What Is Sacred Sexuality, Really? Erotic Attunement with Rahi Chun & Ariel Szabo

Lightly edited for readability. Speaker names added from context.

[00:13] Tammy: Welcome to The Art of Relating, a space where relationship, intimacy and sacred sexuality become pathways to liberation. Here, every rupture is a teacher, every desire is an opening, and every difference is an opportunity for deeper intimacy. Whether we are unraveling attachment wounds, leaning into conflict with presence, or returning to love as a living practice, this is where we explore what becomes possible in relationship when we choose to stay. I’m your host, Tammy Chow, from Somatic Spirit.

Tammy: Hi Rahi and Ariel. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. I’m so excited to have this conversation. I’ve been on my own sacred sexuality journey, coming into creating that divine union within myself and manifesting a partner who could really meet me emotionally, sexually and spiritually, somebody I could navigate conscious love with. I’ve been calling in the right teachers to learn from. I’ve worked with my teacher Adriana Rizzolo in the women’s tantra space and done so much sexuality healing with myself and with other women. For the past five years I’ve been in a place of sitting back and using my critical thinking and reasoning to really see all the different teachers out there in this sphere of sacred sexuality and masculine-feminine polarity, and it takes a lot of discernment, in my experience, to find what’s right for me.

Tammy: Coming from Somatic Experiencing and trauma healing modalities, I really prioritize safety, and how much slowness and safety it’s required for me to unfreeze from my sexual trauma and my upbringing, to even feel safe in sexuality, rather than blipping forward and bypassing all of these boundaries within myself, for example in some other neo-tantra spaces, which I would love to get into with you today. All that to say, I feel like I’ve long been waiting for the right teachers, and I’m really blessed to be in your presence today and to begin learning with you. I’d love to hear about each of your personal journeys and how you found each other before creating Divine Union For Lovers.

[02:40] Ariel: Oh, that’s a great invitation, a great jumping-off point. Do you want to start?

Rahi: Yeah, sure. Well, Tammy, to be honest with you, I feel like my journey into touch and tantra and energy and intimacy started when I came out of the womb. I came out of my mom’s womb with very crooked legs. The doctors wanted to perform surgery on my infant knees. My mom, being a nurse, said, “No way.” It could have just been her mama-protection energy, too. Instead she lotioned and massaged my legs every night for three years until they grew out straight, which they eventually did. So touch is what healed me. Touch is my first love language.

Rahi: Then, cut to college: I spent a year living in Japan, did a lot of traveling throughout Asia, and found a Buddhist monastery in the north of Thailand where I did an intensive 21-day Vipassana retreat. So it was this combination of touch and presence. And I soon came to learn that it had a spontaneous healing effect when there were parts of tissues or bodies that were not used to being touched with that kind of presence. We were in a conversation yesterday and someone said that every moment can have an infinite depth. Time goes linear, but there’s a depth to an experience. When touch is present and intentional, it can have that quality of depth. And that is oftentimes the medicine that the body needs.

Rahi: So, in essence, I went down a rabbit hole of tantra and Taoist practices. Master Mantak Chia was very influential in my life. Margot Anand was as well. And Ariel has been my other teacher of significance, more recently. So I’ll let you introduce yourself and then we can share how our paths crossed.

[04:35] Ariel: Okay. My journey has been one of really understanding the spectrum of sexuality and what can happen in sexuality, first by delving through the darker, grittier, muddier realms where it’s distorted, and then finding my way back from that into the beauty and the pleasure. I experienced sexual abuse as a child. Then, as a way to explore and reclaim my sexuality, I got into sex work, first as a stripper. There were ways I was able to do that and feel empowered and find more agency, and also play and have fun. But I had no capacity at that point to feel into my own boundaries or to advocate for myself, so it was a pretty dangerous environment for me, and a lot happened to my body that I didn’t want. I experienced further trauma, and after that I was sexually trafficked.

Ariel: Then I became a real estate agent for about a decade, and during that time I went deeply into my healing journey. I worked with the energetics of my body through plant medicine, and then through pleasure, when I found somatic sex education. There were so many different things I did in my healing journey, but the two most influential paths I walked were with the plants and with pleasure. Over time I came back home into my body and into my sexuality, and through my experiences I came to really understand the distortion of it in our culture, so that I could unwind that from my own system and then see really clearly how it plays out in other people’s nervous systems, and in our culture at large.

Tammy: Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you so much.

[06:31] Rahi: And that’s where our paths intersected, about five years ago. We were both certified somatic sex educators and knew of each other, and then you kind of tracked me down and we connected. Ariel ended up taking my 3 Keys to Genital De-armoring course and came for the live training, which is where we met for the first time in person. At the same time, I was really fascinated by the plant and psychedelic world, specifically how it can support long-term somatic healing. We know it creates new neural pathways, new somatic pathways in the body, and I wanted to explore that within our field of somatic sex education. So I was seeking Ariel’s advice and expertise in different aspects of the plant world that I was just learning.

Rahi: Then we came together in Canada. We’re part of a collective called the EOS Lab that explores the intersection of the plant world and erotic healing. She asked if we could do a group cuddle the first night. Later on I found out it was just because she wanted to cuddle with me. [laughter] The next day we had an exercise, and it was just so obvious. There was this energetic resonance between us that was undeniable. I’d put my hand on her hip and she’d be like, “Oh, my hip wanted your hand there.” This kind of unspoken language between two bodies. That was the start of it, about two years ago now.

