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Beyond the Bedroom wants you to know who our presenters are. With that in mind we attempt to interview each presenter so you get a sense of who they are and what they will be talking about at the Beyond the Bedroom conference in October or future. If you should happen to be interested in attending you can register for Beyond the Bedroom at any time.
Video Transcripts
Renee: I’m Renee Quintana and I am here with Melissa Walker who has a Masters and she’s also an R-DMT which I’ll have her explain to you in a little bit but we’re interviewing Melissa here today for Beyond the Bedroom because we want you to learn a little bit more about what her class is all about and also why does she want to teach a class like this at Beyond the Bedroom. I want to start really quickly, tell us a little bit about yourself, what do you do and we’ll start there.
Melissa: I am a Body-Centered Psychotherapist and I work with couples and individuals around issues of intimacy and sexuality and I’ve been in practice about 4 years now and I love what I do.
Renee: Great!
Melissa: Yeah
How Melissa Became an Expert in How to Seduce and Flirt
Renee: What got you into something like this?
Melissa: That’s a great question. I have been belly dancing for a very long time and about 20 years now and when I was younger, when I was in my teens and 20s, I would perform lots of different places and we would go to festivals, I would dance in restaurants, art festivals, renaissance festivals, all kinds of different places and one of the questions that I got the most which I was struck by every time I heard it was “aren’t you a little young to be dancing so erotically?” or “aren’t you so young to be dancing in such a sexy way?” and “is this dance all about sex?” I ended up having a lot of conversations about sexuality and I was really curious about the assumptions that people had about me because I was a belly dancer, because I moved my body in a sensual way [Flirting Body Language] and when I decided I was going to get my Masters in counseling and psychology because I’ve always wanted to do psychology and psychotherapy and things like that. I found myself asking those questions even deeper when all of a sudden those questions were gone and here I am in a Masters level, somatic body-centered counseling program and we were not talking about sexuality. I think I had one class where we had two modules around sexuality and that woman who came in to do the modules ended up being one of my mentors but I was just struck how out in the world sexuality is such a big issue, both positive and negative and everywhere in between and then in counseling psychology when I’m supposed to be sitting with people and talking about their lives and what’s going on, it wasn’t talked about. I got more and more interested in that and decided “you know what, sexuality’s going to be my focus.” I work my thesis around sexuality, female sexuality in particular and I decided I was going to work with couples and then I found that I loved it. I just love working with couples. It’s my favorite thing to do and groups also. I love teaching and just taking groups. That’s how I got involved. There was a need and it was really interesting to me and it continues to be interesting to me working with sexuality and intimacy and so that’s my focus.
Renee: What is your class title for Beyond the Bedroom?
Melissa: I don’t remember actually, was it the Art of Embodied Seduction [Anatomy of the Embodied Seduction an Interactive Workshop on Flirting]?
Renee: And flirting
Melissa: And flirting, yeah.
Renee: Melissa’s going to be talking about flirting at Beyond the Bedroom and I’m kind of curious about the class and I know some of the people that are watching this video are going to be curios as well. What are they getting themselves into when they attend your class?
Melissa: Flirting is really interesting to me and how we seduce each other is very interesting to me. The focus of my class is going to be a little bit more on people who have been in relationship for a while and sort of rekindling that art of seduction and…
Renee: It’s definitely needed.
Melissa: Yeah, because after we’ve been together with people for a while we start to lose some of that fire because, for lots of reasons and one of those reasons I think is a lot of the media has the idea that love and sex is always this hugely passionate, I have-to-have-with-your-clothes-off kind of experience and for anyone who’s been on a long term relationship knows that’s not always the case. There’s actually an ebb and flow to relationships and flirting and being seductive with each other is a movement of our creative sexual energy and what I want to do is sort of build a framework around what can that look like? What can that feel like? What turns us on? How can we activate that within ourselves? And because I come from a body-centered perspective I’ll definitely be doing movement in the group, we’ll be having discussions also, that I’ll be actually coaching people to find that sense of seduction within themselves and then talk about how do they bring out their sort of authentic sexuality to seduce their partner.
