Genital Armoring: How the Body Holds Trauma & Blocks Pleasure

 

Welcome to your Body. Remembers pleasure. I'm your host, Rahi Chun. This podcast is devoted to sexual embodiment, intimacy, and the body's innate capacity to heal, feel, and remember pleasure. If something here resonates with you, you're welcome to explore more writings and resources@rahichun.com. And now let's begin.

 In this episode, we explore genital armoring, how unconscious guarding patterns can show up as pain, numbness, discomfort, or lack of sensation in the genitalia. How much of our adult pelvic armor forms during our childhood years and what's required to release this safely and effectively for restored pleasure and wholeness?

At the end of the episode, Suzanne leads us through a somatic exercise for waking up and engaging previously disconnected tissue from within the genitalia and pelvis. I am thrilled today to be inviting Suzanne Skar who I just admire and appreciate so much in our world. She has such a both a depth and a breadth of, experiences that address the whole body and the whole person. So a little background about Suzanne. She is a psychotherapist, a body-based trauma therapist, a sexologist specializing in sexual abuse. She's also a family and couples therapist, an inter spiritual trainer, and has been a midwife for 23 years.

And she has synthesized and synergized her decades of experience into her body of work called the Gaia Method which is so holistic and complete, and it's so beautiful in the ways the Gaia method holds that sacred space for inviting us to return to our essence. Suzanne, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for inviting. Yes. Suzanne, given your, the depth of your experiences in both somatic trauma-based therapies as a sexologist, as a psychotherapist there's so much we can cover, but I really I'd like to focus on specifically deaming and specifically genital deaming. To start off, I would love to ask you, Suzanne, how your path led you to your experiences in holding space for genital disarming?

It started when I was a midwife with me, often experiencing that pregnant women, birthing women clearly gave signs, body signs, or even came to memories of sexual abuse. And I knew nothing of it. I didn't know how to hold space for it. And it was not part of the medical training within obstetrics obstetrics.

So I decided that I needed to know more about that because I met a lot of women. We are not talking a few percentages. We're talking somewhere between 25, 40 5%. All the women I would get in contact with would actually display symptoms or behavior that, that equals that there is some sort of sexual abuse or.

Or incest or maybe even rape, that is hidden in their system or they haven't shared it maybe with us. Some of them don't know. So I decided to become a sexologist and specialized then in sexual abuse, incest, rape, because of me meeting them in the hospitals and really not knowing how do you work with them once they are, pregnant and giving birth, and why do they react so strongly to their sexual abuse when they're in this state of life.

So that was my way into, to starting to discover this and then. I ended up becoming quite a cognitive sexologist having a lot of people referred to me from others. And some of the ones that I would get referred to would be to me, would be someone that had been in, in therapy for 25 years.

And they would come to me and they would speak about their story. Like they were talking about laundry, they were completely unaffected. And I was like, there's nothing I can do with these people. And at that time in my life, I've been in my spare time following a tantric and a shamanic path where you do a lot of, let's call it alternative ways of working at least viewed from a more normal cognitive medical system.

So I had one client especially that was say, let's call it my. My point of no return. That came to me and she was talking about really severe sexual abuse throughout her whole childhood. Like it was nothing. And and she'd been in therapy for so many years. I was like, I can't do anything with her.

And I just sensed that her body was screaming for help. So I asked her, okay, you seem to have spoken enough about this. Has anyone ever addressed your body? And then she completely broke down and said, I just heard the biggest yes. Finally inside of me. So I told her that we can do experimental treatment that I normally don't do in my professional life, but I'm used to working with this in my own.

Communities. And there we, we have really good results with working with various kinds of sexual trauma, sexual numbness disconnectedness, whatever it is through what you would call genital deaming. And that then led to her saying, yes, please, I would love to have a session. So she came for a session and this woman was married for 17 years already, and she was sexually active with her husband, but she was completely numb, meaning that she felt nothing in her genitals when she would have intercourse.

What she felt and enjoyed about being sexual with her partner was the heart connection, the love she could feel that they were sharing, and the joy and the happiness that she saw in him because she allowed him to, share her body. So after a week of the first session, she called me and she said, Suzanne, did you know that it feels good to have a penis inside of you?

And I told her, yeah, I do know. And she was like, can I have the next session? So she got the next session, and after her second sex session, she called me and said, my partner thinks I've had an orgasm. What do you think? So she described it and said, yeah, it does sound like that could have been an orgasm.

And within three months, all the women that was in her self-help group for incest. Started calling me and saying, Hey, you've been working with our friend and could you work with me too? And then gradually that was my way into it. But in the beginning, I truly only worked with sexual trauma.

And sexual deaming. And then later on I expanded that because trauma is trauma when it comes to the body. So you can have things stored in your genitals, even though it's not a sexual trauma, it's another type of blockage that sits in that area of the body. But my way into it was through my. My being specialized within sexual abuse.

And then gradually people that weren't sexually abused started calling me and say, Hey, we hear about your work. I'm not sexually abused, but I have this problem. Do you think you could work with me? And everybody got the same song. It's gonna be experimental. I can't promise you anything. It's out outside the system and you have to be aware.

I don't promise you anything, but if you're willing to explore, then I'm willing to do this with you. And yeah. And then over 10 years it developed into becoming the Gaia method gradually. So that's my way in. That's so beautiful. I love that. I wanna take a moment to really explain a little bit about how armoring can form in the pelvis and the genitalia, really anywhere in the body.

