path with bananas
The philosophy, not the adjective.
Stoicism= philosophy for a skillful life
stoicism= reining in your emotions
Cognitive behavioural therapy is the bastard child of stoicism.
prosochê
Most of my great ideas come when I struggle to fall asleep. I might want to adopt the uberman sleep schedule. :D
Behind the scenes unedited footage recorded between 00:02 and 00:10 on the 4th:
= a room full of mattresses where people are intimate all around.
We had consent flyers posted where it was written:
”What is my motivation for asking the other
person to consent to something? Am I
hoping to convince them to do something I
want to do?
Try this alternative out for a moment:
imagine desiring only for the other person
to have the most joyful, empowered and
fulfilling experience that they can in this
moment, with no regrets”
I think this is a good nudge for most people, but for me, it’s actively harmful. I need to feel into my wants. Questioning my motivations gives room for the inhibitory response to engage. Also, wanting the other person to have an experience with a bunch of superlatives is a rather high bar for engagement. Can’t it be enough for them to enjoy themselves?
again, lowercase t
This may be related to the other inhibitory response that pushes down attraction. In IFS, it’s common for multiple parts to gang together when they share interests; I might have a celibacy alliance in my head. yay.
If you think it’s weird to host a workshop in order to learn something, you haven’t heard of “cocreation”. ;)