Sex coach Delie: it is rarely only about a problem in sex or in the relationship

Another speaker you will be able to meet at Erofest — and get advice from — is Delie. She has prepared a talk on Erotic Archetypes and will be giving it on Thursday and Friday. We asked her how she came to this path of helping women in particular.

You are a coach of pleasure, sex and eroticism, and you also run Aurora dance. That sounds incredibly demanding on your time. How do you manage it all? Tell us more.

It may look demanding, but that is only because of the range of topics I coach on. Women come to me with all sorts of personal issues, so I did not want to label my work with a single title like sex coach or relationship coach. Of course I coach women on sex and relationships, but it all comes from their relationship with themselves, with their body, with pleasure and with erotic energy. That is what then shows up in their sexuality and their relationships. It is rarely only about a problem in sex or in the relationship.

Besides coaching and longer mentoring programmes, I also create online courses for women, and there is Aurora dance — a sacred erotic dance that works consciously with female erotic archetypes and erotic energy. Because of Covid, live Aurora dance classes were impossible for a long time, so at least I had more time to make the online courses. But I am delighted that live Aurora classes are finally starting again in May. I am really looking forward to it, and I hope it will not add too much to my workload!

How did you get into this? Has it brought you anything new — some insight, perhaps about yourself?

As for coaching around sexuality, in a gentle form I have been doing that since primary school, you could say. At home we talked openly about sexuality, the human body and childbirth from an early age, so by the age of three I knew how things worked. As a Scorpio, these subjects fascinate me naturally, so I was happy to fill in classmates who wanted to know something — verbally, of course, never any physical demonstrations or showing anyone porn, which sadly is often how it goes these days.

At secondary school my friends came to me for relationship advice, and sometimes I brought a new book about sexuality or relationships into class — which the boys appreciated, since most of them were afraid to ask outright.

My first proper “professional experience”, you might call it, came from several years as a Netopeer — a peer educator in secondary schools, where I led discussions on relationships, contraception and HIV/AIDS prevention. That was when it became clear to me that I enjoy educating people about sexuality and that I wanted to keep doing it.

But I came to sacred erotic dance and to the beginnings of Aurora dance through an unpleasant relationship, in which my partner’s insults, humiliation and dissatisfaction took me all the way to rock bottom. When someone tells you day after day that you are strange, that you do not turn him on, that this and that is wrong with you, you gradually start to believe it. And when low self-esteem and anxious attachment come on top of that, leaving such a relationship is hard.

That relationship gave me a lot of big lessons and realisations — for example that I did not love myself or my body (even though I thought I did), that I did not feel remotely sexy, and that I had zero joy in life. Which was the complete opposite of how I had felt before.

It was only when I burst into tears out loud on a packed bus at the sight of a couple in love, and briefly thought about suicide, that I understood how bad things were. That gave me enough strength to change my story and start working on my relationship with myself. I invested in several online courses from abroad, went through the Dancing Eros sacred erotic dance training (which sadly no longer exists as a dance modality), and I have kept training in the field ever since, taking women on the sensual journey with me.

Erotic dance, the archetypes and the work on my sexuality did not just save my life at the time — my relationship with my then partner improved as well (we stayed together another three years), and now I have had a wonderful new partner for over two years. Above all, though, I have a completely different relationship with myself. That is why I stand behind this work on pleasure and sexuality so firmly.

What do you like most about your work, and what do you like least?

What I like most is seeing clients progress. It is beautiful to watch a woman who was shy at the start, unsure of herself and troubled by something, turn into a confident, sensual woman. At the end of their mentoring I like to read my notes back to clients — what they first came to work on — and they are often surprised that they ever struggled with it, because they are somewhere else entirely now. Not only in relation to themselves, but towards their partner too, whether that is the same one or a new one.

What I do not like is when women complain about their partners, or worse, about men in general, and cannot admit their own share in it — that their own behaviour comes out of the shadow sides of particular archetypes. They are snide, they take offence like little girls, or they trot out the classic “Nothing’s wrong” while expecting their partner to beg and chase.