And going back to your first experimental client, 17 years in a marriage that after that one session I think you shared with me before that she was someone who had a history of sexual violation severely. Yeah. And I wanna I wanna touch on the degrees to which our tissues hold on to unintegrated emotions and.

How restoring sensation in the tissues is like a gateway for releasing those past unintegrated emotions and trauma. Very often people think of trauma as being a mental thing, and that's a very big misunderstanding because trauma is something that happens to the body. And the mind might remember it, but it might not, but your body always remember it.

So that means that the trauma is actually a physical experience in the body that will sit, as you can call it, memory residue that is sitting in the actual tissue, in your nervous pathways in the cells. And typically when we experience trauma, and I really mean trauma in a very broad sense, because trauma can be these one time big incidents where it's very big and extreme what happens to you.

But that is not the type of trauma you'll find. The most of the trauma we find in the body is what you could call developmental trauma. Meaning that's all the times throughout your childhood when you grew up, when you were not met, seen. Treated, respected handled the way you actually needed it, and where you again and again, basically had to defragment part of yourself by closing elements down of yourself, and part of that can then result in numbness in the tissue because you completely disconnected to this area of the tissue.

The tissue is still sensing, but the signaling to your conscious mind and your brain about what's happening is not there anymore. So it's a disconnect inside the system. It's not really because the nervous system is broken, it's just not communicating with you anymore. So you can pick it up, or it could be the other way where the body gets hypersensitive, where it's so alert to not have this happen again.

That it, the tiniest little thing. Will then be sending a signal to your brain like, Ooh danger. It's painful. You are damaging yourself. So even the slightest little touch can feel like people are stabbing you or pushing really hard. And it creates pain that is not in proportion to the kind of action or touch that you were actually just exposed to.

And there are so many things that can add to trauma in the body and this body armor. And one of the things is, like I said, when you're not treated the way you need it to, or if you have one of these extreme one-time incidents, that could be a severe traffic accident. It could be, you had earthquake, big time, earthquake, things that tsunamis things where you're like, okay, this is violent, this is big.

And it's typically out of your control. It's happening, but it's not something that keeps repeating. Whereas if you are growing up in a, let's say, dysfunctional family or just a family that don't get you Yep. Don't see you for who you are. Then you will have the same thing repeated again and again.

So even if the actual thing that has happened to you seems like just a little thing. Yeah. But it's little thing times a thousand times 10,000 and that means it, it builds gradually to not being this little thing anymore. And so elements of what blocks inside your system is from what's happened to you done by others.

But then there's the type of body armor that is created by our own way of treating ourselves. Such as not respecting our boundaries. Pleasing others, even if we cross our boundaries because we are afraid of not belonging to the group, not being accepted being, so we do a lot of things ourself as well that creates armor.

A classic one for women in, when we talk about genital armor is when you are even in a loving relationship with a partner you love dearly, maybe he feels like having intercourse a little more often than you do. And you notice, oh, it's two weeks ago. And he's starting to be like a little, grumpy and you sense, okay he's, he wants to go there, but basically you don't really wanna go there.

And maybe you notice when he gets a little etchy, he starts also being annoyed with the kids easier. And you're like, oh, I don't want it to harm them. And the woman might be like, yeah. And, I do enjoy it once we start. It's just this starting. I can't get myself to it. But, once we start, 5, 10, 15 minutes down the road, I'm just as much into it as him.

And then you as a woman decide to interact and maybe be penetrated with the penis inside at a moment where your body is actually still saying no, I'm not there. So no partner has been violating you, you've been inviting it in out of a lot of, taking care of other people's needs and basically putting yourself and your own need lower to, I wanna I love him.

I wanna show him, you are important I'll get there. And these kind of behaviors are, I think most women that are in longer relationships they have experienced this at least once, where they weren't really there, but then, oh, okay. I'll get myself there. But these type of actions that we do ourselves, they can actually create armor as well and can create pain or numbness.

Yeah. There's a lot of great things that you shared here. I feel like what I'm hearing is every little contraction within the body and the body's tissue really accumulates and adds up and can start to create that armor really anywhere in the body. But the our genitalia is so sensitive and such a vulnerable part of our body that the armor that can build within the genitalia for a woman or a man doesn't necessarily have to do with just a violent penetration a breach of boundaries.

It can happen within loving relationships. With each contraction or resistance that is overrun by the body's owner, by just succumbing or wanting to please. And by the way, this can happen within men too, whose libido is less than their partner and they feel obligated or forced to engage and then they start feeling disconnected from their own genitalia.

And then there's another aspect to it, and that is once you start working with sexual deaming, my estimate is that with everybody I work with sexual deaming, 80% of what we are actually healing and dealing with is early childhood things. It's from before the age of seven. It's often when they're 2, 3, 4, 5 years old.

And I wasn't good enough. I wasn't the good boy, the good girl. I was, too slow, too much, too little. Not lovable. Many of these negative self voices that many of us have deep within, even though we might try not to let people know we have them, but that negative self voice very often is actually located physically within the genital region or the pelvis region.

