Prologue
- elle
- Mar 20
- 8 min read
Hi, hello. Happy Spring!!
Since last autumn, I have been working on the newest edition of my Loquacious Slut zine. Over the last few months, I realized I wanted to do something different with the work I was making -- I need to start from the very basics. To share what I know in ways that actually make sense to people. I've been swamped in what seems like a river of words and graphics hoping something (anything) good comes out of it.
Something I am proud of is a prologue I wrote to introduce my concept of spectrosomatics. Feeling lost when tasked to explain what I do is no strange feeling to me. It's extremely challenging for me to describe why/how bodywork and touch works so well and its even harder to explain why I should be trusted with what I know. I've been trying to figure it out for almost a decade and this introduction is the best I have ever done in describing how I got here.
This is the introduction of the soon-to-be-released Loquacious Slut: Somatic Intimacy edition. It will eventually be turned into 1. a self-paced course on this website, 2. a downloadable zine, and 3. a hand-binded physical zine available to purchase in person.
I think this intro is a brilliant way for new clients to capture what my approach is all about - as well as offering you loyal, long time clients some clarity and background information on how I have been approaching sessions.
I hope it makes sense ;)
Much of how I understand what is happening during a somatic intimacy session is through my armchair studies of philosophy and the sciences of the senses and nervous system. Over the years, I have been able to put things together to make it all make sense (pun!). I wish I could say I knew what I was doing before I started, but I can’t because it’s not true. Let me start where things should always start...
In the beginning, I was responding to what I was coining ‘touch toxicity’ - a way to understand the impacts and consequences of how we are taught and learn about touch in our culture and society. I realized the only kind of touch education I received was strictly in regards to inappropriate or violent touch. Let me go off...
In elementary school I was taught what private areas of bodies are and what inappropriate touch with others is. These kinds of lessons for young kids are excellent - I am 36 now and fully remember my earliest consent lessons from thirty years ago; they are important and they stick. Then in middle school, I went through sex education in public school and learned again about consent and inappropriate touch. Then, in high school, I went through another round of health education and learned about inappropriate touch. After I graduated, I went on to get many jobs in health care and social services where, again, I went through education regarding sexual harassment and inappropriate touch in the workplace.
That’s an entire lifetime of education on inappropriate touch - from elementary school through adult employment, education on inappropriate touch is everywhere. Yet, we still have a problem with inappropriate touch. It’s obvious to me that these programs do not eradicate the problem of inappropriate touch because inappropriate touch is (thrashes hands around) everywhere. I don’t oppose that these programs exist - I oppose where they decide to stop teaching about touch and consent. It needs to keep going!
To me, there seemed to be an imbalance between how we learn about inappropriate touch, appropriate touch, and what to do when things go astray. So much of what I was taught around consent and touch was about what ‘not do to’ - rules and rules of what we cannot do. There is a healthy place for this, don’t get me wrong; we need to know these things. Where the imbalance comes from is the complete disregard for education on wanted, affectionate, desirable touch. We learn NOTHING about how to touch people meaningfully or what it means to be touched meaningfully. Education on consent and touch should not stop at “no means no” because people are going to say YES to us sometimes. People are going to get naked with us. We will share intimacy with others. We are going to fuck ourselves and other people...so, what then? What do we do when we establish safety with each other and want to play? What then!?
More so! We learn zilch on what to do after we get inappropriately touched or how touch impacts us both positively and negatively. There is so much effort in trying to avoid inappropriate touch that we almost never talk about what to do after it happens (we all know it will inevitably happen). We are given almost zero tools to resolve conflict around inappropriate touch other than institutional processes through HR or the ever-so-unjust justice system.
Almost never are we formally educated by people who know what they are talking about on how to recover and move through painful experiences with touch. We know very well that touch can hurt us. What we don’t know very well is how touch is also one of the most perfect tools available to us and has the power to support us in recovery (healing), repair (connection), and resistance (agency).
It was the discovery of these precise gaps in sex education that got me into intimacy education. And holy bananas did I absolute have no idea what I was getting into...
Touch experts aren’t a thing we think about - but it’s what I consider myself to be. Most of my job involves touch and it works really well with or without understanding why or how it works. It’s wonderful in that way - but as an Aquarian who thoroughly enjoys savaging through deep holes of understanding and mystery, I am determined to fly with my curiosity in hopes of gathering clarity along the way...
