Stories

A month ago, I had completed a coaching process with a one-of-a-kind woman. She had come to me while being in a relationship. Although she was attracted to her man, although the attraction was mutual, she did not feel at all in her own waters – this is a Romanian expression.

She was grieving the fact she couldn’t feel almost any pleasure. And she wanted to feel that with him. And it hurt her that even though she had his understanding and his support, she still could not open-up and relax. She felt something was missing. She couldn’t understand what.

“I cannot enjoy! I’m stricken when I want to be available to him and sometimes I just do not feel like doing anything. Not that I never feel like that, but I often feel hastened & grabbed when he approaches me. I feel there’s just oo much without being asked or waited a bit. Without any form of wanting in that moment. Why don’t I want to? Why can’t I? Why don’t I feel? ”

We initially started with the idea of ​​exploring all the physical practices that a woman can go through in my coaching process. And there are some practices worthy to put on a list of exploring for any woman. She wanted to try everything out and engage in the entire process. I was delighted to see her courage and desire to transform something vital to her own life. And I was determined to do everything I could to help her express everything she had inside.

During the first sessions I have some calibration practices. Simple, seemingly innocent and completely non-erotic practices. Bodywork is much more complex than she initially expected. And those foundations should be tried by everyone. From those exercises we both saw how her relaxation & pleasure was intertwined with instincts of defense & struggle.

It was one of the most difficult moments to see her shadowed erotic blueprint – without even going to deep in the practices. I realized that no matter how able she was to carry out the practices I could facilitate for her, she needed something else. Not a brave exploration, but a conscious connection to self. She needed genuine and real peace within her body.
Why did she not have? In her interactions many things had not been respected, a lot of her vital boundaries had been broken. In time she had come to a closing down of her own body.

So from our initially courageous intention, I consciously put my foot on the brakes and told her we were going with small steps. And gentle ones. I invited her to do the practices that required her conscious & maximum presence in her own body.

It seems something minor, but when you come to such a presence in your body and with your own sexual energy … it is one of the toughest and most powerful things I’ve ever seen in all the groups I’ve been in.

Not everyone has the real patience to sit there with themselves in their darkest and heaviest waters. Moment by moment. With every sensation and every state in their body. She did that. Until she slowly and sometimes with difficulty saw how her condition transformed. She saw, felt and expressed that transformation step by step. Usually we search for intensity, pleasure, haste and explosion. We all want our light, few of us sit with our shadow. Our shadow is slow and it needs our intense presence.

From one week to another, she followed her body intuition. She set her own working pace. This way she cast one layer of tension after another.

She cried. There were moments when she did not want to be hugged. There were moments when she came on her own for a hug. To cry. To get comfort in letting go of what had been bottled for so long inside. But perhaps most importantly, she learned to recognize the imprint of the fighting instinct in her own body. When it was triggered. How it felt physically. And how she could express it. How she could what she needed. She learned how that instinct could transform without there having to be a fight. Not with herself, nor with her lover.

Relaxation eventually became just relaxation.
The pleasure to be present in her body in the end was freed.
She burned the fighting and defensive instincts in her body.

At the end of our coaching, we both recognized that we had worked something completely different from what we had originally intended. But I confessed one thing to her: if we had done all sorts of fun games and touches, without first working with the defensive and wounded mechanism imprinted in her… we would have been painting a magnificent glitter on a shady wall. And at the first test that wall would still have broken down. And she would have not known how to pick herself up. And she probably would have risked loosing an important relationship for her.

Now it’s all a joy. When we meet. When we greet. When we work beautiful feminine practices.

When you take things in the right order, what comes out of you is incredibly beautiful.

This post has her consent. We both hope her story will help other women, in any way possible.

Last year, a recently married man came to me with the desire to work, structured and applied, in order to learn to „hold space” his wife. He was extremely in love with his wife (still is to this day) and he wanted their intimacy to be as great as the rest of their relationship.

More specifically, he wanted his wife to be more adventurous, carefree and courageous in all their moments. And he wanted to do anything in his power to make that happen.

He had attended a group event of mine and heard me talking about the concept of „holding space”, but the concept was not clear to him. He didn’t know what that meant more exactly. So he decided to learn all about that „skill”.

From our conversation he admitted being angry at his wife for not being all those things in their intimacy. He often saw her detained. In time he had grown fixated on time making her more open and more passionate in each of their intimate moments. But that wasn’t happening. He thus became more upset with the intimate aspect of their relationship. And he felt his wife often avoiding his attempts to approach her.