Renee: Is this class for both men and women?
Melissa: Yes
Renee: Because whenever you’re talking about seduction, I think a lot of people just generalize and think that you’re talking to women specifically but I’m sure that you’re trying to target both and couples, right?
Can Men Exude Sexuality?
Melissa: Absolutely, men are sexy too.
Renee: Yeah exactly, whether you’re a couple or not you can definitely attend the class and learn something great.
Melissa: Absolutely, as well as it doesn’t have to be a man and a woman, it can be a woman and a woman seducing each other. It can be a man and a man seducing each other, it’s just about moving that sexual creative energy and it’s not just about “okay we’re going to seduce each other so that we can have better sex.” It’s also that we can have more aliveness in our relationship and more aliveness and creativity in our lives in general.
What Seduction and Flirtation Tips Will Attendees Walk Away With
Renee: Yeah, so what are 3 top things that people are going to come to your class, they’re going to walk away and they can say “I learn three specific things” what might those be?
Melissa: They’re going to learn about the relationship about breath and seduction and how just having a relationship with their breath can facilitate a flirtatious situation. They’re going to learn about how to move their bodies in certain ways that’s more seductive that actually gets the energy moving through their bodies. So breath, body and they’re also going to learn about language, language and sound. How do I use my voice to seduce my partner? How do I use my words to seduce my partner? Because a lot of people they’re not quite sure what to say to seduce each other. They don’t want to take dirty maybe or they don’t want to talk around to each other but you don’t have to talk around to each other to actually seduce each other. There’s actually a way that we sort of skirt what we’re actually talking about maybe or how we speak to our partner in a way that softens them, that opens them up to seduction. It’s about how do I use my language and my voice with my partner and with myself in particular because it’s going to be a little bit different formula but the basis is very similar.
Renee: Right and I would imagine there’s something too that I know I’ve talked to some women who have issues like getting in the mood and I think that there’s certain types of movement probably and there’s certain types of breathing and there’s also certain types of language or words that can actually help.
Melissa: Yeah
Renee: Like you could actually use on yourself to get you there.
How to become seductive and flirtatious
Melissa: Absolutely, yeah. Movements that you can do in the morning just to get yourself ready to go out into the world and you just said something about women sometimes have a hard time getting themselves turned on basically and one thing that I’ll highlight, that I always highlight with my partner is it’s not just about sex, it’s not just about intercourse, right? That’s not always the goal. The goal is how can I invite pleasure into my body and share that with my partner and that may not involve intercourse or other kinds of sex at all. It can just be our two bodies having this lovely experience with each other or it can be me having a lovely experience with my own body, you know?
Renee: Right
Melissa: It doesn’t necessarily have to lead to the genital orgasm that we all think about.
Renee: Okay, so as far as going to be clients that you’ve had, the people that you’ve worked with in the last 4 years, do you have a real life example of a couple that you worked with and how they were like before when they came to you and then maybe after your work and the advice that you gave them and how did they change and how did intimacy become greater and that kind of thing.
Melissa: That’s a great question and I think I’ll speak in terms of themes just for client confidentiality.
