Why Doesn’t Sexual Technique Work When the Body Doesn’t Feel Safe? Rahi Chun & Ariel Szabo on Sex Is Medicine

Lightly edited for readability.

[00:32] Devi: Hello and welcome back to Sex Is Medicine. I’m your host, Devi Ward Erickson, and today I’m particularly excited to share alumni from our show, Rahi Chun and his beautiful partner, Ariel Szabo. Rahi, you and I were online together a long time ago.

Rahi: Devi, I think it was more like 2018. It was back in the Sex Is Medicine 1.0 and Organic Sexuality 1.0 days.

Devi: So we have almost a decade of history. Rahi and Ariel are certified somatic sex educators and sexological bodyworkers devoted to restoring erotic aliveness through conscious touch, deep relational presence and erotic alchemy. Rahi is internationally recognized for teaching the art of genital de-armoring. When we’ve shared your genital de-armoring course through our email, we get emails back saying, “We’re so happy to see you supporting Rahi’s work.” Rahi has developed an understanding of how our developmental imprints influence our adult sexual expression. Ariel is recognized for her depth of attunement in somatic and erotic work, her integration of plant medicine and pleasure, and her writing at the intersection of sexuality, power and liberation. Today we’re talking about rewiring intimacy, the nervous system, and consciousness through the body, through divine sacred union. So tell me, what does it mean to rewire intimacy?

[03:14] Rahi: That’s a really important question for any society to ask, because every society has certain norms around sexuality, and they largely come from a huge absence of accurate and compassionate sex education. So the default is that people are fumbling around, or trying to perform, or trying to look good. We’re really all about deconditioning and reconditioning the body, as well as the spirit and the psyche, as to what’s possible with erotic consciousness: being present moment to moment, being very intentional about the consent of our own bodies, and how sacred that connection can be.

Devi: I love that you said compassionate education. We don’t have comprehensive sex education. We don’t have pleasure-based sex education. What role does compassion play in our sexuality?

[04:35] Rahi: What we see in our work is that a lot of couples and single folks are used to using their body like a product, to squeeze something out of it. “I want multiple orgasms,” or “I want this kind of effect,” rather than treating that part of the body like your inner child, because that’s what it deserves: all the compassion and understanding, to be met, to be heard. What do my genitals want to tell me this morning? Rather than top-down, inviting the body’s wisdom to inform us in our lovemaking.

Ariel: And we definitely also need consent-based, pleasure-based education.

Devi: I love how you said consent of our own bodies, and how often we override our own bodies in pursuit of “I want multiple orgasms, I want to squirt,” this idea of what we think we want to achieve sexually versus being present and listening to the body, working with the body instead of grinding it out. It’s like grind culture applied to sex: we’re going to grind out this experience and you’re going to perform for me.

Rahi: And when we work with couples, intimacy gets lost in that grinding. It gets lost in the performance. We have couples coming to us who love each other and want more connection. They’ve just never been taught or shown the tools of what is beyond grinding and performance and sexual ego.

Ariel: And the goal of climax.

[06:43] Devi: So let’s talk about that. Why should climax not be the goal? Everything in our culture says it’s the peak. You have that climax, then you’re done, everybody’s happy and satisfied, and it usually happens in about two minutes.

Ariel: When we make climax the goal, we set ourselves up for a container of bypassing. We’re not creating a container for deep attunement and checking in: what is my body actually wanting moment to moment? We miss out on so many possibilities of deepening into sensation and exploring subtle realms of pleasure. In my own life, when I was in a mode of grinding toward climax, I would know exactly how to position myself so that my vagina and vulva were being touched in a certain way so that I could climax. When I removed that from the table, I discovered all these other pleasure points over my whole body, and inside my vagina, that are a whole new range of sensations. They lead to a whole new range of types of orgasms and climaxes as well, but those just come naturally.

Rahi: For our audience to really imagine it: you already know how to grind. Imagine if that’s 1% of the potential your body has for erotic pleasure. 99% is being bypassed. And that gets discovered when we slow down, when we pause, when we try different things, when we’re not in a rush or goal-oriented, and when we really attune to ourselves and our partner for where that life force wants to take us.

