The title of my website is Massage By Ki implies massage and you might wonder what the link is between massage and Sex Education and Therapy. It seems like quite a jump.
Well I think that telling my personal story of how I got into this work and how it is evolving might make it easier to understand.
Years ago I quit my former jobs as a white water raft guide and environmentalist and I took up massage. I took some training in Lomi Lomi massage and Thai massage and although I wasn’t officially licensed but I really loved massage and I was good at it.
Being unlicensed, I got a lot of requests from people, men especially, to massage their whole body including their genitals. At first I was righteously and indignantly opposed to the idea. That was just wrong and bad! In hindsight I can see how I had not worked through my shame and fear around sex, never mind sexual touch for money.
Then one day a beautiful young woman came to see me for a relaxation massage. We got to talking during the session and she told me how she did sexual massage, ran her own porn production company, and did professional dominatrix work. This woman was not a victim. She was radiant with life energy and confidence. I was inspired. Something inside of me shifted.
I starting questioning myself, “Really what is my problem with sexual touch? Why am I so uptight about it? Why do I touch people’s body all over except for their sexual organs? What message am I sending to people?”
Well I decided the answers to those questions were all based in some narrow minded morality and sex-negativity that I didn’t really agree with. So I just decided to change the way I thought and what I was doing. Actually it’s truer to say that I changed what I was doing and the way I thought eventually changed too.
So in my massage practice I just jumped into the deep end and started advertising that I did erotic massage, or “full-body” massage as we say in the biz, as well as my regular relaxation massage.
My work became a challenging and interesting learning environment to say the least. Immediately boundaries became an issue – a lot of people, men and women, wanted more sexual play than just an erotic massage. In some sessions I felt like I went further than I wanted to. Communication was difficult too – many people wanted an erotic experience, but they didn’t know what it was they wanted exactly, or they were too ashamed to express it to me, and I was left trying to figure it out. Needless to say there were mixed results – some sessions were deeply unsatisfying for me and my clients. I had lots of my own unresolved issues around sex that got activated while working with clients. At times I’d get my own needs and desires mixed up with those of my clients. Or I’d try to please my clients without really knowing what they wanted. In short, it was pretty messy in those early days.
It didn’t really help that there wasn’t much in the way of mentorship or community. Most people doing erotic massage and sex work are in it for expediency. It’s not their calling, it just pays the bills. They don’t spend a lot of time in self-development and self-reflection or connecting with others in their community.
I think what helped me most in those early days was a strong community of friends who I was open with about my work, my own personal meditation practice of Vipassana, a lot of self love and forgiveness, and a genuine interest in this work and helping people. Even with the challenges, the balance of my experiences were very positive. I learned a lot about myself and my relationship to sex. I got a front row seat on the huge diversity of sexual problems and desires that people have.
After a few months of doing it myself, I started looking for teachers to help me on my journey. My first was Maryse Côté. She is tantra teacher who has devoted her life to this work. I took a couple of 2 week tantra intensives with her and also became her assistant helping her organize and run other trainings. I learned so much from Maryse. I love and respect her dearly. Her teaching had a focus on tantric ritual, erotic massage and the sacredness of sex.
It was a good start but not enough. I found out pretty quickly that when you touch someone, especially when you touch their genitals, you aren’t just touching their body, you are touching their whole history with sex, and their emotions, beliefs and meanings about sex, themselves and the world. Unfortunately Maryse didn’t explicitly teach about how to deal with that tangled web. Certainly she is a master at doing it herself but she didn’t really teach it. It’s only years later that I could even understand what I was needing at the time but wasn’t getting.
So I kept looking for guidance and I kept doing my work with my clients – to be honest they were my best teachers. I believe that it there is no such thing as a sex expert – because the erotic and sexual are just so personal – every single person has a different story and experience. Sure there are themes – for example most people have a lot of shame around sex – but each person is so unique.
My next teacher was Dr. Joseph Kramer. Dr. Kramer is truly an erotic education pioneer. He started the Body Electric school, an innovative series of workshops focusing on attaining ecstatic states by combining breathwork and erotic massage. He is a master at creating experiential erotic learning environments using massage. He even had the vision and drive to create an academic program and a certified profession, Sexological Bodywork, in California. This program is taught in San Francisco at an accredited university, the Institute for Advanced Study in Human Sexuality.
