A sensual yoga class and my Caribbean body

or what my body remembers & shameless bloodlines

This essay features the commentary of Dr. Joy Berkheimer, the host of the Sensual Yoga and Erotic Movement class. There will be mention of sexual trauma and the body in today’s essay. I invite you to pass on this story if that is sensitive in any way for you. With love, Amara x

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My body has become glaringly sacred to me, and I celebrate this rebuilt relationship daily. When I write about ‘becoming’ sacred, it’s really that I grew mostly unable to ignore the cues to rest, worship, forgive, and thank the vessel that I am, and readily became. Before this, I was a city girl, a slick-bunned busybody in training who didn’t observe that I wasn’t very well-rested. I was relatively disconnected from my own rhythm and essence, praised myself for mastering the rhythm of London instead, and only occasionally let myself notice small and beautiful moments in an uncity-like way. 

I’m much slower now. A wellness writer and a beach girl at heart, apparently. I’ve welcomed myself back to spend my days in complete ease and constantly in touch with myself. I do this because of what I have already learned about resisting slowness or my sensitivity, which has felt more welcomed in my body these days. 

When I was invited to Sexologist & Sensual Yoga Teacher Dr. Joy Berkheimer’s, ‘Erotic Movement and Sensual Yoga’ class, I immediately confirmed my attendance. I first started practicing yoga in my final year at university, laying my mat in the narrow passage between the wall and my bed. Since then, I’ve made it a point to create more space on my mat to explore and surrender to thoughtlessness daily.

Youtube-raised yogi that I am, I had no idea what to expect from the class. The virtual class invitation came with a music playlist that included some of my favourite neo-soul classics and oldies. There was also the suggestion to bring along a yoga mat and something rope-like.

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 "There is no pleasure without presence.” This was one of the early statements of the class that eased my body enough to let all doubt sink into the mat. The class began with a meditation and many a prompting to create a comfortable space for the body. Being fully present in the virtual yoga class meant embracing the vibrancy of Dr. Berkheimer’s energy and her multi-coloured yoga set while smiling at my own environment. As I sat on the rooftop of the apartment-building on an island in Belize, the morning air was not yet too humid, and the birds already gloriously loud. Pleasure, in that moment, on that mat, was an intimate stroke from the sea-salted air reminding me, as Dr. Berkheimer did, that a sensual body is often a still one. 

I had work and articles and to-do lists and a race to get most of it done before the afternoon sun peaked, but I preferred this: to be lying down, being with my body, practicing pleasure.

I don’t really know what I was anticipating when the words ‘erotic movement’ popped up on the Gmail invitation. I was just open to being taught. Still, Dr. Berkheimer didn’t teach us how to be sensual, how to dance, or how to be embodied, but instead, how to be present, using techniques that prioritize the sensory body on your own terms. 

“Being embodied is being in alignment with mind and body, embracing desires, honoring your body’s yes and its no, and surrendering to pleasure” she explains. We transitioned through the yoga flow with Dr. Berkheimer’s guidance, always being reminded to remain in a position for as long as the body craved. 

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Dr. Joy Berkheimer

What the session slowly revealed to me was that I had inherited a resistance against a body that feels entirely. A lot of that results in existing in a body that must redefine what it means to feel, be held, be freely sensual and sexual with guaranteed safety.

As a British-born Jamaican, I come from bodies that have been brutalised and which, for many unforgivable years, were not permitted tenderness. My body remembers things that I have not physically encountered. I understand also, that certain behaviours passed down from fear, survival mode, and a need to minimise the presence of the body, found themselves housed in me.

For many of us whose bloodlines were forcibly transatlantic, we’re relearning how to treat the body. I’m doing all I can to speak softly to mine and reeducate the world about how it must interact with my body and those who look like me. 

Guilt-free sensuality and indulging in pleasure were things I found to be missing in my family. Food, music, and church were all forms of pleasure and places where the body could show up and be acknowledged. Being outwardly affectionate, idle, and proud of the body were not regular states of being. While my mother and grandmother are incredibly self-empowered and self-assured women, I noticed how ‘sensual’ was not a word I would assign to them. Their bodies, and unknowingly my own, extended little energy to shameless sensual living.

I carried all of this up to the rooftop with me for the Sensual Yoga and Erotic Movement session. After some yoga paired with affirmations and gentle prompts, we moved on to the final part of the movement class: rope tying. I never considered bondage as a pleasurable experience for physical and likely historical reasons, but I found myself open to participating in this section. 

Dr. Berkheimer’s sensual sessions are informed by Tantra, meditation, breathwork, Shibari, or sensual rope tying. All of these influences are honoured and made accessible for all levels and needs. She taught us how to tie the rope around our chests, encasing our hearts and evoking a sensation of being held. She then invited us, while we sat crossed-legged and encased in the loving bond, to meditate on our relationship to being tied up, and to rope.

Repeating after her, I cancelled any power the rope may have had in any version of the past, over any ancestors, encouraging me to feel entitled to new experiences of total pleasure through it.

As an Afrian-American woman, Dr. Berkheimer shared her own experiences of releasing past pain in the body, just like me. She elaborates on this practice: “Race-based traumatic stress impacts a person's ability to drop into a space of calm, enough to experience pleasure.” And for a sensual life, pleasure is the balm that makes it all worthwhile.

We continued with some gentle movements. For me, every movement intensified the need to affirm that sensuality belongs in our bloodline. I was allowing myself to feel everything that came up, trusting that I was safe to tend and talk to it.

Messages of safety were woven into the yoga class so attentively. As we moved from hip openers to child poses, Dr. Berkheimer made sure we were listening to our bodies and their stored emotions. “Sensual yoga allows you to remember what your body feels like when you feel safe. What it feels like to be held closely, in your own space, on your own terms. Trauma sometimes keeps us from wanting to be present,” Dr. Berkheimer tells me.

Whether hypersexualized, sexually violated, shamed, excluded from loving touch, or exposed to religion-based trauma around the topics of sex and sensuality, I knew many women in my community or bloodline who would benefit from calling back their power during a yoga flow rooted in sensuality. In a way it never had before, my mat became a place where I released for the sake of many.

“Yoga is becoming more popular, but still, not as common in communities that I am a part of or that I serve. To add to that, being a sensual yoga instructor is even more rare and addressing topics of sex and sensuality is often ignored or met with shame. For those of us in this space, this leaves us with the task of trying to normalize discussing desire and pleasure as something as beneficial as eating, having purpose, and having healthy relationships,” Dr. Berkheimer explains.

After the session, I found myself unwilling to move from the mat. I also wasn’t ready to unravel the rope. For the brief time, I had been guided on how to create an inner world that spilled out onto the mat and allowed me to feel native to my sensory body in ways I hadn’t examined. I had anticipated that I might want to journal after the session and so I lay there, where the Caribbean sun beamed mercilessly as I journaled into the late morning. I wrote about how being bound to myself in love took me from being the hugger to the hugged interchangeably. I also wrote at length in response to Dr. Berkheimer’s prompt, which asserted ‘when I allow myself to experience pleasure I am …’ unable to ignore myself, I wrote.

The entire class pulled me into an embrace I didn’t realise I needed. I left the mat. Some months later arrived here to share all that I now know about the permissions we can extend to ourselves when we let sensual living follow us off the mat and into the world of our pleasurable choosing.

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Dr. Joy Berkheimer continues to offer her Sensual Yoga and Erotic Movement classes. I obviously would eagerly recommend. Feel free to check it out and tap into your own feeling world.