By: Margaret Wade and Suzanne Blackburn
From the book, It’s been an amazing journey, really. The erotic exploration I started doing first came from my body, but I would also say that there were strands in the cosmic field that were helping me. When I think back, my mind immediately starts to see how those strands converged, leading me to integrate sex and spirit. I seem to have this particular path of stumbling along, picking pieces from here and pieces from there – pieces from various traditions. But ultimately, the way I work is not traditional. Perhaps not having a teacher or a guru gives my discoveries a fresh innocence.
I began working as a massage therapist in a sauna in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, things are different. Everybody goes to the saunas, which are completely socially accepted. People there are more comfortable about nudity, so we never worried about draping our clients. Not all, but most of my clients were men; they’re the ones who can best afford massage. What I noticed very quickly was that the genitals were always there. What I mean by that is that either a man wanted to have an erection, didn’t want to have an erection, had an erection and wanted me to pretend not to notice it, or wanted me to do something with it. No matter what, the focus was always there. Either by trying to deny or wanting to emphasize what was happening with the genitals, they were always an area of much attention. In that beginning period, I needed to figure out how to deal with this. I could not simply pretend I was not noticing what I was noticing, nor did I want to. I started playing with moving that erotic charge into other parts of the body. It wasn’t really complicated. I simply let erotic feelings rise without touching genitals, because once genitals are touched, they tend to become quite demanding in their need to continue being touched. Then I would go on sensually massaging the body fanning flames of Eros. Looking back, I’d say that this was perhaps a sneaky way of playing with Eros, but people would get off my table literally vibrating with erotic energy.
I loved to play with erotic charge. It gave me a lot of pleasure (still does) but, at that time, before the early 90’s, there was no guidance for these things, there was no language, or at least I didn’t know of anything. What I knew was that people either offered “therapeutic” massage, which excluded and draped everything erotic, or they offered sensual massage and barely touched the rest of the body. I liked it all, so ultimately I simply combined them.
I realize that the cultural climate in Amsterdam has been a very big part of my journey. It never occurred in my mind that I was doing something wrong or unlawful. In Amsterdam, I had learned therapeutic or sports massage, what in the States is known as Swedish. I learned to go pretty deep into the muscles, joints and ligaments. I also learned acupressure and shiatsu. Those models, except acupressure, mostly look for pain. If you hit a pain place, then your treatment is good. And that’s where you dig, just a little harder. Pain was the indicator of good treatment. I used my feet, my knees and I was pretty strong – people loved it.
At the same time, I noticed that these men would come back every week and nothing had changed, and I realized that these people didn’t necessarily come to be fixed or changed. Mostly, they just came to have a break from their busy lives and to feel pampered. Over time I began to feel that digging into those places, which were already resistant, was meeting resistance with resistance, and it exhausted me. So I started to experiment with a whole different approach. I began to use soft touch, and found that soft touch went much deeper, because it doesn’t barge in with force prompting a natural counter force. I began to look for the places in the body that willingly let me in, and then by using some juicy sensation, I seduced the more resistant places into relaxation. This way of inviting the body to open through sweet, pleasurable touch was not only highly effective, but it taught me a basic life philosophy I still find tremendously valuable.
It was all very experimental. Years later, I understood that I was using erotic energy from the sacrum and the sensation in the skin to wake up the body. I was aware that the erotic charge fed me too. I noticed that I was not exhausted like I had been before. I was no longer just the giver and they just the receiver. We were exchanging erotic energy without ever fully playing it out in any conventional way. It was just more balanced and I think that my clients felt that they were touched more completely, deeper. Of course you can never touch only muscles. Muscles are always connected with the emotions and the rest of the person. I would also say that the massage touched a reviving source in people that I couldn’t access without using erotic energy. It was rejuvenating, enlivening – the same way you feel right after having sex, but without the depletion that orgasm can bring.
Except for feeling very connected and learning a lot from my clients, I was quite alone in this work. I longed for someone I could talk to, someone who could understand. Several years later, I met Annie Sprinkle at one of her performances in Amsterdam, and I was just blown away with it. She was my goddess. I thought, “Oh my God, there’s somebody who knows. There’s somebody who understands!” I wanted to meet her immediately. Soon after, a friend of Annie’s named Cora opened a center called New Ancient Sex Academy (NASA), and she started to attract sex teachers; Betty Dodson was the first one. When Annie came to teach at NASA, Cora called me, and we arranged a massage for Annie. Annie was very happy with the massage, and she told Joseph (Kramer), “You’ve got to go get a massage from Isa.” This was the beginning of meeting people who had an idea about what I was doing. Meeting Annie and Joseph was extremely exciting – people on a similar path!