[08:53] Devi: Beautiful. So sex is a practice, not a performance. Tell me more about engaging in sexuality as a practice.

Ariel: When we engage in sexuality as a practice, we can use sex to discover more about who we are, how energy wants to move through us. We can use it as a container to discover more about our bodies: all the different erogenous zones and their capacity for holding erotic charge and experiencing pleasure. We also use it as a practice for pleasure-based healing and expanding consciousness, and for creating a container where we can allow anything and everything to come up in an intimate exchange with someone. When we really allow everything to come up, sometimes uncomfortable emotions or sensations come up, and having a space that holds those and brings pleasure to them is a way to re-pattern, and also to heal things and make love to things. To bring love to things that have been cast away, hidden in the shadows, suppressed or unloved.

Devi: Could you tell me more about bringing love to things? What does that look or feel like?

[10:29] Ariel: I could be making love to Rahi and a part of me could come forward, let’s say a part of me that gets scared about saying, “Oh, I’d actually prefer it this way,” because that part is afraid that if I interrupt the moment or say what I really want, I’ll lose the connection, that he won’t be interested. If I voice that, bring it to the surface, he can say, “No, I want to give you that. I want to make love to that.” And then we can consciously make love to the part that is afraid.

Devi: So it’s integrating these pieces of ourselves that we’re afraid of, or feel shame and shadow around. Being present with them and inviting them in integrates them into the whole.

[11:35] Rahi: That’s precisely it. What we find is that the deeper the erotic states, the longer the lovemaking, and the more free and unattached we are to inviting whatever wants to come up, the more often we touch into very vulnerable young parts of ourselves. When those young parts are met with the kind of love and pleasure and affection that we hold our lovemaking with, it rewrites the whole story in the body. Aspects that may have been hidden in the shadows or not welcome now get to integrate and become more whole. Lovemaking is such a beautiful container for that.

Ariel: And then that scared part isn’t so scared anymore, over time. That translates to how I show up in all areas of my life. It’s easier to advocate for myself, to say what I think, to use my voice with anyone, anywhere.

Devi: I remember learning, thirty years ago in my first monk training, about integrating the shadow. The teaching is that the shadow is the fragments, the parts of ourselves we’ve severed ourselves from and shut away. Not only do these parts carry shame and judgment, they also carry jewels: talents and gifts and pieces of our identity. What I’m hearing is that you’re creating a container of love with each other, and that container is an invitation for these wounded places to arise and be embraced.

[13:26] Rahi: That’s really well reflected. And I’ve learned so much in my partnership and my love with Ariel, because she’s so attuned. She knows what I’m feeling sometimes moments before I do, and invites that forward, so that my little boy and my younger selves that never felt safe to come out and play feel the invitation and the permission to come out and play when we make love. Now when I’m going to the pharmacy or the grocery store, all these young parts come out and interact with others.

Devi: The joyful, playful, liberated, unburdened pieces of ourselves. That’s Priestess Ariel. Making love to her is an alchemical experience.

[14:32] Ariel: And in higher states of arousal, we can really start to experience this merge energy and go into realms of expanding consciousness, this “we” space. It’s similar to what a lot of people describe in psychedelic journeys, a feeling of belonging with nature, with themselves, with everything. By higher states I mean: if we think about a pleasure scale from zero to ten, zero being no arousal and ten being climax, at maybe a seven, eight or nine you can really go into this merge energy. In those higher states we can start to get downloads, and really expand our body’s capacity to hold a lot of erotic charge, which is a lot of sensation, which in turn expands to holding all kinds of sensations in all areas of your life.

Devi: So building our capacity to hold intense sensations of pleasure also builds our capacity to hold intense emotions that may not be as enjoyable. We’re building the capacity of our container to hold and not explode.

Ariel: Yes, and to be with.

[16:05] Rahi: It’s such a reflection. When the nervous system feels safe holding more and more intense erotic charge, it can feel safe holding any kind of charge out there. So there’s the compassion and love of inviting our inner children forward, but the erotic element is also important, because it’s alchemical and transformational.

