What is Sacred Intimacy?

(As so eloquently stated by Caffyn Jesse, author of Erotic Massage for Healing and Pleasure.)

Sacred Intimates are professionals who help others access the joy and power of erotic energy. It is a career and a calling. We teach technologies of ecstasy. We are guides and we are catalysts. It is our job and our vocation to cherish our clients’ souls as we guide them to expand their capacity for intimacy and bliss.

Sacred intimates offer a path for the conscious practice of erotic freedom. We are creators and innovators who see a universe of possibility in the fact that getting paid gives value to our time, our learning and our love. Money allows for an exchange of erotic energy that owes no fealty to compulsory forms of social organization based on family, faith gender identity or sexual orientation. With loving relationships based on joyous and equitable exchange, we can practice a possible future through the medium of money.
Sacred intimacy means that we consciously craft a container for ongoing learning through expanding erotic capacity. It means that we regard sexual energy as potentially offering a way to open the heart and become joyful, to heal personal and cultural wounds, to experience wholeness, and to know the divine in others and ourselves. It means a pledge to treasure the unfolding of our clients’ deepest vulnerabilities and to meet their monsters with equanimity. It means we love each person who comes into our practice, though not as a partner or a friend. We love them with a detachment that can foster their courage, exploration, and growth.

As sacred Intimates, our job is to keep the heart open when it’s trying to close and open when it wants to cling. We want to be fully present with all that is actually unfolding, in ourselves and our clients, in our bodies and our souls.

As I experience the joy of working and playing with erotic energy, I channel grace and love through me. I am filled with gratitude and compassion. Waves of energy awaken within me, and they are waves of bliss.

Sexual energy is life-force energy. When we are open and alive to its gifts, we feel waves of joy passing through us. We experience clarity and awareness. We feel tremendous love for all the beings and beauties of nature; we become like an ocean of love. We are light as air, liquid as water. And erotic energy guides us to integrate aspects of the self that may be dark, mysterious, frightening and violent. These faces of sexual energy can be welcomed and explored, consciously and joyfully, on the journey to sexual wholeness.

What is a Sacred Intimate?

"A Sacred Intimate is a teacher who takes you step by step into feeling more comfort, connection and pleasure in your body. S/he guides you back to a state of recognizing, experiencing and enjoying your body sensations. 

We have been told to disregard and distrust the information percolating up from the gut, genitals, heart, and skin. Instead, we are told to trust only our head or intellect. This is an unbalanced and dangerous way to live, as the mind is quick to play many tricks. If we are separated from our body wisdom that comes from the neck down, we feel hurried, confused and unable to enjoy pleasure. We have moved from our natural evolution of living (slowly) in the body to a hyper-fast life of living from the neck up. A Sacred Intimate is trained to reintegrate our body-mind-spirit as we were designed to live by nature.

A Sacred Intimate is trained to help a client re-sense his/her body information that is constantly available at every moment. By getting a student to listen to the simple and profound messages coming from the body, s/he can make decisions–whether in bed sexually, or out of bed in life–that are authentic, safe, empowering and pleasurable."
~ Charla Hathaway

So What Does a Sacred Intimate Do?
I like to say that Sacred Intimates combine the roles of priest, prostitute, and psychotherapist. In other words, they approach sexuality with the understanding that it's related to soul work and to spirituality. They use mindfulness and integrity to help people identify, embrace, and practice desire as holy, sexual embodiment as an expression of the soul. They hold the body as sacred and view erotic energy as a crucial component of human life and spiritual health. 

Their primary intention is that of healing -- and by healing I mean not just addressing the wounds to the spirit and the flesh caused by sexual abuse, addiction, or disease but also acknowledging that the fun and the pleasure, the vitality and the divine mystery of sex have nourishing properties in and of themselves. That's a message that easily gets lost in a culture that is as ambivalent or sex-negative as ours. 

I've come to understand that much of the healing that takes place in sacred intimate work happens on very, very simple levels. Simple, nurturing touch is so important. Touch that includes genital touch plus breath plus presence feels like acceptance. Giving permission is a big part of sacred intimate work. It's about giving permission to receive pleasure, to feel your whole body, to speak desires, to bring consciousness to sex and touch, to live your spirituality without blocking your sexuality and vice versa. All these are opportunities to heal shame, isolation, erotic malnutrition, and touch deprivation.

Sacred intimates can help people keep their erotic bodies alive in a long and loving but sexless marriage.
~ Don Shewey

As a Practitioner of Erotic Massage
As you may have well noticed by now, I am a big fan of Caffyn Jesse, I love how she approaches her clients. I can so much relate to this!
"As a practitioner of erotic massage, I love the receiver’s bodies. I work with body chemistry and cellular functor to build loving connection from the inside. I honor toes and ears, scars and thighs, listening to the personal history embedded in the body, contradicting self-loathing, soothing the effects of trauma, and replacing the imprints of painful and inappropriate touch with pleasurable and respectful touch. I love the receivers’ minds, coaxing their communication, honoring their desires who I honor my own boundaries, listening to their stories with unconditional positive regard, helping them groove new neural pathways that link brain, voice and feeling. I love the receivers’ spirits, with an unconditional love that could be called agape. I stand in spirit and greet their spirits in a state of wonder and amazement. I am agape, wide open, as I experience the joy of working with erotic energy. And I connect with each receiver emotionally and offer my love, as one wounded human being to another. I holed them in my open heart as they ride waves of emotion, often traveling from deep grief to elation in a single session. This is love in action. It has nothing to do with standards of attractiveness, partner choice, or making the selective judgments that usually limit what we call love. It is about a profound connections of souls.

One receiver described the experience as being “held in an ocean of love” while “my body felt completely electrified…, pulsing with energy head to toe.” It is being held in an ocean of love that allows this unfolding of erotic capacity. Knowing, feeling and sharing love, the practitioner of erotic massage can create a sacred space in which there is a communion of cells and souls.
The above statement is worth repeating:

Knowing, feeling and sharing love, 
          the practitioner of erotic massage 
                 can create a sacred space in which 
                         there is a communion of cells and souls.