Healthy Sexuality: A BodyMind Perspective

Healthy Sexuality: A BodyMind Perspective

Annie Brook, MA LPC

Healthy sexuality is a congruent connection with our basic life-force and vitality. It includes a physical, emotional, energetic and spiritual capacity for living. I believe that healthy sexuality emerges when there is congruency among our thoughts, emotions, and sensations.  As a clinical therapist and former Director of Body Psychology for the Masters program in Somatic Psychology (at Naropa University), it is important that sexuality be included in understanding human nature. In the following paper, I look at aspects that contribute to sexual well-being and give suggestions of how to support this from a bodymind perspective. In addition, I present a few case studies of how I have used body-based interventions in clinical practice when the presenting problem is related to sexual difficulties. These interventions are the ones I most commonly use. My practice is directed toward a more healthy population with sufficient boundaries in place to work toward intimacy. I would not use certain aspects of this material if there were severe psychosis present.

I have written this article in a manner that includes both a clinical perspective and an artistic musing. As therapists, there is an artistry to our work that allows the healing to occur. Sexuality is a very strong and powerful subject. It draws on personal and mythic resources in order to be present for its unique and varied expression. In working with healthy sexuality, I have found that my inner musings support me to keep an open mind. It is this level that brings forth the humanity of treatment, while the keen clinical knowledge supports skillful re patterning of intimate sexual issues.

In writing this article, I asked myself the following questions:

How do we support healthy sexuality in clients without using touch? How do we help those who have experienced sexual abuse reclaim physical and emotional sexual pleasure? How do we guide the awakening of the sensual body? How can we create contexts to explore the difference between sexuality and sensuality? How can we support interested parties in their further study of a sacred sexuality?

Healthy sexuality includes much more than sex and sex is a wonderful expression of intimate loving. Healthy sexuality can be expressed in our mannerisms, our playfulness, and our sense of thriving in the world. When people are connected to their bodies in an embodied and organic way, they have an organic and healthy sexuality. You can sense this; it shows as a quality of playfulness, presence and vitality. When sexuality is shared with an intimate partner, it is a renewing experience for the heart, mind, and soul. Sexuality, when grounded in sensual support, is pleasurable.

When this is not the case, I look for the cognitive and emotional imprinting that impedes the body's organic sexual flow. Rather than seeing sexuality as an "issue" I focus on embodiment as a resource. When this resource is activated, sexual issues seem to fade away.

Emotional Intimacy

In order for healthy sexuality to be embodied, the capacity for emotional intimacy must be present. This includes the ability to be emotionally intimate with the self, as well as another person. Nothing seems to detour sexual pleasure between couples more than emotional blocks. These blocks often arise when people feel scared, angry, sad or withdrawn. Emotions physically block the energy of the body and create an internal disconnection. The ability to feel, think, and act in a congruent manner is gone.

BodyMind psychotherapy supports congruency of expression and the ability to be in contact with others by teaching people to sequence emotional energy through their bodies. Rather than build to a catharsis point, the energy is moved as it arises, and expressed with the entire body. People will often constrict their body when emotionally upset. They hold their breath, tighten their muscles, and tense their organs. Making the body smaller and more tight inside turns the body into a pressure cooker. That pressure can either explode or implode, rather than sequence to completion in an organic natural way. The pressure creates all kinds of creatively harmful behaviors, such as emotional outbursts, sarcastic or self deprecating speech, whining and victimization, chilly resentful attitudes, withdrawal, and health problems, to name a few. None of these expressions exhibit a healthy sexual foundation, and lead to lack of an emotional as well as sexual connection. 

To stay in contact when there is an emotional charge, I teach people to come into the body through sensation, and to send the energy down through their tail and pelvic floor. I ask them to push down into the earth, rather than out at another person. I ask them to feel the counter-push from the earth and use it as a support to reach toward the other person even when upset or afraid.  To successfully communicate, people learn to sequence energy from the tail and legs out through the face and head and hands. They learn to use their entire body as a resource.