Devi: Tell me more. Why is the erotic element specifically alchemical and transformational?

Rahi: Devi, it’s so fascinating. On that pleasure scale from zero to ten, what we’ve found is that the sweet spot between seven and eight, eight and nine, and 9.99 is actually more delicious than the ten. What most people consider a ten is climax, and then there’s the refractory period. But we have a term in our lovemaking, “riding the nines.” We love riding the nines. Then we’ve got to eat, go to the bathroom, and we come back and continue riding the nines. Awarenesses come to us, downloads come through us, and we start attuning to each other’s feeling sense, thought sense. Our whole body of work and our online course came through those states of erotic alignment.

[17:43] Devi: Erotic alignment, yes. When I was writing my book, I was researching what frequencies the brain aligns with in these deeper, higher states of arousal, and it was getting into theta and delta waves. Delta is like union consciousness, union with the divine. So quite literally, riding the nines aligns us with our universal consciousness as humans. How beautiful and amazing that making love connects us to God.

Rahi: It’s the ultimate. And to share that journey, that magic carpet ride, with your beloved. I feel like this is why I’m here in human form: to share this with Ariel.

Devi: And when you’re riding the nines and cultivating this bliss, and then you go grocery shopping and do your daily life, are you carrying that nine with you? Monks sit and meditate for twelve hours a day, but you’re cultivating that in your union and then moving through the world in this bliss.

Rahi: Yeah, kind of buzzing.

Ariel: Very much. And sensitive, and attuned.

[19:33] Rahi: Part of me wonders about indigenous cultures, in Peru and other places, that were so attuned to the elements of nature they could hear the trees talking with each other. If we stayed in this nine zone, could we hear the animals speaking to each other, the leaves whispering to each other? I think that’s where it comes from.

Devi: Living in Costa Rica in the jungle, I would tell you absolutely yes. I’m not even always cruising at the nine, but she speaks. Relaxing and opening into an internal expanded state is what allows me access to hear.

[20:22] Rahi: So much of riding the nines, sex as meditation, sex as medicine, is really the shedding of layers of conditioning that our unconscious absorbs from being a member of this society. In those states, the shedding happens, and then we can go out and be closer to the trees, closer to the nature of our nature.

Devi: And you can resource it any time you choose. It’s not dependent on anything external. That’s empowering.

Rahi: It’s empowering and it’s sweet. I can be on my walk and remember how Ariel smells, or her touch, and then it’s alive in my cellular memory. That energy ripples through my body.

[21:42] Ariel: It’s such a balm for the violence embedded in our culture of sexuality that we’re all swimming in, which is performative and objectifying.

Rahi: Objectifying, and of a taking nature.

Devi: Right, it’s extractive.

Rahi: Exactly. The way sex is held and portrayed in media, certainly in porn culture, is really about taking something from someone else, which is the opposite of yielding and surrendering together.

Devi: And taking from your own body. People do it to themselves, they do it to other people. Extractive is the perfect word, and it’s reflective of our culture: how little can I give and how much can I get? Which is the opposite of divine lovemaking.

[22:49] Ariel: The way I think about what we’re doing in our lovemaking is sex magic. Not the type of sex magic we’re often told about, which is again extractive, like using my sexual energy to manifest more money. It’s working with the sexual energy in my own body, and the sexual energy generated between us, to heal ourselves, to heal the world, and to listen to how it wants to move through the world.

Devi: As a lineage-based Tantrika, I was always confused by the sex magic conversation: orgasm and shoot it out the top of your head so you can get a new car. That’s not tantra. Making love to realize enlightenment, that’s what I want to manifest: freedom from suffering. And we do that by relaxing and letting go of attachment, not by cultivating more attachment and shooting an orgasm toward it.

Ariel: That’s what you get when you mix tantra with capitalism.

[24:12] Devi: Absolutely. So in order to get to these expanded states, we need to build trust and intimacy. You teach about the eight pillars of intimacy. What are those?

Ariel: The eight pillars are slowing down, pausing, noticing, accepting, trusting, valuing, attuning and communicating. They’re the skills necessary to cultivate deep intimacy with ourselves and anyone else, and they’re skills we’ll keep cultivating our entire lives. Attunement is actually a culmination of all the skills that come before it. I think of attunement as presence plus moment-to-moment responsiveness. And I like to think of consent as a practice of attunement.