[08:20] Tammy: Wow. That’s so beautiful. There are so many different segues. I’m curious about the plant medicine part and how you’ve found it to be in ceremony with sexuality. How do you work with plant medicine and sexuality together?

Ariel: I work with it, and we work with it, in different ways depending on the context. The way I’ve worked with it myself in plant medicine ceremony: I remember, in the last master plant dieta I was in, at the end of one of the ayahuasca ceremonies, the medicine had faded out, but I was lying there and my cervix just wanted to be touched. So under my blanket I was just touching my cervix. That’s giving myself permission to be a sexual person while I’m doing plant medicine. It doesn’t mean I’m doing anything I want in the space. But in the plant medicine world there are a lot of hard lines, and the understandable rule of “you may not have sex here” turns, for a lot of people, into “you may not be a sexual being.”

Tammy: Right. Similar to church growing up, or religion. It’s this way that sexuality has been divorced from the divine and from spirit.

[09:30] Rahi: But you know what’s interesting, Tammy? Over a decade of holding sessions, I’ve had so many clients come to me saying it was an ayahuasca journey or a heroic dose of psilocybin that confirmed a violation from when they were younger, or that made them recognize it was time to address their sexual healing. The way I see it, the plant world clears out what’s not of our nature within our psyche, and it illuminates what’s in the body that’s blocking the natural flow of life force. So it’s no surprise that on so many plant journeys, the realization of what’s impeding sexual aliveness comes to light.

Ariel: I love that. And in the couples retreats we do, on the last day we bring in grandfather medicine, huachuma. The first two days people are going through one-way touch practices, and on the last day we bring in some huachuma to bring in that spirit and the support of the medicine, to go even deeper with the practices they’ve already been doing.

Tammy: Beautiful. And you were going to say something, Rahi.

[11:04] Rahi: Well, just the last couples retreat we did, all three couples were at very different junctures in their partnership. In one couple, both people had just come out of divorces and were dating. It was their third date, and they signed up for a three-day intensive on their third date.

Tammy: Fast track.

Rahi: And the other couple had been married for a long time. And the third day seemed to support each couple in resolving a core issue that was blocking them from deeper intimacy.

Tammy: Wow. Oh my gosh. I’m curious, what are some of the big core issues you find in long-term relationships when people come to you?

[11:55] Rahi: Oh my god, we could talk for hours on that alone. I’m always surprised. In our world, one-way touch is kind of a pillar, because we learn so much from having no responsibility but just focusing on how we’re being touched, or giving practice to our voice: asking and adjusting the kind and quality of touch we want. These are everyday practices for us, and I’m always surprised when we work with couples, because it’s very new to a lot of couples.

Ariel: Right. And that’s an example of what it can unearth for people, common issues and patterns. Maybe someone has been enduring for years. They don’t actually like the way their partner is touching them, so there’s a lot of built-up resentment and anger, and maybe they’ve even come to brace against their touch. Performance is another side of that, a really common pattern.

Rahi: Yeah. And I would also say that in a lot of couples, because the arousal patterns of vulva owners and penis owners are so different, for our heterosexual couples there’s almost a giving-up on the woman’s part, that the man will never last as long as she wants. There’s almost a passive acceptance that this is just how things are, because our society doesn’t really speak openly about the question you just posed. Couples get together, they want to look good, they make jokes about it, but no one really gets to the wounding that happens when we’re children and how that’s carried into our adult intimate patterns, and how to repair ruptures. We don’t talk about that as a society.

[13:49] Tammy: Right, and that’s why I love your work so much. So much of the basis of my work is attachment and nervous system and trauma, because sometimes there’s a misconception that sex is its own thing. We have problems with sex in our relationship or marriage, and it may be surprising to people that it has everything to do with attachment wounds and trauma that may never have had anything to do with sexual trauma. Even the simple thing you’re naming, asking for what you want: it’s hard enough as a woman for me to have learned to ask for what I want with chores, or for help in my life. To even think of asking for what I want sexually was so far removed, especially when so many of us have been socialized with porn and conditioned into this performance. For me in a female body, it was all about my appearance and how my body looks and how I’m performing to make a man ejaculate. And I’ve heard similarly from men about how long they can last, how long they can keep an erection. Going on this path and deepening with each partner, I’ve seen the shitloads of neurosis we carry that keep us from the thing we both actually want, which is deep love, to be seen, and true intimacy.

Tammy: You speak about one-way touch as one of the pillars, and I’d love to go deeply into that. But just so listeners get an idea of your whole body of work in Divine Union For Lovers, can you name all the pillars of the work?

[15:39] Rahi: Yeah. We start with the foundational pillar, which itself is called the 8 Pillars of Intimacy. This is the work Ariel has been cultivating over years, and it really meets any person or any couple where they’re at in understanding the art of attunement, both self-attunement and relational attunement.

Tammy: And what are the eight pillars?

Ariel: Slowing down, pausing, noticing, accepting, trusting, valuing, attuning and communicating. The thing about all of these pillars is that they’re skills we’re going to continue to practice and deepen into our whole lives, so they can meet anyone wherever they’re at. They’re like a blueprint for intimacy with self and intimacy with another. All the pillars before attuning are what allow someone to deepen into attunement, the skills necessary to keep refining it. One of our students noticed that the last pillar is communicating, but every pillar before it is an inner inquiry and exploration with self. It’s a deepening of self-intimacy.