And I, I can't say if it's true, but there's a Norwegian sexologist and psychologist that worked a lot with children. And he did some research that actually showed that by the age of seven he did research on children By the age of seven, a lot of children already had very intense, chronic tension within the genital and pelvic region that was stemming from these small things with dysfunctional things in the family, but very much with this, I'm not good enough. I'm not sweet enough, I'm too much or nobody loves me. So those are often things that when we start working with the genital deaming, even if the client came to you because they wanna work with their sexuality it's not rare that it turns out that thing in their sexuality actually stems all the way back to this little inner child not feeling, loved or good enough or appreciated or maybe simply feels like I'm too much or I'm not entitled for anything not worth. Yeah. That makes. They're definitely there.

So it's it's a misconception. Again, if we think that sexual deaming equals we're going to work with sexual issues, we can be working with deep, systemic, low self-worth issues. Yeah. Yeah. I find that actually so many, just as you're saying, Suzanne, so many of the sexual issues that clients come in with are actually life issues.

And as you say, that can be threaded back all the way. To childhood and the early formation of one's sense of self-worth and identity. It makes so much sense to me that the Norwegian sexologist discovered this because that sense of belonging, we feel in that sense of security within the pelvis.

And of course it's where the SOAs muscle is as well. As well as, who knows what gets passed down from our parents through first contact with our genitalia and potty training and our first exposure to playing with our genitals or self pleasuring and discovering our relationship with that important part of our body.

Yeah. A lot of shaming comes from there. And sometimes the shaming is, that you were told by words. For a lot it, it can even happen much earlier. Imagine you are a tiny little baby and you have a diaper on 24 7. And that diaper never comes off unless you need to be changed because you either did number one or number two.

And for a child that wants to touch themselves and oh, it's just nice to get the hands down if you're a little baby and finally the diaper comes up and I wanna have my hands down here, and your mom or your dad is changing you for number two. So the parent will be like, no, don't do that. Don't judge.

But you're not aware of number two being all over the place. And if you put your hands down there, you're gonna get messy. So if you are putting as a little child, your hands towards your genital, because I just wanna touch, it feels like it's calling me. And now you get this very strong no. So you actually get a shock saying, hands do not belong there.

And you might even get this feeling of. I'm bad, I'm wrong because I wanted to do this. So even that can become part of this feeling shame about that area and it stems from being diaper changed and your parents not realizing that them saying no because they were afraid of the little one getting, fes all over their hands.

That actually when a child is coming from a complete different intent and doesn't know anything then that's what it is gonna be affected in there. So it goes really deep what we do. It goes really deep. Yeah. And it makes me sad just hearing that because just recognizing how the pure innocence of a child and particularly a child's exploration and love of their sensations.

Can get shamed and punished. And again, there's that contraction within the nervous system not only of the anger, but of, the threat of love being taken away by my caretaker and how that leads into our adolescent behavior and can lead into our adult behavior. Exactly. So I wanna come back to the genital deaming.

And really because it is, they are unintegrated emotions that live in our tissues and in your journey holding space for genital disarming the role and, it's all over the Gaia method, just the role of the unconditional presence. And inviting the story of the body to be told for that.

Unintegrated emotion to release, how important that is in all Deming. I know you distinguish your Deming as soft from standard disarming, and I would love to hear how, just how you discovered that unconditional presence and the soft Deming is far more effective. I think again, that, that part stems back to being a midwife.

Whenever you work as a midwife and things aren't working right and you learn to have hands that are present, hands that are there hands that are leaning in until the body lets it in. So part of that already was in my system from how we work. But also because for me it makes no sense that when you have armor in your body, you have armor because there was some needs or a boundary that was overstepped, meaning something was pushed too far inside of you.

So to me, it's never made any sense at all that you would then use the technique of pushing too far to try to heal something that was pushed too far. Because for me, that equals breaking down and you can break down armor, but that has a lot of issues that sometimes can surprise people afterwards with some.

Nothing happens other than it broke it down and it was very painful and left them yellow, green, black and blue. But with others, they actually get re-traumatized severely. So for me it's also a question of whenever you wanna heal trauma or heal any unresolved aspect of a person. That aspect is still in there, but that aspect is in hiding because I'm not welcome.

I'm not allowed to be here. I'm not invited to the table yet. So for me, it's very important that the whole approach is an approach of respect and inviting and knowing that a body hold immense wisdom like our brain thinks it's about wise not at all compared to a body. So it's also about trusting that if we are inviting something.

And it chooses not to come forward today. There's a good reason. And that reason can then be that this person needs to develop some skills first before he or she is ready to actually look at this problem or this history. Or it could be that I have to look inward and realize that whatever is hidden in that emotion inside this person, I, as a practitioner, actually cannot be with that emotion myself.

And then I cannot hold space for another one. The welcoming that emotion and the wisdom of a client will be able to tune into that, that, oh, this person won't be able to handle my anger or my resend or my, nasty words if that's what needs to come out. So it's very much about this really inviting, accepting, welcoming that everything is welcome, nothing is wrong, and that all aspects and all parts of people need to be allowed to be part of the whole.

It doesn't mean that a part needs to take over the whole, but it needs to be part of the whole, so that all these fragmented parts that we have had to reject can come back in again. And the soft touch, it allows the body and the nervous system to not have to go into self-defense against me.

But if I start pushing really hard and I push beyond the pain threshold of a person, that body is going to. When we go into the primitive systems of fight, flight, and freeze, those will get activated if I push too hard because now that body will start to look at, wow this person is attacking me.

