We are sexual beings. Sexuality, the awareness of gender differences and capacity for erotic experiences and responses, generates profound emotional and psychological responses. Sexuality is also a primary aspect of our intimate relationship with others and conflicts about sexuality are common.

Sexuality typically enters psychotherapy as a problem or a conflict and the subject is commonly taught in similar fashion. But Eros and sexuality are first of all creative and formative fields of experience. This workshop provides a rare opportunity to explore the psycho-physiological dynamics that shape our erotic and sexual experience and identities.

Eros evokes bodily states of passion, anguish, confusion or helplessness and imbues music and poetry with expressions of sensuality, longing and consummation. Eros individualises our experience and awakens the body-mind to itself. Psyche became acknowledged as the body's inner dimension when ancient Greek poets and philosophers recognised the intensity of bodily experience observed in passionate desire and unrequited love.

In the early 20th century, Wilhelm Reich discovered how respiration and motor activities regulate not only our emotional expression but also our erotic and sexual experience. Reich and other pioneers of body psychotherapy studied the psycho-erotic build-up of physiological tension and observed anxieties and fears associated with the loss of behavioural control.

Psycho-erotic tensions arise and grow along edges and boundaries between the "I" and the "not-I". Eros' play with self-hood gathers pace through a dynamic build up of muscle tension, heart rate and blood flow in the organism. If pursued, this arousal may intensify into a crescendo and find release in an explosive rush. Such intensity of bodily psycho-erotic stimulation and autonomic nervous system excitation can overwhelm the Self and threaten its structural integrity.

This experiential workshop will examine how sensory and psyche-motor skills can support gender and sexual identity. Utilising movement work and the arts, we will explore psyche-motor skills that enable us to build as well as to contain erotic and sexual charge.

The workshop is suitable for therapists and students from all modalities who are open to experiential learning or anybody with some previous experience of body oriented psychotherapy.