Although the mind-body connection has been taught for thousands of years in the east, it’s only recently that we’re seeing widespread recognition in western professional fields that issues such as trauma, depression, anxiety, self-esteem, and attachment can be effectively accessed and transformed through somatic therapy.
We're recognizing that humans spend their entire lives trying to feel safe. Polyvagal Nerve Theory teaches us how the physiological state of our nervous system and our sense of safety informs our experience of the world, how we feel, and our capacity to thrive. Nervous system regulation is essential for a healthy life and healthy relationships. While it's easy and common to get stuck in chronic dysregulation, somatic techniques can be facilitate transformational shifts in how it feels to be on our body and in the world.
Scientific studies have also demonstrated that daily touch is not only essential for early childhood development, but also for adult health, resiliency, and successful relationships.
So there is a strong connection between the body, safety, touch, healing, and connection. It’s no surprise that we’re seeing a massive trend in practitioners integrating new somatic modalities into their existing practices. The somatic revolution is here!
For practitioners working in the fields of healing, personal growth, intimacy, pleasure, and relationships, now is the perfect time to be building out your somatic tool kit, with a focus on understanding the key roles of trauma, nervous system regulation, and cultivating safety in healing, growth, and relationships.
“Trauma victims cannot recover until they become
familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies.
Being frightened means that you live in a body that is
always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies.
The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and
defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe.
In order to change, people need to become aware of
their sensations and the way that their bodies interact
with the world around them. Physical self-awareness
is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.
…The mind needs to be reeducated to feel physical
sensations, and the body needs to be helped to
tolerate and enjoy the comforts of touch.”
- Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
Stacking Modalities in Your Practice for Body, Mind, and More
Traditionally, talk therapy happens in a chair or on a couch, and the practitioner never touches the client. While this might ensure adherence to clinical guidelines, it means that the client's body - where they are actually holding their trauma, wounds, stress, and unreleased emotions - could very well be mostly offline and disconnected from the process. The same could probably be said of couple's therapy or relationship coaching.
In conventional massage therapy, the practitioner touches most of the client's body, but it's usually only physical, without engaging the client's mind to understand or process what they are holding in their body. So there is somatic stimulation without the intellectual engagement and conversational processing that lead to emotional release.
In both cases, the setting can feel somewhat impersonal, which may restrict what the client feels welcome or safe to release emotionally.
In my own somatic practice, I’ve discovered that the most integrative and transformative work happens when I stack modalities to engage both my client's mind and body at the same time, helping them feel physically and intellectually safe and cared for. And then something magic happens - a doorway opens for emotional safety and truly meaningful healing.
Humans are complex, multifaceted beings. We experience life physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually all at once. So it makes sense that we heal best with a multifaceted approach.
My practice has gradually evolved to integrate ritual arts, authentic relating, massage therapy, sensual sensation tools, nourishing touch, and personal growth coaching into a unique, transformational three hour experience called Sacred Touch™.
The results I’ve seen in my clients over the years have consistently amazed me. Many have called the experience life-changing. When I first shared this practice with my partner Trisha, she said, “You have to share this work with the whole world!”. And so together we founded Lit: Love & Intimacy Tools, and I began writing a book about Sacred Touch™.
The truth is, integrating modalities to engage mind, body, and emotions all at once is emerging along with the somatic revolution. This has clear applications in a therapeutic context, as well as being something you can teach your clients to integrate into their personal lives and relationships as well.
At Lit, we offer finely crafted sensual sensation tools as well as education on their mindful use and authentic relating practices to help people feel safer and more alive in their bodies, pleasure, and relationships.
Why Integrate Sensation Tools into Your Practice?
Imagine a client who is stuck in their head, rigid in their thoughts, emotionally frozen with trauma or depression, disconnected from their body, and / or trapped in repetitive stressful patterns. This person might think and talk about their problems for hours, days, or even years without ever having a breakthrough. And yet, in a safe, mindful, and intentional container, when they receive soft, pleasant, nurturing touch on their skin, they instantly sigh with release. Their defenses dissolve. Their breath softens and deepens. A tear of emotion may come to their eyes.
