There’s a reason this episode brought two of the most listened-to guests in five years of “Your Body Remembers Pleasure” together for the first time. What Susanne Roursgaard and Stine Krage know – between The Gaia Method and The Prostatic Portal – represents some of the most sophisticated, compassionate, and practically grounded somatic pelvic work happening in the world right now. Most of it is widely known in Europe. Much of it has barely touched the States yet. Hopefully that begins to change here.
What De-Armoring Actually Is
De-armoring is nothing like massage. Suzanne is unequivocal about this. “It cannot be compared to massage,” she says. “It’s more of points – still points that you hold on to.”
Where massage works with the muscles and surface tissue, de-armoring works with the fascia – the thin, connective sheeting that runs through the entire body and carries the nervous system within it. Suzanne describes her soft de-armoring touch as ultra-light: precise enough to reach the fascia without going past it, with enough connection to make contact.
“If you push just slightly too hard, you went past it. If you don’t push enough, you’re not in connection with it either.”
When she finds what she calls “matching tone” – that exact still point – something remarkable happens: “The clear boundary between what was my finger and what was the client’s body dissolves. I can no longer say exactly where I start and where they stop.”
This is not mysticism. It’s a precise skill that takes time to develop – and it operates on two layers simultaneously: the physical fascia and nervous system, and what Suzanne calls the energy body, which includes the electromagnetic field the HeartMath Institute researches.
The Body That Tests Before It Trusts
One of the most important things Susanne says in this episode: “We are the ones that often overstep our own boundaries the most. More than other people did it to us.”
The body has been trying to communicate for years, sometimes decades. When we finally turn toward it, the body doesn’t just open up in gratitude. It tests. It tests whether the practitioner will get impatient. Whether they’ll push for a result. Whether they’ll project their own discomfort onto the client’s stillness.
This testing is the body’s wisdom. It’s the same wisdom a hurt child uses to check whether an adult can really be trusted this time.
Somatic Practice – Building Trust with Your Body:
Find a comfortable position. Place one hand on your lower belly. Without trying to change anything, simply notice…. Your body has been waiting for this attention – is there anything getting in the way.. thoughts or ideas… Don’t ask it to perform. Don’t expect a result. Just be there. Present with your own body and with what is… If nothing happens, that’s fine. You showed up. Do this for five minutes daily for one week and notice what shifts.
Why 70% of Genital Armor Has Nothing to Do with Sex
This is perhaps the most surprising – and most liberating – piece of this entire conversation.
Susanne stopped using the term “sexual de-armoring” because it gives people the wrong idea about what they’ll find in the pelvic tissues. In her experience, only 10 to 20% of genital work stays connected to adult sexuality. The rest traces back to early childhood – often between ages two and five — when the body learned that expressing itself wasn’t safe.
“Every time they had an emotion that was not household approved… everybody would immediately do a lot to get them to change their emotional state, which is also an indirect way of saying, ‘You might feel like that right now, but that part of you is not welcome.'”
What gets stored in the pelvis isn’t just sexual trauma. It’s the child who wasn’t seen. The child who was too much. The child who made themselves small to survive love.
Stine adds the male dimension: most men with prostate issues have been to doctors, physiotherapists, and specialists who don’t touch genitals in their sessions. The cultural avoidance of genital touch for healing runs so deep that men arrive already carrying shame about the area that holds their foundation.
The Prostate: Surrender, Similarity, and the Science We’re Missing
Stine’s work with the Prostatic Portal has led her to understand that the neural wiring between the uterus/cervix and the prostate is far more similar than most people – including many practitioners – realize.
And what surprises men most when they experience prostate work isn’t the anatomy. It’s the surrender required.
“A lot of men are very wired in a performance state regarding their sexuality and with partners,” Stine observes. The prostate, accessed respectfully and slowly, asks something different: to be completely held. To receive. To let go of the doing.
For many men, this is the most profound healing they’ve ever experienced.
Breath: The Gateway Between Mind and Body
Both Stine and Susanne use breath as a primary diagnostic and therapeutic tool. Stine begins observing breath the moment a client walks in – how deep it goes, how many breaths per minute, whether the three major diaphragms of the body (neck, solar plexus, pelvic floor) are connected or cut off from each other.
People in chronic fight/flight states over-breathe: too many breaths per minute, too much volume. This keeps the nervous system on alert regardless of what’s happening in the session. If Stine doesn’t address the breath pattern first, she says, “I can be doing de-armoring from now on until the day they die because their breath pattern is actually holding them in that state of fear and fight.”
Somatic Practice – Breathing into Tension:
Identify an area of your body that holds chronic tension. With your next inhale, imagine directing the breath specifically into that area, as though you’re breathing space and loving compassion into it – expanding it from the inside. On the exhale, simply listen and attune…. What does this area want to express? This isn’t about forcing a release. It’s about showing up for the conversation your body has been trying to have. Breath into this area again, and on the exhale, give it a sound… whatever sound that wants to come from the areas of tension,
Sound as Frequency Medicine
“Sound is frequency, and everything we do in de-armoring deals with frequency,” Susanne explains. “When you have a blockage in the body, it means that the vibrational level that tissue should have is out of tune with its own vibration.”