This person is a threat, so what do I need to do? Oh, I need to tense up even more to withstand that pressure. And that means that, whatever needs to come from within is not gonna reach the surface because now the body is busy, basically defending itself. And then I would have to push harder and harder.

And at some point we might break it down, but when we don't do that, it sometimes can take with some a little longer in the beginning because the body gets almost, if it's used to a harder handling, it almost gets a little confused. Oh, is she just gonna be patient? Is she just gonna sit there and wait?

Is she. Nah, she can't be that loving because all the ones in my memory from my past, they would always, when I weren't fast enough, get angry with me. So sometimes the body will also, in the beginning when you show it this soft, very inviting way, almost test your patients as a practitioner can you really stay loving and present still even if I don't deliver?

And when the body realized that, oh, actually I'm still being accepted, my speed is being accepted, then suddenly the body actually, they're stepping into co-creating with you. Instead of being dumb to. So it becomes a co-creation between this holding the inviting space with lots of love and compassion and, all those emotions that were absent when the fragmentation inside the person was created.

That's basically what we are providing so that it can come forward and come into a present healing of receiving what was lacking in the past. Yes. Yeah. What I'm hearing is really the importance and necessity of meeting the tissues and the nervous system where the tissues and nervous system feel ready and safe to be met because we are reversing that reflexive self-defense response, again within the tissues in the nervous system.

And the important I always I often view understanding like what age a significant trauma happened. I feel like the tissue is that age, it's feeling stuck or it's, yeah. Still reliving that story. And so if it is a three-year-old, a three-year-old will test the adults around them to make sure that they're absolutely safe.

And also when you activate the tissue or for instance a wounding that was placed in the body when the person is three, very often the person can go into a regression at that time. And their capacity and ability of tools they can use within their own system. The age of a 3-year-old. So that's also why sometimes you might even ask the client, how old do you feel right now?

And they themselves would be like, swear, I feel like I'm three years old. Okay. That's tissue telling you how old were you actually when this freeze came into your system? And then you want to meet it according to the age. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So we're meeting it and rewriting the story for that three-year-old, within the three-year-old's body.

Now in the body of an adult that it, it can be safe, it can be seen, its voice can be heard, and it's safe to feel its natural sensations again. Suzanne I wanna actually touch upon, excuse me, something you shared earlier about, as a midwife, how you recognize the high percentage of trauma that was with the stored within the body of your clients.

And given that, given your background as a psychotherapist, sexologist, and a midwife, you're the perfect person to ask this, when those unintegrated traumatic experiences are still held within the pelvis of a pregnant woman the way that those that those experiences and memories can be activated during the pregnancy, I'm guessing, especially the third trimester, and the birthing itself, when those tissues are being touched into in a way that may not have occurred since a violation or a past trauma.

Yeah, I the degree to the, which that happens or can happen. The reason it can happen is because anytime you have a, an unwanted experience, let's call it that, instead of trauma, but an unwanted experience that your body has memorized in a way where your body's I never wanna experience this again.

Then your body has also created triggers, memory triggers, and that means anything in the future, in the present moment that reminds you of these triggers will be enough to activate that old wound. And pregnancy and childbirth holds a lot of triggers. That equals the trigger and the situation actually that you were in, especially if you have sexual trauma, which means that being pregnant, it can be that, there's something moving around inside your body and it's out of your control.

And sometimes, when you're in a third trim trimester, the baby can be kicking all over and you're tired. You just, oh, be quiet. 'cause, my, my belly is like, I need a break, but you can't get the break. So that in itself can be this feeling of, I wanted to get out, but I couldn't. In childbirth it has to do with, especially when the head is born, the crowning of the head that type of pain, but in a reverse direction is similar to the pain a child would experience if an adult is penetrating them.

So the pain has so much resemblance. To that memory of how the pain felt, that it can trigger it. And even breastfeeding can trigger as well, because again, breastfeeding, you don't own your own body. You are on call whenever it fits the baby. And if you were abused, then you were on call whenever it fitted.

You are abuser so you can have a, you have a lot of situations that are triggers, which also means that you have a lot of of women that actually don't even know they have had abuse until the trigger gets activated and the memory comes back. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just I only had the one client I had came in, I think she was at 38 weeks, so she was safe to work on.

But she was very intentional about wanting to release whatever emotions were within her vaginal canal before the birth. Yeah. And she had a big baby and she feels like it really helped. This brings us to Tova. I wanna ask you about Tova. For our listeners, so Tova gave me permission to reference this story in the DIARING training in SBA Sweden.

Tova went through an experience where through Suzanne's support and guidance was able to complete an energetic interruption within her body during her birth giving when there was an unintentional C-section toga's great. She's healthy, she's a doula now, and her baby is adorable, super healthy, but she had this stuck energy and I wanted to invite Suzanne to describe what happens when there is an unintended c-section that occurs, especially when the parents are planning for natural childbirth.

And what you did to facilitate the release of that energy. I found it fascinating. When you, like you say, when you have the intention of giving natural childbirth and you then for whatever reason ends up with a c-section or even the forceps or the vacuum extraction where it's not natural anymore.

There is a, for many women, especially this sensation or feeling afterwards of I was a failure, I failed on something so fundamental for any woman to do something I should have been able to, and for some women, it actually means that they get a hate relationship to their body, almost like their body deceived them.

You didn't do what we were supposed to do. And at other times it can play into, if you already have a feeling like, I'm never good at anything and now you also failed your childbirth so you can have this deep sense of not being a real woman because you couldn't manage what a real woman should have been able to.