Tammy: Yeah.

Ariel: And they can seem so simple on the face, but they can actually be quite confronting, because they require us to be super aware and honest with ourselves about what we’re feeling, not pushing anything away, and letting that be seen and known. It’s deeply vulnerable.

Tammy: Totally. It’s the opposite of performance. Instead of the action, which is all we ever see in movies and porn and what we think we should do, it’s the inaction. It’s the stillness. It’s the same as our personal spiritual or meditative practice to get to know ourselves, but within a lovership, creating the third thing that holds the couple together.

[17:36] Ariel: Yeah. So we have a foundational module one that goes over the eight pillars. We talk about consent, and we share a practice for holding grief and disappointments together. Then we start moving into one-way touch practices and the nervous system: how the nervous system correlates to sexual responsiveness, and how to work with our nervous system responses, with all sorts of tools for whether someone goes into hypo- or hyperarousal. And then we have a lot of instructional videos of the one-way practices, including genital mapping and ecstatic erotic massage.

Rahi: Body awakening.

Ariel: Yeah.

Rahi: I feel like the treasures in the one-way practices are several. One, the receiver has no responsibility but to inquire what it is their body wants and be present to their sensations. And both people learn so much more: “Oh, I never knew the sides of your torso were an erogenous zone,” or the inside of your wrist. That’s one area. The other thing is that we’re really big on non-genital and non-penetrative lovemaking, because the culture just focuses on cis-hetero penetration, or on orgasms or multiple orgasms. There’s so much intimacy, so many undiscovered terrains before even getting there, so that when you do get there, if you want to get there, it can be more of a meditation than some goal or climax you’re reaching for.

[19:30] Tammy: Right. And I feel like when it becomes that mundane expectation in a long-term relationship, that’s what creates the bracing and the freeze and the pushing away of even wanting sex, because that’s the only possibility we’ve ever been taught. I love the one-way touch. Something that comes up for me, and has in the past, is being able to receive. There’s this neurosis in me that’s like, “Are they enjoying this? I should be giving. Okay, that’s enough for me, it’s your turn.” Can you say a little more about that?

Ariel: [laughter] Wow. So common. But that’s the beauty of the one-way touch practices. They give the receiver and the giver spaciousness, because when you’re going at it two ways, there’s so much to keep track of. You get the spaciousness to really track whatever patterning you have, like this particular patterning of guilt, or feeling like you have to do something in order to receive. You get to watch it, and over time, if you keep showing up to receive, you start to build your capacity to receive. Just keep showing up. Notice when it comes, name it out loud, hold it for yourself, allow your partner to hold it with you too, and over time it really does change.

Rahi: It’s also very valuable, and it’s in the course, I believe in module two, to take an inventory with your lover. Just as you mentioned, our attachment wounds and patterns start when we’re very young, and our resistance and guilt around receiving generally start very young as well. So you look at what intimacy patterns and relational patterns you can recognize in yourself from when you were very young, and share them with your partner, so they don’t take things personally when they show up in your adult relationship.

[21:37] Tammy: Yeah, definitely. And also with sexual trauma, it feels less safe to receive. I’m curious, how do you move through that kind of charge together, slowly, to start to feel safe to open to penetration or to receiving touch?

Ariel: My experience of moving through that in my own body has been pausing when something like that comes up. That’s the biggest thing. And then just holding it and letting it be what it is. Never pushing through or forcing, doing my best to accept what’s happening even if I don’t like it. And only choosing partners who are able to pause and slow down with me.

Tammy: Yeah. Sometimes the medicine really is just pausing, slowing down, and having a compassionate witness in the moments when you were otherwise scared and alone and frozen and couldn’t say what you needed.

Ariel: Yeah. And once I pause and slow down, I might need some time to even orient to what’s happening for me. Then maybe I’ll want to be hugged, or maybe I’ll want just a gentle hand on my yoni or my belly. Just giving yourself as much space as you need to feel into what will feel best in that moment, to let whatever is happening pass, or to feel whatever is happening.

[23:16] Rahi: I want to jump in here, Tammy, and share that moments like that can be far deeper in intimacy and vulnerability and connection than penetration. When you can really feel the vulnerability and attune to what is needed, and provide something different than the ingrained pattern, that’s really important when it comes to breaking free of patterns and creating new ones. Just what you described, pausing, holding, being with what is, can be way more intimate and really rewarding and nourishing.

Tammy: Absolutely. Those have been some of the most profound spiritual moments for me in partnership. Coming from so much wounding, to have somebody attuned to me so deeply that they pause, and I may be crying, and to be held during an intimate moment, even if there is penetration, and for my heart to feel like it’s flowering open. It truly feels like connection to the divine with a lover. And it’s a repatterning experience, not so different from what you might experience in somatic therapy sessions working on your attachment wounds. It feels like such a beautiful portal, to be able to do that with someone for life as you’re forever changing and getting to know this other being who will always evolve.

Tammy: I’m curious how your work contributes to the longevity of relationship, when that seems to be such a prevalent issue in our culture. It’s been a belief for me at certain points: can I actually be with a lover long-term? I say I want that, but it feels like it’s been sold to me that at a certain point the fire dies, the love dies, the passion fades, beauty fades. How does your work help with that?

[25:25] Ariel: I think it does in a couple of ways. One is that we really approach lovemaking as a practice. That’s particularly important long-term, because that initial hot fire doesn’t remain that way.