My first request to him: during the 6 weeks we would work together, forget about any upset, tension or pressure on his wife. In other words, give her peace and accept anything that would happen (or not) between them during that time. Instead, I invited him to take his energy and attention to the work he would go through during the coaching process.

Weekly, I brought up a series of practices that I use mostly when working with women. I told him that it made sense to understand what women needed in their intimacy. It made sense for him to enter a woman’s perspective. Otherwise there was no way he could „hold space” for his wife.

The surprise was that he liked everything he did; the exercises had revealed aspects from his inner self – some he had suspected, but hadn’t paid them too much attention.

He was so determined that he came once while he was having a cold; in the middle of the session when I asked him how he felt: “Cold? What cold?”
He had forgotten about his sinuses, his headache and his „runny nose”:-)

What did we work on? Understanding physical pleasure – long before the sexual pleasure, presence in his body with physical pleasure, communication with his body in pleasure and in lack of it, expression in words (one of the major barriers for women) of sensations & inner states. I invited him to focus on his entire body as part of his whole being.

Week by week, based on his learning intent (without his intent it would all have been pointless work), I facilitated things that women need to relax and open physically – not just in intimacy. So I aimed for him to understand a woman’s overall relaxation & openness.

And, week-by-week, he took the practice and used it with his wife, except he used it at the maximum level. Every week he watched like a hawk for the proper context or time to use any of the tools from our sessions. And he chose the most harmless ways to put them into practice. I admitted to him that he had been more subtle and skillful than a woman in these endeavors.

Gradually, he saw how from his habit of initiating intimacy, he had become the one approached. But not without complex discussions that clarified where his wife’s reticence came from. Not without the moments when he had to give-up halfway, although initially the context was looking bright, when something felt wrong all of a sudden.

It was not easy for him. Yet, it helped him to have a framework in which he could allow his wife patience of transform in her own rhythm – whatever that rhythm was. Uncertainty was not easy to take. Allowing his wife the space to choose for herself, whatever she chose, was the hardest look to take.
Gradually, to his joy (and mine in this case) he noticed how from restraint in physical expression, his wife relaxed and received more easily the new proposals. But nothing came to him overnight, that’s clear.

Holding space is an extremely soft skill that few of us develop consciously and intentionally. This man wanted to do that. The merit was and remains his for sure. I told him personally that he was the most motivated, determined and cunning man client who came to me until that time. Not that other men can’t be like that (to the contrary, we have many capable and ingenious men around us). He just had a piece of information, he was set on using it and he was also open to receiving guidance.

This is published with his consent. We both hope this story inspires other men. If they feel they have something to take from this story 🙂

I’ve been reading your posts and I relate to many of them. May I ask for a piece of advice?

I’ve been married for over five years to a beautiful woman I’m in love with.

Our sex life was amazing until she became pregnant. After that, her libido dropped and unfortunately it remained like that for the rest of our marriage.

I understand women change once they give birth. Raising children takes a lot of energy and obviously the man & the intimate relationship take second place.

But our children are growing and nothing seems to change. We rarely kiss, we rarely caress, we rarely have foreplay, she rarely allows me to lick her…

If I say something she tells me everything is okay, she feels fulfilled and I’m the one exaggerating cause I’m always in the „mood”.

We went to a psychologist, I’ve tried to introduce her to books on intimacy, I work out and I keep a young body… yet I’ve gathered hundreds of nights of frustration and I don’t know what to do anymore.

Could you give me any advice on how to make my wife find her sexual side once again?”

Unfortunately my coaching doesn’t make our partners change into something we would want them to. As long as they don’t feel there’s a need for that, they simply will not change.

The only thing I can do is help people discover more about their bodies and their sexuality, help them hold space for themselves and for their partners and help them overcome any sexual blockages they perceive. But only when they choose to do this work. It’s based only on personal volition.

As much as our partners can’t change our perspective, neither can we change theirs.

BUT

We do have a chance to inspire them while we make a transformation for ourselves.

No need to cheat, no need to break-up. Just work with ourselves for a while and shift our disposition and approach on our unsatisfied sex lives.

This is the most challenging thing to do in fact.
The risk? Our partners may not change in spite of that.
The reward: we’ll be better lovers no matter what may happen in our relationships.

This story is based on a recent Instagram discussion with someone in my community. It has his approval for publishing.

We hope this serves as inspiration for anyone out there who’s ever been told by their lovers that their relationship needed a change.