Embodied Consent: Learning the Art of Giving and Receiving Touch
This past spring, I travelled to Seattle to study with Dr. Betty Martin, the founder of the Wheel of Consent. For five full days, 17 explorers from across North America practiced the art of giving and receiving touch.
A former bodyworker, Betty shared her decades of wisdom and taught us to focus our attention on the direct route to sensory pleasure: from our hands and skin to our brains.
The Wheel itself is made up of four quadrants: GIVE / RECEIVE / TAKE / ALLOW. Through various experiments, we explored giving and receiving touch in each quadrant as a way to deepen our felt awareness, strengthen our boundaries, lean into our pleasure, and negotiate our agreements. The workshop is designed to take us through an inner journey in order to feel ourselves, each other, and the life around us from the inside out.
Playing in each quadrant can highlight many pleasurable pathways, but they can also show us how we get stuck, frozen, and disconnected from our experience.
Betty emphasized self-awareness as “notice-trust-value-communicate” and gave insightful directions such as “listen for the pull, not the push” and “pleasure is accessed in a relaxed state.”
Waking Up Our Hands
The workshop began by waking up our hands with small objects. Cradling a tiny kitchen tool, I tracked the sensations of cool and warm, smooth and rough, firm and soft, and slowly awakened the sensory nerves in my hands and fingers. Surprisingly, as I relaxed, I noticed other parts of my body waking up as well.
The practice is remarkably illuminating. Slowing down enough to feel into sensory awareness takes time and patience. In a quiet, calm, non-demand-oriented atmosphere, I began to listen to the sensations through my hands – like a hidden language.
As our group intimacy experiment deepened, we moved into partner work. Quiet whisperings of “may I feel your hand” and “how would you like me to touch your hand” and “what would make this better for you?” filled the room.
I rested my hand into my partner’s palm and asked for how I wanted to be touched, feeling into my pleasure. I used descriptive words such as “slower”, “softer”, “here”, and “that’s just right.” Then we switched. I gently took my partner’s hand in mine and listened attentively for their moment-by-moment requests.
Hour by hour, we learned to relate to each other in a whole new way – through the body.
Experimenting with the Four Quadrants
After two full days connecting with each other through hand experiments, we moved into full body (non-sexual) touch. Choice was always honoured – and encouraged. It was explicit. We were always given the freedom to choose.
We moved into deepening our experience, and discussed boundaries, set limits, and created living, fluid agreements with each other.
This required more communication and negotiation – and more risks.
In the giving-receiving quadrants, I realized that asking for what I want and receiving it is not always as easy as it sounds. I was surprised to become aware of my discomfort around my worthiness to receive pleasure.
I wasn’t alone in this realization – many of us simultaneously discovered the blocks we were carrying in our bodies around receiving pleasure.
Paying attention to my own experience and receiving without worrying about my partner is a form of yielding, requiring utmost trust and safety. This was hard.
In this exchange, the action is done by my partner for my benefit – all for me. This required me to slow down, listen deeply to my body, use my voice, and feel into my personal sense of trust and safety.
I was able to let go into trust so much, knowing that I was allowed to change my mind at any time.
At one point, I asked for my feet to be bathed. To ask for this, and then to be honoured and served in this way, shifted something inside me. I can only describe it as delight met with deep surrender.
I was learning how to be in charge of how I wanted to be touched.
As the giver, I gave touch in service to my partner, but without self-sacrifice. I asked, “How would you like to be touched?” and then listened. It is crucial to know your own limits as the giver. Giving without considering your own limits is self-denial. In this exchange the action is done by me for my partner’s benefit – all for them –within my own comfort zone.
I was learning about generosity, gratitude, and selflessness without self-denial.
Next, my partner and I played in the taking- allowing quadrant. As the allow-er, I became aware of offering myself for my partner’s pleasure without enduring. It is crucial to know your limits as the allow-er – to know when you’re allowing and staying present with a full heart, and not tolerating.
One partner requested to rest the side of her face on my exposed back, which – she shared with me later – ignited in her the memory of a long-lost lover.
In this exchange the action is done by my partner for their benefit – by them and all for them.
Being the allow-er also requires a huge amount of trust. For me, it was the quadrant that required the most self-awareness. Am I present right now? Am I doing OK with this? How is my body feeling? Am I joyfully allowing, or tolerating?
As the taker, I practiced assertively taking pleasure for my benefit. The action in this exchange is mine – I’m the doer – and the pleasure is for my benefit. A kind of healthy selfishness. This quadrant also isn’t easy. It was a tiny revolution to enjoy being selfish – to take for my own pleasure.
I asked to curl up against my partner’s back and place my face in the crook of her neck. It felt like the deep calm and serenity one feels before sleep. I knew I could let go into my experience because – at the same time – I deeply trusted my partner to say stop at any moment.
Here I was internalizing how to be in charge by taking for my own pleasure.
What I learned in this exchange is self-responsibility and self-confidence.
Whole-group experiments
In the final day of the workshop, we broadened the activities to include whole-group experiments. We rolled around on the floor together, played in circle configurations, connected to our bodies and boundaries, each of us responsible for our own experience.
What surprised me was the more I played and explored, the more risks I was willing to take.
As I moved in and out of various group exercises at my choice, I realized I wanted to go deeper and touch more. My whole body was alive. I twirled long, soft, sweet-smelling hair through my fingers; felt the sharp buzz of a shaved head; smelled different skin smells; rubbed up against rough, woolly sweaters; rubbed my cheek against a smooth leg. Smell dominated my awareness. I inhaled the smells of skin and hair, caressed soft and rough skin, my sensations alive in the moment, guiding me.
At one point I allowed a colleague to caress me with her eyelashes –an experience of grace and beauty I will never forget.
Throughout the five days, I practiced communicating in detail my limits and agreements. I deepened the felt sense of my boundaries. I explored my “yes”, “no”, and “I change my mind.” I explored feeling into my own pleasure, feeling into giving pleasure, asking for what I wanted, and giving without self-denial.
We weren’t asking permission; we created consent moment-by-moment in a slow, deliberate, and embodied experiment. I like to call the Wheel of Consent the Wheel of Empowerment. It highlighted the importance of both parties moving slow enough to feel into their mutual embodied experience to equally bring forth their preferences to formulate a moment-by-moment experience.
This work is active rather than passive, powerful rather than powerless. Most important, when it comes to practicing consent, the body is the essential place of change.
The workshop helps with communication. It is a skill to choose words that match your pleasure. Boundary setting is also a skill – not only strengthening the confidence to say yes, no, or maybe – but also the ability to receive a yes, no, maybe.
For those who have experienced boundary violations and/or sexual trauma, embodied consent workshops offer many new healing experiences in which people learn to choose. It is the act of choosing that becomes a personal triumph.