Why explore Core Erotic Themes as practitioners?

The ability to be in choice while holding space for another in highly altered states of arousal is the key ethical signature of Sexological Bodywork. Our response flexibility as practitioners can be grown from somatically bringing our awareness with radical acceptance, which involves not taking action for aspects of our erotically charged pursuit of gratification and fulfilment. This, if we can bear the intensity of it, enhances our ability to facilitate another’s erotic embodiment with kind acceptance.

Erotic embodiment practices can be understood as ways of integrating aspects of ourselves that have been inhibited by shame.

Trusting spontaneity in intimate decision-making and entering into and emerging from altered states of arousal without emotional hangovers requires learning foundational micro-skills of The Wheel of Consent and The Right Use of Power alongside breathwork, Body Focusing, and Body Poem practices that support emotional and erotic regulation. With these micro-skills, it is possible to ride the waves, swim with the currents and experience somatic openings.

Jack Morin, in his book 'The Erotic Mind' proposes that "our most compelling turn-ons are shaped by one unifying scenario," our core erotic theme (CET).

"Hidden within your core erotic theme is a formula for transforming unfinished emotional business from childhood and adolescence into excitation and pleasure" (p. 141). 

Understanding our core erotic themes is essential for our self-awareness. Understanding the influences that unconsciously motivate us towards erotic integration can help us recognise patterns and own the place from where we teach. There have been many fallen angels in our profession with heart and genital-felt intentions who have adversely impacted clients due to core erotic theme blindspots not being recognised and acted upon. 

It can be rare to experience erotic experiences outside of attraction. The trust that our professional boundaries as Sexuality Practitioners are firmly in place requires extensive practice in the Wheel of Consent and being well-versed inside-out with the right use of power understanding. 

When we understand the power differentials of our roles with clients and the hazards of dual roles, we can facilitate others the rare experience of an erotic experience that is free of relational obligations or expectations. 

This rarity is also exclusive to sex workers who fulfil private opportunities for people to act out erotic scenarios and receive from a menu needs and wants for intimacy, adventure, surrender, power, being loved, appreciated, de-stressed, etc. However, due to the 'all in' nature of this work, many sex workers experience what is called sex worker burnout, delivering their bodies out of the range of their authentic optimum generosity. Treatment model menu work fulfilling fantasies may not always be helpful or needed for intention-impact congruence. In this work, there are many ruptures and emotional hangovers for both clients and sex workers in a practice where training in boundaries is often learnt through hard and painful lessons. 

Healing with sex can be a bit like going to a funeral to say goodbye and weeping for all the times we were afraid and weeping with joy, letting go of what we have felt burdened with, liberating our bodies into pleasure and well-being. Healing with sex and eros is simultaneously pleasurable in the creation and excruciatingly painful in birth. This is life as a human being when we can feel it all. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, laying to rest what burnt us before.

The safety structures of the Wheel of Consent and the Right Use of Power are essential to protect practitioners from working outside of optimum generosity and also from acting out their blind spots, but these alone may not be sufficient once a practitioner is at the effect of altered states. A client may approach a sex worker or a sexological bodyworker to facilitate the new ways of being or changes of state they want. The main differences between sex workers and sexological bodyworkers are our intentions, boundary limits, coaching models and strategies for facilitating this.

Sexological Bodywork facilitates opportunities for transcending the limiting factors of repeating erotic role-play scenarios and facilitates sensate-focused eroticism free from the limitations of meaning and context primarily influencing decisions for pleasure. This supports us in accessing the direct routes to pleasure through the senses and the body, focusing on notice - value - trust - and voice.

Our core erotic themes can be understood to originate from inner hidden drivers attracting us to experience opportunities for integration and empowerment from times in our lives held in "implicit" memory where we might have lost our agency.

Jaak Panksepp opens some perspectives to understanding the nature of these hidden drivers from his research, where he discovered neural networks that are activated in response to experiences in service not just to survive but to thrive. He named these the emotional command systems that we share with all mammals. These are parts of the brain that, when activated, produce an evolutionary behavioural response. Our mid-prefrontal cortex continually monitors our "system" to activate the appropriate response to balance our emotional and physical regulation." 

