18 Sep Self Touch as an erotic embodied practice

I found this snippet amazing to help us understand how important it is to love our bodies. Retraining the nervous system and soothing the spirit with pleasure. Discover how your body works and finally be able to express your erotic intelligence to your partner. Orgasmic Yoga or Mindful Pleasure is the key to your lasting connection to your body and spirit.

Unconstricted Pleasure ~ Breaking Through the ice.

What is it ?
A learning opportunity to practice, develop, and maintain a beautiful loving relationship with your body and your genitals.

What will it help me to do ?
Allow yourself to let go of shame, and experience life through the eyes of loving acceptance and enjoyment.

Here are some ideas about what it has been used for by others but don’t limit yourself you are an individual so what you want may be different and that is wonderful!

Helpful Tips for your Self Practice.

Here are four ways to relax chronic constrictions during arousal:

1. Get aroused–then do stretching, yoga or dance while keeping yourself in an erotic state. If you start to lose your sexual arousal, stop stretching or dancing, focus again on building arousal and then go back to movement.
2. Receive a Sexological Bodywork session or an erotic massage from a lover where the giver works on relaxing and awakening the muscles while you masturbate. This process calls attention to areas of tension and pleasure.
3. Practice mindful masturbation in a hot bath where the heat helps relax the muscle constrictions. Some folks find it impossible to get aroused in hot water because their arousal needs to be supported by muscle tension.
4. Repeat the same stroke ten or fifty times while paying attention to the nuance of the sensation. This practice often takes us into deep awareness. This is a pleasurable form of the Buddhist vipassana meditation.

Pleasure; is the interplay between both excitement/arousal and enjoyment/bliss.
The vast majority of westerners receive no education in accessing and savoring pleasure. In fact, we are conditioned to avoid accessing states of excitement and states of bliss. We are all familiar with the statements of this anti-embodiment education: “Quiet down,” “Sit still,” “Keep your hands to yourself,” “Don’t breathe fast, you’ll get dizzy,” “Don’t touch yourself down there.”
Self-pleasuring is the foundation of our potential to love and be loved.

Self-administrated touch integrates, soothes or comforts, and gives us a psychologically fundamental sense of worthiness and competence – which is commonly called “self-esteem.” It is the antidote to shame. The “skin envelope” defines where, and how, we are in our sensual and existential foundation – the capacity to engage in active self-stimulation of our own skin envelope is thus essential to the formation of a healthy and happy sense of “self” in at least five ways.

First, self-stimulation “in-forms” or integrates our child. It informs us where the sensual space of our “self” has it’ margins, that sensual boundary where – so to speak – “self” appears to end and the rest of the “world” appears to begin. Thus, returning to the process of self-stimulation, and knowing one has the intentional ability to choose such a return, centers our “self” in a profoundly healthy sense.

Second, pleasurable self-touching soothes or comforts us when we are distraught, by alleviating our fearful anxieties, and indeed by helping us – at least to some degree – to achieve a letting-go of our judgmental mind, our fear-based patterns of thinking. The gentle enjoyment of touching grounds experience in the present moment, and quietens the chattering mind.
Third, these abilities, which serve reliably to ground ourselves in our bodies and to center ourselves in pleasure, are the wellspring of our sense of being loveable. By this, I mean that we come to feel basically worthy and competent in our sense of being-in-the-world. As this occurs, we become able to experience more clearly the extent to which our world is trustworthy.

When these three contributions of self-touching are facilitated, self-pleasuring constitutes and catalyzes our most basic human capacities of feeling lovable, of being able to love and of finding spiritual bliss. However, when these three contributions of self-touching to physical and emotional development are interrupted, egotism substitutes for what I am calling a “healthy sense of self.”

Disturbances in these developments of self-touching, the progression from being touched to touching ourselves, lead to profound unhappiness throughout our lives – by which I refer to the extent that we all wrestle with psychotic, neurotic, and addictive processes. Psychoanalysis shows us how everyone suffers, to some degree, from these constituents to our personality. We also know that the psychotic, neurotic, and addictive components to our mental functioning.
From the book Sexual Health and Erotic Freedom by Barnaby Barratt Ph.D.