Principals of DE-ARMOURING : How do you care for a suit of armour?
The reasons someone might seek out a Somatic Sex Educator are vast but commonly the reasons fall under the umbrella of looking for support to shift or expand their experience of pleasure and intimacy in their own body and with others.
Part of this journey often includes a push/pull dynamic where we are drawn towards something we long for, while simultaneously experience intense challenges or barriers to receiving exactly what we long for.
“Armouring” is a term used to describe the protective/defensive measures that are derived as a survival strategy for living in a world that has not been safe-enough. Armouring can manifest as almost anything. Some common sensations of armoured tissues can be burning, numbness, tightness, flinching, etc.
SSE focuses on working with the felt sense to guide us. Embodied exercises allow us to explore metaphor, imagination, gestures, and movement to get curious about what your armour looks like and feels like. What stories does it hold?
De-armouring is both a bodywork approach and also a metaphor.
De-armouring has many interpretations and definitions but for the focus of SSE and this writing we can use the definition Rahi Chun offers us: De-armouring is “the experience of the body releasing previously chronic guarding patterns”.
Practicing de-armouring exercises and touch techniques within the framework of SSE looks like: listening closely, waiting to be invited, sensing for qualities of opening/melting instead of forcing, honouring the whole person, the innate energetic wisdom that lives inside every body, befriending challenging shapes, and creating safety for a new shape to emerge. De-armouring can do amazing things- And all of these techniques are meaningless if the conditions for the armour in the first place are still present.
What would it feel like to have help holding your armour up? What would it feel like to have your armour celebrated and approached with curiosity? How does it feel to be inside your armour? Are there places where it no longer fits?
Is your armour battered, weather and tarnished? Is it sleek and light? Layers of lace and leather?
Is it invisible? Or made spikes that can be seen from a mile away?
As a practitioner my approach with “de-armouring” is to work in a way with my clients that they feel celebrated in the brilliant ways they have survived, that they might feel safe enough to even introduce me to their armour in the first place, to get curious together without insisting it come off.
One client described finding “new forms of protection that I can feel into and bring out whenever I need them.” Yet another said, “I have experienced both physical and emotional/energetic shifts from our work together that allowed me to re-integrate pleasurable experiences again.”
What would it feel like to be safe enough to choose to put down the armour for a while? To discern when we need to put it back on? What does it feel like to notice when we have outgrown something, or what might need mending, adjusting, tailoring?
In my mind it is not about the goal of removing the armour, it is about choice, autonomy and how we relate to our own survival.
Original artwork by West.
