Sex Gets Real 250: Embodiment, pleasure, and safety with Sage Hayes

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Before we get started there’s a huge thing you should know about:

1. Explore More Summit 2019 is HAPPENING! The 4th annual free online conference is all about pleasure this year. You do not want to miss these conversations. They are incredible. Check out the line-up and register FOR FREE at exploremoresummit.com.

Embodiment as our path to pleasure

What are the ways we can access pleasure? What if pleasure isn’t accessible to us? And how does trauma impact the body?

Sage Hayes is here to tell us all about embodiment, trauma, healing, safety, and the phenomenal pleasure available to us when we learn how to listen more deeply.

It’s a beautiful, deep exploration of what it means to be in a body in a world that isn’t very kind to bodies. We also talk about the wisdom of our coping mechanisms, why leaving the body is wise, and ways we create feelings of danger or erode safety in our relationships through unspoken expectations and demands.

Rich stuff ahead!

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Sage and I talk about:

• What embodiment is and what it means to be embodied. Why choice and agency are crucial to being in our bodies.
• Why it’s not reasonable to expect ourselves to be embodied all the time.
• Increasing our capacity for feelings and presence and how that increases our capacity to power.
• Ancestral healing and pairing that with building a relationship with those who come after us as a way to increase our power and capacity.
• How pleasure connects us to our bodies and to the present moment, which also connects us to our power and more deeply to each other.
• Our deepest design is built for pleasure.
• Why pleasure is not accessible to everyone and why safety is required in order for pleasure to be a possibility.
• How safety exists on a spectrum, and so does pleasure, and why what feels safe to me may not feel safe to others.
• We wired for sex, connection, and intimacy, but we often have interruptions that keep us from these things.
• Why it’s reasonable for our systems to contract around intimacy and connection if we’ve experienced trauma and loss.
• The wisdom of our coping mechanism and self-compassion.
• The tender, vulnerable work of working with our trauma.
• The importance of slowing down to hear and trust our bodies, especially if we’re working with trauma. The risks of slowing down, too.
• Titration and capacity building around our pleasure, intimacy, and our body.
• Acute trauma versus chronic trauma and how trauma impacts the body.
• Self-care as a way to process and metabolize stress and trauma.
• The challenges of being in community and the ways our nervous systems impact each other. What do we need to do better community work and to be more present in our relationships?
• The importance of cultivating presence and trust with the body before we go into relationship or sexual encounters.
• Why tuning into the ways we are or are not present, the ways a partner might leave their body and dissociate connects us to the possibility for more pleasure and for deeper love.
• How expectations create lack of safety especially in relationships when it’s over and over again.
• The phenomenal potential for the erotic and pleasure to unfold in the deepest ways when we learn about embodied listening and really tend to sexual partners with that kind of attention.

About Sage Hayes:

Sage Hayes is interested in creating collective conditions for embodied healing and liberation. In their work, Sage weaves together principles and practices rooted in somatic experiencing, biodynamic craniosacral, systemic constellations, quantum physics and love. Offering one-on-one support and workshops, Sage is curious about the evolutionary possibilities at the intersection of emergent life and a multi-layered consciousness focused on justice and liberation.  Pronouns: she/he/they – whatever your experience is of Sage in the moment.

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Episode Transcript

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra, that’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love, as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here in service to joy, connection, healing and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.

Dawn Serra: Hey, you. Welcome to this week’s episode of Sex Gets Real featuring Sage Hayes. We have a very rich discussion that I will tell you more about in just a minute. But if you are listening to this on the day this episode drops, there’s only one week left until Explore More Summit 2019. it’s our fourth annual summit though it’s the fifth time we’ve done it. We had a little breakout session in December of 2017. 

This is my heart and my soul of every year. And this year’s theme is finding power in personal and collective pleasure. All 27 conversations are about pleasure, who gets access to it, what our barriers are to it, how we can expand our understanding of it, what stories we need to change around it and so much more. The lineup is fucking outstanding. Soraya Chemaly who wrote Rage Becomes Her, Afrosexology again, Emily and Amelia Nagoski. You probably know Emily from the book, Come As You Are, that I am constantly recommending to people. Doctor Lori Brotto, who you’ve heard on the show before. Melissa Carnagey from Sex Positive Families who, if you’re not following, get on that and dozens of other in credible folks. Some of whom you’ve heard on the show before and some of whom will probably be new to you. But it is entirely free to attend. 

There’s two to three talks per day for 10 days and if you register at exploremoresummit.com you not only to watch all of the talks as they unfold each day; but there’s also free workbooks that I mail out and a really beautiful, supportive Facebook group where we talk about our feelings and our responses to the talks, we ask for support and help. It’s a really beautiful place to feel less alone about all the things that you’ve got questions about. So I hope that you will join me there. I’m so excited about this year’s event and it’s going to leave you thinking about things for months. Some of these conversations are incredibly deep and incredibly rich. I am exhausted from everything I’ve been pouring into it. The show’s been late a few times because I’m putting so much in. So please join me over there at exploremoresummit.com. It all starts February 25th, 2019. 