Communication

Verbal communication is an important aspect of healthy sexuality and intimacy. In BodyMind Psychotherapy, this is seen as sequencing energy through the throat into embodied speech. Words connect with feelings. Cognition is available when the mind is not in reaction. In BMP, we help people sequence sound and speech through the throat, and learn to value the use of the voice as important as any of their limbs.

Once the energy can express through the voice, I think skillful verbal communication tools are important and essential. Sometimes people who are very 'body' oriented have a hard time with verbal dialog. Here it is important to introduce supportive methods that demystify skillful communication.

A common communication dilemma is that people often confuse feelings with thoughts. It is common to hear in the midst of heated dialog, "I feel like you are making me..." Instead I suggest people become more aware of their own reactions. I ask them to identify the behavior that is upsetting, identify their thoughts that the behavior evokes, the feelings that follow their thought, and their own behavioral response. I then work with them to identify what they wished would happen in a given situation, and to ask the other person how they might co-create that outcome. If the other party is not available for co-creation, I ask the client to be responsible for making a request and to determine a personal behavioral consequence if the request is consistently dishonored. This planning provides the cognitive support for behavioral change. When the body is congruent in thinking, feeling, and acting, and able to handle intensity, this cognitive support can give enough awareness for thoughtful dialog.

Spiritual Connection

When the emotions are intimate and the physical body pleasured and opened, people "feel" love. This feeling often takes them from the personal to the transpersonal. They feel their longing for the divine within themselves, and within their marriage. I believe what is being felt is the release of hormones into the blood via the endocrine system. This is where the physical and the mystical merge. On the physical level, the endocrine glands get charged and activated. The gonads, which are a prime driver of the sexual force, are endocrine. These gonads are linked to an entire body system, the endocrine system.

The endocrine glands release chemical hormones into the blood that affect our emotional and physical well-being. I think the endocrine glands are involved in contemplative and meditative states. Certain traditions I have studied, such as Buddhist, Hindu and  Native American, direct energy through chakra points during meditation. Chakra means 'turning wheel,' and it is believed that meditation can open, balance and activate these centers to increase the capacity for energy to flow through the body. This flow is deemed necessary for health.

Through personal exploration and my studies in BodyMind Centering® (BMC), I sense that at every point where a chakra is located, there is an endocrine gland. I think these glands activate during sexual expression, and form a core channel of energy that runs through the core channel of the body. This force could be the kundalini spoken of in mystical traditions. Kundalini is often represented in art as two snakes weaving a dance from the base of the spine to the head.

A physical correlation of the glands to the energetic placements of the chakras appears to follow the Hindu and Native American Cherokee chakra systems that use seven centers. Biologically, the first chakra located at the base of the spine hosts the coccygeal body. It is located just anterior to the tailbone, or coccyx. In BMC, the coccygeal body is thought to influence the cerebral spinal fluid. It is called a body because it is not yet known how its secretions affects us. As we move through the chakras, it appears that the gonads support the second chakra, the adrenals and the glandular part of the pancreas support the third, the sinoatrial node of the heart and the thymus support the fourth, and the thyroid/parathyroid support the fifth. As we move into the glands of the head we find the pineal and pituitary supporting the sixth chakra, and the mammillary bodies supporting the seventh or crown chakra.

In sexual meditative practices, the energy moves in a wave through this core channel known as the "sushumna", and leads to an altered state of consciousness. The chakras are seen to link into this channel and help us move from the personal to the transpersonal via our glandular system. Healthy sexuality can open these centers and integrate the longing for the divine into an experience of embodied divinity.

In metaphysical terms, the sexual force is called kundalini. It is symbolized as a divine serpent rising up from the base of the spine into the crown of the head. The "tantric" meditations that are used to open the kundalini move through the core of the body. In embodiment practice, learning to sequence energy all the way to the core supports an integrated sense of self.

Boundaries and Sexual Intimacy

Intimacy, heart bonding, sexual union and merging of energetic forces in the body are part of the fulfilling sexual response. To move this much energy, there must be a psychological capacity to be enough boundaried in order to feel self, and enough unbounded to merge in union.

