The Case For Listening To Your Body
The Case For Listening To Your Body
By Selina Nguyen
What is Body Literacy?
The concept of body literacy is a relatively new one in this zeitgeist, but this doesn’t mean it is new to humans in general. It refers to how deeply we know our own bodies, our ability to feel and connect with our sensations, and the ability to make informed choices based on this information.
This can show up in a variety of different ways. For example, being attuned to your menstrual cycle, being able to identify how your emotions manifest in your body, or communicating with your partner when you’re going into fight-or-flight so that you can take a breather and return to a conversation or situation with more groundedness.
In the context of sex and pleasure, being body literate can also look like expanding your capacity to feel pleasure, knowing the specific types of touch that you enjoy, or knowing what taps your sexual accelerators and what slams on your sexual brakes. It all comes back to being able to register what’s going on within your body and what it’s asking you for.
Why it’s Important
Our bodies are always communicating something, whether it’s stress through the tension in our shoulders or joy through the buzzing and warmth in our chests. Yet many of us can be really unfamiliar and even estranged from any of these sensations. If I had a dollar for everytime I heard “I don’t have any feelings” or “I’m not feeling anything” in session, I could retire early.
So often we try to lead with our brains and with logic. We see our brains as a central command centre that holds power over our bodies and very few of us are taught otherwise.
Instead, we talk ourselves out of our emotional experience, we try to push through, and we’re often rewarded for overriding our body’s cues in today’s disembodied culture.
Some common examples of this are: wanting to rest but overbooking your calendar anyway, or wanting to say no to sex but saying yes out of obligation. Then, we come to therapy asking “how can I stop feeling anxious, overwhelmed or resentful?” or “how can I control my body reacting like this, so that I can do more?”. Your body remembers these experiences. This is what we mean when we say that “the body keeps score.”
It’s been found that 80% of your body’s signals are sent from the body to the brain, and only 20% the other way around. Being body literate means being able to interpret these body-based cues and listening to them without judgment or expectation.
Our experiences open up exponentially when we focus less on containing our emotions and more on listening to them, and when we shift from this mentality of performing well to feeling well.
What would be different about your life if you did this?
How would your sexual experiences change?
If you listened to your body, what would you ask for more or less of?
Body Literacy and Sex
You may be thinking “how does this apply to sex?”
Sex can be one of the most sensory experiences that you can have in your human body. Irrespective of different abilities, neurotypes and bodies, everyone can benefit from learning to slow down and to feel more.
By bringing more awareness to not only sensations but our pleasurable sensations, we widen our capacity to feel pleasure and learn more about what we truly want.
It’s a common experience for many women and people with vulvas to struggle to be able to identify when their body is fully aroused.
This comes down to a number of factors, including not having a visual cue, such as an erection, to indicate arousal. Therefore, people with vulvas often end up having sex before their bodies are ready, and being stuck in our heads so that the feeling of arousal doesn’t register until much later on.
If we slowed down these experiences and paid more attention to our body’s sensations, whether it’s the tingling in our fingers or the warmth in our genitals, we can learn more about our sexual desire and arousal, and have sex at a pace that feels right for us, and really, more pleasurable.
More than that, we also learn that these sexual experiences can be malleable based on how we move our bodies, our breath, and even where we place our focus.
It can be big movements like dancing or stretching, or small shifts like a simple tilt of the hips or slowing of the breath, that can dramatically change your experience of pleasure.
Whether solo or partnered, I invite you to play around and experiment with shifts like these and look for where your body comes alive.
Pleasure as the Measure
In making these connections, we can also develop our vocabulary about sex and pleasure because we have more specificity in what we want. Having this specificity means that we can communicate it with sexual partners, and this allows us to create more fulfilling experiences.
By using pleasure as the measure, we also receive directions and ways to stay connected to sexual curiosity, play, and exploration, because there’s always more to learn and experience as our bodies continue to change.
With this focus on sensations and body literacy, we are introduced to a unique way of seeing and interacting with our bodies, one that is not just based on how it looks or how it’s performing, but on how it feels.
For example, if you were feeling nervous about having sex, instead of focusing on pushing through and rushing to the end, what if you asked your body what it needed, whether that be a breath, some reassurance or to simply slow down? This can help switch our performance mentality to one of pleasure and ease.
We can reclaim and savor the experience, rather than conforming to learned sexual scripts that might not work for our bodies or our sexual partners. We can reject these sexual scripts that say we should have sex a certain amount of times per week, last a certain amount of time, and/or orgasm on demand, and we can create our own scripts for the sex we actually want.
Learning to Feel
Body literacy is a practice that requires patience and repetition. It’s a continual process of returning to sensation and asking your body “what do you long for right now?”, “what have you had enough of?” or “what are you afraid of?”
Learning to tend to yourself is also one of the best things you can do for your relationships as well as sex and pleasure because it allows you to deepen your understanding of yourself.
It all starts with a few simple questions.
To dig a little deeper, we’ve developed this Pleasure Log for you to begin tracking your pleasure and tuning into more body literacy through pleasure in your own body.