I signed up for this training as soon as I found out about it. I thought, “Wow here is something accredited that includes sex and touch – that’s leading edge.” The training gave me some important pieces that I needed for my work like technical training in using breathwork and massage but more importantly it gave me a whole new perspective on using bodywork as a modality for teaching people about themselves. There were some rare unusual teachings as well, like masturbation coaching and anal massage. The course also had some great reading material like Jack Morin’s book “The Erotic Mind” which expanded my understanding about the erotic as a mental construct not just a physical response. Ironically, I would say that the Sexological Bodywork training treated the erotic mostly as a physical response.
Good as it was the pieces that were still missing for me from the training were boundaries and dealing with people’s emotions and psychological material. Sexological Bodyworkers are supposed to work with talk therapists who will take care of that material – Sexological Bodyworkers are just supposed to educate people about “erotic embodiment”.
Yeah right. In my experience that’s not very realistic for two reasons. First, I don’t work in California and I can’t get professional certification and insurance so no talk therapist will refer clients to me because of liability issues involved in using sexual touch. By the way I’ve never had a single complaint in this regard. Second, the psychological/emotional material that arises during a Sexological Bodywork session is ideally dealt with in the moment when it arises. In that moment a window to the unconscious opens briefly (a memory arises, an emotion is felt) and a skilled therapist can use that opening to help their client complete a healing process (come to a new understanding or make a new meaning around an old unresolved experience) before the window closes and the material disappears into the unconscious once again. I can only even begin to describe this process after years of my own training, especially with Hakomi, and coming to understand the therapeutic process. So there was a lot in the Sexological Bodywork training that was great and a lot was missing – for me anyways.
One of the unexpected benefits of taking the Sexological Bodywork training was that I met a woman named Betty Martin. She became another one of my teachers. Betty is dedicated to bringing a level of professionalism and ethics to the practice of using erotic touch for healing and education. More than anyone I know, Betty understands boundaries and erotic communication and how that influences the flow of erotic energy and satisfaction that people get in an intimate interaction. She has devised a conceptual model in this area which I believe is revolutionary. And she has devised a way teaching that conceptual model in real life situations between people – be they lovers or a practitioner and a client. A lot of Betty’s work on boundaries comes out the Cuddle Party culture. One of my favourite Cuddle Party sayings is, “You can’t truly say Yes until you feel completely comfortable and empowered to say No.” That has become one of my core teachings for people that come to see me for sexual healing and education work. Learning to know what their No is and speak it.
Betty’s teaching gave me a huge piece around erotic boundaries and communication. I was already learning the hard way, hit and miss with my clients, but her work just made it explicit and teachable for me. It totally shifted my practice.
The world is quite remarkable in that it does respond to who we are. After the Sexological Bodywork training and my studies with Betty I started attracting more challenging clients in my practice. When I first started doing erotic touch most of my clients were men who would come for a one time pleasure experience. I don’t have a problem with that, I still do plenty of those types of sessions. Even in those single sessions which are “just for pleasure” there can be an immense amount of sexual healing and learning that happens as a side effect if I give my complete presence and a lot empathy to someone, which is what I always try to do.
For example, I can’t tell you the number of times a man, after getting a great massage with a release, has spontaneously opened up to share some important event from his sexual history, usually painful in some way. All he needs is for me to hear them, to look at them with compassion, and to just be with them for a moment in a quiet non-judgmental space. Something shifts, some deep tension in his body lets go and there is a new possibility for joy in his life. It’s wonderful.
But after Betty’s training I started to get clients who would come to see me for multiple sessions with specific or general problems they wanted to address. There were a couple of women that I saw weekly over the course of a year with serious problems around knowing their desire and communicating it – which affected their ability to be satisfied sexually and in their life in general. My work was still focused on massage but there was more talk and inner exploration. I learned a lot from them as I helped them. My biggest personal growth areas were about the delicacy of maintaining such an intimate ongoing connection with someone on a therapeutic basis.
But the missing piece for me was still how to skillfully deal with people’s emotions and belief systems – how they see themselves and the world especially in the context of desire, the erotic and the sexual. That inner world is murky, complex and fraught with fear and shame. All of my trainings skirted around the edges of dealing with it – either ignore it or send them off to another expert. That didn’t work for me.
By sheer chance I stumbled upon Hakomi. Hakomi sounds like some foreign metaphysical therapy but it is actually a very new form of body centred, somatic, depth psychotherapy. It’s based in mindfulness, loving presence and all of the new brain science.
