Embark on a journey of spiritual awakening and profound healing with Adam Chacksfield, whose transformative journey led him from academia to spiritual coaching. Delve into his unique approach to intimacy coaching and learn how he empowers individuals to embrace their desires and rewrite the scripts of shame around them. Learn more in his exclusive MysticMag interview below.
Can you please introduce yourself to our readers and share a few details about your professional journey?
My professional journey has followed my spiritual journey. A powerful MDMA-assisted heart-awakening led me to leave my academic career as a political science professor and devote myself to my spiritual path. Some years later I had a profound nondual realization that completely altered my relationship with my mind. In 2010, with the support and encouragement of nondual teacher, Peter Fenner, I started to coach individuals and facilitate groups to share this realization.
As I moved through my own shame and fear around challenging emotions and more deeply inhabited my body, the way I worked with people naturally evolved. I developed a deep capacity for helping people meet their experience with love rather than shame or fear.
In 2018 I was surprised to discover how much shame I’d been unconsciously carrying around my enjoyment of taboo fantasies. With the support of an experiential intimacy coach, I was able to rapidly heal so much of this shame. With this healing, I simultaneously experienced a powerful energetic shift that some might call a Kundalini awakening.
Having discovered the life-transforming power of healing sexual shame, I trained with the Somatica Institute, so that I could offer this type of coaching support for others.
My intimacy coaching has been further enhanced by my shadow work with the Light Dark Institute. I now use erotic energy and play to help people reclaim and integrate shadow parts of themselves that have been denied or rejected. This work also naturally unlocks access to the erotic energy that had been shut away by the exile of our shadow parts.
What ideas and principles do you base your Intimacy Coaching and what is the Somatica Method?
The Somatica Method is an experiential approach to intimacy coaching that was developed by the Somatica Institute. The genius of this method is that it gives clients a safe space for an embodied exploration of the dimensions of intimacy that are challenging for them. This can include explorations of sexual intimacy within certain boundaries, such as the client and practitioner remaining fully clothed, not kissing on the mouth, etc.
In standard intimacy coaching or sex and relationship therapy, the practitioner can only talk to a client about their struggles and make suggestions for things to try with a partner in the future. As an experiential intimacy coach, I can take on the role of a practice partner in the session.
I can use intimacy exercises with my client to go into the places of challenge, which often reveals so much more about what is actually happening for the client, and what is needed to support them. It also allows my client to practice intimacy in a safe and low-stakes setting so that they can develop a greater capacity for intimacy and feel more empowered in that domain.
People often feel like it’s impossible to address their struggles around sex and intimacy because they never have a space that feels safe enough to try things out, make mistakes, and develop capacity. When we’re with our actual partner or on a date, it can feel far too risky to try anything new, so people tend to gravitate towards where they already have capacity and try to avoid the places where they don’t. I’m able to give my clients a safe space for the embodied exploration they need.
I don’t approach intimacy coaching with any agenda about what types of relationships and sex my client should or shouldn’t want. Instead, I completely embrace the desires of my client around relationships and sex and empower them to do intimacy in whatever ways inspire them.
So many people believe there’s something wrong with them simply because they don’t want to do sex or relationships the way they’ve been taught it should be done by their families, movies, or porn. I want every person to know that they get to enjoy their own erotic energy in whatever ways feel good to them. They get to engage in whatever types of relationships and intimacy work for them without trying to match any shaming external standard of what relationships should look like. And they get to share their erotic energy in whatever consensual ways they like without having to follow any type of script about what sex should be.
And so many people believe there’s something wrong with them because they get aroused by things that they’ve been taught they shouldn’t find arousing. This often leads people to distrust their erotic energy and imagine that it’s bad. Yet arousal is always natural and innocent. It never deserves to be shamed. I want everyone to know that they get to fully enjoy their experience of arousal and to know that they always have a choice about what they do or don’t do, even at the highest levels of arousal.
With couples, I typically work on deepening intimacy, so that each person really gets the other and feels seen and understood. From there, the relationship is able to evolve the way it wants, free of anyone’s ideology about what it “should” be.
What does one of your sessions look like?
Sessions can look very different depending on the needs of the client, but they typically involve me helping my client explore what they’re desiring or struggling with around intimacy. A big part of this is me lovingly meeting my client’s experience and really feeling inside what’s happening for them. So much of the shame and fear that can confuse and shut us down around intimacy starts to dissolve when we receive unconditionally loving company.
When it’s helpful, which it often is, we also do practices that help my client explore whatever areas of intimacy they want to feel more empowered around. This could be an aspect of emotional intimacy, relational conflict, or repair. Or it could be an aspect of erotic intimacy, sensuality, or erotic role play.
Can you share a memorable success story?
One of the wonderful things about this work is how quickly and profoundly it can sometimes shift things for my clients. I had a client who, like many, suffered a great deal of shame around her sexual desire. Whenever she expressed her erotic desire, she would experience condemning thoughts and intense contractions of shame in her body afterwards.
At my suggestion, we started an exercise where she could ask for anything she wanted from me, and I would either say “yes” and allow or do the thing that was desired, or I would say “no” and she could ask for something else. Within about a minute she stopped the exercise, saying that she couldn’t do it because it made her feel too greedy and sexual. I invited her to let the “too greedy and too sexual” part do the exercise.
She was immediately curious and excited to do this and started asking for what she really wanted. She was delighted to give voice to her desires and see that they were welcomed and not shamed. It was a huge energetic breakthrough that allowed her to see how much she loved this shamed and repressed “too greedy and too sexual” part of herself. Her love and enjoyment of this part allowed it to be reclaimed and integrated.
After this experience, she felt so much more empowered to start living her desire, and the waves of sexual shame she’d experienced in the past diminished in intensity. She found the courage to share with her partner that she wasn’t willing to continue living a sexless life, and soon after initiated a new romantic relationship.
To learn more about Adam and his work, you can visit www.adamchacksfield.com