Tammy: Right.

Ariel: So you do need to schedule your practice time. [laughter] And part of these teachings is dismantling the paradigm of what sex is, what it’s for, and what it can look like, really broadening the palette of all the different places of pleasure and joy we can go into and discover with our bodies. It’s an endless place to play and discover in.

Rahi: It’s really fascinating to investigate how you define sex, and when I say “you,” I mean each person. If sex is just a release, or something to pat myself on the back and say I’m a good, healthy, capable sexual person, then it’s going to be limiting. But as Ariel said, if it’s a shared practice, a meditation of discovery, it’s really infinite how much you can discover, and how much depth of awareness and attunement you can bring to yourself and to this organism that is the partnership and the practice. We have a weekly practice and we continue to discover new things, in erotic pleasure, in emotional depth, and in our own understanding of what existence is. We find that the longer we stay in states of erotic arousal, it starts to change our consciousness and the downloads we get. So it becomes this ever-evolving inquiry and discovery of life and relationship.

Ariel: Yeah. And the other thing I’m thinking about is that some people grow apart because they were meant to be together for a period of time, they did what they needed to together, and it’s time to part ways. But some people grow apart because they haven’t been fully honest with each other, so there’s so much anger and resentment that builds up. The practice of this kind of lovemaking, extended lovemaking, and the practice of the 8 Pillars of Intimacy require real depth of honesty. Over time, as our desires and preferences naturally change, we can continue to see each other, and so we can each continue to feel met by the other person. Things will always be shifting and growing and changing, but we can do it together if we’re willing to meet each other honestly.

[28:24] Tammy: Right. Would it be safe to say this type of work isn’t for the faint of heart? It’s not a quick fix for a marriage or a long-term relationship, because it is spiritual practice. It’s the same as, “I don’t want to meditate this morning, but this is what I do every morning.” Would that be similar for this practice as a couple?

Rahi: Well, I would say relationships in general are not for the faint of heart.

Tammy: True.

Rahi: They say if you want a PhD in growth, get in a relationship.

Tammy: Totally.

Rahi: I would also say that’s the brilliance of the eight pillars, and of a lot of what we offer in the course: it meets people where they’re ready to be met. Take noticing. Someone who may be dissociated might notice that they’re not feeling very much, and that’s the degree to which they’re noticing. Someone else who’s very embodied may notice the flutters around their ankle, or the energy going up the back of their neck. So noticing, or any of the pillars, can be a simple awareness or a really in-depth inquiry. In that same way, so many of the practices meet people where they’re ready to be met.

[30:01] Ariel: Yeah. And it can be scary to be so honest, and what I find is that the level of honesty is what allows for whatever level of bliss and ecstatic pleasure you’re going to experience in the relationship. So yes, this work is not for the faint of heart. Going deep into any relationship is not. There will be days and weeks that are challenging and hard, and there’s fighting. But then there are also these delicious, expansive erotic states that keep you invested. [laughter] It resources the relationship. You have this beautiful place you can go together. It’s not always accessible, but it’s a stabilizing force that supports you when things are hard.

Tammy: Right. When you were speaking before about the way sexuality is distorted in our society, I’m curious if you could open that up a little: what you notice and what you mean by that. What you’re describing now is when the energies feel balanced and both people come to sacred sexuality as a resource for love, for their work in the world, and for thriving relationships. But what’s the opposite? Where do we start from in society? What is the distorted sexuality you’re talking about?

[31:25] Ariel: So the distorted sexuality is a reflection of the system we live in: colonial capitalist patriarchy. It’s an extractive system. It organizes itself around extraction, and therefore sexuality becomes performative and disconnected. It’s about what someone is going to give, instead of connection. And what it’s extracting is the sacred. The system takes the sacred out of everything.

[31:58] Tammy: That brings tears to the back of my eyes, because I went through a big dark night of the soul around 32, when I was with my partner of six years. He came to me earnestly about guilt and shame around his porn preferences, which he was working through in therapy. But it triggered all of my stuff. It felt like it triggered ancestral memories, all of women’s pain. It felt like all my trauma responses were uncontrollable, like women’s rage for generations, and I’m not proud of a lot of the ways I showed up during that period. I did not have the capacity to hold it all, and it came all at once. But when I was being self-responsible and doing the shadow work and self-inquiry, I asked: what is it in me that’s also attracted to similar images in pornography? What is it in me that’s attracted to this extractive quality in sex, and how have I attracted that into my own life experiences?

Tammy: So I went on a deep dive into porn. I was like, “All right, I’m going to existential-kink this. I’m going to dive in and see what I’m turned on by.” I’d been in that reactive state of “porn is bad, this is the reason I’ve experienced rape,” and I think there’s a lot of truth to the way it plays out in our society. But I stumbled across tantra porn, and I thought, wait, this could actually possibly heal the world. I found some creators who had their own OnlyFans, and they were teaching things like how to one-way touch the vulva. I didn’t know that was available to me. I thought porn was what it was, the extractive thing we’ve all seen. When I witnessed that, I realized: oh, this is the sacred. Sex is not bad. Attraction, desire, seduction are not inherently wrong. But when we divorce the sacred from it, that’s when there’s control and pain. So thank you for reminding me of that distinction.

[34:43] Rahi: Tammy, I want to share that in all the studies being done around human sexuality, the data shows that the number one indicator of sexual pleasure is actually relational connection.

