She Feels Your Tension Before She Feels Your Hands

All right, and welcome back. So today I want to talk about touch and connecting with women. How you touch a woman, why it lands or doesn't land, and what's actually being communicated before your hand ever moves. And I want to start with a claim that sounds a little mystical until you see the physiology under it. She feels your tension before she feels your hands, before the first word, before the hug, hello, before anything you would call a move. Her body is already reading your body, and what it's reading is your state, how much tension you're carrying, how you're breathing, whether you're actually there with her or three conversations away in your head. I said in a recent episode that her nervous system opens into yours. So today I want to go underneath that and get into the mechanics. Because most of us men were never educated and were handed, frankly, the completely wrong map about touch. We learned touch as technique. What to do with your hands, where to put them, in what order. Like it's some kind of magic choreography, right? And so then when touch isn't landing, when she flinches a little or goes flat, or you can tell she's just tolerating the hug instead of melting into it, we as men conclude we did the wrong move. And so we go looking for better choreography. But her body was never reading the choreography. Her body was reading the man doing it. There's this beautiful phrase I first heard from one of my teachers that has stuck with me for years. Physiology doesn't lie. Your words can lie, but your body can't. Not really. The tension in your jaw, the speed of your breath, whether your shoulders are up around your ears, all of that is broadcasting all of the time. And the feminine is exquisitely tuned to that broadcast. Let me make that concrete. A woman can notice you across the room and feel genuinely drawn to you. Handsome guy, good energy. She's interested. And then you walk over, and in the conversation itself, your breath changes her experience of you in real time. You get shallow and quick because you're nervous, and what she felt 30 seconds ago starts dissolving while you're mid sentence. Nothing you said went wrong. Her body updated its read of your body that fast. The challenge for us guys, again, is nobody sat us down at 15 and said your breath is the first thing she'll feel. Most of us, myself included, got our education from porn and movies, and both of them taught us touch is something you perform. So many of us guys have been optimizing for the wrong variable, including myself, for a long time, which I'll get to because my Own history with this is not pretty. So today, again, three things. What her body is actually reading. Why your breath is the one lever you always control in a practice you can run tonight at home for free. That will show you this whole episode in, you know, about 20 seconds. Okay, so what is she actually reading? Let's start with the wiring. There is a bundle of nerves called the vagus nerve running from your head all the way down through your torso. It's the highway between brain and body. And what they've discovered when they map it, is that really only 20% of that bandwidth runs from brain to body? About 80% runs from body to brain. So sit with that ratio for just a second. Your body is not the output device. Your body is the input device. Which means when you're actually in your body, grounded breathing, feeling your feet and legs, you're taking in more of the moment. You can track more of her. You move slower, not because you're performing slow, but because you're actually receiving what's happening now. Now. And that difference, a man who is receiving her versus a man who is acting on her, that is the difference her body feels in your touch. I talk about this as gripped versus free. Gripped consciousness and gripped bodies are wound up, vigilant, managing tight free consciousness. And bodies are relaxed, alert and available and often very, very settled. And you can feel this in other men, often within seconds of shaking their hand, right? You know exactly which state the guy across the room from you is in. Now, she has the same instrument, but tuned even finer. So here's where this lands on touch. Take something as ordinary as a hug. If you hug her while you're gripped, shallow breath, chest tight, half of your attention on the thing you were just doing, the hug is technically correct and yet completely empty. She feels held by your arms and abandoned by your attention at the same time. Now take the same hug and change one variable. You're breathing deep and slow down into your belly. You're grounded through your feet. And you hold her maybe a second or two past the point where our culture says the hug is over. If you're the one breathing deep and calm in that hug, you will feel her body let go. There's this melt. Her shoulders might drop. Her weight settles into you. Sometimes there's this long exhale she didn't even plan. I see this with my daughter, right? All the time. Maybe she gets anxious and fussy, and I pick her up, hold her steady, and I just breathe and her whole system lets go. She'll literally let out this little Sigh sound, you know, a little sigh and just settle her nervous system. Borrowed mine. That's not a metaphor. That's co regulation. And it's wired into us from birth. And it never stops being how we actually work. Grown women, grown men, all of us, the calmest nervous system in the room. Hear this is contagious. Which brings me to the frame I want you to carry out of this episode. In any interaction, polarity wise, whoever is breathing the most deeply and the most relaxed is holding the masculine pole. In that moment, you're providing structure. That's it, that's the whole game. Not who's tallest, who's loudest, not who has the best line. When you're the one breathing deeper, you're bringing structure to the moment. Everyone around you can relax a little because somebody is finally holding the ground. And when her body relaxes in your presence, she