Dawn Serra: This week, I am talking to Sage Hayes. Now, Sage was a speaker at last year’s Explore More Summit, and Sage specializes in embodied healing and liberation. Sage has some beautiful perspectives about the ways that we can work with trauma, work with healing, to increase our access to pleasure and to connection, has a really clear understanding of embodiment and how it plays into, not only the depth and the potential of our relationships and our pleasure, but also how it contributes to better world and better lives for everyone who comes after us. Sage has such an incredible perspective. 

In our conversation today, we start with an exploration of what embodiment even means, how embodiment contributes to things like choice and agency, why being embodied is not a reasonable thing to expect of ourselves all the time. And sometimes we do need to leave the body and dissociate and numb out. We talk about building a relationship with our bodies and our trauma, how pleasure connects us to all of those things. And then we go really deep into safety and why pleasure really isn’t accessible to us if we don’t have a certain level of safety. So what does safety even mean? Where are we maybe losing a sense of safety in our closest relationships? How can we do the tender vulnerable work of working on our trauma? Then we talk about the importance of cultivating presence to really unlock the phenomenal potential for the erotic and for our pleasure. And also why expectations can create a lack of safety. So there’s some really, really, really rich stuff here. 

Dawn Serra: I also invite you, if you are a Patreon supporter, head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast because Sage and I recorded a little bonus chat for this week. We talked about how we can help people in our lives who are experiencing panic attacks or who are being triggered by their trauma, how we can be better partners. And also, I asked Sage for some advice on how we can bring people over into understanding our perspectives, especially those with the most privilege and our culture. Sage had some really wise thoughts about that. So if you want to hear that, you can support it $3 per month or above to get access to the weekly bonuses that I put out with guests and on my own. If you support at $5 a month and above, you can help me answer listener questions. And I put up three new listener questions in the past week. So if you are one of the $5 supporters, be sure to check that out and to weigh in with your advice and thoughts. Again, that’s at patreon.com/sgrpodcast 

Let me tell you just a little bit about Sage and then we will jump in. Sage Hayes is interested in creating collective conditions for embodied healing and liberation. In their work, Sage weaves together principles and practices rooted in somatic experiencing, biodynamic craniosacral, systemic constellations, quantum physics and love. Offering one on one support and workshops, Sage is curious about the evolutionary possibilities at the intersection of emergent life and multilayered consciousness focused on justice and liberation. Sage’s pronouns are she, he, they, whatever your experiences of Sage in the moment. So here is my conversation with Sage Hayes and don’t forget, go to exploremoresummit.com and register for your free ticket because this thing is about unfold. I will see you there. 

Dawn Serra: Hey, everyone. Welcome to my chat with Sage Hayes. Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Sage. 

Sage Hayes: Oh, thanks so much. It’s so great to be here. Thanks for having me on. 

Dawn Serra: I had so much fun connecting with you and Explore More Summit last year. Our conversation was so rich and nourishing and so having you on the show is something that I’ve been looking forward to for months. You do really important work in the world around somatics and embodiment, and the ways that those things intersect with trauma and social justice. For people who aren’t familiar with what embodiment is, can we start there? Can you talk a little bit about what it means to be embodied?

Sage Hayes: Yeah, that’s such a great– I’m so glad you slowed that down and ask about that. For me, in my experience and my invocation around embodiment is that there’s so much happening on the planet and there’s so much happening in history that our bodies are asked to cope with, to deal with, to experience. I think embodiment is like our capacity at any given moment to be able to be in relationship with our world around us and with ourselves and in particular our sense of choice and agency about that. Are we able to have choice and to do the things that we have the most passion and desire to do or do we not have that choice? And I think being in a body depending on your identity, your class background, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, all those things obviously intersect into how safe it is or how not safe it is, how dangerous it is to be in a body in different contexts.

There’s a lot that goes into thinking about can I be here in the now in this body, in the fullness that I want to be here? And if I can’t, how am I even managing that in a way where there’s still choice? Right? That’s what I’m really interested in because it’s not reasonable for us to be fully embodied all the time, especially in the context of oppression. But I’m really interested in how do we even find liberation in that while we keep working on the systemic levels of change to be able to create more possibility and safety for us to be in a body. It’s like how do we find liberation in the now given the restrictions?

Dawn Serra: Yeah.

Sage Hayes: The now is like what we always have and it takes a real willingness and a courage to be open to the ways that our whole selves are trying to show up. Sometimes that’s like super embodied and sometimes that’s the opposite. And knowing on some level that that’s enough, given each moment, and that everything we do now to be able to increase our capacity to be here, that all does have massive ripple effects on both systemic change, right? Because if we’re showing up with more capacity and more choice, which ultimately connects to more of a sense of power, that enables us to go and participate in these environments that are fraught with systemic oppression and to be able to be both energetically changing the air in those environments. And, of course, making the other changes, too, such as policy representation and things like that.