Devi: Tell me more about that, because that’s juicy.

[25:15] Ariel: A lot of the way we’re taught about consent is binary: yes or no. Once I get it, cool, we just keep going. But consent is really a dance between energies that are constantly shifting, and so much of consent is about seen and unseen power dynamics. Power is shifting and moving between two people in every moment, in every single interaction. To really be in consent, we need to be in consent with ourselves in order to be in consent with another human being. To even feel into what is true for me right now, what I want and don’t want, you need to be able to slow down, pause, and notice what’s happening for you. Accept it as true rather than bypassing it or pushing it away just because you don’t like it. Value it enough to take up space with it, make it important, and follow it.

[26:24] Devi: How does trauma fit into this? We’re talking about a deep level of self-awareness. My journey of healing from trauma has been, first, being able to notice that there’s something going on inside, paying attention to it, attuning to it, and then also believing it and honoring it. That’s such a big part of the journey. How do you address trauma in this work, when we don’t necessarily have the ability to self-attune or honor what’s arising?

[27:13] Rahi: What’s brilliant about the eight pillars is that they meet any nervous system where it’s at. If someone is highly traumatized and used to going into a freeze response, maybe they’re just working on slowing down, and that’s the most important practice day to day. Then they can get to a place where they practice the pause, just practicing saying “pause” as an exercise. And then noticing: someone very embodied might notice excitement in their solar plexus, and someone coming in and out of a freeze state might notice that they can’t feel into their solar plexus. That’s a noticing. So each of these pillars meets the person wherever they’re at. It’s almost like eight steps, wherever you are, to deepen your attunement. For one person it might be the beginning stages of that practice, and for someone else it’s deepening their mastery.

[28:20] Ariel: Devi, I really resonate with your journey. So much of my journey was being able to even believe myself about what was true, and then honor myself. That ties back to the word you used earlier, Rahi: compassion. Having compassion for ourselves and where we are, and reminding ourselves that the confusion is because of what happened. Confusion is embedded into the trauma, and right now I’m working through the confusion, and that’s okay. The practice is to keep asking myself: what do I need? What do I want? I might ask myself for a month and not know the answer, but just keep asking and keep listening.

[29:21] Devi: This is where letting go of goal-oriented intimacy really comes into play. If my goal is to crank out three orgasms tonight, I’m not able to attune to what’s arising, or I’ll push down and bypass what’s arising to meet that goal. I love that the first pillar is slowing down. Slowing down is really the key to attunement, and it’s what we don’t get in our society, where so many people have to bypass and push down just to keep grinding to survive. Slowing down to pay attention to ourselves has been such a huge piece of my reclamation.

[30:09] Rahi: It is huge. One of our students pointed out that the first seven of the eight pillars are all internal experiences: the noticing, the accepting, valuing what you’re feeling, trusting it. Only the eighth is actually communicating it to your partner. And to your point, if you had a lovemaking afternoon of just slowing down, how rich and intimate would that be? So sweet and delicate. So much more terrain to explore than rushing toward what you already know.

[31:00] Ariel: When there’s a lot of trauma, a really magical tool is one-way practices. This is magical for everyone, whether or not you resonate with having a lot of trauma. In one-way touch, there’s not as much going on, so it’s a lot easier to practice attuning to yourself. You get to focus on your own experience of either giving or receiving.

Rahi: I’ve found over the years that clients who’ve been married for decades have never explored one-way touch with each other, and they end up learning so much about the kind and quality of touch their partner never knew they liked. It could be the inside of a wrist, or the sides of the torso that have never been delicately explored. “Wow, how come I didn’t know this for twenty years?”

[32:05] Devi: Absolutely. Many years ago when I coached couples with lingam and yoni massage, it really stood out how many men, particularly cisgender heterosexual men, had never been able to sit and be lavished and honored in that way. So many of them cried, because it just had not been their experience to not have to perform when it comes to sexuality. They’re so conditioned by this culture that they’ve got to perform. To have the opportunity to be in the receptive place, where they don’t have to do anything but enjoy and communicate about their experience, was so nourishing and transformative.