trusts you more. And when she trusts you and you're in your body, that's where turn on starts to happen. Trust. First, her body opening is downstream of her body relaxing. You cannot skip that step with just better hands or choreography. Now the picture I want you to hold because I've watched this exact scene a hundred times. Right Guy at a party. There's a woman, he likes shoulders hunch, checking his phone. Breath up in his collarbone, kind of angling towards her sideways. There's an energy to that and she reads it instantly. I've been that guy. Now contrast that to a different version of the same guy, same party, right? Feet under him, breathing down into his belly, shoulders back, head up, heart open. He hasn't said anything yet in either version, but he's a completely different man as far as her body is concerned. Yeah. So when I say she feels your tension before she feels your hands, I mean all of this. The read starts across the room, it continues through every word. And by the time your hand actually lands on her, your touch is just confirming what her body already knows about your state. Touches the receipt. The transmission already happened. Now, before I get to my own story, one more layer. This is something I've been teaching on recent coaching calls. And I've watched it land hard with the men, particularly in long term relationships. So I want to lay it out here. We've been talking about tension like it's just one thing. There are actually three tensions in play with a woman. In any given moment, there's tension in your body. Everything we've been covering. The grip, the breath up in your collarbone, the head that's still at work while your hands are you Know, not even really here at home. Her system reads that the second you walk in, and it answers in kind. She matches you. She braces against your bracelet. Those are the options. Then there's the tension in your life or in your relationship, all the stress you're carrying from work or from not doing your taxes or failing to set boundaries with a family member, or just failing to take care of yourself in an important way. In partnership, in relationship, it's often the argument that was never repaired or the resentment. Nobody said out loud yet. And this stuff doesn't expire, right? It sits in the space between the two of you and it thickens the air. You've almost certainly felt this in some kind of relationship, right? You walk into the room and nothing is happening, and yet everything is happening. That's really the second kind of tension. And then there's eros, or erotic energy, right? Which cannot breathe in that air. That's really the third kind, the one you actually want in intimacy, erotic tension. This is what polarity actually is, right? The arc between two poles, that charge, that pull towards each other that neither of you is doing on purpose. When a couple says, we've got chemistry, this is the thing they're naming. And every man listening knows both sides of this one. What it feels like when it's alive and what it feels like when it's just gone. So here's the frame I've been giving the men I coach. The first two tensions take up all. All that room. That's it. That's the whole insight. A charge needs a gap to arc across. And when your body and life and the relationship and the air between you is full of tension and stress, there's no gap left. There's no room there. And this is how couples end up in the place so many couples end up. It's just comfortable. You know, you're best friends. Nothing's wrong, but nothing's pulling you. The charge didn't die just because you got older or because that's just what happens. It's just that the charge ran out of room to move. Which is why the spark question, and I hear it constantly, the spark is gone. How do we get it back? That question almost always gets answered wrong because it's additive. Plan the date night, book the trip, learn a technique. We're trying to add charge to a system that has no room to hold it. When that date night falls flat, guess where that goes. It goes into that air, gunking things up with everything else. So here's the move, and it's not the sexy version, which is probably why nobody talks about it. You don't add. You move through the tension in your body. You move through with breath, self care, and handling the shit hanging over you in your life. And hint, hint, a men's group can help with that. That's really this whole episode in a lot of ways. Then there's the tension in your life again. You just gotta handle it, you know? And the tension between you in the relationship, you actually move through by leaning into it, saying the thing, having the argument all the way to the end, instead of halfway taking on some of the household chores, or doing the hard work of repair and apology. And something happens when a couple does this. I've watched it in the men I work with, and I've lived it in my own marriage. You move through something crunchy together, and on the other side, the room is different. She's brighter. You're more here. There's charge between you that was not there an hour ago. Because the crunchy tension and the erotic tension were never too different substances. It's all just energy, either stuck or moving. So once you start to move, comes back and creates space for the kind you want even more of. Now, let me tell on myself here, because I didn't learn any of this from a book first, right? I learned it because touch was genuinely hard for me. And I mean in my body, not just in my head. After I'd done a bunch of coaching work, I got referred to a somatic therapist, an amazing woman. In some of our first sessions, the work was just distance. She would stand across the room and ask, how does this feel in your nervous system? What are you noticing in your body? Then come a step closer. How about now? And I got to watch in real time, the threshold where for me, closeness itself, just feminine energy coming near me, put my body into distress. Nothing was happening. Nobody was touching me. And yet my system was braced