So how does the magic of therapeutic sensory touch work? It operates on the body’s natural affinity for touch. In much the same way that we feel the care in our mother’s loving touch before we can even form a thought, the science of touch teaches that our bodies are prewired to feel and enjoy a variety of sensations.
While our minds want to be the sole owner of our experience, our brain actually has no direct contact with the outside world. Everything our mind experiences is translated through our physical senses. And what’s the single largest sensory organ on the body? Our skin! Our skin is full of highly evolved nerve cells that each specialize in perceiving a particular type of sensation, such as pressure, vibration, movement, and temperature, to make sense of the world around us. One of my favorites, C-tactile afferents, are designed to perceive soft, pleasurable touch, such as a caress.
When we receive a soft caress in a context that feels safe, our nervous system lights up our brain to flood our body with natural neurochemical medicine like dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. Our nervous system is soothed. We feel present and comfortable in our bodies. Our mental and physical health is instantly improved. And in a safe, intentional, and well-held container, we naturally open to feeling and releasing emotion, healing wounds and trauma, and integrating positive information. In other words, we enter a transformational state, similar but safer and even more effective than those currently being achieved with MDMA, psilocybin, and ketamine therapy.
In my own life and practice, I find that mental and emotional challenges like stress and anxiety map in layers across our bodies and nervous systems in the form of physical tension, nervous system dysregulation, shallow breathing, repetitive thoughts and emotions, and physical, emotional, and social detachment.
While massage or dialogue on their own can sometimes provide momentary or minor relief, it is the combination of modalities that begins to really permeate the layers and create healing.
Combining a variety of soothing and pleasurable sensations across as much of the body as possible, together with mindful intention and caring, authentic dialogue is an ideal modality stack to regulate the nervous system, create genuine feelings of safety, awaken bodily awareness, release stuck emotions, lift mood, and create new levels of wellness and positivity. In other words, it creates real, deep, powerful change.
Whether you’re working with individual clients, couples, or facilitating groups, by adding mindful sensation work into your offering, you can harness the natural, magical power of the body to help us heal, grow, and transform.
Bringing Sensation Tools into the Light
Until recently, the range of available sensation tools and their intended use has been somewhat limited to two extremes: clinical sensory work (picture a spiked metal Wartenberg wheel for neurological testing) and BDSM scenes (picture a leather flogger or rope bondage…and maybe the same Wartenberg wheel).
Our sensation tools utilize a variety of tactile materials and textures to provide engaging sensory stimulation to the skin, such as ultra soft satin, feathers, and faux fur. These sensations are soothing and relaxing, pleasurable, and sensual, which can invoke a certain sense of intimacy. In mainstream conversation, when we talk about sensuality or intimacy, it usually equates to sex. But here, we use it in the context of safety, awareness, and the feeling of being nurtured, similar to an infant receiving touch from their mother.
A professional Swedish massage with oil, even by the most professional and licensed standards, involves the soft hands of a practitioner smoothly and pleasurably gliding over much of a naked client’s body. In its own prescribed therapeutic application, this has elements of sensuality and intimacy. And the same can be said for the sensory experience of hot stones, fire cupping, and similar somatic arts.
In certain aquatic somatic practices, a practitioner intimately cradles a bathing suit-clad client in their arms and gently glides them through the water, and even under water. I’ve tried this several times, and the luscious feeling of tiny water bubbles rippling and flowing over every inch of my body is beyond sensual…it’s ecstatic.
For many people, having their head lathered and massaged with shampoo at the beauty salon is a fairly normal and pleasurable experience. And having our heads thoroughly rubbed is also both sensual and intimate in its own way.
