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The first thing I teach everyone I work with—the first thing we cover on workshops, retreats, and webinars—is the heart connection.

When I started teaching massage, more than 25 years ago, it was all about technique. The focus of the lessons was how to, and the ways to.

Then I developed “the heart touch,” and everything changed.

From that heart connection, we touch differently, with greater awareness, love, tenderness, and energy. We’re able to be more present and come back to presence when our minds wander.

There’s a deeper intimacy in this touch, it’s coming from the heart, it’s the energy of love.

The deeper connection and the place within that it comes from, bring us to a place of stillness, and enhances our intuition.

From the connection, the massage flows, without it being about the movements and the technique. It happens in the connection, from the connection.

As an aside, I could say that when we know something about touch, about massage, that makes it a little easier, because the mind has something familiar to settle into. However, that can be a limitation, because we go into the pattern of what we know, we go to the technique instead of the flow.

The more we’re connected to the heart—the more we trust ourselves, our own hearts, bodies, and breath—the easier the flow.

This makes the heart connection I’m going to share with you more important.

I get a lot of requests from people wanting to learn “tantric massage.” I’m putting that in quotes because the understanding of tantric massage is mostly quite different to what it is. And that becomes my first question:

“What do you think tantric massage is?”

Most people reply that it is sexual, orgasmic, yoni or lingam massage.

So we have a chat about traditional tantra, neo-tantra, and both sensual and erotic massage.

For me, erotic is the heart. It’s the expression of life energy, vitality in so many ways, and deeply connected to sensuality.

We’ve mostly connected sensuality to sex, believing that sensuality is the foreplay.

Sensuality is how we experience life, the world, each other, through our senses; taste, sight, touch, feel, hearing, talking, and intuition.

Sensuality is a path to and of consciousness, taking us into greater awareness and presence in the moment.

The more in our sensuality we are, the more in our eroticism we are, the more in life we are.

When we learn to touch and massage from the place of connection, so much changes. It’s a massage of presence, rather than just a technique.

I will say that certain techniques, Taoist massage, for example, are beautiful and powerful experiences.

This is different—it comes from your heart.

In this moment, this is what the massage is. And later, tomorrow, next week, it’ll be another expression of the heart. You may not even remember what you did, I often don’t.

One of the most beautiful things about this is that giving and receiving merge into sharing. It’s a meditation of our heart, expressed in touch.

It all begins in the heart, and here’s a way to connect with yours:

>> Find a comfortable position.

>> Close your eyes. (Read this first before you close your eyes.)

>> Take a few breaths, in and out.

>> Become aware of your heart centre, in the middle of your chest, deep in the middle of your body. Maybe place a hand, or both, on your chest—this might help in your awareness and connection.

>> As you inhale, have the awareness that you’re breathing into your heart centre, and as you breathe out, that’s where you’re breathing out from.

>> Slow breaths, as deeply as you comfortably can, without forcing your breath.

>> Become aware of the texture of your heart, whatever that is for you today. Simply feel that, without commentary, without judgment, just as the sensation of the texture of your heart.

>> Become aware of the colour of your heart, if you’re aware of that. If not it doesn’t matter.

>> Become aware of the shape of your heart, whatever that is for you today.

>> Become aware of the sound of your heart, whatever that is for you right now.

>> Become aware of the smell of your heart, whatever it is.

>> All of this, with the awareness of what it is, no meaning, no explanation, no judgment—just the sensation, the sensuality, the sense of your heart, in as many ways as you can.

>> Spend as much time, in and with your heart as you like. Feel what you feel.

>> When you’re ready, slowly open your eyes.

>> Be still, be in what you feel, and notice what arises.

As with all practices, the more you do it the more you’ll feel. A sensitivity develops over time.

This is the beginning of heart-centred erotic touch.