Tammy: Right.

Rahi: And we’re in a society where, as a cis-het guy growing up in the locker rooms, it’s like, “Oh, did you hit a home run with your date?” It’s all about achievement and results, not emotional connection, which again is the number one indicator of sexual pleasure. “Did you get some?” There’s an extractive quality: what do you get? And growing up there was this expectation, for young guys at least, that if you pay for a date, you expect something in return at the end. It’s almost a commodification that, as Ariel said, is reflective of our colonial capitalist systems.

Tammy: Totally. That reminds me, I even went through a period in my twenties where I didn’t want guys to pay for dinner because of the expectation I felt myself to then have sex. [laughter] “We’ll split it.” And then, coming into polarity, I realized I do want to be taken care of. So how do I lean back and let myself be taken out, without the expectation of sex afterwards as an exchange?

[36:21] Ariel: Yeah. And something else really beautiful you just showcased is that it’s not that porn is bad. There can actually be porn that’s healing. It’s just that a lot of the porn out there is a reflection of the sickness of our mainstream culture of sexuality.

Tammy: Right. Which is not so different from fast food or consumerism, the way we’re addicted to shopping. I may cut this out of the podcast, but I’ve had this fantasy: what if one day I could make beautiful porn that shows people how sacred intimacy could really look? Obviously I’m shielding my parents and family from this, as a Chinese good girl in their eyes. [laughter] Maybe I’ll wait until I’m in my sixties, when they’ve crossed over and can give me blessings from the other side. [laughter] But that idea is why I realized that sex education, we didn’t get it in school. We just got “wear condoms.” We were never taught how to work with the energy of attraction, and that has been really painful, confusing and damaging in my life.

Tammy: For example, the ways the male gaze impacts my body, or not learning what to do with attraction as a teenager, with so many hormones, and only being taught that it means we’re going to make out and have sex. Or what to do when attraction comes to me from a man. I subconsciously thought that if a man is attracted to me, I automatically owe him something. It’s taken so much somatic process to understand on a body, nervous system level that it’s not just vanity, which kept me from talking about this for so long. I thought, “Oh, I’m just vain. I just want all this male attention.”

Tammy: But in one of my somatic therapy sessions, breaking it down, I realized how it was connected to my father’s gaze. When he looked at me, I felt alive and glowing and dazzling. And when he looked away, in my session I couldn’t believe I said this, but I said I was like a deflated blow-up doll, as if he took all my organs from my body and I couldn’t even breathe. All my extremities were panicking so much that it was like, I need to find another host, another man out there who can give me my organs back. I saw this pattern playing out in my romantic life as an adult. I said I wanted committed lifelong partnership, but I was still in this trauma response of finding the next person to validate me and give me my organs back, quote unquote, until I finally learned to create my own organs and be an autonomous, sovereign being. So I’m curious about your thoughts on attraction, and how you’ve worked with or teach about that in the sexuality world.

[39:57] Rahi: First, thank you for sharing so openly about the effect of the male gaze, and particularly the imprint from your father. We were talking yesterday about something different but related. When we’re children and we get sexual attention, or we’re violated sexually as children, a child often isn’t mature enough to understand the ramifications of being touched in their private parts. But attention is something they know and crave. A child can easily mistake that attention for love, or “I am valued,” or even “I exist.” And that can become eroticized as an adult: that attention, whether it’s good or bad, dangerous or safe, healthy or unhealthy, means I exist, that I’m valid.

Tammy: When you say “I exist,” that really resonates. And the body can also experience violation from unwanted attention. So “I exist and I’m seen” gets coupled with “don’t look into my body like that,” especially growing up as a young girl and starting to get stares at 13 and feeling that invasive male gaze. I both want to be seen naturally, as an expressive being growing into my womanhood, and it’s also just not safe to be seen when eyes are penetrating me without my yes.

Ariel: It’s like, yes, I want to be seen, but not like that. [laughter]

Tammy: Right. And that gets confusing too, because I do want to be attractive to my partner and to my crush. I went through a period of really closing myself off and covering myself up, and that doesn’t feel like my authentic expression either. There are all these layers of push and pull that I feel your work is really addressing, before we get anywhere near penetration.

[42:09] Ariel: Right. And having someone be attracted to you is different than someone objectifying you. They’re going to land very differently in your body.

Tammy: Can you speak more to that, and what the difference feels like?

Ariel: This brings us back to the sickness that permeates our culture around sexuality, which is objectifying. We’re all inundated with media that trains us to objectify our own bodies and other people’s bodies. If I think about it in my own body: if someone is objectifying me, I’m not actually being seen, because I’m not being seen as a human. I’m being dehumanized and seen as something they can use or take something from. If someone is just finding me attractive, I feel like I’m being seen in my being, in my essence, my soul or my voice, something true to me, not something they want to get or take from me.

Tammy: Can you describe the somatic sensations of how those differ in your body, to give somebody an idea?

Ariel: For me, if I’m being objectified, my whole body tightens up. I’m bracing and protecting, and I can feel my ligaments and muscles… it’s very subtle, but it’s a clenching, almost like crawling up into my insides. If someone is really seeing me, and, this is actually an interesting thing, if I feel safe being seen [laughter], then my cells expand out a little, almost like there’s breath moving in and out of each cell, and I can feel myself taking up a little more space, really inhabiting my body and the space around me.