Ron Kurtz, the creator of Hakomi, calls it assisted self-study. In Hakomi you do not look upon the client as a person in crisis seeking therapeutic help but rather a person curious about getting to know themselves better. It reminds me of the writing above the entrance to ancient Greek oracle at Delphi, “Know Thyself”. I like that – it’s empowering. At the time of writing this article I have been studying and using Hakomi for 2 years.
Hakomi uses the body and touch as a way to access the unconscious mind, emotions and beliefs so that they can be examined and changed. And the learning of Hakomi has nothing to do with reading books but rather practicing how to enter into a deep resonance with clients and create a space of trust and communication where healing can happen without effort. It was the last major piece that I had been missing in my work and really gave me the confidence to work on a mental and emotional level with my clients and not just their bodies. Nobody in the Hakomi world as far as I know is doing sexual touch.
I’ve actually become somewhat circumspect about just jumping right into doing erotic massage with someone who wants to do deeper work in finding more freedom and choice in the areas of sex and the erotic. A lot of people come to me out of desperation and think that they need something radical like a tantric massage to “breakthrough their resistances” or “remove their blocks”. Sure they could possibly have a great “WOW” experience with a tantric massage but it often doesn’t translate into anything useful for their day to day life. It’s similar to the “workshop effect”. If you have ever done a weekend personal growth workshop and feel like a new person on Sunday evening but by Wednesday morning you have a hard time remembering what you learned and life looks pretty much then you know what I’m talking about here.
These days I’m looking to create more lasting changes in people. To do that requires spending more time creating a deep trust with clients and teaching them about mindfulness and communication before we get into erotic touch. After studying Hakomi I use much far less sexual touch to do far more sexual healing.
So it feels at this point I have all the major pieces in place for my sex education and therapy work. But I have to say that I still feel very much like a beginner. And to be honest I feel comfortable with that. Beginners mind and being open to the spontaneous rather than “knowing” is the appropriate response to have when dealing with sexuality. So much of what the experts know about sexuality is dead wrong in my opinion. It’s much better to just approach each person as a mystery and create a loving space where they can discover themselves.
That being said I am constantly digesting new material about sex, the erotic and sexual healing. My education will never be done.
For example, I recently became very much interested in the work of Esther Perel the author of Mating in Captivity. Here is a woman who has deeply examined the elements that give rise to, or kill, the erotic in long term loving relationships. This is especially interesting to me because so many of the individuals and couples who come to me seeking help are in relationships that are devoid of the erotic. I’m also interested on a personal basis because I am in a committed relationship with a 7 month old baby and I’m feeling like my old erotic identity has evaporated and I’m searching for a new one. Often my own life is a fertile field for learning about sex in ways that I can bring to my clients.
So bringing it into the present, if I had to describe my area of “expertise” it would be in using touch and mindfulness to help people develop mastery in what I would call the “satisfaction cycle”. It goes something like this:
- Feeling safe with intimacy. Which depends largely on developing healthy boundaries e.g. being able to say No and Yes and feeling like you have sovereignty over your body and personal space.
- Feeling good about enjoying eroticism and sexuality. Or in other words seeing yourself as an erotic and sexual being and that being a good thing which means getting over sexual shame.
- Knowing what it is that will satisfy you, referenced from yourself, especaily by paying attention to what your body is telling you. This is in contrast to the default position that most people have which is trying to please someone else and give them what they want.
- Communicating your desires to another person which requires specific erotic communication skills which may be verbal or non-verbal. This also requires self confidence.
- Receiving and enjoying what you asked for. Receiving touch is a definitely a learned skill. In our touch starved culture there are a lot of people who don’t have it. Getting the touch you want might also require that you be able to teach another person how to do it. This is another skill.
- Allowing the cycle to repeat over and over and deepening into your satisfaction, pleasure and the connection with yourself and your partner. This is the ultimate goal.
Every step of the way there is stuff hidden in the unconscious, habits and beliefs, that will sabotage the process and keep you from fully getting the pleasure and satisfaction you want. I don’t know anyone who is completely satisfied and at peace with their erotic life, there is always another level of erotic mastery that can be attained.
So there you have it. That’s a “brief” history of my evolution from a masseur to a Pleasure and Touch Centred Sex Educator and Therapist. Thank you for taking the time to read all the way through this 3000 word treatise. If you want to talk more about how I might be able to help you please drop me a line at info@massagebyki.com or call me at 604-618-3381. I offer an initial free consultation of 45 minutes. Go ahead take a chance – all you’ve got to lose is the stuff that’s keeping you from having the erotic satisfaction that you desire.