How to explain that the workshops are intimate but not personal
or
Why you aren’t being unfaithful when you do this work
In Episode #01 of the Pleasure Lab podcast, Amy and Zed talked at length about doing work in community, why it’s intimate and yet not personal, and how it can be a significant support to your existing relationships. Here are just a couple of pearls from that much longer conversation.
Zed: “I can bring all of those habits into an erotic workshop setting, instead of into a relationship where all my stuff is up in my relationships and my habits are running so hard that it’s really hard to shift them. When I get to go to a workshop and relate to those folks it’s kind of macrocosm of my habits and then I get the non-consequential moments to be able to practice changing those habits with that group. Also, because of the power of the community I can tap into not just my own energy but also the energy of the group. I can pull from that energy of the group and apply it to moving my habits in a new way and then bring my moved habits back to my relationship. Doing work in community makes my transformational potential much bigger and much quicker than if I were just doing it on my own.” (4:31)
Amy: “One of the freedoms I’ve found in erotic community is liberation from the relational aspects that, for me, can be confounding. If I’m in a relationship with someone and I’m being sexual with them, often I’m worried about or eager to provide a quality experience for them, but that means some portion of my brain is not paying attention to my pleasure but paying attention to their pleasure and our collective pleasure. So when I’m doing erotic work in community, I can focus completely on my own experience. In community, I can really focus on my own experience but also be really supported by other people. Letting myself be seen in community has been really healing for me. Shame, which many of us have about various elements of our erotic life—is hard to get over that if you can’t be visible.” (3:30)
“Being in community can break down our expectations about who and what gets to be “beautiful”” (20:30))
If you’d like to hear more, check out the podcast on iTunes and Stitcher. More information here.