Photo: Thomas Wanhoff

In “Urban Tantra” Bar­bara Car­rel­las dis­cuss a pow­er­ful con­cept – The Resilient Edge of Resis­tance.
The Resilient Edge of Resis­tance when applied to touch is the kind that you’ll want to receive for­ever. It’s not too hard, nor too soft. It’s like when you’re show­er­ing: If you’d make it hotter, it would be too hot. If you’d make it colder, it would be too cold.
The good touch is adapted to the feed­back that you get from your sub­ject. It’s dynamic in pres­sure, loca­tion and “tool of choice” (tools as in fin­gers, hands, feath­ers etc).
The goal of this is to build up an envi­ron­ment which sup­ports the sub­ject to open up and take risks, get­ting deeper into the expe­ri­ence in a safe and com­fort­able way. If you would go over this edge, you’d prob­a­bly cause pain. If you stay below the edge, that could be equally painful.
This con­cept applies to every­thing in life.

It’s a very pow­er­ful prac­tice, and you could easily apply it to con­ver­sa­tions and other forms of inter­ac­tions. You’ll get more sen­si­tive and aware, and you’ll focus on deliv­er­ing value instead of react­ing out of old habits.