I think one of the things that is really interesting about this moment, I mean, there’s so many things that are interesting about this moment, but what I think what is so exciting about stepping into power and embodiment is that sometimes it’s not so easy to see the impact right away. One of the practices that I have been really leaning into myself, and inviting other people into and groups and things like that is starting to develop– I know a lot of folks are talking about ancestral healing work right now, which is working with the people that came before us in our lineages. 

I’m also interested in inviting us to work with our descendants, the people that are going to come after us and start to build a relationship with those folks. Because it’s so amazing. Every small and big choice that we’re making right now around deepening into our bones and into our bodies, and into our power has this incredible impact, ripple impact into the future on our descendants. And I don’t mean just children that we have. I mean that the people that come after us, the benefit from the choices that we make. I really want to encourage people to not only connect with ancestors but also to transcendence because there’s a lot of potency at both ends of that spectrum.

Dawn Serra: Yes. I love this invitation of when we’re thinking about our bodies and how we are in life and the choices and the capacity in that we have. Being able to stretch in all directions towards who did we inherit our bodies from, who gave us the things that we’ve got now. These folds, these flesh and then who comes after us. That’s such an interesting way to position ourselves in something that’s so much greater than us, which I think is, like you said, potent and offers a lot of power.

Sage Hayes: Yeah. It really, it really, really does. And it does contextualized our lives within time and within space and within, a greater lineage of love and a greater lineage of yes and a greater lineage of courage and willingness. It is pretty amazing to look back and to look forward, to be able to feel perhaps that there’s a bigger arc which– And even connecting into the future that we might be able to even tap some of that embodied liberation, that is going to be on the planet maybe after we’re gone. But that we might even be able to sort of touch some of that as we lean toward our descendants and that they’re going to get to your experience because of what we’ve done. We might even be able to tap some of that right now. You might not see it all around us, but that we might be able to even cultivate that generative garden within ourselves of future freedom.

Dawn Serra: I’m really interested in exploring the ways that pleasure helps to connect us to the here and the now. In my experience, not saying it’s universal, but in my experience, pleasure is accessible now. The sensations are happening now, the feelings and the process of pleasure, it’s unfolding in the present moment. So the more present I am often, the more I’m able to really experience and sink into that pleasure. Pleasure is a way to help us to get present and build that capacity, and also pleasure as a way to help nourish us because we are existing inside of trauma so many of us. Because we are existing inside of a world where being in our bodies can be so hard. I’d love to know for you, when you think about pleasure, how does that weave together with this embodiment work and even positioning ourselves in this bigger arc of past and future?

Sage Hayes: Oh yeah, for sure. It’s such a great piece to bring in. I think the first thing I want to say about pleasure is that our deepest design– I guess in my belief, our deepest design is built for pleasure. There is a generative blueprint. All we have to do is look around. Look outside of ourselves into nature and we can see this phenomenal beauty and geometry; that nature on its own, in its own way, in its own time builds all around us all the time. There is so much I think when, at least when I drop in and I’m able to be in an environment where that’s reflected and where I’m able to feel my feet on the ground and to feel the textures and the wind and the sun.

The pleasure of interacting with nature, with the environment is it’s almost like it connects me to– The design is so perfect. I know that sounds almost like a weird, religious thing to say and I don’t mean it in that way. But ultimately, the deepest blueprint is towards life, towards pleasure, towards beauty and then being able to interact with that and experience that. And I just think it’s the thing that makes me feel whole. It’s a thing that makes me feel like I have a place on the planet. Beauty is the interaction and then pleasure is the sensation that comes up. Whether it’s nature or whether it’s relational or whether it’s sexual or any of that is just– The potency and the possibility of what pleasure is possible right now. Like you said right now, to me, it was extremely infinite. And at the same time, what we know is that when people don’t feel safe, pleasure isn’t really that possible.

Dawn Serra: Yes.

Sage Hayes: We have this really tricky situation right now because the now is always potent with infinite pleasure and possibility but it’s easier said than done, often depending on the body that you’re in and the history that you’ve been through or the history that your ancestors have been through. There’s a lot around being able to surrender to pleasure or release into pleasure that we think that’s a great idea. It feels really good to talk about and being able to talk to those parts in our body that are like, “Uh-uh. Pleasure isn’t safe.” Or “Last time I did that, this is what happened,” or “It’s too complicated because there’s also an aspect of uncertainty in pleasure. You don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

Being able to feel and experience pleasure assumes underneath it that their safety. Safety is an interesting word too. I think of it not just as a static term, but as a very dynamic, multi-layered, entity in itself. The idea of if my body feels safe, then I’m able to release into pleasure and that’s all contextual. That’s the first thing I say and I think we can go a lot deeper in this, but I’ll pause there and see what your reaction is to all that.