We are magnetically attracted to re-create situations and play with them in the hope of integrating them. The PLAY and LUST systems together mobilise implicit memories held in exile. Our upper cortical structures reframe these memories into sequenced language so that they can be integrated and restored in explicit memory.

Only when we consciously accept all of our parts can natural intelligence bring us back into harmony and integration. Working with sexuality and harnessing eros is fire medicine (as the phoenix fire people of the Deer Tribe say). Fire only burns us with eros to feel what we might have felt before. If we are not equipped with enough support to brave the heat while burning where we were burnt before, we can get burnt all over again. We need CARE while burning our grief. 

Play is the most heavily Dopamine-rewarded drive of all the primary drivers and determines the rules of engagement in all erotic activities. 

PLAY teaches us to exercise balance within the magic range of 60 - 40 win-lose and 40 - 60 lose-win. If we have repeatedly experienced higher ratios than this, e.g. 80 - 20 lose-win or the other way round, as adults, the PLAY system will be continually activated to redress this imbalance. 

BDSM practices are an expression of this PLAY system seeking balance. BDSM often exercises 70 - 30, 80 - 20, 90 - 10 scenarios and in extreme power play exercises 100 - zero - the ultimate surrender of death with deathlike experiences of dorsal vagus immobilisation. Playing with dorsal vagus mobilisation, with and without safety simultaneously, can potentially integrate the gravest of exiled implicit memory when the dorsal vagus is immobilised in receiving the data of a terrifying experience. 

This is sometimes understood under the heading of shadow play. Literally, activating the play emotional command system, often with the interplay of the LUST system, to repair and bring into recovery exiled memories, in the excruciating birthing from shame into the kindest witness with the weeping release of toxic hormones and laughing relief that "I didn't die again". 

Kindness, acceptance, and care are crucial when these terrified and helpless aspects of the self are risking life again, risking love again, coming out of hiding, and being seen. It is a double tragedy when people play in rituals of BDSM without care and kindness. It can become another trauma; deepening the neural networks of the old one or power over / power under PLAY can create new trauma. New adult trauma is different to developmental trauma, but it can hitch onto memory channels of developmental trauma, compounding them. 

Hidden danger ganglion loops. Betrayals cause damage to our autonomic nervous system and can alert our "hidden danger circuitry" into chronic activation. The "hidden danger circuit" is a ganglion loop in the subcortical structures of the brain responsible for its title. Once an unexpected danger has been remembered, this circuitry will ever be on the lookout for this happening again. Once betrayed, we are always sensitive and easily alerted to this happening again. The job of this part of the brain is to look out for hidden, unexpected dangers. There is a biochemical "feel good" reward for discovering the danger in service to our survival. That's why it might feel so pleasurable to "see" the "tiger in the grass" and to play "peek-a-boo". 

The Love Trade

When loving radical acceptance becomes limerence
 

Love in its widest capacity can be understood as radical acceptance.

Kindness is the manifestation of integration - Daniel Seigel

When we love, we are giving our focus of attention and opening our sensory receptivity with acceptance, alchemically satiated with feelings of gratitude.  In these states of being, love is an emergent process of senses opening with kind acceptance and gratitude. Love in these states does not want anything different to happen; we can refer to this as radical acceptance.

Radical acceptance is the love we experience when witnessing another without wanting to change them. We are learning how to love in this way as practitioners when we witness another by honouring and trusting their emergent self-organising intelligence with kind acceptance.

It's easier to be kind and accepting when we have acknowledged, understood, grieved, repaired, and learned from memories where kindness was lost. We can understand this as a process of integration that frees up these aspects of the self from projecting their resolution onto others. When we no longer need to project into others, we feel much safer receiving them just as they are. This is kindness manifesting.