After meeting Annie and Joseph, I began exploring Taoist Erotic Massage and the Big Draw with Cora’s husband, Willem, who had taken one of Joseph’s weekend workshops for men. Until this time, Taoist Erotic Massage had only been applied to men, and we wanted to know if this would work on women too. Willem and I met once a week for several hours. We played with the different techniques, using breath and touch to build and spread the charge. At first, I was very resistant. To me, the breathing was work, too much work. I would get very turned on and I just wanted my orgasm. I wanted sex, not breathing! After about three sessions, I let go of my resistance and really opened up, emotionally and psychically. I experienced sensations I would describe as profoundly cleansing. I cried and I cried. I cried so much. I used whole boxes of tissue. I noticed that after a session with Willem, my heart felt very open. At the same time I was exploring with Willem, I was attending some spiritual retreats. I felt the same kind of opening I felt after the retreats, so I began to wonder if we were working with the same energy, and I believed that we were. This really strengthened my awareness of the oneness of sex and spirit.
For several years, I was the only woman who had thoroughly experimented with Taoist Erotic Massage and the Big Draw. It was an incredible gift – personally and professionally! Suddenly I had a format or a method for all the stuff that I had been finding intuitively. Joseph’s work helped me make the leap to touching genitals in a way that felt sacred and interesting to me, not just arousing. He gave me valuable tools to do way more with those genitals than simply jerking someone off or engaging in sex. His series of cock strokes and the breathing expanded the erotic energy, and gave me the opportunity to work with people in a holistic way. The body wants to be whole. The genitals are not something you can just take off and put on the shelf.
Taoist Erotic Massage adds a completely different dimension to the sexual experience. It is a tool that has three main components. The first is the genital stimulation, the second is breathing and, finally, the Big Draw. There is a splendid menu of genital strokes that can be used to reach an exquisite state of arousal. Then, instead of riding the familiar train route of arousal straight to orgasm, you use your breath to scoop up the arousal and spread it throughout your body. The breathing adds a completely different dimension to the sexual experience. It is specifically designed to produce the most profound states of pleasure. The breathing can produce a state that looks and feels a little weird, but never mind, let it happen. Sex is about letting go and letting your body do whatever it wants. The breathing assists you to push through emotional resistance, resistance to feeling, to receiving. It also keeps you present in the moment, and is the key to spreading the energy throughout the body. After a period of building and spreading arousal, when you’re about to explode with pleasure, you go into the Big Draw. Often the Big Draw brings you into an altered state which can be highly transformational.
What we call pleasure is a combination of two stages. First is the excitement stage in which we get more and more aroused, we go up and up and up with excitement. If you kept going like that you would reach a place of discomfort. So what is needed is the second part, which is the release and relaxation that brings joy and contentment. Excitement alone is not pleasure. Contentment alone is not pleasure. When you combine the two you have “The Pleasure Package” – excitement and release; arousal and contentment.
Sexual energy opens us up and sweeps through our core. I call it the chimney sweeper. Usually we keep our sexual energy localized in the genitals and then it goes out. When we reverse this process and bring that energy into all of our body, our whole system opens up in a way that goes deeper than with any other method that I know. By reaching deeper into ourselves, we access places that have been hidden, opening doors of rooms that we didn’t even know existed. When I do the Big Draw, I feel like my entire system gets updated. The tricky thing is that you can open doors of rooms that are too big or that come with psychological complications, and there I think we need to be careful. We really need to be very respectful of our limits.
In Amsterdam, I could be very open about what I was doing, and I was very popular. Once I began to use the techniques of Taoist Erotic Massage, I was able to offer a unique kind of massage, and there were plenty of people who wanted to experience it. But I only stayed in Amsterdam a couple of years after that. I was invited to come to the United States. Initially I was going to be in the U.S. for six weeks, but well, now it’s thirteen years later.
By the time I left to travel through the U.S., I had already begun offering a workshop on touch at NASA. I didn’t really see myself as a teacher nor aspired to be one, but I did have opinions about touch that I was ready to share.
While traveling, I landed at a gathering on Lama Mountain, a spiritual retreat in Santa Fe, where I met the people who are still very important in my life. In previous years, Joseph had offered his work at this gathering, and they were happy to have found a woman who could offer “sex and spirit” material to women. That’s how I was welcomed into giving my first workshop. It was a time of magic, yes, and many nerves too, before that workshop, but I can hardly imagine a gentler and richer plunge than at that gathering. I didn’t venture directly into teaching erotic massage in the workshops. Initially, I led exercises in movement, breath, touch, especially soft touch, and in honoring our bodies. I learned the importance of creating ritual for these exercises. That is one of the gifts I got in the U.S. – ritual. In Holland, I had learned a lot about touch, but I had no clue about ritual.
