Blissexology: Intimacy…and beyond

Truly feeling seen.

Real intimacy is to see and be seen, beyond the body, into the dimension of what we, as limited physical beings, perceive as soul.

It feels strange to say it, especially as an intimacy coach, but one of the most intimate experiences I’ve ever had, was with an audience at the 2024 KwaZulu Spirit festival, with Sensorium. 

Being able to share from the depths of your being, in public, even when ‘afeared’ as the Scots would say.

We had this experience as we were about to begin the Sensorium, my trembling and sweating husband confessed how nervous he was. Not just to me, but on a microphone to the entire audience!

He’s not used to being on the stage, he’s normally behind the scenes on tech, filming, mixing and organising. He was so vulnerable in front of the much larger audience than we were expecting.

Intimate experiences require vulnerability and the dropping of the social masks we wear and he was so beautifully and completely open about his ‘afeared’.

Before we started our intimacy coach training business, Tim (my husband) and I had long careers in the entertainment industry, myself as a singer and vocal artist, Tim as video editor and live stream mixer at corporate events.

In 2022 when we sold up everything and moved to a cabin in the jungle on the South Coast, we thought those days were completely behind us.

We redesigned our lives to work with our Intimacy Coach International online business and thought we had to limit our energy to that one thing, after all, isn’t that what the business coaches tell you? Find your niche, advertise, stick to it…

Yet… if I know one thing about enhanced life force energy/sexual energy, it’s that it’s deeply creative.

We are not just one thing and this year’s festival taught me that in a new way.

Creativity doesn’t like to be put in a box, it wants to play and the box I’d put around intimacy was somatic relationship coaching work, the form of intimacy coaching that we’ve been teaching online for the past 10 years. 

Forgetting that so much of intimacy is being seen and sharing energy.

Into me you see, especially when we share creativity…

You’d think with how much I teach the differences around sensuality and sexuality, using the senses to ground and connect, experience everything around us, that I would have realised this sooner.

It seems that this Ikagai, this cross section of energy, had just been totally in my blind spot.

That’s what happened with Sensorium at the KwaZulu Spirit Festival.

I often struggle to explain Sensorium to people. It’s not music, but it is. It’s not touch, but it is, it’s not songs or poetry alone, but it is.

It’s also seeing into the energy of an audience and connecting at a soul level with people – and this makes it deeply intimate. 

I’ve had similar experiences in my singing and performing career when there’s deeply moving words, or the tune is just so exquisite it raises the flesh along your spine, you feel the music physically. 

But this is more.

We shared our energy, through our lyrics (years of meditation and channelled words that flow through me, rather than from me) through the frequency of voice sung into being.

I had goosebumps and strong energy flow for most of the experience and adding the saxophone into this sensory soundscape connected yet another intimate energy for me.

The immersion with the audience going through their own conscious touch experiences during the deep guided relaxation, heightened their innate ability to immerse in frequency and energy.

It felt as though my heart and root energy flowed through me, in a recipe from the divine as a conduit, not as a performer from myself, but as an addition as a flavour of my soul.

And that’s BEYOND intimate.

I’ve felt for so long that I had to choose between intimacy coaching, which often in the general public’s view is very limited as being ‘some strange sex stuff you teach’ and singing.

This was the experience that blended those talents into a new intimacy, seeing both deeply into myself, sharing that with others and seeing into them with energy, joy and vision. 

The ability to move beyond ‘what I/we do for a living’ into the experience of living itself.

The acknowledgement of the audience having such intense energetic experiences that they individually shared with us afterwards, moved this beyond an intellectual understanding, into a visceral sharing with community.

The man that finally said he “understood the strange woo woo events his wife has been dragging him to for years” as he felt an energy like electricity running through his spine..

The folks that felt their lost loved ones’ energy around them during certain parts of the experience…

Those that danced and swayed and those that stayed snuggled in blankets lovingly crocheted by the Flower Foundation for the festival, all of you live in our hearts now.

We are honoured to have experienced that with you all.

Into me you see.

That’s intimacy.