Let me introduce you to Julie…
Julie was an accomplished people pleaser.
She had spent much of her life appeasing others at home, work and in sex.
She was well practiced in tolerating and going along and through some work together was beginning to realise how much she was trapped in a cycle of over giving.
Julie, like many of us, had been unconsciously conditioned to believe that intimate touch with another didn’t need to be talked about, and consent was assumed if you were in a committed relationship.
Not only that, Julie began to see that she had not been taught the essential skills that support clear communication and the co-creation of authentic agreements with lovers.
As we spent time together learning and practicing new skills, her realisation grew.
Julie began to recognise that saying ‘no’ got stuck in her throat and was often over ridden and left unvoiced in a void that fostered resentment.
She began to realise that she found it very hard to know what she wanted let alone request it for herself.
Here true desires lay buried deep under layers of fear, shame and taboo.
Julie often froze, tolerated touch and avoided her partner as she did her best to navigate sex.
This upset her deeply as she began to see the relational impact and her personal entrapment.
This was a sharp and painful recognition and one that she fortunately is now utilising to fuel her commitment and find new and useful ways forward.
One of my passions is to share the Wheel of Consent practices that Julie, and many others, found key to liberating themselves and their pleasure.
The Wheel offers many ways to embody learning but one of my absolute favorites is the practice of noticing, trusting, valuing and communicating or choosing what we want.
NTVC for short.
Each step in this process is profound and invites us into new levels of embodied awareness and skill.
In order to practice NTVC, we firstly need to build our capacity to slow down and pay attention to what is happening to our body.
Noticing is the art of feeling for our limits and desires rather than getting information from our thoughts alone. It is about tuning into the felt sense of the body and taking time to really notice what we want rather than going ahead because we think we should or want to please others.
Whilst this can sound simple, it is radically different to how we are often taught to approach consent.
It requires a pause and taking the time to listen into our impulses, gut feelings and senses.
Once we have the ability to notice, then we are invited to trust our body.
Trust in this model is a simple but profoundly powerful act particularly in a world in which more value is placed on our minds and discourages us from really believing our bodies.
Trusting an impulse, a felt sense of longing, a movement away, or towards, or a gut sense that something is – or isn’t ok; are all things that are not taught, let alone encouraged to do.
The Wheel teaches us that we can trust our bodies and NTVC is a practice in constantly learning how to do that.
Once we have noticed and we trust what our body is telling us, we are then invited into valuing that enough to communicate it to others.
Valuing our felt sense is an act of self-worth and self-honouring. It is a gift to us and those we engage with. It is truth telling and shifts paradigms of self-sacrifice.
Learning to find the words that communicate what we want to others, is a skill we can practice and learn. It can feel clunky and awkward at first, but over time, we learn to share with confidence and care.
NTVC is a simple but life changing practice that Julie and others have used to firmly place themselves inside the Wheel of Consent.
It is a tool that cultivates body awareness and skilful choosing that step by step, takes people from tolerating and going along, to empowered confidence and intimate connection with others that feels good for everyone.
