5 Ways a Sexual Healer Can Help You Embrace Pleasure
Jan 02, 2025
A sexual healer is someone who facilitates the release of stored trauma, stagnated energy, and emotional pain related to sexuality through intentional practices that harness healing energy and address both the body and mind. They work with the intricacies of the human psyche, the nervous system, and the subtle energies of the body, aiming to restore a healthy relationship between your sexual energy and overall sense of well-being.
This is not about sexual pleasure for pleasure’s sake, but about addressing deep-seated wounds that may manifest as numbness, shame, or a disconnect between mind and body. They create a safe environment where you can confront your sexual fears, unpack past experiences, and move beyond trauma. This process often involves a combination of talk therapy, guided bodywork, breathwork, and practices rooted in spiritual practices, such as Tantra.
Common Misconceptions about Sexual Healing
A significant misconception about sexual healing is that it is synonymous with sexual services or focused on the physical act alone. This is far from the truth. Authentic sexual healing is about exploring the energetic dimensions of sexuality, uncovering the layers of how someone feels about themselves and their body, and transforming those feelings into acceptance and deeper self-awareness, ultimately leading to authentic sexuality.
It’s a therapeutic process where physical touch, when used, is part of a broader intention to facilitate the release of tension and trauma, and not about fulfilling sexual desires. The focus is on energy flow, emotional release, and reconnecting with the body’s natural capacity for pleasure.
A Healing Journey
by Ma Ananda Sarita
A man came to me for Holistic Healing. He had severe acne all over his body, felt disgusted about himself and was not able to find a girlfriend. In taking his history, it turned out that as a child he had been sent to a Catholic Boarding School. The Head Priest sexually abused him at regular intervals. When he raised this subject fearfully with his mother, she interrupted him and said curtly, “The priest knows best. Just do whatever he tells you!”
This journey was particularly focused on healing sexual trauma, which had deeply affected his sense of self and his ability to form intimate relationships.
I decided to offer this man a Healing Journey. In this process, the facilitator is a compassionate companion during the client’s voyage inside their own body, learning to tap into body-wisdom and to discover their ‘Source of Healing.’ There are three important points to remember during a Healing Journey:
- Everyone, no matter what the issue, has a healing source within.
- Imagination is the door to intuition and so allowing the imagination to play an important role in this process is optimal.
- Whoever or whatever the client meets during their journey is there to help them find their healing source and simply has to be asked to do so. Even nightmarish beings who may appear are in reality, guides on your path.
Since the client had sexual abuse trauma, I chose the genitals as the point for his consciousness to enter and explore his body. He entered this area, utilizing his imagination. He found himself in a cave, full of vipers (poisonous snakes) . He was terrified.
I asked him to speak with the vipers and to ask them for guidance on how to find his Source of Healing. They hissed at him, replying, “There is nowhere to go. This is your home!” I then asked him to speak to these vipers, saying; “Yes, you are right, this used to be my home. But now, I am on a Healing Journey, searching for my source of Healing. Please guide me.”
After he said those words, the vipers parted, revealing a path he could take beyond the cave. He went on a long serendipitous journey, meeting other beings who offered him guidance and wisdom. Finally, on a mountain path, he met an old man who shone with radiance and wisdom.
He realized this man was his future self and was simultaneously his Source of Healing. He asked the old man to guide him in how to live his life in a way that he could step into light, health and wisdom. The radiant old man gave him a list of how to live his life according to his unique inner potential.
When he returned to the original starting point, the genitals, there were no more Vipers. The cave was filled with luminous crystals. He started dancing in the cave, feeling a huge sense of liberation. Soon after, his skin was cured and he met a beautiful girlfriend.
The Roots of Sexual Healing in Tantra
Tantra is often misunderstood in the modern world, frequently reduced to a set of exoticized sexual practices. However, its roots stretch back over a thousand years, with its origins deeply embedded in ancient Indian spiritual traditions.
Classical Tantric texts and practices consider the body to be a sacred vessel through which one can experience the divine. Tantra approaches sexuality as a powerful means of tapping into deeper consciousness, not as a hedonistic pursuit but as a method for exploring the very essence of being through spiritual practice.
In the context of sexual healing, Tantric practices provide a way to transform sexual energy into spiritual awakening. The ancient sages understood that sexual energy (often referred to as Jing or Shakti) is the most potent form of life force within the human body. They developed techniques to harness this energy, allowing it to flow throughout the entire being.