Ritual, to me, is important, because it creates a container for the mystery we’re inviting. Ritual lets us keep one foot on the earth while the other flies, God knows where. I also knew the importance of safety because of the incredible intensity I’d experienced in my one-on-one work with sexual energy. Some people ended up screaming or crying, and all sorts of wild things happened on and off my table. So when I did this workshop at Lama, it was important to me to make it safe for the women to meet themselves erotically – through themselves, each other, through touch and movement and breathing. The workshop, as I did it then, actually became the foundation for the women’s basic workshop at Body Electric.
Joseph called me to tell there was going to be the first event that included both men and women at Body Electric. It was called the Cosmic Orgasm Awareness Week, and was led by Joe and Annie. In that week, I connected with Collin Brown who was looking for a woman to teach women’s programs. Collin helped give me the framework to do erotic work in a group. I was hesitant about it. In my private sessions, I had been working with such deep intensity. I couldn’t see how it could be done in a group. It’s not that I thought that women were too fragile or too wounded or too something, to be outrageously erotic in a group. That’s not it. The men’s workshops were very genital focused, and it didn’t take them that long to get there.
My experience was that, in general, women need a longer or deeper building of intimacy before they let someone play with their genitals. You can’t just skip that phase, and say, “Honeys, time to spread your legs now!” I tried to go faster, believe me, but women, thank God, protested all over the place. The result was a weekend in which we spent a lot of time building up to the Taoist Erotic Massage, to then finally practice it on the last afternoon. The down-side of this format was that, after we were done with this intense, incredible event, it was about time to wrap up and say goodbye. We often went way past the official time, just to get some decent closure and grounding.
At first, Collin and I butted heads like crazy. It makes me hot when I think of it, and I smile at the same time. My protest was that he wanted women to do the workshop the same way men were doing the workshop, and that really did not work for me. Now I see that some of it also was a different style of facilitation. Collin was very structured and worked with a set plan, whereas I need to improvise, and work with what comes up at the moment. Each step we take as a group decides the next step. That doesn’t mean we were devoid of a general outline and a common ending place; we just can’t quite predict how we’re going to get there. This, to me, was a way to make space for mystery and surprise, and let participants co-create the event. At the time, I thought this was a fundamental difference between “male” and “female” approaches. Now I think it’s just as much a matter of personality, regardless of gender. Eventually, Collin let me follow my own instincts about what women needed.
After a few workshops, women were asking us – my partner PK and me – to do more than Body Electric was organizing. We also began doing events for couples, because so many excited women were going home after our workshops and saying, “I want my husband to know about this.” These groups were certainly powerful. What comes back to me is having a room full of people feeling safe enough to open up in ways they couldn’t imagine was possible. I can’t tell the number of times women said, “This feels so natural!” referring to being there with other women, taking off their clothes or not, talking about genitals and sex without shame or guilt, and without having to perform for a partner. You know, it is natural. We just got trained out of it.
There are many, many beautiful moments that stand out in my memories from these workshops. I remember, for example, a delightful little transformative interlude when we, a group of women, were in the midst of showing and telling about our vulvas. In one woman’s story, the Catholic Church came up. (It seems that the church is never far away when we talk about sex.) Lots of women had Catholic memories, and between the rantings was a lot of laughing. Suddenly someone grabbed her vulva lips and, moving them around, burst into spontaneous song singing “Hallelujah, Hallelujah.” Within seconds, we had a choir of vulva-lips happily singing “Hallelujah.” It didn’t feel irreverent. It was purely a celebration of joy, and we didn’t have to leave our cunts out of it.
At another workshop, I remember a man bursting into tears after being held by one of the other men of the group. When he suddenly realized the emptiness of that aspect of his life, he started sobbing and said, “I don’t know of any tender contact I’ve had with another man. Not even with my father!”
One of the most tender moments I witnessed involved a woman who had been torn between staying and leaving throughout the entire weekend. I could see that it was so hard for her to stay and not run away screaming. This workshop put her totally on the edge. To me, she was this delicious person who was so present, and she was often the person I would use as a compass for where to go next. She was my measure of how fast to go, because she was having such a hard time. Ultimately she stayed, and in the very end she said, in a way that I still hold as one of my biggest treasures, “I’ve never felt so loved before.”