Rahi: Their little boys get to come out. And I feel like a lot of what men are chasing out there, in greed and accumulation and fancy cars, is actually trying to make up for what’s really missing: that slow, vulnerable reception.

[33:43] Ariel: The culture around sexuality, tied in with the socialization of men, teaches them to reach for sex, for climax, as soon as they feel any desire. But often there’s a desire under the desire. As Rahi just shared, there’s a deep longing underneath to feel fully met, to feel fully seen, and they’re never going to get it by going for the climax. There’s a slowing down that has to happen, a listening, and staying in that place before the resolution, building a capacity to stay, to keep feeling, to deepen into sensation.

Devi: And that’s also how men master their ejaculatory response, by learning to expand their capacity for sensation. I’ve heard from so many cisgender heterosexual men that what they’re actually desiring is connection, and they’ve been conditioned to understand connection as genital intercourse. They’ve been cut off from understanding other ways of connecting. So the desire rises, and it’s actually a desire for connection, but because of conditioning it gets channeled into genital sex, when the true yearning is for connection, which may or may not include genital stimulation.

[36:13] Rahi: To that point, I remember one of the first tantra workshops I ever did. We were soul gazing and breathing as one, and it was so much more intimate than a lot of the penetrative experiences I’d had. My mind was blown. It’s one of the things that made me want to learn everything about tantra.

Ariel: And on the other side of this, people who are socialized as women are often taught to perform desire, and often to endure a lot, and are afraid to ask for things to slow down.

Devi: I use a blunt phrase for it: those of us socialized as women are taught to just push through it. If it’s uncomfortable, you push through it. Conventional sex lasts two minutes, so you grin and bear it, it’ll be over soon. It’s not about my pleasure, it’s about his orgasm, so he stays with me. That’s the subtext.

Ariel: And when I heard you say “so he stays with me,” what a lot of women actually want is for him to literally stay with them: to stay with their emotional body and their physical body in the way it wants to be met.

[37:35] Devi: But again, we’re conditioned because of the lack of other resources. If the only thing in our face is porn culture and a lack of sex education, we don’t know there are alternatives. Some lucky people like us intuited that there must be something else and went out to find it. But for so many people, we don’t know anything else unless we’re introduced to the possibility.

Rahi: Our society doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. And the tragedy is that slowing down, going back to connection, is the balm for everyone, and yet everyone is bypassing the actual medicine we’re all yearning for. Our bodies have been conditioned to override that medicine, to discard or deny it.

[38:39] Devi: What keeps coming up for me is: what about those who are afraid to slow down because they’re afraid of what may arise? What about the fear of being seen, the fear of authentic connection?

Rahi: One of my peers in Europe says, “Slow is the fastest way,” and I love that. There are a few elements that are necessary, but I think safety is the prime one. A nervous system that may never have experienced safety may even feel threatened by safety, because so much can come up when we finally experience what we’ve longed for. It makes us realize how much we’ve missed it our whole lives. So it needs to be safe for the nervous system, and it needs to move at the pace of the slowest part, which is something Ariel says a lot. You’ve got to move at the pace of the slowest part of you.

[40:02] Ariel: It can also be really helpful to find a place that feels safe enough for connection. For me, that was nature before people. I started to allow myself to be seen by the trees, by the sky, by the ocean, and even started to move erotic energy with the elements. I did all this for years before really doing it with another human being. Just start where you are. Maybe that’s finding connection with an animal, and being really conscious: can I let this animal see me right now? And I’m going to see the animal, and we’re going to have a really sweet cuddle together. Find wherever you can experience some sort of connection, and expand from there.

Devi: So cultivating a resource of safe, digestible connection, anchoring there, and then slowly, gently expanding outward based on your own capacity. What about using pleasure as medicine to rewire the places where we feel uncomfortable, blocked or constrained?