There are moments when neutral, kind, accepting receptivity activates wanting more 

At this point, these ingredients of gratitude in this emergent alchemical process are becoming recognised as food for our hearts. In these moments, our focus of attention might subtly move between receptivity with emerging sensory data and satiation and gratification. If we discover hunger in this emergent process for loving or being loved, our receptivity might subtly shift between recognising gratification and wanting more of it. Once wanting is activated, our focus of attention naturally seeks strategies to satiate this.

Love can become a powerful commodity when "wanting to love and be loved again" is recognised by our hearts and guts to seek these ingredients of gratitude from others.

Once love has become food that we consciously recognise we want, we can co-create relationship agreements, take action to love and "take in" another as food for our hearts or "allow" ourselves to be loved and taken in by another. The degrees to which love is recognised consciously are the degrees to which this "love trading" in taking and allowing is conscious.

Love that has been recognised in these ways can become a gift, and, in this context, loving and being loved can be understood to be in the "Take-Allow" quadrants of the Wheel of Consent.

Loving and being loved as gifts are magnified or diminished by how digestible these are, with meanings, context, and associations influencing our acceptance of the difference between grateful digestion and indigestibility.

Receptivity, being loved and receiving another with loving acceptance, can also be understood to be influenced, like any somatic opening, by Betty Martin's "Three components of pleasure" model. In unique combinations, in relation to meanings and contexts, sensory communications from the interior of our bodies, as well as exteroception, influence receptivity. These two influences determine our focus on wanting to receive less or more. 

We discover limits with our capacities to love and accept another into our hearts and/or receive being loved in another's heart. Love is not a gift when meanings, context and associations counter-indicate acceptance; without acceptance, there is no gratitude.

Gratitude is a core human need, and we can feel hollow without it. Feeling hollow inside can become an ache that hurts until it is recognised. Desires to be filled with the gratitude of loving or being loved might intensify to soothe and satiate aspects of the self exiled from loving and being loved.

When engaging with this process, we play with elemental parts of ourselves that can mobilise an expansive range of intense sensations and emotional affect. 

The love trade

These ingredients can be bought and sold, exchanged for, bartered for, given and received, seduced and allowed, hunted and hunted for, chased for and run away from and commodified in many ways. However, radical acceptance of love is not necessarily found in searching for versions of it; it will be found when we have loved and been loved enough. This is the precious job of sex workers and sacred intimates, loving the unlovable and allowing themselves to be taken.

Loving and being loved is about care, play, lust, protection, belonging and all the fears of the intensity of feeling it or losing it. Beyond fear is an emergent process where the radical acceptance of love is discovered and found.

It is in the intensities of wanting love where limerence arises

When lonely aspects of ourselves become hungry, limerence arises, powerfully bringing alive our wild animals from within, mobilising us to hunt and seek out loving and being loved. Limerence is a physiological hormonal state sometimes referred to as the honeymoon period. The intensity of the hormonal and nervous system responses can feel like being engulfed in hedonistic waves of no return, eating or being eaten alive. 

... and we can drown in the digestion of this honey, in the craving for it, with fears of losing it. This is very different to the radical acceptance of love and requires management and regulation to support response flexibility with our emotions and to support others with theirs. As practitioners holding a duty of care, it is essential for us to manage our response flexibility with strong limerence.

Fire Medicine

Feeling loved and loving in our sensual sexual, erotic, intimate expressions are core for us human beings. We each have unique imprints of feeling loved, receiving love and loving. Some of us have experienced catastrophic breaches in feeling safe with love. As practitioners, we are facilitating somatic practices that offer routes into reconnecting with love. In the sacred intimate role, this is called "fire medicine" (for example, in the Quodoushka teachings) for good reason, as it is often the fastest way to integrate exiled parts of the self and the fastest way to get burnt in this quest.

As sexuality practitioners, we may not be practising sacred intimacy, but we are in the love trade practising fire medicine.

People seek practitioners to feel more love and acceptance with themselves and to welcome this love in relationships. 

... and, feeling more love comes with it, the grief where love was lost.

We have defence mechanisms to support ourselves feeling less if it has been recognised as painful. These include shallow breathing and tightening muscular structures around the heart to inhibit our capacities to love and be loved, avoiding the excruciating pain of losing belonging. Therefore, It can be a big deal to breathe more deeply.