Tammy: Beautiful.

Ariel: The tricky thing is, if there’s a link between being seen and a lack of safety, like you were just talking about, there’s going to be a period of untangling those two things.

[44:35] Tammy: Totally. There was so much untangling for me between those two things, because I had basically learned that getting objectification was safe for me. I mistook objectification for attraction, for somebody being genuinely attracted to me. Hearing about your history, Ariel, I’m curious whether that was part of your journey too: seeing the ways that you, as a woman, were taught to attract objectification.

Ariel: Yeah, I definitely resonate with the confusion. I would seek out the objectification, but never actually the connection I desired, and it left me feeling worse and empty. I was tying my value to my desirability to men. What really shifted that for me, like a lightning bolt, was developing facial paralysis, which quickly and drastically changed the way I looked. It cracked through the identity I had: that my desirability, my attractiveness, is my value, the most important thing I carry in this life.

Tammy: Wow. Was this within your relationship, or were you in a different relationship?

Ariel: This was a long time ago, around 2016.

Tammy: Would you be willing to share? I imagine that was a very dark night of the soul.

[46:12] Ariel: Yes, it was. I really believed I was ugly. I didn’t want to go outside. I thought my real estate career was going to be over, because that role is so front-facing and I was seeing people all day, every day. But so many beautiful things came from that cracking open, like untangling that identity. I was down in the pit of “I’m not desirable, I’m ugly, I want to hide,” and there was a part of me that wanted to get out of the pit. That part said, “Okay, let me find the things I am that actually make me who I am, that are valuable.” Over time I was able to anchor in other things that had nothing to do with appearance.

Tammy: And did it affect your relationship?

Ariel: It did, in that I was convinced my partner at the time was going to leave me, because I thought I was ugly and I thought that’s why he was with me.

Tammy: Wow. Thank you for sharing that. It’s so vulnerable to share, because it feels so embarrassing to admit as a woman, this secret in the back of my mind always feeling like, “At the end of the day, I know you’re really with me because I’m beautiful,” and then this terror of what happens when that goes away. [laughter] Even though I know that’s not true now.

Ariel: I was proved wrong. That was also helpful. That would have been pretty hard if he had left. [laughter]

Tammy: Well, I’m sure a beautiful learning journey would have come from that as well, finding your value beyond that. But I’m so curious, we have Rahi here, a cis man. On your side of things, how do you think about this stuff, or how has it shifted for you growing into manhood?

[48:23] Rahi: Well, I’m maybe not a good example, because [laughter] growing up I was really into the quirky girls, the offbeat ones, the weirdos.

Ariel: That’s why he likes me. [laughter]

Rahi: That’s what really got me curious, the unusual. I grew up outside of LA, and the stereotypical blonde, blue-eyed look, and I don’t want to disparage that, wasn’t that interesting to me because it was so common. My school was predominantly Caucasian, a lot of blonde and blue. It’s like my mom, who confuses all my white friends and calls them by the same name. [laughter] But here’s the other thing, Tammy. I think human nature works this way: when you really find someone attractive, when you like something about someone, you just see them as beautiful. That’s always been the case for me. I remember in junior high there was this girl, Michelle. She wasn’t considered beautiful, but I thought she was the most beautiful girl in school, because she was so cool.

Tammy: Right.

[49:40] Ariel: What I’ve found in my experience is that if I’m really in love with someone, just like you’re saying, everything about them is beautiful to me. And if something about their appearance starts to bother me, it’s usually not about that. It’s actually about something else, and my psyche is finding a reason to pull away or push away.

Tammy: Right. It’s a protective response. That came up so much in that journey with my six-year relationship, when we were having sex maybe every three months, and I made it mean I’m not attractive, you’re not attracted to me. The porn stuff made it even worse. But it was a huge growing journey for me, because at a certain point I couldn’t just stay in my mess and my victimhood. I had to see all the ways I was closing myself up sexually, and find my value beyond my appearance. The relationship did end. But beyond that, I realized it had nothing to do with the size of my body. It had to do with my radiance, my inner being, my essence. When we connected a few months later, he was so attracted to me, and I thought, “I wish I’d figured this out while we were together.” I think this is such an important conversation, because it’s a very prevalent neurosis I hear people talk about over and over, with aging and in long-term relationships: the problem of attraction. They think it’s about appearances, because that’s what we’ve been sold, but it’s really about the emotional depth and connection and safety you’re talking about.

[51:33] Ariel: I mean, the hottest thing to me is attunement. If someone can attune to me, that keeps my desire and attraction going. As soon as attunement starts to disappear in the relationship, my desire disappears right with it.

Rahi: Some of what underscores what you’re both sharing is that attunement, a sense of safety and emotional connection are what open up your heart and your body, and these are the things that lead to deep sexual pleasure. Looks may do it in the beginning, but going back to your question about sustaining a relationship, it really comes down to: does this person see me and know me? Can they feel me? Are they with me?

[52:21] Tammy: Yeah. I had an experience with my partner early in our relationship where, of course, there was a little of the conditioning around performance when we first became intimate. There was a moment when I thought, wait, I need to ask for what I want. It was going too fast, and you go into autopilot even if you’ve done this work for so long. I said, “I need slowness.” And he actually slowed down, and suddenly I felt myself with him again. Before that moment I’d been noticing: I have no sensation in my pelvis right now. This is just happening. Why are my thoughts elsewhere? Shouldn’t I be totally consumed in this beautiful act of lovemaking? When he slowed down, suddenly my heart opened. I had tears, and I felt an incredible amount of pleasure in my pelvis, like my yoni was finally opening to receive this love. And that did start with me asking for what I needed, and even having the recognition to know what was going on.