Over my nine years of practicing Somatic Intimacy, my ideas of sensual sovereignty have come to me from many different areas of study and my passion of reading books I find. I invented the term Somatic Intimacy in 2016 to build a framework for combating and resisting what I understood as the “touch toxicity” I described earlier.
I knew how to give a really good massage - this is true. Without any formal training in massage and only a smidgen of training in Reiki level II, I was reliant on my god-given hands and previous mental health training to figure most of what I do out on my own. I have never had a mentor (aside from my spirit buddies and my prayers) and I have never found anyone who I would actually trust enough to be mentored by. Until my elders find me (or I find them), I will continue doing this work entirely on my own through my own studies, skills, and intuition. Being good at this came naturally to me, but understanding what the fuck was actually happening underneath my hands did not. It felt as though I was built to do this work - and it was my life’s mission to understand what I was figuring out.
What I never would have expected was people telling me I am offering something bigger than I knew. The work I was doing with clients was extremely meaningful to them; more than any other kind of massage or bodywork they had received before. I was introduced to tantra in 2017 by a client when he told me “you are doing tantra” that sent me down a spiral of spiritual teachings from around the globe that were able to weave spirituality and sexuality together. Some hobbyists who have traveled the world and received bodywork in other countries were telling me “you can’t get this anywhere and I’ve been everywhere”. Spiritual healers have told me I have Catholic saints surrounding me and that a singular touch of my hands can rise Kundalini energy. I’ve been exploring this work since I was 27 - it has not been without serious doubt, bouts of impostor syndrome, and, at times, a complete sense of incompetence. But now it’s 2025 and I am reaching the corner of passing a decade of this work. It has been my longest standing sole source of income in my life.
At this point in my self-made career, I have learned that people enjoy reading my writing. How I have been thinking about and understanding the role of touch in our sensual lives resonates with so many of my clients - we are hungry for this kind of knowledge. I have learned so much about the sensual and embodied erotic experience through hundreds of hours of reading, working with clients, and processing what I know through writing and imagery.
This work is a gift - given to me, given to you, given to us. Sometimes it makes all the sense and other times it makes no sense. I have learned to trust touch and its power with everything I have. Leaning into the wisdom of the senses and how they support our aliveness is what I am devoted to. These offerings in this zine are meant to build a shared understanding of what the hell I am doing and the work I get myself into on and off the bodywork table.
What happens on the massage table happens on the massage table. It is a devastatingly challenging task to get what I know from my tactile experience of providing sensual massages into written form. It is like making air out of a stone. But along the way, I have found a few resources that have rooted themselves into the structure of my practice. Some are of my own invention, but I would not have been able to complete this system of practice without the knowledge of others.
One of my first somatic teachers was a tarot deck. Learning how to work with the four suits translated into working with the elements - eventually bringing me to a full working system of universal elemental embodiment. The way I work with elements in bodywork is methodical, intuitive, and relies on a felt sense of connection with how elements function and move within the flesh of the body- it’s the most reliable tool of alignment I have found and use it every single time I practice somatic work even if we don’t ever talk about elements out loud.
I have never found a philosophy resource that better supported my style of sensual bodywork than the work of Richard Kearney in his book, Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense. The first chapter is the most important chapter of any book I have ever picked up in my efforts of understanding why intentional sensual touch works so perfectly fine. If he didn’t write it, I would be lost and still wondering why the heck all of what I do works so well.
His description of tactful senses was a missing link to having any reasonable or logical way of explaining what I was starting to understand about somatics, interoception, and the senses. Building off his work, I have developed my own alignments into a wheel that I am calling “the juice” of Somatic Intimacy. It starts with touch (which has scientifically been proven to be the first sense we develop in the womb) as a felt sense of yourself. From there, once we have proof we are alive through touch, our other senses bring texture to our experience of being alive.
This is where I started to build how I “interrogate” the sensual experience when I work with clients on the bodywork table. I have been using the same methods of extracting sensual language from people for over five years and it has never once not been supportive in some way or another. They now exist in wheels on the following pages and have been named Spectrosomatics. I have created a spectrosomatic wheel for the four elements, the five senses, and an expansion of Kearney’s work on touch to support our journey of sensual, sexual, and erotic sovereignty.
May the best be ours.
Stay tuned!
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