“My aloofness stems from a fear that no one’s going to actually show up.”
The woman smiling in front of me is known as Jaiya, the world’s leading somatic sexologist with a flourishing career in helping partners understand each other sexually. How could such an incredibly mindful and conscious individual like her have hidden pain that actually began to affect her business?
“It stemmed from really young wounds,” says Jaiya. “When I was a little kid, I spent a lot of time alone and had a very traumatic childhood. My one dream was to have a party. I’d dream of having a surprise party and all these people would show up. But instead, I’d throw a party and no one would come.
“No one wanted to come to my party because I was a super geek kid which made me never want to open my heart and throw myself out there. So the times I’d put it out there, I’d put an energetic wall around what I was offering in order to protect myself.
“My homework right now is to really love you all—and whether you show up or not, I’m still going to open my heart to you.”
If you’ve never heard of the woman I have the honor of interviewing today, prepare to be transformed on a physical and emotional level.
“Countering my fear looks like engagement,” she tells me. “It’s like Rapunzel in a tower. I can put myself up in that tower or I can come down and engage with people. It has to do with energy. I’m here and I’m engaged —I’m not disconnecting from you. The abandoning of my business looked like me saying, “You guys figure it out.” It looks like me expecting my team to engage with me while I’m not even engaged. It looked like excuses such as ‘I’m so busy with clients’ or ‘I’m so busy being an artist’.
“If I’m hiring people who can manage my business for me, I can’t be upset and blame them when they make a mistake because I made the choice to disengage.”
Two years ago, Jaiya tells me, she’d reached the point of burnout. Despite the success she’d begun to have with her clients, Jaiya was exhausted and didn’t know what she was doing anymore.
Her turning point came at an event with life-performance coach Brendan Buchard who asked, “What’s your big why?”
In her small group, Jaiya began to cry, asking her friends, “What do I want?” She knew she wanted every man and woman to feel free to express their sexuality, to feel safe; she knew she wanted the world to awaken to freedom, for rape to end, for peace.
It was in this moment that she realized that she didn’t want to quit because she was burnt out. She wanted to quit because of how big her why was, and because she felt like she had to do it all on her own.
“The nuts and bolts of my transition began when I started interviewing people and hearing from them what they needed. What I discovered is that most people had no idea what turned them on, and in addition to that, they expected their partners to be able to mind-read them and their desires.”
Born from this insight, Jaiya created The Sexual Blueprints, a harvest of 20 years sowing into sexual relationships and discovering the differences—and thus the disconnect—that exists between our erotic personalities.
What If No One Is Sexually Incompatible?
Turns out, the sexual disconnections between you and your partner may not be things they’re doing to annoy you, but rather part of the way they are erotically wired.
What if they’re not doing anything wrong and what if you’re not doing anything wrong? What if you’re only speaking different sexual languages? These concepts blow my mind.
Jaiya is the world’s leading somatic sexologist, which means that she does primarily body work, using people’s physical energy to tap into their sexual potential, rather than psychology or conversation-based methods.
In over twenty years of practice, she’s discovered that what turns one person on is entirely different from what turns another person on.
“It was literally through watching people’s bodies react that I discovered we all have different turn-ons. Because really, I believe that the body doesn’t lie.
“The body tells us what is arousing or not, all while our bodies also tell us what we consider shameful or ‘not allowed’. But then you get into the body and the body goes, “Oh!,” or you see flushing and goosebumps.”
The 5 Erotic Blueprints
Through her hands-on work, Jaiya began noticing patterns of arousal, which she sorted it into five different types, described as the following blueprints:
- Energetic —The type that is turned on from not being touched as much and from anticipation, tease and lots of space.
- Sensual—Turned on by lots of touch, smell, aesthetics, beauty and closeness. They want bodies next to each other.
- Sexual—The type our culture often hails as the standard, and what it expects men to be as well. The Sexual is a very simple blueprint turned on by nudity, arousal, penetration, climax and all the physical aspects of sexuality.
- Kinky—which is all about turn-ons that are taboo. Not necessarily 50 Shades of Grey kinky, but always with a hint of naughtiness.