Dawn Serra: I actually literally just had this conversation with my therapist last week, because I see a therapist, about safety. We’ve been starting to get to a place where I’m feeling into the the depths of the ways that I don’t feel safe. What I’m finding, for me, is that it’s this really– I love that you use the word dynamic. That there’s this spectrum that I’m constantly moving along in certain circumstances and in certain contexts. Certain levels of safety feel more available to me and in other contexts, they feel less available to me. Sometimes it feels downright dangerous and safety’s off the table. Other times it’s mostly safe with a little asterisk. And even being able to tap into that, I feel like it is giving me an opportunity to then play with a lot more nuance around the ways that I’m connecting with my body and with pleasure; with the here and now rather than it’s like, “Yes, I’m safe. No, I’m not.”

Sage Hayes: Yeah, absolutely. That makes so much sense. And I think it is so multilayered and dynamic because I think when we use a word like safety, especially when a white person which I am white, uses a word, there is this infusion of is this word a static word that we’re going to set as the norm or as the bar? I just really want to be transparent about that to say that I am not interested in using the word safety in any of those ways. And that safety is relative and contextual to who you are and to your history, and what’s safe to you… Sometimes violence is actually safer for some people than not. I think the complexity and the nuance of safety is it’s per person and per situation. But really if we take that notion of safety, which is, to me, if we want to connect it to pleasure with a semblance of safety, my body will allow me to feel pleasure, right? With a semblance of, “I got myself and I know that nothing terrible is going to happen on some level,” or I can at least tolerate my uncertainty around that to be able to experience myself. 

We’re all in different places around building our capacity to do that with pleasure, sex, sexuality, even connectivity. Often intimacy and connectivity and pleasure can be much, at least for me, scarier than sex and sexual connection. I just think the nuances around that are important and each person has their own. We all have this amazing body that’s billions of years in the making of evolution and we’re wired for connection. We’re wired for sex and sexuality, we’re wired for intimacy. We often have a lot of interruptions in our early childhood or through social trauma or lots of shit has happened to us that have basically created a whole room full of evidence that has said, “Yeah, we know you have this impulse to connect,” That’s a deep human drive, “But here’s all this evidence that it’s not safe to,” That it’s not… So it’s really tricky living in a body where there’s all this evidence all around all the time that’s sort of saying.

And this evidence room is actually given more precedent in our body. It’s given the steering wheel a lot more than our mind or desire. Our nervous system– It really drives our yeses and our nos more than probably we even know. It’s really honest to say that if we’ve had things in the past that have really compromised our safety, that it’s really reasonable that our system is going to contract. It’s going to have to negotiate and build some capacity and talk to the part that’s distrustful of a situation and build capacity around that so that you can establish more ground within yourself to be able to move toward whatever it is that you desire.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. I so appreciate the compassion in that. I’m really interested in what it takes for us to turn towards the ways we’ve survived our coping mechanisms, whatever it is that has gotten us to here. I’m so interested in turning towards those things with this gentle acknowledgement of the wisdom that they bring, the hard work that they’ve done, the ways that they’ve gotten us to here, which runs so counter to so much of what we see in the culture; around needing to fix ourselves and how bad it is to do certain things in order to get through a day. How bad it is to numb out in service to capitalism and conformity and all the other things. But I so appreciate this gentle tenderness of “Yeah, maybe contracting around connection or around pleasure is exactly what you need because the evidence tells you this is not a safe thing. You have been hurt badly doing this before.” That, to me, feels “Okay, maybe I’m not doing something wrong.”

Sage Hayes: Yeah, absolutely, Dawn. And just to share a little bit about my own personal experience with that, to be compassionate to those parts of ourselves. First of all, that is an act that that in itself is a radical act of massive self love. I mean social, personal love. Because these are the parts. It’s like we want so much to be what we can imagine we can be. And then we have these triggers or contractive points. Would that send us in a whole different direction of fear or other sorts of behaviors that maybe we’re not even so proud of? But we don’t feel like we can control or that we don’t feel like we have agency over. Being able to slow that down and to be compassionate and to acknowledge like, “Wow, this has really been a behavior that really, really helped me in my life in the past.

One example of that, for me, just to share is I’m adopted. Just a little bit about what that means to me is the first three months of my life I was in a foster home. In the beginning of my life I had two very intense transitions and losses, right? I lost my birth mother and then at month three, I lost my foster family. So what happened is that connection got really disorganized for me. And that plays out in every… I mean, I laugh but I could be sobbing. That plays out in every connection I have. This part of the set up for me was, “I can’t trust connection. It’s not going to be there.” That’s a little bit about my early blueprint story. Then I had an adoptive family that was totally there and available. But by the time I got to them, my body, my little body had already endured so much confusion and so much disconnection that I have been working with that my whole life. And really watching how it shows up in my adult relationships. 

