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The Body Connection

How do we awaken the deeper pleasures that live within us?

Gaydar

12 Jun 2025 — 12 min read

Alex from The Body Connection is a massage therapist and a somatic bodyworker who works with men to awaken the deeper pleasures that live within our body.

For our podcast, Naked Men Talking, I caught up with Alex to talk about the power of feeling, allowing yourself to be vulnerable enough to receive pleasure, and why over-thinking is bad for your erections.

Listen to the episode

Massage is something that everyone can easily visualise but maybe just start by explaining what a somatic body worker does?

Somatic bodywork came to me through a course that I did called Somatic Sexological Bodywork - I've kind of cherry-picked from that course to create my own treatment, which I've called the Ultimate Connection.

Somatic bodywork can be many things to different people, but to me it's either touch therapy or feeling therapy. The beauty of the work is its simplicity. The core of it is to have a felt experience rather than a thought or mind experience. It's also known as embodied work. It's essentially about connecting to yourself and getting curious with yourself and your body, and feeling what's happening within your body - the aliveness within. You can't feel if you're thinking, and a thinking experience is not the same as a felt experience.

For example, I think most guys would agree if you're having sex and you get into your head about something you'll potentially lose your erection - quite often, that's what erectile dysfunction is, it's the mind taking over.

Somatic body work is really about you - it's your experience, your feelings. It's not about me. It's not about us. I'm just there to facilitate your pleasure.

Essentially, I play your body like a musical instrument - I turn up the sound so that you can feel it. It's very intimate. It's very connected. Between the two of us, there's full body-to-body connection but I give and you receive.

There's a fine line between pleasure and sex, but the key to a successful session is just to receive and to connect with your body and become aware of what you're experiencing, enjoying the ebbs and flows of pleasures and riding that, so to speak.

What led you to start to work with men and to focus on pleasure in this sex-positive way? Did the massage come first and then you progressed into the somatic body work?

It's been a long process for me to get to this point where I feel comfortable about offering this kind of work. But being a gay man, I've been forced to evolve throughout my life and I'm constantly challenging my belief systems.

It all started with massage. It was about 10 years ago that I embarked on this change in my career. I was working in the corporate sector. just sort of going through the motions, so to speak. I didn't hate my job, but I was envious of those people who love their job. I never loved my job and I just thought I don't want to go through life not loving what I do. And one day I saw a sign at a cafe that said, if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten. And that sign kind of, you know, resonated with me profoundly. And I pretty much decided that if I wanted my life to be different, I had to change. And so I started with my job.

I wasn't sure about massage, but my partner supported my choice and it's more aligned with me. I'm sort of a tree hugger and I kind of want to help people. So I signed up for a diploma in remedial massage, studied for two years and got myself a job in a sports clinic. And I still work there today, but that's sort of where I started my massage career. And it's a great way to learn. You sort of have hands on bodies and you start feeling because massage is a feeling modality and you have to feel. but it still didn't feel right for me. And I wanted to expand and explore and really was more interested in holistic treatments and working in the body. I'm interested in connection because I need it for myself.

I discovered a technique called Kahuna Massage. It's very sensual, it's full-bodied, it's intimate, and it really was pushing my boundaries at the time because I'm quite conservative. But I liked it and it was more up my alley and I kind of wanted to learn more. And then just by chance, I came across a guy who runs a men's only studio for massage and naked yoga near to where I live. And he was running a training program for Thai yoga massage. And I was curious, of course, and keen to learn but I was terrified about being in this naked space. And I rang him and he said, look, you don't have to be naked. So I signed up. And once he discovered that I was a massage therapist, he basically harassed me to come and work with him because he needed a massage therapist. And that's kind of where it all started. And I said to him, OK, look, I'll do it, but I'm not going naked, even though all the clients were naked. And he'd been established for quite a while, and he had a bit of a following.

I thought that the clients would be all perverted old men but I realised that they were just regular guys and really nice - my experience was really, really positive. Then, I had one guy who was blind and I thought, I'm going to try this naked thing. So I took off my clothes and massaged him and it was really, really cool. And that's sort of how it started. That was five years ago, that was during the pandemic. And you're sort of working in this space, you're working with these men and they're mostly aroused, which is fine, but we actually had a "no happy ending" policy in the clinic. The clients had all been pre-screened and they knew that, but they always looked disappointed by the end of session. I knew what they wanted.

I think it's a very beautiful space to be in when you're working naked with a client - it's a very vulnerable space, very special, very authentic. That's the thing that really resonated for me - it was a very connected authentic experience which is something that I crave.

I wanted to lean into that but I knew that I needed to know what to do because I didn't know what I was doing. And that's when I signed up for the sexological bodywork training. It was a six month course, so it was quite involved. And that's what gave me the training, to then pursue pleasure work.

I've got so many questions from what you were saying. Can you go back to - you're working in a massage center and they had a "no happy ending" policy - what was the the rationale for that?

I'm not quite sure I really understood it either. I didn't really question it. I was actually happy with that because at that time I didn't want to go down that path. For me to be working at that clinic was really pushing my boundaries.

One of the things that you learn in the sexological bodywork is about shame. you know? And one of the things with sexological bodywork is providing a safe space for men or for anyone really, but in this case for men to come and to feel safe and not to be shamed or to be judged or anything like that. My concern was that am I shaming men by not allowing them to express themselves in this way? They're on the table, they're naked, they're aroused, they're enjoying it - what is the big deal about it? What is the problem? That was the question that I was constantly asking myself. I really couldn't come up with an answer for why it was a problem.