And that can sit as a very deep wounding and it's often a deep wounding that actually affects the connection between the child and the mother. Even if on a physical level the mother's doing all the right thing with the child, you will often experience that there's something energetically between the child and mother that is, is not really there.

And sometimes you can even experience that these children prefer their daddy over their mother, even though the mother was breastfeeding. But I still prefer my daddy, and so there, there is something that gets interrupted somehow. And when you do sexual DMing if there is any kind of birth trauma, whether it was the c-section or the forceps instead of or the vacuum extraction instead of natural birth.

Some women will experience that when we touch upon different areas of the inside tissue, and especially when we touch around the cervix, that suddenly they are, moved back to the sensation of the childbirth. Like they feel like they have contractions or they feel like, oh, it's almost there's a child that you know, should come out.

And in that situation, you can go into an energetic birth rebirthing, as I call it, but it's an energetic one, but it's an energetic one that is done in connection with the woman's sensation in her physical tissue. And what kind of images, what kind of sensations, what kind of thoughts and emotions that bring up in her system?

So for the woman who enters this sensation of a rebirthing is starting energetically for her, it truly feels like there's contraction. There's a baby. With her mind, she knows that's not the facts, but this is how it feels in her body. And in that position, we can simply go into childbirth, have her start pushing, have her, grab your legs, pull them up, if there's an extra helper, have them support her, lift up and have her push.

And as the practitioner, what you do is that you give just a little bit of resistance against the cervix so that she has something to push against. And at some point she'll feel like, whoa, it's crowning, it's coming out. And it will really feel like her. And you'll typically see these mothers.

Spontaneously take their hands down and, literally not do like this, but grab this invisible child, put it on their belly, and really hold it like there is something here. And typically go into crying relief joy. That totally looks if you see a beautiful movie of natural childbirth, whether the child comes out, and the mother just, blissfully cry from relief and happiness.

And you can often see that coming. And then right after that, sometimes then the deep grief from the birth that they've been carrying comes as well. And the very interesting part is that I've been doing these kind of rebirths so many times, I don't know how often anymore. But with the ones where there have been some disconnection to their child, it's never been, they have a good connection, but it's never been, you know what, they might, sometimes the mothers know from other children.

They have there's an element lacking and all of those that I've known that had that issue, when they come home and they connect with the child immediately. It's like it was never there. And that's even been when the children has been five years old, 11 years old, 14 years old, 14-year-old teenager that just constantly slams the door in the face of mother.

And, it just, and then they come home after a rebirth like that and suddenly the teenager doesn't slam the door and speaks nicely and come and sit down and say, Hey, you wanna hear what I did in school today? And the mother's what? Where they share with me, I don't know what happened, but something in our energetic interconnection has completely switched.

So it's quite magical. I don't understand myself what's going on. I know about oh, what's it called? Family Constellations. Const. Family Constellations. And this is what it reminds me of. Yes. The same kind of effect that you hear from family constellations. And what I've noticed also when I do these rebirthing, is that it can only be done.

If the woman actually senses it, but it can be invited. So if I have women that know they have birth trauma, then when we start working internally, and especially when I'm addressing the cervix and working around the cervix, at some point then I will be holding the cervix and I will be asking them, could you please start pushing?

I'll say, push down. And then we see, and very often if they have an intention of going there and the body actually wants to go there, then just as often by doing this invitation, we will experience that it does start happening, even though it didn't open up by itself. But at some points the body also says Uhuh, it's not gonna happen.

But so sometimes we invite it to see is the body willing or not? But it is very beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. It was so beautiful. And Tova gave me a ride back to Stockholm after that training, and she was just feeling so different in her body. And as her relationship with her daughter, who was I think about two at the time, had changed.

Yeah. What strikes me in, in, and what strikes me is recognizing once again, when there is an interruption of the Organic Life force, how the Organic Life force wants to expand in the body. So the cervix is like preparing for nine months or maybe even longer, to, embody this sacred, past this sacred birthing.

And so it makes so much sense to me that when it's, for medical, for whatever reasons, the C-section occurs, the cervix is still in a yearning kind of incomplete stage, and that. That those memories or that sensation would still be held there in the tissues. The whole body is preparing for birth.

The many last months of the pregnancy getting everything looser, softer, more ready to be able to expand and dissolve. And so definitely the body is preparing itself for this is the road we're supposed to go down. And something is interrupted on a bodily level? Definitely.

At least that's my take on it. Yeah. I wanna just comment on on Cerv cervical disarming for a moment, because I find that for most of my clients the cervix is quite armored when it's first made contact with, because I think most women, certainly are penetrated before their bodies are ready, during their adolescence and then all of the, medical procedures that cervixes have to endure.

But then within, one session it can really deamer quite quickly and sensations can return. And then there's this whole, almost like a part of their body they weren't connected to can, can reconnect. Yeah. I think there's another element to it, and that is, the cervix is this hidden organ.

You, it's not like a man where you have to go pee and you have a natural access physically to, to your genital where this part of the woman's body is so hidden up there. And definitely many countries, many religions do not teach women much about what they look like inside. So for many women, they're not even aware that this body part exists, which means that even on a emotional and mental level, you're not connected to it.