So for many years I just ignored it and I deflected some of my more dysfunctional behavior in relationships on to other people. Because that was the best I could do. I was definitely not ready to look at that because the look at some of that, unfortunately, also means that we have to start to feel some of that. That’s really, I mean that is tender, vulnerable work. Deep sort of early trauma healing work isn’t for everybody. I just really trust people’s process and what they need to do in their lifetime, and sometimes it’s healing and sometimes it’s not. But I knew, for me, really, I’m increasing my capacity to be compassionate to those very young parts of me that…

Sage Hayes: For example, for me, it’s easier to shut down than to deal with my discomfort in intimacy. It’s a long road to develop that capacity. And that is directly connected to the opportunity for me to feel pleasure. Because if I can’t come into connection, then at least for me, I can’t have all the goodness and the yumminess and the juiciness of that connection. Fortunately and unfortunately, it’s meant that I have to weave back and do some work from early stuff and bring that capacity into the now and it’s beautiful work. It’s treacherous. It’s terrible. It’s amazing. And that’s liberatory work because if we can build capacity around those places where there’s been trauma, whether it’s in our own lives or in our lineages, and we really build their capacity to have some new choices that means that we can move forward in a new way. Our lineage can move forward in our new way and the descendants that I was talking about get to also have a whole compounded experience of that. 

There’s so much compelling evidence that doing your work in whatever way makes sense for you, right? You can go to this type of practitioner or do this type of movement or go to this type of community. It really isn’t about there’s a right way to do the work, in my opinion. It’s about what community or what type of work you feel met, you feel held, you feel safe enough and that you can really do some of this more tender, vulnerable work in service of building that capacity for new choices. And, to me, that’s what trauma works all about. 

Dawn Serra: So much of what I’m hearing, which is something that, I will not say I am not currently still resisting but slightly increase my capacity around the resistance, is this slowing down. Our culture values, speed, productivity, working no matter the cost production. Thank you, neoliberalism. And so much of this work to really be able to hear the cues and the messages from our bodies, the sensations that it’s trying to offer us, the stories. There’s a slowing down that has to happen. I think that that’s where, for me and I know some of the other people that I’ve worked with, a lot of resistance comes up around that slowing down because of that piece you said around, “Then you got to feel the things.”

Sage Hayes: Yeah. I think that’s really, really well said. It’s like how do you slow down just enough so you don’t freak out?

Dawn Serra: Right!

Sage Hayes: That’s real and that’s cool. But can you just slow down a little bit so that you can notice maybe just a touch of what rhythm you’re going at or what’s trying to emerge in your body that you’re working so hard or you’re doing whatever that you’re avoiding. It does take a lot of practice and courage. I do think, in somatic work, one of the most important teaching is this is this notion of can you do a little bit? Can you slow down a little bit? Can even notice what your body just a little bit because I think the tricky thing about when we say pleasure, it can be this word that can be so overwhelming and we can sort of think, “Oh, I should be feeling pleasure full on right now.” It’s such a full word, right? It calls us to this image of whatever. I don’t know whether it’s sexual pleasure or sitting on a beach in… It’s this full body image for some people. And it’s like, that’s not the road that’s going to necessarily get us to pleasure is to sort of think all or nothing. Because all or nothing keeps us stuck. 

It is like small incremental little steps of titration. Titration just means taking a little bit at a time and offering something new to your system. And then going back to where it’s secure, right? It’s not even about going forward, forward, forward. It’s about taking a step into what’s been comfortable and then actually taking a step back, and letting that new experience integrate. So that when you step forward again until like a little bit of that discomfort, you might feel a little more comfortable there or you might be able to go a little bit farther. I think there’s also the body and the nervous system needs that type of pace to be able to acclimate to uncomfortable content.

Dawn Serra: A lot of people who listen to the show and who write in are people who have experienced violence of some sort. There’s a lot of sexual violence, of course, for people who listen. So many women, so many trans folks and non binary folks. And then even beyond that, just the violence of living in the world depending on your identity and the body that you’re in. For people who maybe aren’t aware of how trauma impacts the body, can you talk about that just a little bit? How trauma lives in the body?

Sage Hayes: Yeah, absolutely. Sure thing. So there’s a couple of ways we want to think about this. We want to think about one time events, like a sexual assault. There’s that type of trauma. You could also say a car accident or something like that. And then there’s also chronic trauma, which is if you’re in a black or brown body or indigenous body or a trans body, sometimes a queer body or a poor body, there’s just ways that you can’t get out of overwhelm because there’s so much threat coming at you all the time. There’s acute events and then there’s chronic events that are very traumatic. So what it means though that something, at least in my working definition of trauma, is that it’s something that overwhelms your body’s capacity to cope. They’re stressful events that we go through that really maybe make you wobble or make you throw you off balance and maybe you’re not even yourself for a couple of days afterwards. Maybe a small car accident or something really terrible went down at work or even a event on the national stage that you’re affected by and how– It’s very stressful. But that your body’s able to get back to, into somewhat of balance after it. It might take some time, but something that’s traumatic. It basically is breaches the barriers of your capacity to be able to hold yourself, to be able to stay in balance. And what makes a traumatic is that you get overwhelmed, your body, your brain and your body is incapable of getting to safety because there’s something that’s so threatening and you’re incapable of getting to safety.