Thankfully, with clients who have this problem we always clear it up quickly. Unfortunately there are a lot of women who do not even realise that this behaviour is destroying their current or future relationships with men.

Is there one issue women come to you with most often?

Every woman is unique, and we always end up working on several interconnected themes, even when it looked like there was only one at the start. What comes up most often, though, is their relationship with their body and with pleasure. A lot of women do not like their body and feel ashamed of it. That shame then shows up in their sexuality: women are ashamed of their desires (or do not know them), they do not want to be seen as insatiable sluts, so they tone themselves down and try to be good girls so their partner will not be upset. They often have sex mainly for their partner’s pleasure, not their own.

They cannot say no, and instead of genuinely enjoying sex they either fake it and play the porn actress for their partner, or quietly endure it. Some women have had shame about their natural erotic and sexual nature drilled into them since childhood, when their parents told them not to masturbate; others get “stuck” later in life, because of a remark from a partner or from a stranger.

So what I work on with women most often is accepting their body, their sexuality, their desires and all the faces of womanhood. Because we can be good girls and saints and, at the same time, passionate, wild women in bed. It is about accepting yourself in every archetype and every form of womanhood — something the pressure of today’s society rarely lets women do.

I saw that you also run courses that are not only about eroticism but, let’s say, about the relationship with oneself, or between women — Sisterhood Wounds. Am I right?

Yes, that is right. Erotic energy is not just arousal and wanting sex; it is life energy, and sexuality is therefore connected to every area of our lives. When sex is not working, we usually do not feel entirely well or content. It works the other way round too: stress at work or problems in the family can affect our sexuality. Everything is linked. One part of accepting your sexuality and your body is accepting how you differ from other women — not in the sense that some are better, but that we are all unique, beautiful, worthy of love and of great sex.

There is still enormous rivalry between women, endless comparison and, sadly, slut-shaming, where women condemn other women for being comfortable in their bodies and unafraid to show their erotic, sensual side — their Whore archetype. Women constantly feel they are not good enough and have to be better, or conversely they are afraid they are too much and should tone themselves down, which in the end means not being themselves at all.

This theme shows up best in the Aurora dance courses, where by the end the women not only create a loving, accepting “sisterhood”, but also realise that they are just as beautiful and just as important as every other woman, and that there really is no need to compare or compete.

At Erofest you will be giving a talk on Erotic Archetypes. Can you give us a hint of what to look forward to?

Archetypes are certain primal patterns and energies that operate within the collective unconscious. We can all picture a proud princess or an ice queen, and if we had to play them on stage we would roughly know how to behave and how to speak. Erotic archetypes are the archetypes connected to erotic energy. A lot of people wrongly assume that only the Whore archetype, say, can express sexuality and eroticism, while the Mother should not be erotic — that is the common view in society. It is also why women stop working on their sexuality after having children: they feel it is no longer appropriate and that they “shouldn’t”. As I said earlier, though, a sexuality that is not working then shows up in their relationship with themselves; they stop looking after themselves physically and mentally, and their relationship often falls apart too. Each erotic archetype has gifts for us when we use it well, but if an archetype is missing from our life, or is far too active, it causes us problems. In the talk we will go through the basic erotic archetypes and I will show you how they show up, so if the subject interests you, do not miss it.

Do you think Czech men treat women attentively? Including when it comes to sex?

That question honestly surprised me a little, because my partner now is from Northern Ireland, and our relationship is nothing like my previous relationships with Czech men. But I do not agree that how men treat women is determined by nationality. There are certainly plenty of wonderful, attentive men in the Czech Republic — unfortunately, though, most men do not behave towards women the way I think they could and should.

Part of the blame lies in the fact that many people had no model of loving, respectful partnership at home while growing up, and the subject is barely covered in schools. So most people do not even know what to aspire to and learn about healthy relationships, respect for the opposite sex and how to be in bed as they go — often by trial and error over successive relationships, or by repeating their parents’ unhelpful behaviour (which their parents in turn picked up from theirs).