Without interoceptive awareness, we are at the effect of the indirect routes to pleasure, often driven by romantic or fetish associations, fears and co-dependency. When interception is inhibited, we are disabled from making decisions based on the direct routes to pleasure and harmony, and these might be the very reasons a client has approached us for help. However, when we invite the other to breathe more deeply to enhance interoceptive awareness, we do not know what lies inside waiting to be felt, where harmony and feeling through the senses might have been once interrupted. 

The responsibility of breathing more deeply

To take responsibility for this, one must be conscious of what it means to breathe more deeply and feel more sensations in focused touch exercises.

Waking up the hands can also wake up the heart

Deep breathing expands and relaxes the diaphragm, massaging the heart's muscular and cellular structures. Lost and shut-down hopes and dreams, losses, grief, terror, longings, desires, wishes, wants, needs, passions or lusts are embedded in our hearts. Waking up what we are tender with, opening up our receptivity, and listening to the callings and memories of our hearts can make us feel vulnerable. It can awaken times when we experience grief arrested in time. Idolisation of the therapist, teacher, and the person holding the duty of care is a developmental natural stage of defence against such feelings of vulnerability. For these reasons, the Wheel of Consent Practices should only be practised at first in small episodes with reflection and integration time built-in

It's a natural defence mechanism to project out all this love that’s been held at bay unexpressed when it overwhelms capacities to feel. 

Confusion with gratitude

Gratitude is the first expression that I notice when another person receives new insights and expands awareness, understanding, and perspectives. It may arise from somatic practices or from simply feeling understood after loneliness.

This is sometimes a signal that the projection defence mechanism is relaxing and opening, feeling safe enough to receptivity. 

It is natural to feel gratitude towards the person who has facilitated this. Here, this gratitude might tip over into feelings of love and eros that overwhelm the capacity to stay present.

This gratitude might be experienced as overwhelming with sensory receptivity awakening lost aspects of the self, and it is a natural reaction to get rid of what is too much to bear. 

Sensations in the body and corresponding associations with love can feel too much to bear. Gratitude can feel too much to bear. The romantic sexual route of discharging these feelings is a common route. The intensity of the sensations translating without differentiation can lead to acting out the impulses rather than feeling them. Most often, people do not have an alternative strategy to acting out romantically or sexually when experiencing a pressure cooker of love, gratitude and expansion of consciousness.

The person who has witnessed another with their self-expression and stayed with them is commonly the person towards whom all the love is directed. It is important to recognise that despite reactive responses, there may also be parallel processes out of sight, and they are developing capacities to bear and integrate them. 

Gratitude can develop for a person who has helped us understand our world differently or transformed our fears into feelings. This could be towards a teacher who's just given a talk, a workshop, or a practitioner holding a therapeutic space. This person has a duty of care when they are perceived as experienced, present, kind, and mature, as representing authority or expertise, and as catalysts for insights and change. It is natural to imagine that they will care for the needs of being loved. 

We can assume, for the most part, that the cultural narratives for self-expression of eros, lust, love, and sensuality are in roles that hope to guarantee belonging. It can sometimes be hard to tease apart and be present with the shifting and changing needs for bonding and closeness and needs for expansion and exploration. 

Grief and love

 Our capacity to love is our capacity to grieve. Without this capacity, we are likely to seek relief in another to discharge the intensity of it.

The capacity to love requires the capacity to grieve for past loves lost and the projection of losing love. Loving and being loved will be defended against by “falling in love,” which projects idolised parts of the self not yet appreciated into another. It is never really literally about the teacher, practitioner, therapist, coach, event, organiser, space holder, etc. But the person in the up-power role may feel gratification and understandably want to believe it is about them.

Client-centred care

Client-centred care can be seen as a guiding ethical principle for practitioners working with fire medicine. Client-centred means we put their needs and wants forward while setting aside our wants, honouring our optimum generosity and limits with our willingness. 