How Ancient Tantric Texts and Practices Emphasize the Sacredness of Sexuality
The sacred texts of Tantra, like the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra offer specific meditative practices designed to awaken the practitioner’s inherent capacity for bliss and presence. Sexual energy is seen as one of the most powerful means to access this state of heightened awareness, but it must be approached with reverence and mindfulness.
For example, the practice of Yoni Puja (a form of honoring the feminine aspect) and Lingam Puja (honoring the masculine) is not about the sexual organs themselves but about the life force they represent. These rituals remind us that our bodies are gateways to higher states of consciousness, with sexual energy flowing as a vital force for spiritual awakening.
Understanding the Concept of Sexuality as a Spiritual Journey in Tantra
In Tantra, sexuality is understood as a microcosm of the relationship between creation and dissolution, a powerful force that mirrors the cycle of life and death. This is where sexual healing takes on its deeper dimension.
Sexual healing is not simply about reclaiming pleasure, but about using sexual energy as a pathway to understand the nature of existence itself. Sexual healers working within a Tantric framework guide individuals through this process, helping them to experience their own energy as both the lover and the beloved, the created and the creator, ultimately embracing their identity as a sexual being.
Sexuality in Tantra is often described using the metaphor of the kundalini serpent, dormant energy coiled at the base of the spine that, when awakened, ascends through the chakras, leading to states of enlightenment and unity with the divine. This isn’t about chasing peak experiences but cultivating a slow, mindful approach to intimacy, where the breath, subtle movements, and awareness of energy flow allow the practitioner to reconnect with their primal, raw essence.
How Tantric Philosophy Sees Sexual Energy as a Pathway to Enlightenment
Tantric sexual healing is fundamentally about transmutation, turning the raw energy of desire into a refined state of awareness. Through practices like breath control (pranayama), focused touch, and meditative connection with your partner or oneself, you learn to direct sexual energy upwards through the spine, nourishing the higher energy centers or chakras. This process clears out old emotional patterns and traumas that are often stored in the body, particularly in areas like the hips, pelvic region, and lower abdomen.
As the energy rises, it can open the heart, leading to a sense of deep compassion. It can also activate the third eye, or the center of intuition, helping you to gain clarity about your life’s purpose and your place in the universe. The sexual healer’s role is to facilitate this journey, offering techniques and support to help the individual confront their deepest shadows and embrace their full power as a sexual and spiritual being.
Unlike many forms of spirituality that emphasize transcendence over the body, Tantra insists on an embodied approach to enlightenment, recognizing the integral role of human sexuality in this journey. It recognizes that our desires, emotions, and even our most basic physical sensations are all expressions of the same universal consciousness.
What Does a Sexual Healer Do?
A sexual healer helps individuals reconnect with their bodies and their sense of pleasure, addressing areas where trauma, shame, or negative experiences have created stagnation. In many ways, a sexual healer functions similarly to a sex therapist, providing a safe space for individuals to explore and heal their sexual identities.
They work holistically, integrating physical, emotional, and energetic aspects of healing. The goal is not to “fix” but to guide you into a deeper understanding of your own sexual energy, allowing you to release old patterns, traumas, and embrace a sense of empowerment and self-love.
The Different Modalities and Techniques Used in Sexual Healing
- Energy Work: This involves working with your subtle energy body to release blockages where trauma might be stored. The healer might place their hands over certain areas or use focused intention to guide energy through pathways that feel stuck. This can lead to a deeper sense of connection with parts of yourself that have been numbed or disconnected due to past experiences, particularly in the context of healing sexual trauma.
- Breathwork: Breath acts as a bridge between the conscious and subconscious. A healer might guide you through circular or connected breathing patterns to help access emotions that are held in the body. This allows for a release that isn’t always possible through verbal expression alone, creating space for you to experience a fuller range of feelings and sensations.
- Touch Therapy: In this context, touch is used to help you reconnect with your physical bodies in a safe, non-sexual manner. A healer might use a gentle touch along the spine or apply pressure to specific areas that correspond with emotional tension. This kind of touch can be profoundly healing for those who have become disconnected from their bodies due to trauma or societal conditioning around sexuality.
- Ritual and Ceremony: Rituals serve to shift you out of your everyday mindset and into a more intentional space where healing can occur. This might involve setting an intention for the session, using elements like candles or crystals, or creating an altar that represents your desires for healing. Rituals are not just symbolic, they create a container where you feel seen, heard, and safe to explore your inner world.
How Sexual Healers Work with Individuals
A sexual healer doesn’t follow a script. Instead, they engage deeply with each client’s unique experiences, using intuition, presence, and a nuanced understanding of the body’s language to guide the process.
