Touch me where you find me beautiful

Fierce Queers is a three-month process where we explore what happens when thoughts, ideas and wishes become lived experiences.

We can talk about belonging, desire, shame, identity, boundaries and relationships. We can understand where our patterns come from and why they make sense. But there is something different about actually experiencing something in the body — having a moment where an idea becomes something you can feel, sense and relate to differently.

Rather than trying to explain what that looks like, I want to share an example from one of our previous groups.

We had a participant who shared that one of the things he was struggling with was that he didn’t find himself attractive. Even when his friends and the occasional lover complimented him, he didn’t believe them. Quite the contrary: being complimented made him physically uncomfortable.

As a gay man, he understood that growing up in a small East German village in the eighties had left some scars. Back then, he had tried to hide everything about himself that could be read as gay. Anything that might give him away had to be carefully managed.

The price of safety was a feeling of shame about who he really was, and an underlying fear of what would happen if people found out.

Now, as a grown man living on his own in Berlin, he was still struggling with comparison and the beauty standards of masculinity he encountered on dating apps and at parties. He could understand where these feelings came from. He could see the connection between his past and the way he experienced himself in the present.

But understanding something on a cognitive level doesn’t necessarily mean that our bodies trust it yet.

He couldn’t find a way to give his body, heart and soul an update that fitted the present moment, rather than the past.

On an experiential and embodied level, he discovered that when someone gave him a compliment, it somehow didn’t land underneath his skin. It flew right past him, over his head, and disappeared into an empty space behind him. He would stiffen, as if preparing for something bad to happen.

For him, as I believe is the case for many of us, a defence against something painful in the past had gradually transformed into a resistance to allowing something good and healing to happen in the present.

Towards the end of our time together as a group, we had not only gotten to know each other better, but had also learned about consent, practised touch, and developed the skill of turning a thought into a wish that could become an embodied experience.

So, with the help of the group, he set up a scenario with the intention of actually allowing a compliment to sink in, land and stay.

Most of us could relate to the struggle he described. And even though he was of course nervous, there was a sense of shared understanding: each of us, from our very different places on the queer spectrum, knew what it was like to put on a layer of protection. We also knew the deep desire to learn how to take it off.

So he sat in the middle of the group with his eyes closed. For ten minutes, with his consent and invitation, the rest of us could go to him and touch him where we found him beautiful.

The touch meant that he had a chance to experience it, rather than just imagine it.

Having his eyes closed allowed him to step out of the role of performing something for the sake of others. Instead, he could stay with his own experience and notice what was happening inside his body. He could choose to receive, to notice, to take a pause, or to let something move through him.

As the minutes went by and he was touched, he started to ease tension in his body. The effort of protection softened, and he somehow found a way to take the in the compliments and affirming touch.

Afterwards, he said that the intensity of fear and shame he had felt in the beginning had slowly changed into gratitude, grief and a deep exhaustion.

It’s hard work to keep good things out.

I of course don’t think that these ten minutes on a Thursday evening in a workshop completely cured him of ever feeling shame and insecurity again.

But I do believe that he made a new pathway inside himself. An experience of being seen, desired and touched with care had become something his body knew was possible. And perhaps the next time someone tells him he is beautiful, it will be a little easier to let those words land.

This is one of the things I love about working with the body.

We can spend years understanding our patterns, where they come from and why they make sense. That understanding matters. But sometimes we also need the opportunity to experience something different.

An embodied approach can give us a chance to create small, real experiences of the changes we want in our lives. Not by forcing ourselves to become different, but by creating the conditions for something new to become possible.

In Fierce Queers, we work with themes around belonging, sexuality, identity, desire, boundaries and relationships. We make space for thoughts, ideas and wishes, but we also ask: What would it be like to actually experience this?