Our somatic practices are introduced to support learning objectives with co-created educational/therapeutic practice agreements with upfront descriptions to support the health and well-being of people who use our professional offerings. These can be with in-person or online clients and participants in our webinars and workshops.
 

Bandwidth and response flexibility

The therapist/teacher/elder/practitioner/coach/workshop facilitator/event organiser/nurse/doctor or any professional position of responsibility may be vulnerable in relation to their own relationship with love, which may get triggered into receiving idealistic projections literally. 

If the person holding a duty of care is not getting their “being loved” needs to be met or if bandwidth is reduced with life situations, e.g. when we are in pain, an adoring other will slip by codes of conduct and ethics, like water finding its way through cracks in rocks. Slippage and justifications of the situation with Jesus clauses, with talk about this being a unique situation, etc., will wash over the ink on the written pages of ethics and accountability. Suddenly we can't see the writing on the page when we are in this limerence of love. 

The writing inevitably reappears in print on the pages of mediation letters, messages from alarmed colleagues and partners, disciplinary reviews or in Facebook public humiliation posts with loss of social and professional position. The very same social position that the participant or client wants to affiliate with can result in an avoidable tragic loss of this position of power for the teacher/practitioner. This potentially leads to being exiled from belonging with professional colleagues who do not wish to affiliate with this failure of response flexibility responsibility.

When love is expressed with seduction invitations, our ability to be in humility and acceptance, with appreciation, is our first compassionate response, without literally going along with reciprocation. We understand that tenderness and grief could possibly be in there for the client/student/participant, held at bay while all the lost self-love projects come out in the hope of belonging.

Two-way touch

When we reduce distractions, limit time and focus our attention, receptivity increases the intensity of sensations and arousal, not just for our clients but also for us as practitioners.

It is important to recognise and understand that the 3-minute game and the yes / no game, where desires are being shared both ways, can lead to limerence activation. It is not an option to enter into self-trickery here, with selective negligence, imagining that this can be innocent if other motivations are not yet communicated into awareness. What can start as shallow water requests with no follow-through can quickly lead our clients and us into waters potentially out of our depths with justifications for follow-through. It is imperative to build in installation time to cool off and differentiate when the impulses are asking for more.

Stealing might result from a lack of deserving or fear of rejection when the relief of satiation is desperately needed as a break from the terror of separation. Be kind when this happens, as humiliation can exacerbate the panic system. Support the other to bravely ask for what they want with the no game so that it becomes normalised, being said no to and played with so there’s still agency when being said no to. Stealing can also occur when the practitioner offers to give a “treatment model” touch when they want to get their hands on the other.

Make everything time-limited so it’s not too immersive. Remember that differentiation is essential for containing and housing strong-feeling states so they are manageable. This offers opportunities for agency and choice with these feelings. If you can play with them and find laughter, this can break the spell, too, and relax and restart the neural networks like a reboot! 

Acknowledgement of needs, desires, and wants in the accept quadrant is needed to develop sufficient robustness in receiving gifts for self-love rather than seeking indirect love or projecting it as gifts to others. Be mindful of genital or erogenous zone requests and keep the touch to areas on the body with fewer partner engagement associations.

Getting ‘something' can relieve the torture of wanting or needing. The romantic strategy is often the only one people have in the face of these feelings. 

Fear of feeding the wild animal

Fear on the teacher or practitioner's part that this will feed it and go along with it is not necessarily true if we avoid any double messages and create clear, manageable limits, honouring enoughness and willingness. Moments of relief, of ‘soothing the pain of love,' can be massively tender, and we can be of great service here, supporting differentiation and self-care and allowing gratitude, tears, joy, and relief to be shared. 

So long as we do not act out, we are just another human being here being with and bearing witness to what it is to be human, opening ourselves to feeling more of ourselves. 

Practising the "Take" quadrant

When practising all the quadrants (when facilitating this for a client), only inhabit the"take" quadrant in small amounts of time, with parts of the body away from erogenous zones specific to this person. This might be a soothing experience of touch that calms rather than excites. 

