When we talk about intimacy, our minds tend to leap to sex. However, true intimacy encompasses much more: connection, closeness, heart, trust, depth and beyond. With life’s daily distractions, it can be difficult to cultivate this kind of closeness.

The doctors and wellness experts at BIÂN Chicago have come together to share tools that can support the deepening of the art of intimacy.

Shut down your phone/TV/alarms, etc. and turn on your blood flow to get things moving in the bedroom. The best way to turn it on in the bedroom is to turn off all distractions—and that’s really hard to do when our brains are in a constant state of overdrive. “I teach my clients to access acupressure points that are known to encourage blood flow to the first 2 chakras (the pelvic and genital regions),” says Dr. Sandra Subotich, BIÂN Director of Eastern Therapies. “We also tap into Daoist meditation/visualization, which are meant to help couples become more familiar with themselves in a physical, emotional, energetic, and psycho spiritual way through the lens of intimacy.”

Dominica Fisher, BIÂN’s Director of Meditative and Creative Exploration, agrees: “We spend most of our days flooding our systems with corrosive stress hormones,” she says. “It’s important to learn to momentarily put that stress down and allow the system to rest, digest or repair.” Some of the techniques that can be used to relax your mind, like meditation, can also help prime your body for intimacy. 

“Typically, we start with energetic exercises, then move into specific body part awareness that is intimate, yet not necessarily thought of as sexual, for example, beginning inside the wrist and slowly moving up the arm, the neck, the ear, eyelids, chin and lips, and so on,” shares Dominica. “I end each practice with a visualization, allowing participants to see an intimate situation in their mind’s eye that is safe and allows for exploration - seeing themselves ask for the type of intimacy they’d enjoy and it happily being obliged. Giving a visual where desire is not seen in the imagination as wrong, dirty, bad, etc. but an exploration where both parties are open and consensual.”