You Don't Know What Your Body Feels Like

July 12, 2026•7 min read

You Don't Know What Your Body Feels Like

The gap in sensation language most men don't know they have

Sex & Somatics with Mandy Rose

Jul 12, 2026

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Hello beauties.

So if you didn’t know, my initial training was in traditional Thai massage. And I was doing this for years before I even came across Tantra as a personal practice, and then eventually leading into Tantric massage as a profession, and now a somatic sexologist. But the thread that remains beneath everything has been my fascination with the body, our connection to it, and how we experience life through it.

I would call my Thai massage sessions therapeutic because I’m not running a general sequence on somebody. I’m actually addressing the challenges and restrictions that are coming up in their body. I’m doing it in a way where I can give specific attention to the parts that need it, getting into the nitty-gritty of different muscles, opening the movements so that the body can flow.

In a Tantric massage, it’s not the intention to focus specifically on a physical element, but to bring about a general relaxation, calmness, safety, slowing down, while still cultivating the arousal. And even when I do these kinds of massage, I still notice through my eye of therapeutic Thai massage, where the hips are locked up, where the back is bracing, where the shoulders rise high up into the neck, and where the tension in their temples are from what’s been spinning around mentally. I do my best in those sessions to acknowledge all of the skin and the body so that it knows it’s included, but I’m unable to give it the full attention it deserves.

And so when these men are in a Tantric massage and I’m guiding them to rock their hips, roll their pelvis, their body between their knees and their mid-back often move as one unit. In these cases, my instruction isn’t enough. On one hand, yes, these men need to be able to practice these kind of movements in order to feel them. But at the same time if their body is completely locked up from living life, they literally don’t have access to this movement. This is where I want to be able to tell them, “Hey bro, go get a deep tissue massage. Let your body release what it’s been holding onto.”

Because the people who gain the most out of this work are the ones who are not only connected to their body, but are the ones who take care of it. Because the anxiety, the frustration, the tensions that you experience in life end up in your body, and it’s something we want to work in synergy with.

Choose your words tiles — Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

What I’ve also noticed from men in my Tantric massages is that, It’s something they’ve never experienced before. And it took me a while to realize what they meant by that, which is they felt their arousal in a relaxed state. It was slow. It was spacious. There was no pressure or expectation or performance. And so when I ask them how they feel at the end, they’ll say relaxed. And again, what I’ve come to understand is that relaxed is the ceiling of most men’s bodily vocabulary. It’s the closest word they have for what’s happening rather than a precise description of it.

There’s a joke I heard once that men can only describe three emotions: mad, happy, and sad. And I wanna offer that the same is true when it comes to their bodily states. Because the majority of responses I get are either, “I’m tense,” “I’m stressed,” or “I’m relaxed.” That’s it, that’s the full range of their vocabulary. So when I ask them, “Are you relaxed or are you grounded, spacious, still, at ease, expansive, full in your body?” They go quiet. “Oh, I didn’t think of it like that. Yeah. Yeah, maybe that one.” And that’s the thing. You can’t name something you don’t have language for. And so then relax becomes a word that has to carry everything because it’s the only one they have.

What I notice is that men who come to me in this work with the most language are also the ones who pick things up faster. Are almost the always the ones that have some kind of regular somatic practice outside of sex. Whether that’s getting a massage, seeing a physiotherapist, doing yoga, breathwork, anything that gives the body regular tension, regular attention and creates the conditions for them to actually feel something and notice it. Because that’s where reference points get built from.

For the men who come to see me as an isolated experience, who don’t do any somatic exploration outside of what we explore together. I either give them the language at the end of a massage, or we go through it together in coaching where we are connecting sensations to words. And when it’s laid out for them, they get it right away.

There are two things standing between most men and their full experience of pleasure. The first is physical, a body that has been holding the anxiety and frustration and tension of just living life for years, without anyone paying proper attention to it. A body that is locked up, that doesn’t have access to the full range of what it can feel.

And the second is language, because without words for what you’re feeling in your body, you can’t track it, you can’t seek it out, you can’t tell the difference between what you’ve always felt and what becomes possible in your body when it’s actually safe enough to feel more. That language gap doesn’t just limit what you can describe, it limits what you can experience.

And the beautiful thing is they’re connected, because when you start tending to your body, getting regular body work, attention outside of sexual context, you begin to close both gaps at once. And you’re building reference points that give you the language to your experience and more.

Thank you beauties for sticking with me to the end. If you wanna dive deeper into this, in this month’s membership space we are going to explore some of these words. Connecting sensations to words, the different layers and experience and learn how to actually connect and find some of these sensations right here, right now in your body.

I’ll see you there