What strategies might we need to have in place as practitioners to support NOT acting out our own erotic romantic experimental desires and keeping to limits?

The incest taboo - saying no. This taboo is useful here, as all parties can relate to this.

A practitioner's job is to keep the space safe, like a parent keeps a child safe.

We have a responsibility as a practitioner to say no to an invitation that may increase arousal. 

Useful authentic practice working with what is useful in this context. Keep your ‘yes’ to invitations in the three-minute game that are within the boundaries of the incest taboo. Say “no” to invitations that may engage your arousal. This is appropriate for your relationship with your client/student/festival workshop participant as a practitioner/teacher/holder of space. 

Practising receiving “no” and developing response flexibility is a useful exploration for any client. It will support them in being less avoidant of situations where they might be rejected by either taking without consent or withdrawing to avoid rejection.

Take the steam out of it

Take the steam out of it if you experience attraction; to support differentiation, take it to supervision. 

This gets the steam out of the want or desire so that it doesn’t follow through with self-deceptive justifications into action. 

Get to know your core erotic themes and languages of love.

• Words of appreciation

• Physical touch

• Acts of service

• Special time

• Gifts

Each of us has weak points in our limit setting. It might be that if someone asks to massage my shoulders and play with my hair, offers me some chocolate, compliments and appreciation, gives me their attention, or offers an exchange for housework, gardening or pa work. If I need any of these things, I might lean toward these invitations with my needs and desires coming forward. 

It is easy for others to penetrate our defences when our guards are down and we are in need.

Core Erotic themes are themes of attraction where there is an erotic charge in the service of rebalancing and integrating past unintegrated experiences. There could be an erotic charge with themes of acting out roles that are secret, hidden, forbidden, using power, seduction, seeking a repair, revenge, connection, expansion of consciousness, integration, appreciation, being valued, etc

Core erotic themes of gaining power through seduction can be challenging for a person in positions of power and authority to resist, and it can be damaging to allow this acting out to be successful, not just in relation to a career! 

Attraction categories and receiving gratitude

Imagine you have just delivered a lecture or workshop, and a participant comes up to you in the break and adoringly shares their gratitude for the transforming understanding they’ve received.

If they don’t fit in with your attraction categories, being kind and receiving their gratitude without acting out is easy. People can be attracted to teachers in positions of power and authority if their core erotic theme for power affiliation is seeking gratification in addition to the lecture.  

If the participant’s qualities fit in with attraction categories, it can be difficult to resist and spot when they express their attractiveness to us.

When we are within our bandwidth and have response flexibility, we can receive gratitude as a welcome gift that is about their experience. 

It is especially important to understand this deeply without taking it on board literally to reassure your own self-love.

Some examples of reactive responses

Some categories with examples of responses NOT to make to a participant, student, or client who is expressing desire, love, or attraction toward us. 

• Externalising authority  

• Shaming, interpretative diagnostic, rejecting responses as a defensive response 

• Literally colluding with Limerence 

• Avoiding responding with selective negligence

• Literalising the invitation from the client

Some examples might be   - “Sorry I’m in a relationship already” , “Sorry I’m not in love with you” , “I’m flattered, thank you”, “Yes, I am lovable!" , “I don’t have sexual romantic relationships with people who are paying for my service ”, “This is just projected erotic transference” , “Let us explore this and see where it leads us” , “Let us follow our hearts” “I feel for you too” ,“I feel for you too, but my code of ethics says I can’t act in this” ,“my partner would get upset if we got together” ,“you’ve got attached and dependant and I need to refer you to someone else’,“I experience you as being over-demanding and doing this for my attention” (This example was revealed in a public disciplinary procedure after the practitioner handled the limerence with collusion followed by defensive manoeuvres) ,“I feel repulsed by you and don’t find you attractive”  (implies, if I did find you attractive, it would be a different response),“avoid eye contact and shut down being receptive and empathetic with them’, “Let's talk about something different” ,"Let's play the 3-minute game together to safely share our desires with each other”,“I can give you an erotic massage to help with these desires” 

These all potentially exacerbate the torture of unattainable love and shut down the possible therapeutic gains of moving through these strong emotional affect states into integrated maturity and awareness with self-managing response flexibility. 