It's like this nonexisting part in there. And then for a lot of women, the only connection they have to it is that they have been having intercourse in positions where there's been a bit too much, let's call it banging. Yeah. Straight directly on the cervix, which has been painful depending on where their cycle is.

So they also have this ooh, there's something in there that can hurt. And that mean they don't necessarily get this sensation that there's anything positive about the cervix. 'cause nobody ever taught them and they didn't get to connect themselves with it. So I feel that many women, when we start working with sexual deaming, they're actually on a discovery path of just starting to get a relationship with their cervix.

To realize that this cervix is a magical gateway to immense types of orgasms and experiences that. Far over seed for instance, a clitoral orgasm. So that's also part of it to even just embody that body part and realize, whoa, there's a body part here that, that can do things and actually can increase the ur eye as a woman can experience.

When I. Do choose to be sexual or intimate, whether it's with yourself or a partner. Yeah I'm always amazed because I feel like it's, amongst the most important aspects of a woman's sexual anatomy as well as I, as you had mentioned, the vagus nerve goes all the way down to the cervix, so it does, yeah.

The quality of orgasm is going to be full body, open the heart, it's gonna be so other worldly. And yet I feel like it, we're in a kind of stage where people are just discovering or just, becoming educated about the the sacredness of their cervix. Definitely, but you can say that in general around female genitals.

It's only what, 10 or 15 years ago that it was discovered, the size of the clitoris and the shape of the clitoris before that, we didn't know anything about that. So there's been a tendency to not really, from a medical point of view, having much interest in the female genitals.

And then also because most of the medical knowledge you had on female genitals was what doctors could discover from doing what's it called? Autopsies on coxes. Yes. And coxes do not move, respond to pleasure and respond and open up and flower and close and, so a lot of the knowledge was based on.

Not knowing how this live organ actually can really move a lot and move down and pull itself back up and, almost have a life of its own. Yes. So those things are, really only in the last one, two decades that, that this is starting to come up, at least in the western world.

'cause you can still find a lot of information if you go more toward the tantric Asian old knowledge about even the Kadoka native American, they seem to know much more about sexuality than, let's call it the typical Western world. We are only catching up slowly now to, to the sacredness and yeah the potential I would say.

Yeah, absolutely. It's endless, the potential there. There's one thing I didn't get to mention when we talked about armor that I would love to actually address, because many women will be like, no, I'm not numb. So I don't have that kind of armor and I don't have pain. Oh, I don't have armor. Perfect.

Then I sometimes ask them, so if you are sexually intimate with penetration, does it get boring within five to 15 minutes? A lot of women will be. Yeah. After 15, 10 minutes, I do my little wiggle so we can get it over and done with. That is armor too. That is partial numbness. And a lot of women do not even know that boredom when you are being, whether it's massaged, touched or being, intimate physically, if you get bored after a short period of time, that is actually also armor because you're not receiving all the expanding pleasure signals.

Your body is just not armored with numbness immediately. It just shuts down gradually after you start it. So a lot of women know that one that Oh, yeah. It gets a little boring after 5, 10, 15 minutes. And that's partial numbness. And it's also armored. Yes. Yeah. And it can all come to life, like you said, and it's really just about addressing it.

Giving attention and staying with it and meeting it and touching it. Softly. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to touch on this phenomenon that you spoke of that speaks to the desensitization, the lack of stimulation which is within clients where there is a physiologically noticeable response to stimulation.

So physiologically there's a healthy response, but they are not giving themselves permission to register the arousal and pleasure. Yeah. And in some clients it'll be like overcoming childhood shame. And then it's I had one client say, oh, I just felt my father leave the room. And then the pleasure started coming.

Or, other clients where it seems like it's, allowing the energy to open, reopen the channels and then the arousal pleasure response will connect like in the synapsis of the brain. But can you speak to this phenomenon, because I know you've seen it quite a lot. Yeah.

It's really about this internal capacity of sensing yourself. Because when we are touching and we are seeing physiologically it's responding, but it's responding due to some touch we have, but internally, the person is not connected. And that is really the neuron pathway between your conscious awareness, your brain, and the actual tissue that's disconnected.

And like you said, shame is a big one. Lots of various cultural things. What kind of culture, religious things can also be, and why you are not allowed. But also it can also be a what's that called? I'm trying to find the English word here. Conviction. That, that is the reason you can't feel something, because maybe you were brought up with very strict parents where no fun until you've done all your chores and all your homework. And especially when we talk about sensitivity in the genitals inside, for most it's linked to sensitivity is linked to, then I can feel my pleasure.

But for instance, if you were brought up with you, don't get out, have fun and play until you did all your chores and all the things that were on your list. And most adults have a list that will never empty out in a day because it's long enough for, a long time. That's right. And if you have that really strong build into your system, you are incapable of giving yourself permission to explore pleasure because you still haven't done your chores.

So there's so many aspects to look into. Some of them are more cognitive, am I even allowed to feel pleasure or do I have to perform first? That's one of them. Yes. And the other one, like you said, is the shame or there's family members watching me energetically and they need to clear the space before I can actually be with my own body.

Fear is also one fear of what other people would think about you. Sure. And that sometimes is a fear that wasn't there when they were small, but it came there when they were teenagers having their first explorations within, sensuality, sexuality, and typically exploring with another one who is just as insecure, not knowing what's up and down and right and wrong.

