Learning Intimacy

Many of us experience anxiety, confusion and unfulfilled longing in our connection to others. Much of this is based on a lack of experiential understanding – the felt sense knowledge – of genuine emotional intimacy and connection.

“Learning intimacy” in this context means exploring through alive interpersonal experience (through actual engagement) how contact and emotional intimacy are established whilst allowing the exchange to deepen your capacity for relational connection. I offer you guidance to observe this ‘alive’ contact and the resulting intimacy through different channels and pathways which we humans can use to form emotional and energetic connections.

For example this may be exploring contact in the mind-space where we can differentiate our normal “narrative driven” conversational contact from a meeting in spacious-openness, strongly related to our true conscious presence.

Or it may be venturing into the area of heart-centred contact and intimacy: here we can meet and experience acceptance, warmth and a more love based connection. For some this can bring some anxiety if the experience of heart based intimate connection in childhood has also been experienced as a threat.

Other pathways are equally important, though often less clearly experienced and understood. For example the connection to others in the belly centre with its qualities of “embodied will”, or pathways related to touch which can be deeply grounding for our intimate relating. Here we can learn to differentiate fears and tensions around erotic/intimate experience from deep presence within a peaceful and spacious, emotional-energetic intimacy freed from our ego-driven aims.

In the sessions I offer you can train to navigate contact and intimacy with skill and lightness while allowing the experience of your intimacy with friends, loved ones and partners to deepen.

What is my role:

As your guide, you can ask me to support you in becoming more aware of your intimate connection capacities and to help you strengthen different pathways, qualities and forms of connection. The aim is for you to establish greater freedom both in choosing how exactly you want to become intimate as well as increasing your choices around the level of closeness and intimacy in different contexts and relationships.

What happens in a session:

One could describe the work as a kind of “relational meditation”. We sit and allow different forms of contact to evolve naturally. As it is a guided enquiry you can learn specifically which channel of contact is easy for you and which might not be so easy or even might bear historical fear or insecurity.

All this happens naturally in a very slow and focused exchange which you might find quite effortless. We tend to look at one area of contact at a time, with all its learning and nourishment. It’s fun to observe contact and emotional intimacy in this way rather than falling into the often-experienced overwhelm when trying to relate intimately outside such a safe structure.

Through this very slowed-down and calmly contemplated experience you become more and more expert in guiding your own intimacy and contact process with a sense of clarity, understanding depth and safety. Going forward this helps you looking after your own contact and intimacy needs more fully.