Any of the above is potentially a re-traumatising experience if we attempt to change the state rather than bear its intensity with horizontal acceptance and naming of the sensations and story themes being expressed. 

When seeking to be felt and heard, these strong emotions can activate the parts of us also longing to be soothed with whatever it takes to take away the pain of vulnerability. We must NOT resort to sweet-giving, as keeping things sweet is actually toxic.

What strategies and supports might be useful for us as practitioners when at the effect of limerence?

• Body Focusing to support transferring partner engagement into the direct routes to pleasure

• Clean language to support differentiation from immersion 

• Body Poem to support understanding of hidden agenda 

• Self-regulation to support response flexibility with movement and breath 

• Supervision to support us with witnessing and reflections on our feelings so we don’t take our needs to clients/students. 

• Private therapy/bodyworkErotic/romantic partners who are peers or partnerships external to the professional worlds we inhabit 

• Listening pairs or peer supervision

What capacities do we need?

• Empathy to support kindness and non-hierarchical acceptance

• Resilience to bear witness and empathetically feel strong feelings without interrupting, soothing, making better, merging with, distracting from, acting on or changing. 

• Emotional fluency with receiving another person's ‘ no' without tumbling into feelings of rejection 

• Emotional fluency with saying no and setting and maintaining limits with a simultaneous appreciation of the other's relationship to being said 'no’ to. 

• Ability to shift awareness and focus back into the direct routes of pleasure and presence through touching an object, for example.

Now that we’ve found love, what are we gonna do with it?

As eros is being expressed - bear it and be with it with horizontal acceptance.

 Honour the expression of it.

• Emotional fluency to shift the focus of the limerence into curiosity and a conversation naming the desire in the room and keeping it company, resisting sharing our feelings or charge we might be having in response to the client/student. This is rarely helpful - take it to supervision.

• Ask about what they are noticing in their body through body focusing.

• Ask what it is like to notice these sensations and feelings to support differentiation and grounding.

• Body Poems can be useful for uncovering unmet needs and helping differentiate projections directed toward the other. 

• Ask about the historical experiences of these feelings to support possible insights.

• Describe the process of relaxing the muscular and cellular structures of the heart through embodiment exercises to feel more of ourselves and open up our gratitude, which naturally can translate into love. 

• This gratitude signals that we have started to open our senses and feelings. Vulnerability and fears of getting lost or overwhelmed are common during this opening.

• This is part of the process that understandably feels painful at times. It can feel painful to feel love again when it's been held at bay by grief and fears of loss. Alongside the heart, the thymus gland, which protects the heart and what matters, is also being massaged awake, activating inner protectors and vigilance.

It can feel awful, vulnerable, and intoxicating, like life depends on it. The make-believe of romantic love can create momentary relief from the longing, e.g., imagined satiation, and extinguish the torturous anticipation of unmet needs seeking help.

Remember that this is a transient phase - it’s not a forever fairytale love that we must go along with. 

Support content and context reframe of love transferring, sublimating it from partner romantic fairytale strategy to self-care, self-nurture, self-love, self-pleasure, creativity, singing, poetry, painting, and dancing. Throughout time, the greatest art pieces have been created out of the torturous feelings of unbearable love being awakened in the heart and unrequited.

Sensations that we can all recognise like stomach-wrenching, tingling, butterflies, shoulders tightening, genitals throbbing, arse clenching, heart palpitations, heart aching, nipples tightening, sweating, volatile body temperature, face flushing, head swimming, foggy, fuzzy or dizzy,  rampant inner dialogue about predictions and regrets, all signify the sympathetic nervous system and a hormonal cocktail of the LUST, PANIC, CARE, RAGE, PLAY, SEEKING and FEAR emotional command systems searching for a solution to this vulnerability and distress. 

Body focusing and Body Poem support increased capacity to bear strong feeling states and to name and house them in manageable forms.