To support this work of boundary, I work at the level of the physical membranes. The membrane of a cell is semi-permeable and can let in things it chooses while keeping other unwanted things away. The skin is the largest membrane, and the cellular membrane one of the smallest. Organs have membranes, as well as the organelles inside cells. There is a vast resource of membrane tissue in the body. When people learn to feel their own membranes they have more availability for the direct contact that intimacy requires.

One of the premises of BodyMind Centering, which is a core influence on BodyMind Psychotherapy, is that support precedes movement. Building in support at early levels of sensation-based learning provides the safety, physical resource, and integration for more complex relating.

I have spoken of spiritual yearning, physical support for energy and emotions, skillful communication, and how to learn resources of healthy boundaries to develop a capacity for intimacy. Following I give some examples of how these concepts are applied in clinical practice. 

Case Studies

I will give a few examples of the effectiveness of using developmental movement interventions. (For further understanding, see my book From Conception to Crawling: A Foundation for Developmental Movement). A psychotherapy client requested treatment because of a lack of interest in sexuality. As I watched her body, I noticed she held herself in a stiff and rigid manner. Rather than focusing on sexuality, I chose to focus on movement and sensuality. I introduced her to developmental movement and the support of the pre vertebrate patterns. Through these she discovered horizontal rotation of her organs and spine through the mouthing reflex and freed her body of its rigidity so she could begin to feel sensual pleasure. As she deepened her physical integration and movement ability she began to experience sexual interest and desire. Over time the sexuality issue disappeared.

Another client was hypersensitive to touch. This particularly escalated when her husband wanted to make love. Sara (a fictitious name used to ensure privacy) had no known nor assumed history of sexual abuse. She did have a medical condition with symptoms that consisted of very tight vaginal walls that made intercourse extremely painful. Doctors were unable to discover a biological reason for the nerves to contract the muscles in such a manner. When Sara and I discussed her treatment and the issues she was striving to resolve, Sara exhibited heightened alert qualities. Her breathing increased and her gaze darted about. Her trunk became taut, and she appeared to hold in her organs. Rather than focus on sexuality or sexual touch, I decided to design treatment using the BMC premise of 'support precedes movement', and help Sara find physical and emotional support for her body to relax. My goal was to help Sara be able to speak of sexual issues and touch issues without tightening her body tissue, or scaring herself.

To support this, I encouraged Sara to follow the pre vertebrate developmental patterns. These help a person develop connection with sensation. Through lying on the floor Sara became aware of tension in her organs. As she learned to yield into the support of the floor and relax ( a process of finding active yield in tissue tone awareness), Sara deepened her breathing. Her organs softened and we worked to help the organs support a balance in the nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system, which engages organs, could be a support for the sympathetic nervous system, which engages muscles. Through this body awareness, Sara eventually became able to speak about sex without a fear response. This took a number of sessions, as Sara progressively let waves of fear and tension move through her body. Each wave of released fear would be followed by a deeper relaxation.

As Sara felt more at ease, she became curious about her heightened response. Sara began eventually to trace this to preverbal exchanges between herself and her mother, who is a paranoid schizophrenic. At the time of Sara's birth, her mother was neither in treatment nor on medications. Sara knew that when her mother was a child, her sister had died. As an adult in her first pregnancy, Sara's mother appeared to have projected this fear of death onto Sara, constantly watchful that Sara would not also die. Following Sara's birth, her mom lit a prayer candle and dressed her in blue every day for 5 years to ward off evil spirits and to pray that Sara would continue to live. This was an intense experience for Sara as a young child. We wondered if that intense fear were projected into Sara during her time in utero (a time when she was naturally more unbounded) and might be at the core of Sara's distress.

Slowly Sara began to release and work with her fear. Through following the sensations of her body, and staying present to her responses, Sara learned to both contain and sequence her fear. I next worked with her to distinguish between sexual touch and sensual touch, and to find her own comfort with each. I worked with her to awaken the sensual body. Finally I worked with her to find desire and satisfaction, and how to sequence this to completion using the developmental actions. Sara became able to feel her love for her husband more strongly than her fear, and because of her awakened sensual foundation, her own natural desire for sexual intimacy.