[41:42] Rahi: Pleasure is medicine in that regard, on different levels. From a genital de-armoring perspective, I’m a big advocate of finding the resources of pleasure in order to start to rewire the areas of numbness or pain. Emotionally as well. The other day was a great example: we had a little fight during our love lab. Our Fridays are devoted to love labs. And then we made love through it. That wasn’t to deny the emotions coming up, but to be present with them and let the pleasure gradually consume the other emotions. We got to a place of so much pleasure that the conflict just seemed trivial.

Devi: It dissolved.

Rahi: So you can use pleasure physiologically, as medicine to rewire tissues and sense perception that have been wired with pain or violence, and you can also transmute emotions with pleasure.

[43:07] Ariel: Pleasure is really foundational. It’s basic nourishment. And taking it into a bigger picture, we can use it as a resource to move through and hold what feels unbearable. There’s so much tragedy and violence all the time. How do we hold that and keep ourselves going? There are so many ways to find pleasure: we can sing, we can dance, we can touch ourselves, we can be touched by another human being. Not denying the grief, but meeting the grief with some pleasure, staying with the grief and having pleasure as a resource through it until it transforms into something new.

Devi: I love that you said pleasure is a most basic form of nourishment. We come into this world with pleasure as our compass, our guide. Then we’re conditioned to fear pleasure, to have shame about it, and only certain kinds of pleasure are allowed. This culture divorces us from our birthright to pleasure, and I think that’s a trauma.

[44:28] Rahi: It is. And all living beings seek out pleasure. Animals, trees, anything that’s alive gravitates toward the sun, for nourishment, to feel alive, to feel connection. That’s who we are as a species. Like breathing air or nourishing our body with food, pleasure nourishes the soul with aliveness.

Devi: And it nourishes the energy body, building a healthy, vibrant, strong energy body, and there are chemical responses in the physical body that support our health and immune system. On the energetic level and the physiological level, pleasure is nourishment.

[45:16] Rahi: This circles back to working with bodies that have been deeply traumatized: start wherever you can. Maybe the pleasure is in the form of food, or, as Ariel shared, being in nature. It doesn’t have to be sexual at first, but allowing that to permeate, and being curious how pleasurable sensations can be experienced in so many different ways.

Devi: The image I get is rebalancing: there’s all this pain and suffering, and pleasure is filling our cup to rebalance the scales. And I think it’s important to name that expanding our capacity for sensation and pleasure is going to be uncomfortable sometimes. We need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Uncomfortable feelings are not the end. They’re a stepping stone on the journey, and there is brilliance and beauty and openness and expansion on the other side. You can look to people like Ariel and Rahi, and all the wonderful people on our show, who embody the reality that there is something on the other side of pain. Our culture really doesn’t want us to do that, so it feels important to name.

[47:25] Ariel: It’s so important to name. I like to think of an arousal dial, with pleasurable feelings on one side and uncomfortable feelings on the other. It’s all arousal. It’s all sensation. And we don’t get to expand into one without expanding into the other. It’s just not possible.

Rahi: Ariel often talks about how grief and pleasure are two sides of the same coin. The deeper you can go into experiencing and embracing your grief, the more your pleasure capacity expands as well. To Ariel’s point, it’s all sensation. I’m so glad you’re bringing this up, Devi, because sometimes I have clients who look at it like an efficient business thing: “In three sessions I want to be here.” But it’s a really sacred journey of revisiting the parts of ourselves that didn’t have enough time or space, or were denied the spaciousness to be seen, felt and met. That’s where the healing happens, and where the pleasure then opens up.

[48:44] Ariel: I find this really interesting process, almost an existential grief that follows opening into a new level of pleasure and connection. I open into this new level and then I’m like, “Oh my god, I’ve been missing out on this.” Then I have to move through that grief, and then my system recalibrates to that new expansion as my new baseline.

Devi: Beautiful. That mourning of what has been kept from us, which is our birthright as humans, and then the joy of reclamation. So let’s talk about nervous system attunement as an aphrodisiac. How can we turn ourselves and each other on with attunement?

[49:49] Ariel: It’s the best foreplay there is. If we really want the experience of divine union, that merge energy, that one consciousness, it’s only possible when two bodies can yield in surrender. And that’s only going to happen when there’s enough safety, which you’ve built within yourself and in the relationship between you, to go into that deep state of surrender and let that level of pleasure move through you.