And sometimes that other one has been responding to your maybe very expressive body language with what are you doing where you feel like, oh, this is wrong. So there can be many aspects to why it is that we can't feel it. Yes. But one of the aspects that I typically do when I or the things I start practicing is to, have the client work with themselves and then start doing this little practice of sensing their tissue with a finger.

So now it's my hand exploring, and that could be externally, but if they're internally, then the finger is exploring the walls of the vagina or maybe the cervix, if they can reach it, maybe the gpa. But then after a while I tell them, okay, hold your finger still now, have your tissue feel the finger. And there you can often see, can they or can't they? So you can get a sense here of whether or not their internal sensations are there or not. This is also linked to what is called the, my English is failing me right now. When you have the primary root of, or the first root of pleasure, which is the direct root of pleasure, that's an in internal experience of what goes on in my body.

And then you have the indirect root of pleasure, which is where you need something else to give you permission to experience it. And that is often what's involved with when we have this kind of, I, I can't sense it that this direct root of pleasure, connection has been distorted somewhere down the path.

And every newborn baby is born with that one intact. The capacity of feeling pleasure in their blood body and feeling bliss. If you massage a little baby, they're just gonna be, enjoying it. No shame, no holding back. But then life comes in with our, upbringing or shaming people, ridiculing us, whatever happened, culture all these things that then gradually makes us cut off this ability of actually sensing the direct root of pleasure.

And now we start needing an excuse. And that excuse could be, have you cleaned up your room and done all your chores? Or it could be, I can only enjoy sensations if it's being done to me. I sometimes meet women that come to me and say, I don't get it. If my partner is. Is pleasuring me with his hands or with his mouth?

Oh, I get the most beautiful orgasms, but I've never been able to masturbate and get an orgasm on my own. Here you have a classical one. I can't do it to myself 'cause I'm not allowed. I need. External reason for it to be okay. But that one is very important in this one. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really about permission and for our listeners to really investigate the degree to which we do give ourselves permission.

And where that might have been where that contraction may have been formed. It could have been, being caught self masturbating for the first time by a parent and being yelled at. Or it could have been, a, an older sibling or a relative who's being judged for being too sexual.

A promiscuous. Yeah. Or as you're saying, we can have it done to us, but to do it to ourselves is a whole other realm. So to really. Inquire within your body and your kind of yeah. Your journey where that permission may have gotten stuck. I, if you are, for instance a client and you don't feel anything, then you know the job is to or the, not the job, the journey is to really start touching and then, sit with it.

I can't feel anything. And then, the next thing that might arise is frustration. Okay. Then you sit with the frustration. I can't feel anything and maybe after the frustration, the sadness comes, I can't feel anything. So you sit through all emotions because what you're doing now is you're giving permission.

But very often when we start a journey like this, if it's a woman coming, 'cause I wanna be able to feel pressure and I wanna be able to do it myself, and then she start touching, but I don't feel pressure, she gets frustrated and see's not working. But this is the journey towards pleasure because the journey towards pleasure means can I give myself permission to feel what's alive right now?

So when you start the healing journey of this in the beginning, what's alive is, I can't feel anything. Okay? Sit with that one. And then the next feeling that might come underneath, sit with that one. Because every time you give permission, then it can transform into the next little thing, the next little thing, the next little thing.

And gradually you'll start to realize, oh, now it doesn't feel as numb anymore. Okay, sit with this. So it's very much about the this compassionate. Allowing and being with what is that is actually the permission giving that is needed to end up having full res sensitization at some point. Yes. I love that.

Being with what is, and again, meeting the tissues where they feel safe and ready to be met and allowing whatever story, even if it's boredom or frustration, to be felt. To be told. To be expressed and especially frustration because if you sit and hold onto a tissue that's numb and you get frustrated.

First of all, you probably get frustrated with yourself in many other situations of your life, meaning you're not very loving towards yourself. So this practice is also a practice in self-love. Can I sit with this and not get frustrated, not get angry? And if I get frustrated, can I even have compassion for the frustrated side of me?

Yes. But also at the same time, remember that when we get frustrated that actually this numb tissue or oversensitive tissue that's causing me pain is not trying to harm me. That tissue is doing what it's doing in an attempt. To keep me safe because it was created at some point in our life where we needed either something to stay away, then pain is a good way for us to stay away from something or something we couldn't stay away from because it kept happening and it was so uncomfortable every time it happened.

So our body helped us and say, you know what? I'm gonna help you. I'm gonna make you numb when it happens so you don't have to suffer through it. So whether we're dealing with armor that is numbness or armor that is, is hypersensitivity, it's your body that at some point was doing its very best to protect you.

To actually serve you. And now when we want to tell this armor, Hey, I don't need your service anymore, then it's very important, at least this is my view, to not come at it with this anger and just get out and go away because no, you know this is a part of you that's been trying to look out for you.

So now we need to get this part to understand that we appreciate what you've been doing up till now, but your service is no longer needed. You can, you can ret relax, and then we can allow the body to restore again. So that it comes from this point of gratitude actually. Yes. Yeah. I feel like this is such an important point, Suzanne, because the body is infinitely wise in knowing what it needs to survive and to protect itself.

So there was a reason for the tissues and the armor to form in order to survive certain situations. And this actually occurs, especially in incidences of trauma, when we dissociate or leave the body, it would be too overwhelming to bear that experience. So the nervous system is really doing what it needs to survive and.