You may get stuck in a certain state of activation or might shut down because it’s just too much, too fast. And there’s a whole mechanism in the brain and the nervous system that it goes through to decide where things might get stuck. Our bodies are so brilliant in dealing with trauma. But how we know we may have gotten something may have sort of sticking with us is that there’s symptoms afterwards is that our body can’t quite get back into balance. When something overwhelming happens, what happens is we go into a survival state where our hormones are dumped into our bloodstream. We try to get away from it. We try to fight it off. If all of that survival energy isn’t fully metabolized after the event is over, then that energy is then stuck in the body and the body is trying to manage it, right? So imagine terror or fear or things that that we’re not able to be fully processed because something might have just been too much. So there’s all that energy in the body and then you have to go back to work the next day or then you have to play it like nothing happened. 

All sorts of shit goes on with trauma, especially sexual trauma that you have to go on with your life or whatever. All of that energy, what we know from studying animals in the natural world is that the mammalian body is capable of being able to metabolize that energy through a natural process of shaking it out and finding ways to process it. But as humans, we often aren’t…

Sage Hayes: Collectively, we’re so terrible at creating spaces for people to have their process after something overwhelming happen or when something overwhelming is happening, for the body to be able to process this; which often looks like shaking or resting or any number of intense feelings kind of processing through the body. So when that doesn’t get to happen, the energy can get stuck in the body and that survival energy gets bound up and starts to get managed, and that’s what creates symptoms down the line. Symptoms that often sort of seem like we don’t know what’s going on. Here’s a symptom. We can’t trace it to anything. Often, those untraceable symptoms are usually connected to something overwhelming that’s happened. Not all the time, but sometimes it’s pretty easy to track it once we look at somebody’s history.

Trauma is like all of that survival energy that doesn’t get metabolized. And with chronic trauma… I think it’s quantumly more complicated because– As a trans person, so much of my life in public, it’s never to different degrees. It’s never been safe. I’m still navigating bathrooms, grocery stores, airports, using my id, families. There’s never a day and many, many moments in a day where my transness doesn’t create some survival activation in my body. Part of how I manage that, so this is what I say to folks who can’t get away from– cis women, brown and black body– I mean anybody who’s under chronic threat all day everyday; it’s like this is where the self care practices. Not just for la la self care. But this is survival self care to be able to create practices with the survival energy, which is involuntary. It’s not like you’re choosing to feel this, but it’s that fight, flight energy that doesn’t fully get the process. 

Sage Hayes: We need to create spaces where that gets more metabolized. For me, I have to go to the gym every day. That’s one of the ways that I metabolize that. But I think there’s a million ways you can do that. We can talk more about that, but that’s a really important part of, I think, just for people living in this moment of today. How are we tending to that constant charge of not being able to get away from what’s very threatening? We’re wired to be able to get through an event that’s threatening. We’re wired to be able to go through that and then to be able to metabolize that afterwards. But what we know now is that people were not creating the support and there’s just too much for our bodies to be processing that. And that’s where the fatigue comes, the depression’s coming in, the insomnia. All these symptoms that people think they’re crazy. People think, “Why do I have depression? Or why do I have anxiety or why can’t I sleep? Or why can’t I just slow down?”

If we look at the nervous system, it actually tells us the most obvious story of it’s because our nervous system is stuck in a state of fever. And that’s really understandable. Being able to learn how we can downshift from that activated state into a deactivated state. And again, each one of us, this is kind of from danger to safety. What we need to be able to do that is gonna vary from person to person. But that is so connected to our health and our vitality and the more space that charge is taking up in our body, that survival energy, the more life force is being demanded of it. It’s taking away from our vitality. Anyways, that was like a huge mouthful. I’ll pause there.

Dawn Serra: That was awesome and important. The only thing that I just want to add to that is, and this is something that I think is sometimes hard for us to remember, it’s like we give love the way we want to receive love type thing is; is what’s too much for me, what would potentially trigger that survival response for me may not in any way be too much for you. And also just having some understanding for the fact that we might both go through the same thing and have very different responses for very different reasons. Allowing people to have their responses without trying to prescribe what that should be.

Sage Hayes: Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think that’s one of the things that I think we have a lot to learn about, especially in group spaces. I just want to say, I think in community and group spaces, this is such a challenging piece to work with. Because first of all, we’re often trying to organize to create change so we’re trying to move forward to treat the collective nervous system. Get it back into regulation and health. But in the process, we have to work with many nervous systems together that are holding a lot of charge and how quick it can happen that one person’s charge is triggered and it starts to roll. And the tricky thing about the nervous system is once one person– this is if you ever see national geographic and you watch a pack of gazelles in the desert or wherever they live and all of a sudden you see the camera flashes to the leopard. What you see as you see one gazelle just perks it’s ears, right? Even though the leopard’s miles away. You see one gazelle perks it’s ears and then what happens next is everybody perks their ears. 