Ariel: There’s a reason why slowing down is the first of the eight pillars. [laughter]

Tammy: Genius. So simple, but seemingly so complicated for most of us.

Ariel: It can take so long to build that muscle to speak.

Tammy: Oh my god. That’s the first muscle that gets constricted and closed off from past trauma: being able to speak. I’m curious, besides one-way touch, what are the other practices inside the work?

[54:03] Rahi: You’d asked about the pillars of the work. We talked about the 8 Pillars of Intimacy, nervous system attunement, and one-way touch, which involves mapping each other’s full bodies as well as the genital erogenous areas. There’s non-penetrative lovemaking. And within those lessons and demo videos, there’s a lot of expanding the body’s capacity to be present to erotic states of arousal and pleasure. Again, it’s deconditioning the fast, goal-oriented results. Can you explore what it’s like just to be with heightened erotic states of arousal in the body, be present with them, and let your container expand? Then when you get to the pillar of extended lovemaking, you can be present with that experience.

Ariel: In the non-penetrative lovemaking, there are different ideas for ways to have your genitals touch without penetration. And then if you move into penetration, you approach it as a meditation.

Tammy: And I imagine that really helps with expanding capacity, because many of us dissociate during that without even knowing it. “Okay, I’m going to dissociate, it’ll be finished, and that’s it.” Slowing down and staying with each moment, you’re bringing the body safety with each increase in holding these erotic states.

Ariel: Right. In any moment that it’s not pleasurable for both people, that’s a great time to slow down and pause.

Tammy: Absolutely. Because in that moment we usually don’t speak. We don’t want to ruin the moment or ruin it for the other person, and there are all these assumptions that we’ll be the bad, wrong one. But the reality is both people probably feel it, and both are afraid to speak.

Rahi: Yeah. And once again, pausing in that moment can open the door to real intimacy, because then you can really be vulnerable and share what’s going on for each person.

Tammy: So beautiful. And I find that a lot of partners have this fear: “I don’t want to ruin this for my partner. My partner’s in pleasure right now.” But most of the time I hear from the other person, “But I want you to feel good right now. If it doesn’t feel good to you, I don’t want to do it.”

Ariel: Yeah. The surprising thing is always that my partners get a lot of pleasure out of me having pleasure. There’s so much unlearning that happens through relating.

Rahi: And that’s why relating is the ultimate altar for the evolution of your consciousness and self-awareness. Again, the pillars are really brilliant, because they can be applied in any kind of intimate situation.

[57:21] Tammy: Are you willing to share a difficult moment in your relationship that this work helped you move through?

Rahi: Yeah. Which one do you want to share? Let’s look among our favorite ruptures. [laughter] For some reason the summer rupture comes up, when I went to my high school reunion and came back. Do you have a favorite one?

Ariel: You can go where you want to go.

Rahi: I’m searching for what actually happened in that rupture. So if you have one ready…

[58:07] Ariel: Well, I’m thinking about the other week, when we were in our love lab. Every Friday we dedicate a day of devotion. It’s our play space, and also a space where we discover new things. We stay in bed a lot of the day, but we also like to go to the beach and enjoy food together. In the middle of the day, at lunch, we got into a fight. We were at each other, and it was an old fight, one we used to have all the time. It had gone away for a while, but here it was again, this familiar energy pattern. We both got to a point of being able to say, “Okay, let’s drop it,” and then actually drop it. Some sadness came in, and some distance. Sometimes after a rupture you aren’t open to connecting yet and there needs to be some space, but this wasn’t a big enough one for that, for either of us. We were able to let it go and make love, and then the whole thing just went away. It didn’t turn into a day-long thing we needed to excavate. The energy of eros and the pleasure we were experiencing together dissipated the pieces of it that were kind of ridiculous.

[59:44] Rahi: If I can chime in there: in my experience, when I’m in a rupture there’s an egoic part of me that really wants to be right. There’s an inner attorney collecting evidence, going through all the file cabinets of past reasons why I’m right. But when we made love, the connection from our lovemaking so far superseded all that evidence-gathering that I mentally threw all those files into the ocean, and you realize, oh wait, this is what our relationship is about. It’s not about being right and making points. That’s what it was like for me.

Rahi: And the example I was chewing on, the one that came up in the summer: you had looked into your sex trafficker’s eyes and found love.

Ariel: Yeah.

Rahi: Ariel has done so much work around her past, and one piece is having been trafficked. I still have more processing to do around forgiving this person, who I’ve never met but know caused harm. Ariel has lived through it. So when she expressed compassion for him, it triggered something in me, and I got really scared. I thought, “If Ariel can forgive someone like him, who in my mind is a monster I still haven’t forgiven, what other dangerous situations might she be in?” I didn’t realize it was that scared part of me that got triggered. I ended up choosing something else to argue about. A lot of times, I find that when I’m in a rupture, I’m arguing to be right about something that isn’t even the main point. A boy got scared, and I’m just trying to protect myself and wanting to be right about it.