They dive into the complexities of trauma, emotional blockages, and the unspoken stories that reside in the body. This work often extends to improving sexual relationships, helping individuals and couples to reconnect and deepen their intimacy. This work is about peeling back layers, like an archaeologist unearthing hidden artifacts, helping you reconnect with parts of yourself that has been buried under shame, fear, or numbness.
1. Creating a Safe Container
The first step for a sexual healer is establishing a space that feels truly safe, not just physically, but emotionally and energetically, especially for those dealing with sexual trauma. It’s about creating a space where you feel you can bring out the things you have hidden from everyone, even yourself.
This might mean working through moments of silence, allowing awkwardness to linger, or holding space when you breaks down mid-session. It’s in these raw, unfiltered moments that real healing begins.
Safety is creating an environment where difficult emotions can rise without being immediately shut down. The healer is there, holding the space, but also knowing when to push gently against your resistance, inviting you to lean into the discomfort and see what lies beneath it.
It’s the difference between telling someone, “You’re safe to cry here,” and sitting with them through the waves of tears until they hit the deeper currents underneath.
2. Reconnecting to the Body
Many people live in their heads, disconnected from the sensations of their bodies. A sexual healer’s role is to help you drop into your body, not just to “feel good” but to hear the stories your body has been holding. For some, this disconnection may stem from experiences with casual sex that left them feeling emotionally unfulfilled or disconnected from their bodies.
This often starts with simple practices like scanning the body for sensations, but it quickly goes deeper. For instance, you might focus on your belly and realize there’s a tightness there. A skilled healer might ask, “What does this tightness remind you of?” Or, “If this tension could speak, what would it say?”
This is where surprising realizations happen, when you understand that the tension in your shoulders isn’t just physical stress; it’s the weight of feeling responsible for everyone else’s happiness. Or that the numbness in their pelvic area dates back to a teenage heartbreak you never fully processed. The healer isn’t there to give answers but to guide you to uncover your own truths, to help you see that your body has been keeping the score all along.
3.Emotional Release and Healing Sexual Trauma
Sexual healing often involves tapping into emotions that have been buried so deep that they’ve turned into physical pain or chronic patterns. It’s about accessing those places where the body has locked away feelings for years, like the hip that holds anger or the chest that has learned to close off against love.
A sexual healer guides you to go straight into these sensations, not to analyze them, but to let them move through. This process of emotional release is essential for reclaiming sexual freedom and experiencing a fuller range of sensations and emotions.
Sometimes, this release looks like a torrent of tears, but other times, it might be a sudden shudder that moves through the body, a primal scream, or even unexpected laughter that bubbles up from nowhere. It’s not always pretty, and it’s not always easy.
But these moments of unrestrained expression are like pressure valves releasing years of pent-up energy. The healer’s job is to stay steady, to not flinch at whatever comes up, holding a non-judgmental space where you can finally let the body’s truth surface.
4. Revisiting the Past
Many clients come to sexual healing with baggage that’s too heavy to carry but too tangled to let go. This might include past experiences of abuse, feelings of inadequacy, or a lifetime of negative messages about their bodies and desires.
A sexual healer guides you through revisiting these moments, not to dwell in the pain but to reclaim the parts of yourself that got stuck there. This process can involve visualization techniques, where you are invited to sit with your younger self, offering words of compassion that you never received back then.
It’s about shifting the narrative, not seeing yourself as a victim, but as someone who survived, someone who can choose a new story. The healer acts as a compassionate witness, offering a steady hand as you navigate through memories that might have once felt too terrifying to face.
5. Awakening the Body’s Joy
A key part of the healer’s role is helping you rediscover pleasure, not just as something that happens in the bedroom, but as a way of being. For many, pleasure has become entangled with guilt, shame, or a sense of unworthiness. A sexual healer works to untangle these knots, introducing you to the idea that pleasure is your birthright, not something you have to earn, and helping you embrace your identity as a sexual being.
This might involve gentle, non-sexual touch to remind the body what it feels like to be safe and seen. It could mean guiding you to move in ways that feel good to you, not to please a partner, but simply because it feels delicious to stretch, to sway, to let their hips undulate without worrying about how they look. It’s a process of re-learning how to inhabit the body without needing to perform or prove anything to anyone.
Empowering You: Learning to Be Your Own Healer
Ultimately, a good sexual healer doesn’t want clients to become dependent on them. Their goal is to teach you how to tune into your own body, to become fluent in the language of your own sensations. Many sex therapists also emphasize the importance of self-empowerment, providing tools and techniques to help individuals become fluent in the language of their own sensations. This involves giving you practical tools, breathing exercises to calm yourself when anxiety flares, rituals to help you feel more grounded, or affirmations that remind you of your worth.