like something was wrong. And then she took it deeper. She partnered with a masseuse for a session, my therapist, working with what was happening inside me while this woman worked with my actual body. And what I found in there was I could barely receive. I'd go totally numb and almost catatonic. Everything's fine. Whatever you're doing, whatever you're doing is fine. I had no preference. No voice and no agency. Just a little freeze wearing a polite face. And my therapist, she coached me in the moment to find words. That feels good. More of their. No, not that. Thank you. To actually be present, in contact with a say in what was actually happening. Right? And as that unwound, and it took time, something in me relaxed that had been braced my whole adult life. And I have to tell you, on the other side of it, I got really into touch. Like genuinely not just sexual. Oh, this is sweet. This whole territory that had been a low grade threat became one of the best parts of being alive for me. So when I tell you touch is a body issue before it's a technique issue, I'm not theorizing about you. That was me. I had years of thinking I needed better moves or techniques when what I needed was a relaxed body that could actually be in contact. So what to do with all this? Well, here's your practice and I want you to actually run this later today or tonight because it costs nothing and it'll teach you more than this whole episode actually can. And there's two parts. Part one, the doorway. And this one's for everybody. Before you walk into anything later today or tomorrow. Your front door, a friend's kitchen, a bar, a first date. Stop. 60 seconds. Five slow breaths down into the belly. Longer exhale than inhale. Feel your feet on the ground. And really you're doing one thing. You're arriving and landing in your body before you arrive at anything or with anyone else. That's it. Part two, the hug. And here's where guy split. So listen for your version. If you've got a partner, when you greet her, hug her with your feet grounded and your breath low and slow. Hold it two breaths past the point you'd normally let go. Don't say anything, don't make it a thing. Just breathe. Stay and notice what her body does. And if you're single, you can run the same experiment. You just need a different body. It could be your buddy, your brother, your mom, the next person you hug goodbye, feet grounded, breath low, slow. Then hold it two breaths longer than you'd normally hold. And honestly, this version proves the point even better than the partnered one. There's no romance in it, no agenda, nothing to get. So when that person's shoulders drop or their belly softens or they exhale even deeper, and more often than not, they do you know exactly what did it? Your body talking to their body. And once you've felt yourself do that on purpose with your brother or friend, you can do it with a woman you're attracted to next. That's it. And if the shoulders drop, there's that little extra melt, that exhale you just felt everything I've been talking about. Live in your own bodily experience. In arms. And then you know what? One more the advanced version for those in partnership and. Or any kind of relationship really. This one's about the tension between you and somebody else. If you're with someone, pick one thing you've not been saying to them about the relationship and lean in a withhold attention, resentment. Say it kindly. Say it cleanly. It's not about an ambush and it's not about having a big case file of things you're upset about. Just one simple truth laid down where they can see it. Remember, if you're single, don't skip this. You've probably got the same thing sitting somewhere. The friend you've been quietly annoyed at, the client you never billed, your dad. Pick whichever one you know just made your stomach drop a little bit when you think about it. That's the one. Lean in because that one has the tension. Because an unsaid truth doesn't magically dissolve on its own. It sticks with you. It shows up at dinner, at work, it's even in the bed with you. Saying it is how it moves out. Breath moves the tension in the body. Truth moves the tension between you and someone else. And watch what the air feels like on the other side. Now some of you are going to run that practice and feel what a gold mine the breath points to. And there's a way to take it deeper. Monday, August 10th. I'm co teaching a live 90 minute workshop on Zoom with Elizabeth Anika called How to Touch Women. It starts with your breath and it focuses on how to read her breath and use it as a compass toward deeper connection and better sex. This is Elizabeth's great, great teaching. It's at Pacific. It's 97 bucks. And if you can't make it live, everyone who signs up gets the replay. Just visit Evolutionary Men Touch. And one more thing while I've got you. Labor Day weekend, September 3rd through the 7th, the evolutionary men retreat in Northern California. Four days capped at 26 men top and as of this recording, there's only three spots left. Everything in this episode, the grounding, the breath, the capacity to stay in contact, that's what we train there. At depth with a crew of kick ass men doing the same. If it's been tugging at you, this is the window. The link's in the show notes or just go to Evolutionary Men Retreat. So let me land this where we started. She feels your attention before she feels your hands. Which used to sound like bad news, right? One more invisible thing you're being judged on. But flip it over it means the most important part of how you touch her is something you can train tonight for free with your own breath. So it's not about better choreography. It's about a calmer being doing the tension. A calmer being doing the touching and the tension you actually want with her. The charge, the arc, the one you don't manufacture. Make the space lean into what's real. Deal with the tension and the chemistry. The erotic tension comes back on its own. It always wanted to. So go run the practices, feel the melt, and until next time,