[1:02:14] Ariel: And this is where the pillars are so important. When things are fiery and there’s so much going on, we have to slow down. You had to slow down and take a pause: what’s actually going on for you? What are you actually feeling? You’ve got to go inside.

Tammy: Yeah. And what was actually beneath the “what other situations could she get into?” What was beneath the anger and the hurt?

Rahi: Well, what Ariel has pointed out in a number of the ruptures in our relationship is that it’s usually the little boy in me who gets scared that Ariel is going to be in some kind of danger. There’s a part of me that wants to protect, really protecting her and us. When that little one gets activated, he usually finds something to argue about that’s somehow correlated to it.

Ariel: And then, interestingly, I usually have a reactive part that feels like he’s trying to control me.

Tammy: Right.

Ariel: So I’m like a teenager: “No!” [laughter]

Rahi: What I find in these moments is that whoever has the most capacity at the moment needs to hold it down, and wait their turn until later.

Ariel: That’s not always possible. Sometimes I just have to go at it right when you’re going at it. But if I can, I’ll say, “Okay, I’m going to hold it down right now. I’m actually good, and I’ll get my turn, maybe tomorrow, to express my side of things.”

Tammy: I love that.

Rahi: And then there are times when I’m like, “Okay, she thinks she’s holding it down until tomorrow. I’ll let her think she’s holding it down, because I can hold it together for us until next week.” [laughter]

Ariel: Wait, what do you mean?

Rahi: No, I was just making a joke. She always thinks she’s the one holding it down, and she often is.

Ariel: Not always, though. Sometimes you are too. I’ll give you that. [laughter]

[1:04:36] Rahi: Thank you. But Tammy, something I want to share: as Ariel mentioned, every Friday we have a day of devotion and spend most of it in bed. It’s not only about lovemaking. Things that accumulate during the week get to be processed. There’s a space for everything to metabolize. So if there have been disagreements, in between our lovemaking they usually get resolved.

Tammy: When you first shared about the love lab, you said a rupture happened, and normally you’d go into it, but instead you chose lovemaking. Was there a segue, some relational practice first to attend to the rupture before going into lovemaking? Or was it just a moment of choosing lovemaking?

Rahi: I kind of feel like you initiated it.

Ariel: I think I did. I was feeling really sad, and we were holding each other, and I asked him if he would make love to my sad part.

Tammy: Oh, I love that.

[1:05:44] Rahi: And this is where pleasure can be potent medicine. When there are aspects of ourselves that are sad or scared, or feel ugly or judged, making love and bringing pleasure to those aspects can really metabolize a lot.

Tammy: Definitely. My partner and I are both really into ritual theater and acting, so there’s a big part that’s almost shadow work through different characters, our wounded parts becoming full characters, and these energies get to be in erotic play together. I’m curious whether that’s any part of your practice or your work.

Ariel: That sounds amazing.

Rahi: But remember the character work we did, when you were 13…

Ariel: We have, in our personal practice, but it’s not a piece of the course.

Tammy: Can you tell me about your personal practice?

[1:07:02] Ariel: Oh, this was so special. I wanted to replay a different ending. Rahi played a man who raped me when I was 13. I told him the scenario I wanted to be in, and then I got to say no and leave. We did it at the beach.

Rahi: You got to really use your voice, stand in your power, and create a different somatic ending. We had a beach towel, we created the whole scenario, and Ariel got to create a different ending to that story.

[1:07:50] Tammy: Thank you so much for sharing that. On my own path, that’s when I really started exploring what in BDSM or kink can be somatically healing for sexual trauma, and it’s very validating to hear about your personal exploration. When my partner of six years and I first talked about role play, there wasn’t the safety, connection and attunement we’ve talked about in this conversation for it to feel natural. For you to have the safety to build that scene, keep a straight face and really be in it together, present, takes this beautiful body of work you’ve created together: being present with one another and in service to each other’s process.

[1:08:38] Rahi: I think this speaks to the importance of creating clear and sacred containers. Our love labs are really sacred containers, because there has to be that safety. There has to be talk about boundaries and aftercare, so you can really drop into whatever the container is inviting you to drop into.

Tammy: Beautiful. Thank you so much. What’s coming up in your teachings of Divine Union For Lovers? I know you have two retreats coming up. And where can people find your work?

[1:09:26] Ariel: People can find us at divineunionforlovers.com. We have an evergreen, self-paced course that people can take on its own or with personalized support. And we have couples retreats coming up, one in June and one in September: three days for three couples. Do you want to say a little about them?

Rahi: Sure. We keep it small, so it’s very intimate. It’s a lot of the material from our online course, but in person, so there are live demos. I’ll demo a one-way touch practice on Ariel, people get to understand and ask questions, and then when they go off into their private rooms to practice with each other, we’re positioned in the middle of the doorways. If they need some pointers on a zone of the vulva or the penis or whatever it is, we’re right there and they can course-correct in real time. Then we come together, the three couples and the two of us. I love group experiences, because everyone learns from each other while their own bodies are learning new patterns.

Ariel: And on the third day there’s the optional bringing-in of some plant medicine.

[1:10:49] Tammy: That sounds like such a beautiful experience, and I hope my partner and I will be able to be there with you in person at some point. I’m so grateful to you for sharing your work in the world and for sharing your personal relationship and experience today. This is such a necessary conversation in the sex world. Thank you so much for being here.

Ariel: Thanks so much for having us.

Rahi: Thanks for having us, Tammy. This was so great. Thank you.