Sexually, men are strongly influenced by what they see in porn, and they take it as the model for how sexual interaction should go. I have experienced that myself several times. Instead of connecting with his partner and finding together what they both enjoy sexually — because everyone likes something different and responds differently to erotic stimulation — men automatically do what they have learned worked with previous partners, or what they saw in porn. Which is sadly rarely what women actually like. Plenty of women will tell you that the best sex of their life was not with a man who acted like a porn star, but with a man who paid attention to how their body responded and let the sex follow from that.

You cannot pin it all on men or on porn, though, because women have their share too. Instead of holding a standard for how men behave, or saying straight out “This behaviour is unacceptable, I don’t like this, I’d rather have that”, they often keep quiet and go along with it, glad that at least somebody is interested in them.

I often meet women who do not know what behaviour — or what sexual practices — they actually want from a partner, or what they are “allowed” to ask a man for. They do not know their own desires or boundaries, so in the end they often settle for unacceptable behaviour from men, because they do not trust themselves and do not want to be alone. This is where the much-discussed “daddy issues” come in: women who lacked a father in childhood, and a model of a healthy relationship, and who are now afraid of being abandoned. They would rather stay with an unsuitable partner than go through abandonment again. That was my case, and it is the case for many of my clients.

Thankfully, once women start working on themselves, their relationships and their sex life change automatically. Either the men start behaving more attentively and “grow” alongside their partners, or they “drop away”, as it were, and are replaced by a man who is the partner the woman has been longing for, romantically and sexually.

Is there a sexual dogma you come across often in your work?

The most common is probably the one I mentioned: that mothers should not express themselves sexually and should not be erotic. Which is actually absurd, given that a woman conceives precisely through the presence of erotic energy, gives birth through her sexual organ, and breastfeeds with breasts her partner previously found extremely erotic. Breastfeeding itself can be orgasmic for many women, as can giving birth. The fact that a woman is a mother does not mean her sex life should be over. Quite the opposite — this is when sexuality needs far more attention. Women who do not take care of their sensuality and erotic energy lose it, and with it the juiciness and joy of life (and sometimes, sadly, their partner too). Many of them then end up frustrated and embittered, and men do not want to spend time with them — and why would they.

Closely related to this “boxing” of who may and may not express sexuality is another very common dogma: the expectation that women will always be the same and always behave in one single way. But we women are cyclical beings, and we carry different archetypes within us that come to the surface at different times. So it is perfectly normal for a woman to be vulnerable and in the energy of a child one moment, sexy or nurturing the next, and difficult and wanting her partner to leave her alone shortly after. Society as a whole struggles to grasp this — we are not used to it, because we do not see it often — so people condemn a sweet, modest woman when the Wild Woman or the Whore archetype suddenly shows up in her, because they had filed her under “chaste, unproblematic Virgin” and refuse to accept that a woman might have more than one face. Fortunately there are more and more conscious people, men above all, who can support their partners and women in general in all their forms.

Is there a milestone you would like to reach in your career?

Right now I am focused on two. One is to take a first group of women through the Aurora dance courses so that, as Aurora teachers, they can pass this transformational dance system and the work with erotic archetypes on to more women in the Czech Republic and Slovakia — and, in the future, hopefully further afield. The first level of Aurora dance opens in mid-May, and if all goes to plan the first Aurora dance teachers should complete their training in mid-2024.

The second milestone for me is writing a book about erotic energy, sensuality, archetypes and femininity. I want to retell not only my own story, which is closely bound up with everything I do, but also to give women a guide on those pages to starting work on their sensuality and sexuality, even if they cannot take part in my courses.

I hope that will bring my work to as many women as possible, so that they can experience all the benefits of working with erotic energy that I and my clients experience.

Is there anything you would like to say to our readers and to Erofest fans?

First and foremost, a big thank you for being open to sexuality and to exploring this wonderful side of our lives. A lot of people live in shame and fear of expressing their sexuality, and a lot of people also live with trauma connected to it. If we stop suppressing our sexuality and learn to use it consciously, life will be better for all of us. Erofest fans and all our readers can be proud that, if they are working on their sexuality, they are part of a wave of transformation and change in society. Thank you all for that — and I will be very glad to see some of you at the festival!

Website: https://delikatnosti.cz/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/delikatnosti/