When I think about what happened during those workshops, I remember not only the successes but the failures. Some things I feel I couldn’t quite resolve. One woman wrote to me after a workshop saying that she felt that the approach was too “male,” too goal oriented. And this was after I thought we had restructured it to make it more appropriate for women. Even more shocking was something that came to me indirectly. One of the participants had said to a friend that during the workshop she was ecstatic, she loved it. But afterwards she wasn’t sure if she violated or traumatized the woman she worked with. That has never left me. Those comments caused me to reevaluate the exercises.
This is not to say that most people didn’t come away with a very positive experience, but that it’s important to find out what else is needed to take care of people after a workshop. At the time you feel great, but when you come home you can fall in a big hole. It’s not that we have failed, but simply that there is much more to learn. We have a serious gap in the process. For this reason, I’m less interested in using erotic energy to generate big cathartic erotic processes until we figure out how to fill that gap. I don’t have the answers. Maybe we just need to stumble along for a while until we figure it out, but it’s not something to be ignored. If this work can go on, if it can grow, we need to listen to the needs.
It’s not about endlessly dwelling on every emotion, but about letting them be part of the journey so they don’t turn into monsters. See, generally we have understood that sex is severed from spirit, but sex is also often severed from having feelings. That’s why it can happen that one partner is galloping quite excitedly to an orgasm while the other is waiting for it to be over as soon as possible. I believe that the main reason that couples stop having sex is not because their bodies don’t want it anymore, but because they don’t know anymore (if they ever did) how to reach each other emotionally.
A one-on-one session is quite different from the group experience. It can have more detail in it, and can go deeper, more direct into the individual issues. Over the years I’ve developed a general formula, but it always has to be adapted to each session.
When I meet with a client, we begin by having a talk so that I can learn what is happening in the person’s life. Then it’s important to find out what her or his wishes, expectations and intentions are for this session. When that feels complete, we move into what I call “temple time,” or ritual space. Another way to describe ritual is to say we move from particle reality into wave reality, or to say that our logical mind gets a break and our bodies can speak. There is a clear beginning and end to the session; what happens in the middle we can’t predict. The beginning is time to tune in. We (the client and I) come from different worlds and now we come together, so we have to, somehow, meet on the same frequency in a short period of time. The process of tuning in is different with everybody, of course, depending on how well we know each other and what language we share – talking or silence, movement or sitting or touch. But usually, sooner or later, we will sit opposite each other on the bed or on the massage table. I’ll lead us through a simple process of becoming present with our bodies here and now and inviting all our parts. If appropriate, we will breathe together and connect on an energetic level. This beginning usually tells me how to continue into the deep meeting. After that, we flow into the body of the session, and that is where the mystery unfolds. Every session is different. I always end with giving thanks for the sharing and the experience, and with un-merging our energies.
This all sounds very serious, but it’s often very playful. It’s exciting and fun. It’s deep, serious, intimate, beautiful play in which we connect on so many levels. Inviting all our parts to show up and truly meet, filling them with pleasure to then go back into the world. How’s that for a job description?
One of the crucial elements in this work has been that, over the years, I had to learn that a very big need of people is to give touch, not just receive it. It took me a long time to allow people to touch me, to receive them in that way. What I had noticed was a big hunger to be received. Sometimes “please let me touch you” can be translated into “please receive me” which can be translated into “please love me.” These people were saying, “Let me in, take me for who I am. I really need you to receive my touch. I really need you to receive my body.” Once I saw that, it was a lot easier for me to let it happen.
I have strong feelings about the very terms “sacred prostitute” and “sacred intimate.” My main objection is that these words still come from a paradigm that separates sacred from sex, not to mention “sacred” from the rest of life. I love sex and I love spirituality. It’s very obvious to me that spirituality and sexuality are one and the same. The reunion of sex and spirit is part of my personal mission in this life, and as I go along, I seem to meet people who want to join that mission.
I’ve always been a very spiritual person. My mother is very religious, Calvinist. When I was young, even though the church was declining rapidly, we all went to church and read the Bible every day. Now Christianity is not my place, but I feel that having an awareness of a god has been crucial to creating my spiritual hunger in a time when that hunger seemed to be rare. I am very grateful that my mother insisted on bringing us up with that kind of awareness even though none of us are following the church now. My father stopped going to church many years ago, a decision that was completely against his upbringing. It was a very courageous thing to do. Essentially he’s a pagan even though he doesn’t know that word. He is very much into plants and animals. I got that from my father. My parents are both heretics themselves, really. They had the audacity to leave the extreme orthodox church of their families. That act was very, very courageous. According to some of their family members, they might as well have knocked on the devil’s door directly. But it was the biggest blessing they could’ve ever given to their children. Orthodox Calvinism is not a small thing. It terrorizes people through life and death. I admire my parents for stepping out of that.
