Advocacy from Pleasure: An Inquiry
Before moving into private practice, I spent a decade in community advocacy and legal environments supporting individuals and communities to find their voice, navigate complex systems and create meaningful change. That worked revealed both the resilience people carry and the subtle ways responsibility, expectation and habit can disconnect us from the body. It showed me how without embodiment, long term change making comes at a deeply personal cost.
Lately, I have been sitting with what becomes possible when these two worlds, of somatic sexology and advocacy, are brought together. What happens when the way we organise for change is informed by the body, by pleasure, regulation and aliveness.
Community organising, at its core, is about bringing people together around a shared cause. It is about building relationships, fostering connection, and creating movements that can hold complexity over time.
But I am noticing more and more that how we come together matters.
I have been in community spaces where people are deeply committed, highly engaged, and sitting firmly in their power but are also operating from anger, urgency, and a kind of chronic activation. Spaces where I have felt a palpable sense of fear, despair and tension. Where people are operating from a sympathetic nervous system being fuelled by cortisol and adrenaline.
It makes sense. Many of the causes we organise around are rooted in harm, injustice, and deep care. So of course there is anger and grief. And in advocacy, that heightened state often becomes what drives people into action. But at what expense?
Community often becomes the place we come to not be alone in that, to share, process and make sense of what we are feeling.
But I am also noticing that when advocacy is sustained primarily from this place, from a dysregulated nervous system, relationships begin to erode, people’s capacity to stay in the movement diminishes, mental and physical health are affected, and the this idea of “othering” grows.
The movement loses its capacity to expand.
So the question I keep coming back to is not whether we feel these things, but how we move with them.
I have been wondering what it would look like if community spaces were not only places to gather around a cause but places of somatic circulation. Places where the energy of fear, anger, and urgency could move, rather than accumulate. Places where being together actually supports nervous system regulation.
Through the lens of social engagement theory, we know that humans regulate in relationship. The ventral vagal system, associated with safety, connection, and openness, is not something we access alone. It is shaped and strengthened through co-regulation, through safe connection with others.
Through intentional connection, through relationship that truly attrends to how people are feeling and moving in their bodies, we have the capacity to shift our state. To move out of survival and into something more resourced.
So I am curious about what happens when community organising begins to account for that.
When spaces are not only strategic, but relationally and somatically attuned.
So what could this look like?
building relationships that are not only anchored in the cause, but in genuine connection
creating space for people to notice and tend to their internal state
allowing emotion to move, without it becoming the only place we organise from
including pleasure, not as an afterthought, but as a resource
Because I am noticing more and more how pleasure might not be separate from advocacy, but part of what makes it sustainable.
And so I am exploring what it means to advocate from pleasure and embodiment. Not as a way to bypass anger, suppress fear or invalidate lived experiences, but to stay with what is happening in the body.
To notice fear in the body and meet it with breath or to allow tension to soften through sound, touch or movement. To bring a quality of tenderness to what is present. To be deeply engaged in what we are experiencing rather than dissociate from it.
From here, advocacy feels different. It feels less about reacting and more about responding. It feels less about depletion and more about capacity. It becomes a place where we are acting from a nervous system that can hold complexity and that can stay connected, even with those we might othewise see as “other”.
I do not think this replaces the urgency or importance of the work but I do think it changes how we hold it.
I have known what it feels like when a movement is driven by fear. My community is tense, people are bracing and everything feels small and contracted. And so I am curious about what becomes possible when we advocate from a place that also includes pleasure, embodiment, and regulation.
How does this begin to change the way we relate to each other and those we might see as “other”. Decision-makers, people with different views and even those we oppose. How can they no longer be adversaries but part of a broader relational field.
Through tenderness, care, and the cultivation of pleasure, we may be able to build communities that are not only effective but sustainable. Communities that can hold people for the long term and that nourish as much as they mobilise. From that place, advocacy might then become something more than resistance, a living, relational process, rooted in the body, sustained by connection, and guided by pleasure.