So that's kind of my journey to pleasure work. It stops at that. I've not taken any further than a release, I guess. Well, not yet anyway.

You touched on that you were really reluctant to get naked in that naked massage space - why was getting naked such a big barrier for you?

I didn't have a great relationship with my body growing up. When I was a kid, I loved my body. I loved being naked. I was an exhibitionist - one of my most vivid recollections was being at my grandmother's house in the middle of the suburbs and going down to the letterbox naked and getting a real thrill out of it. I was like 11 years old.

My problem started when I became a teenager and I started to realise I was gay and that it was a problem. So this is in the mid 80s during the AIDS pandemic. I'm in country WA, everyone's conservative farmers around there. And you're a kid and you're listening, you watch the news and you learn pretty quickly to keep your mouth shut.

And that's how I went from being sort of this happy-go-lucky kid and then I sort of made myself small and I sort of faded into the background and sort of pushed people away and built walls up around myself to protect myself.

I ran away to London - this is in the 90s - but I was still really, really, really fearful of HIV. And so I didn't really have a lot of sex. I discovered a community, I discovered the clubs. Eventually I discovered drugs and it was amazing. I had an amazing time. But I was always a relationship kind of guy.

I've never been one to sort of sleep around or whatever. And it's really sort of based out of fear. But one of the things I think that happened for me, particularly in London, was I started comparing myself to everyone. I started to feel not good enough. When you grow up in country WA, then you move to a city like London, everyone's cool and everyone's exciting and happening and everything that I wasn't. And everyone had a plan and I didn't have a plan. My plan was just to run away from home and to kiss a boy. That was my plan. That was all I could think about.

I eventually came out to my parents, came back to WA and then I moved to Sydney. And the gay scene in Sydney is even harder than London. It's fun, but it's also quite cruel.

I met my partner of 17 years and we lived together, had an amazing life. The life I always dreamed of, had the husband, the dog, the house, all that sort of stuff. And I felt safe, you know, protected, but I was also hiding a little bit as well. But that all started to unravel about five years ago,and it's all around death. The death of my dog, the death of my mother. My partner left me single at 50 and my dad passed away two years ago.

It's a wake up call. You you're getting slapped across the face. Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up. And so really it was sort of like, you know, what the fuck am I doing? You know, what am I hiding from? Who am I worried about offending?

This is the catalyst which has really propelled me now in this work - to explore my sexuality and start to enjoy my own body.

I was just wondering if you could touch a little bit more on the somatic body work and the course that you did, because you said it took like six months to do, is that right? Could you talk a little bit about what that course involves? Because that was your transition from naked massage into pleasure based therapy - what sort of tools does that equip you with?

The Sexological Bodywork course is primarily about sex education. It's about preparing you to become an educator. And to be honest with you, it's not something that I'm really that interested in. The education side can be many things. It could be helping people with trauma, if they've disassociated from their body - providing you with the tools to deal with clients like that. So there's that side of it, and then there's the other side of it where people just want to experience more pleasure for whatever reason.

The course itself was developed by a guy called Joseph Kramer. He developed this course back in the 80s during the AIDS pandemic to help guys have safe sex, to basically have these non-ejaculatory orgasms.

The beauty of this work is the simplicity of it. But the foundations are things like communication, setting boundaries, consent - these are things that I draw on for my work and they are essential.

You're helping someone to engage with their body, teaching them how to communicate - what do they want, and what do they like? If I touch you here, how does that feel? If I stroke you fast or I stroke you slow, which feels better? It's helping people to start becoming aware of their body and giving them that safe space to explore their body. It's about getting curious with your body. What am I feeling? What do I like? And a lot of people don't know that.

We have neural pathways which reinforce our sexual habits and it's sort of teaching people about rewiring our neural pathways and if you're always doing something the same way, you need to change your body up to experience your body in a different way and it's really about developing those neural pathways through practice, practice, practice.

It's beautiful work because it's all about you and you don't have to do anything. All you have to do is receive and feel. And it's as simple as that. But it's easier said than done. It's actually hard for people to do because people genuinely, instinctively feel the need to give back.

It's a structured kind of intimacy, isn't it? You really have to let yourself be vulnerable to do that receiving somehow, don't you?

What I've learned is that the basis of boundaries, consent and communication are so essential to this work being successful. Because really what you want, what I want is for people just to be able to lie on that table, know what's going to happen, get out of their head and just connect with their body and enjoy the ride, so to speak.

If someone was interested in the work that you do but wasn't quite sure where to start in terms of feeling more connected with their body, what advice or guidance would you give them?

If you're interested in the work, the Institute of Somatic Sexology is a world-renowned course and you don't have to be in the industry. When I did the course, there a lot of people that were just there for their own personal reasons.

I think another organisation that I know of is Body Electric. I think that runs in the US and they run courses all throughout the year.

If you just want to experience it for yourself, you can search for a sexological body worker. Some of them are more sex educators and then there are others like myself which are sort of more hands-on like massage practitioners, but not all sexological body workers do massage. A lot of them are more based on helping people overcome trauma and stuff like that.

A tantric practitioner, or a massage therapist who specialises in sensual touch would be a good person to go to - as I said before, it's really about feeling. It's a feeling modality.

You don't need to give, you just need to receive. You just need to connect with your body and just start to get curious. There's no right or wrong way with this work. Whatever happens for you happens. It's not an outcome-based work. It's really about the journey. So if nothing happens, nothing happens. And it's still a successful session. But if it works, it can be amazing. If it all connects for you, you can go from basic to mind-blowing. It really can be quite incredible. I've had some amazing experiences with people on the table.