After 28 years of exploring the art of using sensation tools in a therapeutic setting, I can say the sensuality and intimacy of the practice is as normal and legitimate as those described above. I co-founded Lit to bring the use of sensation tools into mainstream professional somatic use with science-backed knowledge, impeccable ethics, and a focus on safe, trauma-informed care.
The science of touch teaches us that the more we experience and explore pleasurable touch, the more our nervous system develops to perceive and enjoy it. It’s neuroplasticity for our body.
Just for a moment, exercise your own neuroplasticity in imagining how integrating sensation tools might allow you to deepen the impact of your work. Start with your current practice, and picture adding a variety of professional quality sensation tools that help your client feel safe and present in their body, regulate their nervous system, attune to their emotions, and enter a transformational state. If you like, imagine adding elements of sacred ceremony, intention setting, and authentic dialogue as well. Again, human beings are multifaceted beings. Why not engage our client’s body, mind, emotions, and spirit? This is where I find the real magic happens.
Adding a somatic modality like sensation tools gives our clients permission to inhabit their body in the world. It also gives them permission to enjoy being in their bodies! While this notion might seem obvious, outside of sex in the bedroom, bodily pleasure is often cloaked in the shadow of shame. I propose that we no longer need to suffer the weight and shadow of that shame.
Let’s bring the practice of benefits of healthy, embodied touch into the light, for the wellness of our each other, our clients, and the world.
Harness the Power of Sensation Tools in Your Practice
Whatever your practice or offering, incorporating sensation tools can add new dimensions. With the growing acceptance of somatic modalities, you’ll find many of your clients open to exploring sensation therapy.
If you’re not familiar with using sensation tools in a professional capacity, attending a Lit event or watching our videos is a great way to develop your understanding of the practice.
You can introduce sensation tools to your clients as a form of science-backed somatic therapy with instant benefits in nervous system regulation, neuroplasticity, and emotional attunement. Help them feel comfortable with the work by clarifying that it’s an optional modality that is entirely modulated to their comfort, with the clear boundaries discussed below under Safety. The most important thing is that the client feels safe and is a “Yes” to the experience.
Here are some examples on how to integrate sensation tools into existing practices:
Coaching:
Make your sessions multidimensional. Help your clients feel more present and empowered in their bodies. Boost their neurochemistry. And see how their experience with your work deepens! This can work for in-person or remote sessions.
Somatic Therapy:
Add a wider variety of somatic and neurochemical activation, accessing deeper levels of somatic engagement, permeating complex, layered tension patterns, and facilitating emotional release.
Massage Therapy:
Add new dimensions of therapeutic sensation, create fuller client engagement, more bodily safety and awareness, nervous system regulation, and a context to expand the healing depth of your sessions.
Talk Therapy:
Bring your clients’ bodies online, regulate their nervous systems, and help them feel safe to access and release trauma and emotions.
Couples Therapy:
Help couples create life-changing breakthroughs by dropping into their bodies, co-regulating, feeling safer together, attuning emotionally, and creating space and energy for more authentic affection and stronger, deeper intimacy.
Sex Therapy:
Facilitate deeper body awareness, nervous system regulation, safety and emotional attunement for more powerful experiences of connection and pleasure.
Play Party Facilitators:
Slow things down! Help your participants drop more deeply into their bodies, experience, and connections, with more presence. Open up new ways to practice explicit interaction around consent and boundaries, and wider opportunities for play that is safe and pleasurable!
Tantra Practitioners:
Gorgeous new tools, sensations, and techniques to enrich and deepen your sessions
BDSM Practitioners:
Add exquisitely soft, nurturing, and blissful sensations to your toolkit to access deeper realms of experience.
Workshop and Retreat Facilitators:
Bundle a Lit Sensation Tools Kit into your event price and we’ll provide resources to help you integrate transformational sensation work into your event!
Keeping Sensation Work Safe
When it comes to touching people’s bodies, we believe safety comes first. The bridge between the intimate vulnerability of sensating skin and the safety and comfort of your clients is built with education, crystal clear boundaries, and impeccable integrity. This applies to all sensation work, but is especially critical when working with women and anyone who has suffered sexual trauma, violence, or violations of their boundaries.