So when one person’s nervous system gets pinged it actually, biologically, we’re wired that everybody’s nervous system’s going to then get pinged because it’s actually like– It’s a pack survival response. Part of our work is how do we, in any group situation, how do we notice the impulse to get swept up in the charge and in the velocity that fear can come into a room? How do we practice staying grounded and noticing what comes up in us? Is it possible for us to not go with the energy in the room that is going to start to basically play ping pong and go back and forth; and become a conversation of a survival based dialogue versus a more grounded in our bodies, in the present moment dialogue. 

I think it’s super messy and I don’t think there’s a right… I don’t know if I have a big prescription for it. But I do want to say that, I think, is part of our charge right now is to learn how to cultivate this consciousness in groups and in communities where we almost plan on the trigger. We plan on the activation and we acclimate our bodies and practice together. Some people are going to get activated and if you’re not one of the peoples of the activated, how do we stay present and how do we balance that out versus getting everybody getting swept up into it?

Dawn Serra: Yes. So that brings me to something that you mentioned before we hopped on, which is how can we, in both these groups and even in our most intimate relationships, how do we start paying attention to the nuance in our bodies, and as you said, what’s between us? I think that that’s something that so often in our most intimate relationships, a lot of what we do is playing out of scripts that we’ve been given culturally and also rushing through our interactions often. And so for us, whether it’s in one of these larger groups, like even if it’s a kinky group and we’re all at the dungeon or whatever it is or it’s in our most intimate partnerships, how do we start noticing what’s happening in our bodies and what’s happening between us? Because there’s so much information there.

Sage Hayes: Yeah, absolutely. No doubt. Well, I think, to me the first thing is there’s something about an ongoing commitment and cultivation of connectedness to our bodies. Even before we start to get into relationship or in a sexual experience; it’s like being able to walk in in a way that’s super resourced and that’s grounded in self and grounded in like, “I’m here. I got me. I feel here.” And how I know I feel here is because my heart rate’s pretty chill and I can look around and I feel pretty safe. If you’re in a more triggered, activated state, it’s likely not going to go well. It’s not even about well or whatever, but it’s likely you’re not going to be able to necessarily have the quality of connection that you might really want. So there’s a tending, right? There’s an invitation to a tending to self before going to connect with other sexually or intimately. I would say is really important. Then there’s paying attention to and then there’s the practice of paying attention. 

Sage Hayes: We all have our different languages that we speak. There’s verbal and audio and there’s touch and, there’s all sorts of nuance in language. Being able to open up our awareness to be able too– Our nervous systems are absolutely so intuitive around paying attention to other people and getting a sense of, “Is that person here? If I look in their eyes, is there a sense of hearing this or not hearing this? Is their body doing one thing but their energy doing another?” I think there’s a way to that. I want to invite us all to lean into re trying too read people a little bit more about what’s going on in their bodies. Because, there’s the story are our voice tells, right? There’s a story our mind tells. And then there’s the story our body tells. Being able to start to pay attention to that in ourselves and other people is really, really helpful. And there’s nothing wrong with checking in with somebody and just being, “Are you here right now? How do you know you’re here or what’s one way you know you’re here? Or to be able to say, to be able to start to notice like for so many people with relational trauma and sexual trauma, leaving our bodies is such a brilliant strategy. Just going up and out. I could keep having sex or whatever and it could look– Everybody could think that I’m here, right? Because I’m doing this and that. But really, I’m out the door, down the street, whatever. 

There’s a way to, how do we start to pay attention for what are the smaller signs that give us smaller indicators of when we start to feel like we might need to leave our bodies? How do we catch those indicators? What are some of those sensations or those behaviors that we do when are we start to get nervous or we start to feel unsafe? Because usually, it’s not an all or nothing thing. Usually it’s a series of cumulating markers along the way that eventually tip into, “I’m either going to shut down and leave my body,” I might be here. How do we catch those and how do we help other people catch those? And that is such an act of love for self and other. Because again, connecting it to pleasure and the depth of pleasure, having people being fully embodied and being able to be here. Because if we’re not here, we can’t really feel the depth of pleasure that’s available to us. Being able to slow down, even though it’s uncomfortable and it’s we’re maybe not practiced in it, it’s the trust that that builds of self to self or self to other; the trust that that builds and also I don’t know, even slowing down just creates an opportunity for the body to catch up to the now and bringing us into the present. Then to be able to go from more of a here and now place, I think, very much connects us to more possibility for pleasure and for what we really desire. We’re so not used to that, right? It’s not what we watch and television and it’s like, “Nobody is teaching us these nuances”. So it takes a lot of practice and it is kind of scary. And again, if it’s too scary, don’t do it. We’re just going for a little bit.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. Something that I’ve learned in the work that I do that I think is so important to name here is that sometimes the thing that creates a lack of safety is approaching an interaction with expectation. If I know when you give me a back rub that underneath it, even if it’s unspoken and even if you’re not aware of it, there’s an expectation that something else is going to be asked of me or hoped of me, that can trigger a feeling of not safe. And so really each of us having to take the responsibility of noticing, am I approaching this with expectation, with hope, with something that might feel like pressure and being able to just be really honest with ourselves around that of like, “God, I really do want this thing.” Well then maybe we can talk about the fact that I really want this thing instead of ignoring it or not speaking it and trying to like work our way around it. I think that creates a lot, a lot, a lot of, small little safety pricks in relationship and we may not even realize how much we’re eroding safety when we do that.

