What the science says is actually happening in your Tantric massage.

How oxytocin, nitric oxide, endorphins, and dopamine shape the pleasure of safety and depth that you didn't know you were receiving.

So one night I was doom scrolling and I came across this term called oxytocin bathing.

And the way that they presented this was as a way to make sure that you are nourishing your body so that when you are dating new people, you don't fall for someone who may not be aligned with you simply because you're touch starved. And this creator offered a few different ways that you could do practices for oxytocin bathing.

And so this sparked my interest and I started going on a deep dive rabbit hole.

- What is oxytocin bathing?

- What is its purpose?

- How does it affect the body?

And oxytocin in a nutshell, is one of those chemicals that your brain makes, which is also known as the love and bonding hormone.

Oxytocin is released after orgasms when we cuddle and for birth givers after childbirth. This is essentially the hormone that helps us feel connected and loved to one another, and in some ways, we can create this hormone in our body through touch. Whether that's massage, cuddling, holding each other, eye contact, humming, chanting, breathing slowly.

All of these practices basically signal to our body that our nervous system is safe, specifically the vagus nerve, right? And when the vagus nerve is getting all these active signals of safety and trust. Then that signals the hypothalamus and pituitary glands to release oxytocin into our body.

And now this makes total sense to me because this is what I'm doing in a tantric massage.

We're eye gazing, we're breathing, we're connecting with each other, in the moment.

I call my massages an experience of receiving loving devotional touch. It's all these elements coming together. But as I continued down this rabbit hole, I started discovering about other brain chemicals being released when our body feels safe, and we're sending it those active safety signals, which is activating that vagus nerve.

Other hormones such as nitric oxide, endorphins, and dopamine are creating an alchemy of deep and nourishing pleasure.

And so I read that nitric oxide is something that gets released into your blood, which basically aids in vasodilation, which is the ability for your blood vessels to expand, which, you know, engorgement tissue needs help with that, ie. your pleasure anatomy is getting ready for sexy time.

Endorphins, on one hand, they're known as our natural painkiller, but they also contribute to that state of bliss and dreaminess.

And now dopamine. Dopamine was an interesting one for me because I've only ever thought about dopamine as a reward system, right? Like getting those hits while you are doom scrolling for hours on end or pulling the lever at the pokies.

But actually dopamine is apparently released in the body in anticipation, not when you get the reward. And so another way I could think about this is through the lens of curiosity. So when you are in a curiosity mindset in your sexual exploration, when you're present with what's coming up, without jumping ahead, that's when dopamine is being released.

And so all these different chemicals through these different practices are coming together in this beautiful cocktail, to create an experience that is deeply connected and nourishing, rejuvenating, and actually increases the sense of limbic resonance, which is that subtle syncing of emotion and physiology.

So when I look at that information, this neurobiology, this physiology that's happening in our system and seeing how in a tantric massage we are creating all of this.

There's an invitation to be present with what's actually happening right now in your body and your experience. That's why we use the breath to anchor that and keep returning again and again back to that moment to bring that curiosity mindset and as such, that dopamine activation.

And so for my clients who in a Tantric massage can actually do this, can actually allow themselves to breathe deeply, to keep bringing their awareness back to the moment. For those people who are actually able to sink into the experience and be enveloped by the sensations and pleasure of their body, they're the ones who walk out the most dreamy.

These are the clients who have such a deep experience of not just relaxation, but landing of being grounded, inhabiting their entire body completely. These are the clients that weeks later they email me and they say, wow, it's been three weeks and I'm still feeling amazing from our session together.

And so from my view as a practitioner to see that there is science backed evidence as to why people are having this experience in a tantric massage. And yet there are people who say they want to learn Tantra and will yet question these kinds of practices. These people are goal oriented. They're not open to instruction or curiosity from another perspective.

There's a sense of woo woo of like, “oh, why would I slow down? This feels awkward to make eye contact there.” Hands are tense. They're pushing towards a goal and you can just see their whole body freeze and collapse because of it. And so to me, this just doesn't make any sense If the science backs this up.

Why do so many people resist it? In a word, shame, which is why I talk about shame so much in all its different expressions. But for now, for those who have unlocked the full archive, we're gonna dive deeper into what it really means to cultivate the chemistry of connecting