Sounding works on multiple levels. When a client sounds, they activate the vocal cords – and the opposite end of those cords connects to the cervix and prostate. Relaxation in the throat creates relaxation in the pelvis.
Sound also bypasses the defense mechanisms the body normally deploys. It shuts down the “talking brain.” And it amplifies what’s already happening – turning up the volume on the body’s own healing process.
Susanne’s preference: Tibetan singing bowls over crystal bowls, specifically because Tibetan bowls hold hundreds of overtones and undertones. The wider the frequency range, the greater the chance of resonating with exactly what the tissue needs.
Somatic Practice — Simple Sounding:
Lie down on your back and feel the Earth or floor or bed supporting you. Really receive that support. Take three slow breaths. On your next exhale, let any sound emerge — it doesn’t need to be musical or intentional. Notice where in your body you feel the vibration. If you feel any tension in the pelvic floor, try directing a low hum toward that area with your next exhale with an “wooooo” Rest in the silence after. Notice what changed.
What It Actually Means to Hold Safe Space
Space holding isn’t a vibe. It’s a skill with specific components, and Susanne names them precisely.
First: the practitioner’s own capacity to sit with emotion. “How much can a practitioner handle somebody going through emotional states without them being affected because they find it uncomfortable for themselves?” The body is always tracking this.
Second: clear energetic and sexual boundaries. Susanne is direct that in any retreat or training container she runs, there is absolute zero intimacy between facilitators and participants. In tantric spaces where this boundary gets murky, she sees it consistently: the body can’t fully surrender because part of it is still scanning for threat.
Third – practitioners must learn to consciously open and close their own sexual energy flow. Many practitioners don’t realize they’re “leaking” sexual energy in sessions. Clients feel it, even when it’s unconscious. The advanced training includes live feedback exercises where practitioners practice shutting and opening their sexual energy flow while another person tracks what they’re receiving.
“You need to be 100% aware of what is happening so that you can contain and block off your own sexual energy when you work with somebody else’s arousal,” says Stine.
This is not something most trainings teach. It’s one of the reasons this collaboration is significant.
The Psoas: More Than a Hip Flexor
The final major thread of this conversation involves the psoas muscle – given its own full module in the advanced training, and referred to in Tibetan tradition as the “seat of the soul.”
For Susanne, the psoas is not primarily a muscle. It’s an expression of the nervous system. “It is the muscle that is providing us the fight, flight, freeze responses.” Trauma blockages code themselves into the psoas at an early stage. And critically: the psoas cannot be directly manipulated with massage or trigger point techniques to release what it’s holding, because it’s only the messenger.
Stine adds the embryological dimension: strands of the psoas muscle extend all the way into the neck. The psoas links, and can be relieved through the rebozo tradition and TRE, through the vagus nerve, all the way through the body’s containment of the uterus and pelvic organs.
Working with it indirectly – through breath, pendulation, and the rebozo technique — allows the nervous system to discharge what it’s been holding without being forced.
The Advanced Training: Where Science and Intuition Finally Meet
Susanne and Stine’s joint advanced Gaia Method training addresses something both have observed across years in this field: practitioners with exquisite intuition but insufficient clinical knowledge to know when to refer – and when not to proceed.
Erectile dysfunction, for instance, can be an early sign of cancer, cardiovascular disease, or diabetes. A practitioner without that knowledge might proceed with genital work while the man urgently needs a PSA test and blood sugar screening.
The training bridges this: seven modules over three months before a live intensive in February, covering pelvic and genital anatomy, advanced soft de-armoring protocols, trauma specialization (including early childhood sexual abuse vs. adult sexual abuse), psoas work, energetic ethics, sexual energy management, and hands-on palpation.
“When you have knowledge of why you do things, you start becoming capable of replicating your work,” Susanne says. “You get a broader scope of information to use in your work also for future clients, so it doesn’t become these stories of, ‘I had this client, and it was amazing. What did you do? I don’t know, because it was intuitive.'”
The goal is not to flatten intuition. It is to give it a foundation that holds.
I’m so grateful to Susanne and Stine for the generosity they brought to this conversation. What they carry between them – decades of midwifery, somatic therapy, trauma specialization, and the kind of clinical precision that comes only from years of working respectfully with real bodies – is rare. And it’s exactly the medicine this field needs.
If you’re a practitioner working with the pelvis and wanting to go deeper, I encourage you to explore their joint training at the-gaia-method.com and to look into Stine’s Prostaic Portal practitioner training and certification pathway at theprostheticportal.com. If you’re new to de-armoring or simply curious about what your own body might be holding, Stine’s Amosoma practice and Susanne’s retreats for non-practitioners are a beautiful place to begin — Susanne also has a 21-day female embodiment challenge coming in July, and a female membership community launching in August.
And if this conversation has touched something in you around your own somatic journey – around the places in your body that hold old stories, around what it might mean to return to the felt sense of yourself – there are more episodes on somatic sexual healing to explore, or to go deeper, The 3 Keys to Genital De-armoring online course, live training and certification as well. I am here. This is the work I love most.
You can find the full show notes, all links, and more resources at rahichun.com/podcast.
With warmth and reverence,
Rahi