Devi: Such deep trust.

[50:22] Rahi: I find that the biggest turn on is when Ariel does attune to my nervous system, knows where I’m at, and meets me there, and even comes underneath to support my nervous system where it’s at. I can’t imagine anything more intimate than that. It is such an aphrodisiac, and so intimate, that you just want to merge, to meet and be met there.

Ariel: When I think back on previous partners and the lack of attunement in those relationships, like not being able to meet me in my needs or put energy into the household, that was such a turn off that I actually wouldn’t want to have sex with them anymore. But when someone is listening to what I need and putting effort into attuning to my physical and emotional needs, I’m like, yes, I want to give myself to you. I want to make love to you.

Devi: It meets such a deep human need to be seen and known and heard.

[51:59] Rahi: As people who function and carry many responsibilities in society, there’s almost a default, I wouldn’t say hypervigilance, but a kind of bracing. When someone attunes to your nervous system, it just melts that bracing. There’s a yielding, and you just want to be a puddle.

Devi: And it’s not intellectual. It’s a total somatic experience. It bypasses the brain. It’s a felt sense.

Ariel: Some people may not even realize why they’re melting, but when you’re being met in that way, there’s nothing to brace against.

[52:48] Devi: Beautiful. Before we go, let’s talk about playing the pleasure scale. I love that concept. What does that look like?

Rahi: We’ve established the pleasure scale of zero to ten. Playing the pleasure scale is meeting, in this case, Ariel’s body where it wants to be met in arousal, playfulness or emotion. Often we’re so attuned that our arousal scales mirror each other as they build. When it gets anywhere from a four to a nine, we’re able to downshift if it gets too hot, or build the arousal if we want more spice. We do that consciously, but we’re also surrendering to how the energy wants to go and lead us. How does this lovemaking want to play us as the instruments of its music?

[54:07] Ariel: You can also do this in your own self-pleasure practice. You can say, “Today I really want to explore the three to six range. What are all the different sensations I can explore there?” And you can really get to know every place that exists from zero to ten.

Devi: I love what you said, Rahi, about the music that wants to play through our bodies as instruments. Every lovemaking session, every self-pleasure session is different. It has its own intelligence, its own flavor. It’s universal energy playing through our bodies based on the causes and conditions arising in that moment. That’s so much of letting go of the goal: surrendering to the moment, being present, and allowing ourselves to be played as instruments by erotic love.

Rahi: By our erotic nature. And coming back full circle to letting go of the goal, it allows unimaginable terrains of erotic intimacy to be played through us.

[55:28] Devi: So how can people find out more, and learn how to allow their bodies to be played by the erotic energy of love?

Ariel: We have a virtual, self-paced online course at divineunionforlovers.com. People can take it on their own, or with customized support from us, or even with the addition of in-person sessions. And we have a solo path and a path for couples.

Devi: What’s included in the course?

[56:16] Rahi: We’ve talked a lot about the eight pillars of intimacy, and that’s foundational, because studies show that the biggest indicator of sexual pleasure is actually the relational and emotional connection between two intimates. So we focus a lot on that as a foundation. Then there’s a whole range of one-way touch demonstration videos: genital mapping, exploring the body with the giver’s hands, non-penetrative lovemaking. We really go through all the ways we can play the pleasure scale, as the music that wants to come through us.

Ariel: And when you do bring penetration in, orienting to it as a meditation. There’s so much in the course: videos and handouts on working with different nervous system states, how to work with triggers, and how to hold grief and disappointment as a doorway to deeper connection and intimacy.

Rahi: We wanted it to be very practical and applicable to singles or couples at any stage of their relationship.

[57:54] Devi: Beautiful. Where can folks find it again?

Rahi & Ariel: divineunionforlovers.com.

Devi: We’ll include the link below this episode. Thank you so much, Ariel and Rahi. It has been an absolute pleasure, truly a meeting of the masters. And thank you, listeners. Please check out their work and their incredible offerings. See you next week.

Rahi: Thanks, Devi. Great to see you.