For me, a key to allowing an ever deeper meeting with people was my spiritual (Sufi) practices. These practices connected me with a love that was way beyond the personal, the romantic, etc. This connection has been the key for me in being able to share more and more of my self with others. Our meeting is totally personal, and at the same time, it’s beyond personal. It’s like reaching the universal through the personal and reaching the personal through the universal. This all sounds so terribly intellectual for something so not-intellectual, something that simply feels good.
Along the way, I’ve also learned the importance of being acutely aware of my own needs and wants. In other words, to know what gives me pleasure as well. I can’t afford for the exchange not to feel good, the price is too high. Namely, I end up dissociated, in pieces or resentful and angry. So, I learned to turn no into yes. Let’s say I’m touched too fast or simply wrong. First, I need to notice that I’m cringing and withdrawing. Then I need to find what I want instead. I need to let my client/playmate know what I want. I had to learn that being in touch with myself and standing up for my needs was essential to being able to stay loving and very close. It’s not about rejecting somebody or telling the person they are doing something wrong, but rather about finding out what works together. I noticed many people end up in a relationship with sex where there is either a “yes” or a “no.” There is rarely a range between. It is either “yes” to the whole package or “no, I don’t want any part of sex.” With the Taoist Erotic Massage, we can have an enormous spectrum between the yes and the no. At any time during the massage there is the invitation for each person to ask for exactly what he/she desires. There is also the gift of not having to perform, not having to get somewhere. We don’t have to reach a particular goal. There is no way to fail.
In the last few years, I’ve been working through another layer of my own incest work. This has been an incredibly painful and enriching healing process. It has helped me to understand other people who live with trauma and through trauma.
There was a time when I could not bring myself to do anything sexual, period. I could barely get turned on, so forget about sex and penetration, not even with myself. One of the people I’d been seeing for a long time still really wanted to have sessions, so I agreed to meet with her. There were times when she would get very turned on, more turned on than I, or I would get turned on and then get scared. I would just have to stop and say, “I’m sorry. I can’t do this. I can’t go any further. All I can offer you is my own impossibility to have sex.” Remarkably, she turned the ritual around and approached me in the same way I had approached her asking, “Where are you? What do you need now? What can we do now?” Later on, she went through her own period of not being able to be sexual. The most amazing thing I find, is that for both of us, the most empowering aspect, perhaps, was that we were allowed to say “no” to sex. In hindsight, I can hardly imagine this difficulty anymore. Not because I’m always sexual, but because the range of what “sexual” means has grown so much bigger.
The last years I’ve spent a lot of time writing and coaching. The writing has allowed me to articulate what before was just a feeling. Writing made me see that my sexual experiences didn’t fit anymore within the language that was available. I felt that I had to create alternate concepts to give a place to them. For example, the language of sex is usually narrowed down to the physical, because our culture doesn’t hold the idea that sex is also spiritual and emotional. Love is everywhere, but the door to this state is inside of us and sex is one of the ways to open the door. I hope other people can benefit from my articulation some day.
Doing sex coaching has given me very concrete insight into the questions people have about sex and what the gaps are that want to be filled in. Basic things like communication, or prolonging erection, or “How can I ask for what I want if I don’t know what it is I want?”
This has inspired me to write A Map of Sexual Pleasure for my coaching clients, subtitled Living Sensually and Sexually with or without a Partner. It presents a way to cultivate these qualities from the inside out. Sensuality is often forgotten, I find. Yet sensuality is the very force that connects inside with outside. And sensuality is the giant area between the all-or-nothing in sex and the all-or-nothing of having a partner or not.
This Map goes from cultivating awe when we walk on the street, to breathing into our genitals, to having sexual orgasms, to becoming familiar with sexual energy and its immense power for pleasure and healing. And for all this, we don’t even need a partner. I want to offer this Map as a guideline to people I work with individually and in groups. And to anyone who’s interested, of course.
I hope that people on spiritual paths and people on sexual paths will continue to talk and listen to each other. The process of healing the split between sex and spirit affects the way we live in the world. Maybe, some day, we will allow spirit to come back to earth. Maybe, instead of us thinking that we have to go up to the heavens to find spirit, we will just look around, feel our bodies, our sensuality, our sex and know that we don’t have to go anywhere to be spiritual, but just be here and now.