- Shapeshifter—wants everything that I just talked about, all the time, and they are often judged for being “way too much” at times in their lifetimes, but they are the most erotically sophisticated because they want it all, they can handle it all, and they can take it for hours.
These five types transitioned Jaiya’s business from a hands-on practice—which she still does with select clients—into a much bigger mission.
One of the most significant things Jaiya did to catapult her business into the movement it has become was the incorporation of a quiz to help people determine their blueprint for themselves.
Take the quiz and find out your blueprint here.
I ask her about the difference it makes when you know yours —and your partner’s—blueprint.
“Honestly, it makes all the difference. I didn’t expect that we’d have 30,000 people take the quiz. I also didn’t expect simply taking the quiz would be such a drastic game changer for so many people. When we don’t know our erotic blueprint, we don’t know what turns us on. People are saying things like, ‘I’m in tears, I just had a revelation, now I’m able to communicate my needs.’ ‘I was really blocked around getting satisfied. I didn’t know how to talk to my partner.’ ‘or, ‘Now I know why something didn’t work in the past.’”
The Biggest Myth of Them All
Even though we live in the most sexually aware time of our nation, Jaiya is continually breaking the myth that if we’re sexually incompatible with someone, we’re doomed.
“You don’t have a compatibility issue,” she says to me. “If you think about the blueprints as languages, imagine Energetic being like Japanese, Sensual being French, Sexual being American English and Persian being Kinky. If your partner speaks French and you speak Persian, you have to learn how to speak their language.
“You don’t say, ‘Sorry, I can’t fall in love with you.’ You just fall in love and then learn how to speak their language. We need to stop speaking about our differences as if we’re broken. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not broken. Nobody’s broken sexually. Nobody’s sexually incompatible. We just speak different languages in the bedroom. ”
“It’s about learning those languages and discovering what you need and desire, and about learning what your default or shadow sides are so that you can avoid them or work through them or heal them.”
Jaiya has worked with marriages that have been sexless for over a decade and after learning each other’s languages, they have the desire of 16-year-old kids again.
Perhaps when we learn to appreciate each other’s differences instead of saying things like, “Why aren’t you more like me? Why don’t you get it?” we discover the true joy of intimacy.
Jaiya’s vulnerability is touching. She tilts her head and smiles, opening up about her personal relationship. “My partner Ian and I, we struggled. We had a child and after that, we had like three years of me crying myself to sleep at night because he was rejecting me as he fell asleep at night, rolling over because he’s exhausted and we have a new baby. But I want sex, and I’m approaching it from my own blueprint, so he’s turned off by my approach to the whole thing. And then he would approach me, but I wouldn’t get it, because he’s approaching me from his blueprint!”
Jaiya’s partner, Ian, is a Kinky/Sensual blueprint type while Jaiya herself is an Energetic/Sexual. “I approach from my Sexual, however,” she explains, “So I’d be like, “Hey, wanna have sex?” Or I’d touch his genitals and be like, ‘C’mon, we’ve got some time, let’s go!’ all while he needed a mystery.
“He’d come to bed and just snuggle with me. And I’d be thinking, ‘I guess we’re just falling asleep again tonight.’ Because to me, snuggling is not a turn on as much. I don’t like all that closeness. I didn’t have an opportunity to yearn because my Energetic blueprint wasn’t being fed.”
She laughs and holds up a note from her partner, titled Private Note, and says, “But now we understand each other. This is a note about all the things he’s going to do to me this afternoon.”
Who Wants More Passion in Their Love Life?
Once you’ve received your quiz results, you have the opportunity to experience Jaiya’s Erotic Blueprint Breakthrough courses, which train people in the mastery of their own sexual blueprint.
Jaiya and Ian are holding a live event, Your Path to Passion, to demonstrate and explain how bodies work within their different blueprints, teach understanding your own turn-ons and the mastery of thrilling your partner.
To learn more about this exciting, life-transforming event held in Los Angeles, visit here for more information. To find out what your own erotic blueprint is, take Jaiya’s free Erotic Blueprint quiz here.