Sage Hayes: Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree and I would just add to that that the whole necessity of it. There’s nothing wrong with expectation. There’s nothing wrong with being like, “Yeah, this is where I’m going with this.” If that energy is infused in a way that’s sort of being indirect. Here’s the shitty truth is that most people on the planet have touch trauma. A lot of that is sexual trauma. And then you throw in sexism and all the objectification of marginalized bodies. It is so important, too, to have no matter what your desire is and your expectation to be able to totally honor that and hold that and think that that’s a totally beautiful thing. And at each next part of the movement toward what you want to be really tracking and paying attention for consent. Both in yourself and in the other person. 

People who have been traumatized with touch, it’s like consent got really disorganized. Like, yeses and nos. When you’ve gone through touch trauma, yeses and nos around touch can be really confusing to find your voice or to find your sense of agency. Sometimes it’s really clear, but sometimes it can be really, really complicated. So what I would say is, because a lot of people on the planet have touched trauma, why not be super thoughtful, like you said, about communicating and really for checking for consent and there’s so many different ways to do that and to continue to do that throughout the process. Because again, somebody might seem like they’re there and saying yes, and they’ve left their body. You still might have a pleasurable sexual experience with that person even and they might even have some pleasure. And that might be on some level, fine. I think the deeper call here is, what can we do here to create conditions for an even more embodied experience that has choice for both people? It’s not trying to make anything wrong, but how do we create even more generative capacities and possibilities so that pleasure can amplify and safety and trust and deepen.

Dawn Serra: Yes. And connection can become so much more expansive and deep and vast. I mean, the potential inside of that when everyone involved is doing their best to tend to themselves and track each other and to communicate openly. I mean the potential inside of that is infinite. 

Sage Hayes: Yeah. It’s so infinite. And I will say too, and I’ll put a plug in for learning how to listen really deeply and intuitively to someone else’s body; it creates this whole portal, this whole doorway into probably pleasure unforeseen, right? Because being able to really deeply listen and even if it’s fast or it’s slow or whatever. But being able to listen with your hands and listen with your eyes, and listen with your intuitive body and your energetic self. Learning how to listen to in those ways is, first of all, being listened to is sexy. 

Being listened to is a turn it on and then there’s being tended to in that way where I’m listening for your pleasure. I’m not only listening for your nos but I’m definitely listening for your yeses. Part of that I learned about the nuances of those, the more phenomenal doorways we’re going to find erotically or otherwise. Or at least that’s been my experience and I just think practicing that quality of listening well, it may seem like a little bit of like, “Oh, I got to slow down and…” I want to just invite. There’s such a doorway of depth there possibly there’s more, more pleasure that could be quantumly amazing. 

Dawn Serra: Heck yes. Yeah, I sign on for that. 

Sage Hayes: Me too. 

Dawn Serra: Yes, yes, yes. So you and I have to go record our little bonus for the show’s Patreon supporters. But before we do that, can you share with people how they can find you online and stay in touch with the awesome work that you’re doing?

Sage Hayes: Oh, thanks so much, Dawn. You can look me up on embodiedliberation.com where you can put my name in, Sage Hayes. Pretty much you can keep up with, I got a bunch of workshops coming up on the West Coast and I’m around so just embodiedliberation.com

Dawn Serra: Sweet. Well, I’ll have that link in the show notes so people can just click through and see the cool stuff you’re up to. If you are a provider, definitely check out Sage’s workshops for providers that would up your game so much. Sage, thank you so much for bringing your wisdom and your experiences here to the show. I know this is going to give folks a lot to think about and feel into, so thank you. 

Sage Hayes: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me on, Dawn. 

Dawn Serra: To everybody who tuned in, thank you so much for listening. Of course, I will be back next week. Click through the show notes to check out Sage and if you are a Patreon supporter, pop over to patreon.com/sgrpodcast where Sage and I are going to go have a little bonus just for you. Until next time. Bye.

Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured in this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and to get awesome weekly bonuses. 

As you look towards the next week, I wonder, what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?