Renee: Yeah
Real-life Example to Create Desire…
Melissa: One of the biggest themes that I get in my practice is where one partner wants sex a lot more than the other. Desire discrepancy is by far the most theme, the biggest theme that I see with my clients. A lot of that has to do with people have expectations so the partner who wants sex more has an expectation that “okay we’re married. We’ve been in a long term relationship and this is what we’re supposed to do and this is what I need and I want you to give it to me” and then for the other person her or his expectation can be that “I’m supposed to do this and I don’t want to” there’s a power differential that happens there in relationship with a desire discrepancy. That’s about how do we decode your expectations about sex and intimacy in a relationship and how do you define sex and can we actually decode that and find a common ground between what does sex mean to you and what does sex mean to you and where do the two of you agree? And also with the person who has a lower desire which I’ve seen both men and women who have had low desire in a relationship that they find the things that turn them on again and develop a relationship with their own sexuality, that maybe they have the belief that my sexuality is not okay or that my sexuality is bad, all these sort of cultural schemas that get thrown on top of us when we’re growing up about our relationship with our bodies and our genitals and things like that. To have her develop a relationship with her sexuality or to have him develop a relationship with how he penetrates the space and things like that and to find what turns them on again. For the other, for the more higher desire partner, how do they actually contain their sexuality a little bit more and feel their sexuality on a more subtle level because a lot of times what I’ll hear is “I can have sex all day, everyday all the time” which is not true, I mean most people can have sex all day every day.
Renee: Right
Melissa: Right but they say that because they just want it all. They want it so bad, they just reach way out into the space and for the counterpart partner who is not in the mood to have sex a lot and who does not have a relationship with their desire, they’re going to go “whoa there’s no space for me here” so how do we have them make themselves a priority in this space and a higher desire partner sort of pull themselves back and contain their sexuality a little bit more and make space for their partner to actually discover what it is that they want or what they love and working with that configuration right there I see people who finally can have a conversation about sex, who can enjoy being intimate with each other whether they’re just giving each other an erotic massage or they’re actually have more versions of sex. I’ll be helping them broaden their palate of what it means and what they can share together, showing them how to touch each other again. A lot of people when they’ve been in a relationship for a while and they see this a lot, they just won’t touch each other as much. It will be sort of the peck when you come home or the hug that when you leave or that sort of thing that when it comes to actually exploring each other’s bodies, because our bodies are always growing and changing, always, so there’s always something new to find there so having them develop a relationship with who they are at that moment also.
Renee: Okay and I think that that also have to do with something that you’ve mentioned at the beginning of all of this that you do the body-centered therapy…
Melissa: Yes
Renee: And I know when we first started talking that was the question that I’m sure a lot of people have, what is body-centered therapy so can you please explain that?
Melissa: Yeah, absolutely so body-centered therapy is basically we all have a body and our body is not separate from our brain. It’s hooked in, our brain is hooked in to our body through our nervous system and that nervous system runs through our whole body and we pick up information from the environment and that lands itself in the individual blueprint that we have about sexuality, about intimacy, about our relationship with our bodies and that can get triggered in a bad way, it can get triggered in a good way by our partners and it’s helping people develop a relationship with what do they literally viscerally feeling in their bodies moment to moment and how do they regulate themselves, how do they inspire themselves base on what their bodies need.
Renee: Great
Melissa: Yeah
Renee: Well tell our listeners also how can they find you? You can mention your website or your email. What’s the best way for them to find information about you personally?
Melissa: My other websites and it’s melissawalkerdmt.com, DMT stands for dance movement therapist and my email address is melissawalkerdmt@gmail.com.
Renee: Okay and we also, obviously this interview will be on our blog so there will be a connection so that people can register for your class at the Beyond the Bedroom event and you’re planning to be on that event all weekend.
Melissa: I am going to be at the event all weekend.
Renee: We’re looking forward to meeting with you and I’m sure people have questions for you or whatever, I’m sure that you would be more than happy to answer those at the event.
Melissa: Absolutely, I’d love to.
Renee: Well great, Melissa. Thank you so much for taking a little bit of your time to share what you’re going to do.
Melissa: Yeah, great, thanks Renee
Renee: You’re welcome.
Check out Melissa’s workshop Anatomy of the Embodied Seduction: An Interactive Workshop on Flirting where she will talk about seduction, flirting and sexuality coming to Beyond the Bedroom in October of 2013. If you like the sound of this class, let us know and we will certainly make sure to bring her back in the future too.