A sexual healer might ask you to create a small ritual at home, something as simple as lighting a candle and spending five minutes breathing into your heart space, inviting the warmth of the flame into any areas of tension. These seemingly small acts become potent reminders that healing is not something that happens only in sessions, but it’s an ongoing, daily practice of turning inward, listening to the body, and choosing to honor its messages.
The Importance of Touch and Connection in Sexual Healing
Touch holds a profound power in the realm of sexual healing, especially if you are grappling with feelings of disconnection, shame, or trauma, as it can help to channel healing energy throughout the body. Unlike the superficial, goal-oriented touch associated with physical arousal, Tantric massage offers a much deeper experience. It’s a practice grounded in intention, respect, and the slow, mindful strokes that allow you to truly feel without judgment.
For many, this can be a revelation, particularly if you have felt disconnected from parts of your body. Trauma and shame often manifest as physical numbness or tension, making it difficult to fully experience pleasure or even simple relaxation. But through the intentional practice of Tantric touch, sensitivity can slowly return to these areas. It’s about inviting the body to wake up again, allowing emotions stored deep in muscles and tissues to rise to the surface and be released, sometimes for the first time in years.
If you’re struggling with a sense of disconnection, feeling stuck in patterns of shame or tension, or simply yearning for a deeper way to connect with your body, our Tantra Massage Course is designed to help you transform that experience. This course offers practical, guided techniques to help you use touch as a pathway to healing, self-love, and deep, meaningful connection.
Join our online course and discover how the power of touch can be a turning point in your journey towards wholeness, helping you rediscover the pleasure and peace that your body is capable of feeling.
Who Can Benefit from Sexual Healing?
Sexual healing is particularly beneficial for individuals who have experienced trauma, as it provides a space to process and release stored emotions in a safe and supportive environment. It’s also valuable for those seeking to understand their sexuality beyond societal norms, offering a chance to explore desires and needs in a judgment-free space.
It’s also valuable for those seeking to understand their human sexuality beyond societal norms, offering a chance to explore desires and needs in a judgment-free space. Couples can also benefit from sexual healing, as it offers tools to reconnect and deepen their intimacy, helping them to rediscover each other on a much more deep and intimate level.
Recognizing and Avoiding Predatory Sexual Healers
While sexual healing can be life-changing, it’s important to acknowledge that not all who offer these services are trustworthy. Predatory practitioners often exploit the emotional vulnerability of clients, using their role to blur boundaries and push their own agendas.
They may claim that breaking your comfort zones is part of the “healing” process, using manipulative language to pressure clients into situations that serve the healer’s desires, not yours. True healing is about empowerment and reclaiming sexual freedom, not surrendering that power to someone else.
A genuine sexual healer will never push your boundaries or make you feel obligated to engage in any practice. They will clearly explain what to expect, ask for your consent at each stage, and ensure that you feel safe and respected throughout. If you encounter someone who uses spiritual jargon or makes you feel that discomfort is necessary for growth, it’s a warning sign. Your intuition is a powerful guide, if something feels wrong, trust yourself and walk away.
True healing is about empowerment and reclaiming control over your body and experiences, not surrendering that power to someone else. Your healing journey should leave you feeling more self-aware and grounded, not conflicted or uncertain. Prioritize your well-being above all else, and seek out practitioners who respect the sacred nature of this work.
Conclusion
Sexual healing is a profound, emotional, and beautiful journey back to your authentic sexuality. A true sexual healer is like a compassionate guide, helping you sift through the noise of self-doubt and societal pressures, so you can hear the quiet, but powerful, voice of your authentic desires. They’re there to walk beside you as you shed the old stories that told you how you should feel about your body and your sexuality, and instead, help you discover the unique rhythm that has always been yours.
So, if you’re ready to take that first step toward embracing your true sexual essence, give yourself permission to explore. And remember to enjoy the adventure, the discoveries along the way, and the newfound joy that comes from finally being in touch with who you truly are.
Ready to Dive Deeper? Join Us at Our Tantra Retreats!
If you’re carrying the weight of past traumas or feeling stuck in your sexual journey, our Tantra retreats are here to help. Discover a safe space where you can let go, heal deeply, and reignite your inner fire with guidance from experienced practitioners. Our retreats integrate spiritual practice with sexual healing, providing a holistic approach to reclaiming your joy. Join us and reclaim your joy!
