Stofft, Ken Website July 2011

A transition is often a time of confusion, isolation, loneliness, disorientation – resulting in your feeling unsafe and out-of-balance. Often this occurs when you turn 40, 55 or 65 or encounter career change, separation or loss, which challenges your sense of self. It's a time of opportunity to re-assess your beliefs, self-image, relationships, sexuality and attractions, the dreams you have held for yourself. What will work now in your best interests versus what is no longer needed or wanted?

Somatic or Body-Centered Coaching uses the wisdom of your bodily senses (soma = whole living body) in combination with your mental ability (psyche) to reflect and evaluate. When we generate our sexual energy in our bodies mindfully, our perspectives shift and we gradually begin to re-create our lives more authentically. We begin to more profoundly embody a 'sense' of wholeness –integrating our beliefs, movements, sexuality, attractions, desires and needs – even our fantasies and fetishes. We can reach a profound level of self-awareness.

Many men – whether self- identifying as straight, gay, bisexual, or transgender – struggle to find ways to achieve that integration. We've all been so heavily conditioned to fit into a mold (box) of what it means to be male. In our attempts to fill our inner voids – loneliness, lack of intimacy and trust, missing self-love – we turn without success to distracting compulsions: drugs, sex, unsatisfying relationships, careers, macho competitiveness, shopping, often masking a deep, cynical despair. Until we free ourselves from the stereotypes of what it means to be a man, more often than not they prevent us from embodying authenticity, integrity, inner peace. When we strive to live up to those external standards of masculinity, we're often deprived of our unique personalities, dreams, hopes – and our special path through life. We do our best to fit into an external mold instead of living from the inside out.

For example, boys are trained: to keep it in -- shallow breathing in the chest (versus the belly); to suppress and hide feelings (even anger); and to limit their orgasms to the pelvis (quickly and never feeling a full body orgasm). We're compelled to stay silent (don't make a sound) and subsequently do not give ourselves permission to ask for what we need – or want. As adult men we bring those behaviors and beliefs along with us and then get stuck in them. These conditioned routines severely limit our freedom. They become a block to receiving pleasure, and they affect our relationships with others in many negative ways. All of this 'training' is based on shame and control. That shame is embedded in both our bodies and psyches.

Ken creates a safe space to enter and embrace your time of transition, to identify and ask for what you need, to experience trust, to be heard and seen, to receive and not simply to give, to explore your self-awareness in and through your body -- channeling your emotional and sexual energy in expansive and more authentic ways.