An interesting weekend

I spent last weekend fully immersed in a SAR workshop, emerging dazed, exhausted, over excited, joyous and hopeful.

SAR stands for Sexual Attitude Reassessment, a pre-requisite for my certification and a must for professional development within the field of Clinical Sexology.

We do not know what we do not know and having been warned about the triggering effects of SAR, I still could not wait to get started, meet my fellow participants and facilitators, get stuck in.

A bunch of us congregated virtually from different parts of the world to watch, listen, discuss, journal, assess our attitudes towards a whole smorgasbord of sex related media and talks by guest speakers, coordinated by a team of counsellors, psychologists and therapists.

The facilitators led us by the hand and helped us explore the feelings, body sensations, knee jerk reactions and triggers that images and words provoked while warning against letting our logical, rational mind try to make sense of what was being revealed.

Armed with enough tea to take me through the night into early hours of the morning, cheese, clementines and cake, I braced myself for a whole lot of uneasiness and discomfort.

The weekend was a crescendo of stimulation, thought provoking, rapidly overlapping photos and videos, shining the light on areas of sexuality that were unfamiliar as much as they were amazing.

Perhaps the most enlightening part of the workshop was to switch off my curious, analytical, explorer-like brain that was trying to understand how all the body parts fit together, ‘Jenga-like’ when not in the ‘expected configuration’.

Once I stopped trying and just let feelings and sensations take over, it hit me.

The ‘configuration’ does not matter, if anything it is a barrier, a limitation to experiencing what really counts.

What matters was the look of pure pleasure and joy of the beautiful humans involved in giving and receiving pleasure, connection, intimacy.

What matters was the pain and sadness of those trapped between their true self and a society that dangles the carrot of freedom of self-expression while wielding a spirit -crushing stick

What matters was the camaraderie I felt with a bunch of strangers - different upbringings, life experience, beliefs, sensitivity - at the end of the 2-day marathon

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We were amazed, grateful, humbled by what we had confronted and surely even more convinced of the importance and relevance of the choice we made to work in the field of Sexology.