The first time I attended the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival 2024, an old friend and I attended the sensual yoga workshop.

My friend and I met over a decade ago during a yoga certification course and have been besties ever since. We’ve taught yoga together, cultivated our individual writing identities, and witnessed each other’s families decline and grow, struggle and thrive.

As fate would have it, she and her family moved to Portland, and we have incorporated the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival into one of the many shared experiences of our lives. 

Afterward, we both agreed it was the best yoga class we’d ever taken. The teacher used a chair. As a one-time teacher, I was immediately impressed. Chairs are a great way to keep your students safe, especially when working with all experience levels. Though, from the perspective of “sensuality,” using a chair is just sexy.

Our guide made it easy for us to check our egos at the door, the mark of an excellent teacher, allowing students to enter private spaces where we could inhabit their own bodies without fear of judgment. This would be challenging considering the sensitive setting and anxious allure of a “sensual” class during an erotic arts festival where vulnerabilities and curiosities are laid bare.

During the class, we draped ourselves over the chair, walked around it, and straddled it. We stretched shoulders, opened hips, and lengthened muscles. Each move was explicit and intentional, and the transitions through the movements were gradual and intuitive, allowing for focused mindfulness.

Between the chair and the mat, we drew into the sensations of temperature changes over skin, the satisfying pull of a forgotten muscle, and the contraction and release of an overused muscle. Each of us listened to the rhythmic beats of our hearts and succumbed to the flush of exhilaration and calm that tingled and radiated under our skin. On our mats, we shattered into the infinite fragments of our beings and reformed ourselves into our dynamic whole selves. 

The practice was transformative. It reminded me, as a complex, sensual being, to be aware of the internal subtleties of my body and to engage all my senses as I interact with the physical world. I left the space with a refreshed view of non-sexual sensuality. There was nothing sexual about the class, but it was sensual in its truest sense.

*This post originally appeared in 2025. This is the first of many short reflections that will be migrated to my new home. It's a nice way to revisit old posts.