I think it's especially important because I feel like there's something in our culture where I feel like if there is a lack of sensation or numbness, especially in sexuality, people wanna go harder or faster or, and it's the opposite that's needed. Just as you're saying. There needs to be a safe space for listening and just being with and meeting the tissues with the safe space.

I, I have a motto in my company, which is less is more and slow is the fastest way. That's actually my motto, and that's what I work after. Love it. And like I said, slow is really the fastest way because it's always only in the beginning. We have to be slow because by being slow, by being compassionate and patient and loving and just inviting and accepting the body for what, where it is and what it is at this moment.

That builds trust. And when the body starts trusting, then suddenly the body starts pulling me and saying, Hey, let's go to this edge here and jump together. 'cause I trust you. But as long as the body is not trusting it, it'll be me pushing if I'm, using the pushy type while the body's constantly trying to put in the brake because oh, not too fast.

So by being slow you actually get this trust built. And the trust is not just between a client's body and me, it's actually also between the client's body and the client, her or himself. Because often our bodies don't even trust ourselves because we have overstepped our boundaries again and again.

The body has been giving us sickness, Hey, don't do this. Oh, I don't like that. And we just move on with it. So when we finally start to enter a healing path, doing the right thing. I think I understand why a body is a little can I trust in that, because normally, every time I give you half a finger, you rip my whole hand with you.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna pause here and watch you and see if it's, if you really have that patience that you're displaying right now, is it true? So the body often do the same with the clients, need to almost rebuild the inner trust as well. Absolutely. Of, you are listening now you are seeing me, you are seeing my limitations, my boundaries, my borders and also my capacity because that's us also often, no, I can't do this, I can't do that.

My body can't do that. And then you can work with a client. Suddenly they realize what a magnificent being that body is and all the things their body could, that they never thought they would be able to experience. So it's also this journey of trust. I think that really sums it up really nicely.

It is a journey of trust with the self. It is re reestablishing trust for the body, to trust the owner of the body. Suzanne, to wrap things up, is there a a somatic exercise you can share that can invite our listeners to explore a deeper connection with their own embodied sexuality?

My, my suggestion right there, here would actually be the one where we switch between the direct and the indirect root of pleasure. Is it, how sensitive is my body, actually, because most people are aware their hands are sensitive, but then they, think that this was my body feeling and actually it was just still their finger feeling their body.

So it could be placing the hands on the genitals somewhere maybe with a little pressure with the fingertips on certain points, and then use the fingers to really feel the tissue, and the fingers can be, putting a little sort of pressure that releases and gives in to say, okay, what does this tissue feel like?

So all the attention is now in the fingertips exploring the tissue. Do that for a few minutes, get a good sense of what you're feeling. And then switch inward. Like really put your attention inside, down through your heart, connect with your heart, move through your belly into your inside of your pelvis genital area, still having the hand connect, but now have the body feel what it feels like when the fingers touch.

So you should have the same feeling, like if it was a stranger's hand, you were feeling. So now you disconnect from the hands, from the outside and inside and play with this switching, because this switching is really important, especially if we wanna increase our sexual pleasure, sexual experience.

Because if you cannot have internal experience it's not really gonna give you much. So you need to awaken this side of you. Yeah, I feel like this is also a way to give agency to the tissues of the genitalia so that they have a sense of ownership of what they want to, with what they wanna feel and touch as well, rather than just being on the receiving end.

I would love to add a thing to it, and if the ones doing this chooses to move the fingers around a bit, then I would invite to really notice where is my sensitivity different. So that they start realizing, oh, this part feels everything. This part just next to actually didn't feel as much so that we, they start to build this inward awareness of what is my level of sensitivity?

Where am I maybe hypersensitive, where is there pain? Where is there numbness or simply just, eh, a little boring, but I do feel it. And where am I? I know my finger is touching something, but from the inside I actually can't feel my finger because that's also when you do the internal, you might notice with your finger, I'm touching something, but when you're trying to feel the finger, you're like, the inside can't feel the finger. Then you just found the numbness area. Yes. Yes. Or you notice I can feel the finger. I cannot save the finger is on my perineum or in my joint where you can't locate it because that's also, then you're also partly numb because you cannot, you don't have clear sense of where you're being touched.

That sounds wonderful. So Suzanne thank you so much for your time today and for sharing your wisdom and really for the work that you are doing in the world. The Gaia method offers, retreats really all over the world. You can find the work of Suzanne and Adam, her beloved@thegaiamethod.com.

That's the dash gaia g aia a method.com. And I'll have that in the show notes as well. And Suzanne, you've been offering virtual. Guided self disarming for women? Yes. I have a closed Facebook group for women only, so men is not allowed in there. And there are women from all over the world by now in this group.

Where I normally will post upcoming dates for when I will offer these guided online sessions. And the way they are charged is that it's on donation basis, so anyone can attend no matter the size of their wallet. That's great. Yeah. That's so wonderful. Thanks again, Suzanne. It's good to see you.

It's always great to see you, and I look forward to seeing you in person sometime, whenever we get a chance soon. Yeah. Thank you. It's been a pleasure being here.

Notice how this exploration with Suzanne is landing in your body. And whether your body may be inviting a deeper exploration of any stories, it may be ready and wanting to share with you

 Thank you for listening to Your Body. Remembers Pleasure If this conversation supported you, the simple way to help this work reach more people is to leave a five star rating or a brief review. You'll also find more resources and teachings@rahichun.com. Until next time, take good care.