In a professional application, the first boundary right up front is that the sensation work we teach and practice is non-sexual. This boundary is essential for establishing a safe and appropriate container for healing and transformational work. This means the work and the sensations are not about sex or orgasm, not directed to the genitals, and not intended to sexually stimulate.
Drawing a clear nonsexual boundary creates the necessary space for practicing body positivity, body acceptance, normalizing pleasure, and the healing of bodily shame. By safely normalizing the engagement of our client’s body, skin, and pleasure, we are giving them a potentially life-changing new level of permission to be joyfully present in their body in the world.
While it’s up to each practitioner and client to find the right balance of privacy, safety, and comfort in how much skin is exposed, we can offer some broad strokes for working with ably-minded adults*:
Take time to understand the client’s trauma history, comfort, and preference. Give them the power to choose the level of skin exposure that feels right for them, and to change their minds or make adjustments at any time to be more comfortable.
For many practitioners, for instance talk therapists or coaches, clients might be mostly clothed and seated, especially when first trying sensation work. The arms, hands, neck, face, and feet can still be easily accessed.
For massage therapists, bodyworkers, and in other situations in which there’s mutual comfort, a massage table is an ideal setup, allowing the client to relax and disrobe to their comfort with appropriate draping.
For BDSM and tantric practitioners, those working with sexually active couples, instances in which practitioner and client are comfortable in supporting and affirming the client’s nudity, and even in sexwork, we recommend a firm boundary around the genitals to create safety and spaciousness of the type of healing and transformational somatic work we teach. This boundary can be held with clothing, draping, or simply crystal clear agreement.
Remember, the impeccability with which we hold the non-sexual boundary is the strength of the container which allows the client to safely step into the vulnerability and pleasure of intimate and sensual somatic work.
We call it sensation “therapy”, and there is certainly a very professional, mindful, and sober responsibility in doing this “work”, especially for clients with trauma. There will likely be sessions in which the tone remains entirely in a very carefully focused place of nurturing and healing. But in many cases, once safe boundaries are in place, the client’s nervous system has regulated, and they’ve become comfortable in their bodies with the wonderfully pleasant sensations of the tools, it can also become sensation “play”. That is to say there can be a lighthearted, playful levity to the work. We are, after all, normalizing bodily pleasure, and that is a joyful endeavor. The work then becomes a playful dance with the tools, providing a symphony of pleasurable sensations, in flow with the breath, sounds, and bodily response of the recipient. It becomes a beautiful and reverent sensual art.
So What’s on the Sensation Menu?!
Lit’s line of finely crafted sensation tools provide a wide spectrum of delightful sensations to soothe the nervous system, awaken bodily awareness, and enhance neurochemistry.
The Softies
- Nurturing and nervous system regulation -
Stimulates serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin
Vibration and Percussion
- Soothing & awakening body awareness -
Muscular release, improved circulation, serotonin, dopamine
Thrilling Activation
- Activating, awakening, intensifying -
De-armor rigidity and awaken the body with endorphins.
*We are in the process of building a professional advisory panel of pediatricians and other child health professionals to develop guidelines for the use of sensation tools with children.
Get Lit
Whatever lights you up about sensation tools, we invite you to join us in spreading this work in the world.
Shop our line of amazing sensation tools.
Save 25% when you buy all 12 of our tools in our Totally Lit Kit
Along with our line of sensation tools, we teach our integrative somatic practice to couples with our SPARK intimacy framework. You can download our SPARK Playbook for free here.
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Learn more About Us
Learn more about Sacred Touch sessions.
We also provide education, exercises, sessions, workshops, and immersive retreats for couples and practitioners. Check out our Events or Get in Touch to inquire about one in your area!
In the future, we’ll be offering professional certification training in Sacred Touch for practitioners and facilitators.