Betty Martin - The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent

The Art of Receiving and Giving

Copyright 2021 by Betty Martin

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America
Cover Design by Claire Flint Last

Luminare Press
442 Charnelton St.
Eugene, OR 97401
www.luminarepress.com

LCCN: 2020916914
ISBN: 978-1-64388-309-0

This book is dedicated to my students.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Robby Pellett for paying the rent for those first couple of years so I could write, for teaching me more of this than I was comfortable learning, and for loving me in spite of it. Rest in peace.

Thank you to Robyn Dalzen for many hours of reviewing, suggesting, and collaborating, for helping me put it all into an order that made sense and carrying me over the finish line. Thank you to Lola Houston for saving my you-know-what when I couldnt go on. This book would have taken a few more years without you. And for countless hours of listening, Mallory Austin, Lola Houston, Charla Hathaway, Avi Klepper, and Teri Ciacchi. And to my editors through various stages, Lola Houston, Robyn Dalzen, and Lori Stephens.

Thank you to my predecessors and colleagues in eros and sex, for teaching, guidance, inspiration, and healing. I stand on the shoulders of giants. Isa Magdalena, Joseph Kramer, Collin Brown, Carol Queen, Annie Sprinkle, Carol Leigh, Barbara Carrellas, Chester Mainerd, Alex Jade, Selah Martha, and Sequoia Lundy, and Im sure theres more. And Alex, Selah, Sue and Carla. Thank you to Harry Faddis, for inventing the Three Minute Game and welcoming me into your circle just a few years ago.

Thank you to my teachers in the healing arts, notably Donald Epstein. Thank you to my predecessors in Cuddle Party, Marcia Baczynski, Reid Mihalko, and Len Daley. Thank you to my teachers of Co-counseling, notably Diane Balser and Charlie Kreiner.

Thank you to my students and clients, with whom I learned to clarify and hone the principles and practices, and who inspired me to no end. Thank you to my colleagues and partners in crime at the School of Consent, Robyn Dalzen, Carmen Leilani De Jesus, and Michael Dresser.

Finally, thank you to my kids, who also taught me more of this than I was comfortable learning and patiently kept asking me, Hows your book coming, Mom? And to my grandkids, who bring me such joy. I hope this is helpful to your generation.

Foreword

I am deeply excited by the appearance of this long-awaited book. When I studied the Wheel of Consent with Betty Martin ten years ago, I immediately knew that the practices she taught, and the understandings she offered, were the key to unwinding the confusion that made my work as an intimacy educatorand my intimate worldso perilous. Wheel of Consent practices heal trauma by empowering choice and voice. They connect couples by offering a path of respectful relationship. They transform communities. They foster interactions based on generosity, integrity, gratitude, and willing sacrifice instead of survival and threat management.

Using these practices and understandings on a daily basis for a decade has only deepened my respect. They are transformative at every level. They have brought resourced, empowered, and enduring love into my work as a sacred intimate and educator as well as to my close relationships and community life. Bettys generous teaching, through her in-person workshops and online resources, has brought this deep level of healing and wellness to thousands of people around the world. With her focus on teaching teachers, she has brought the possibility of safe and wanted touch into the lives of all our students and their students. With her book, I imagine many more people and communities holding in their hands this key to a life of joy.

The practices in this book will guide you in understanding in an embodied way how we do not have choicenot without taking time to uncouple giving and receiving, doing and being done-to. We are trained in enduring unwanted touch. We live in intimacies, societies, and economies based on nonconsensual taking and overgiving. If we want to create safe-enough space to be brave and truly consensual in our relationships, we need to slow down and ask, How do you want to be touched? We need to take a sacred pause to inquire of ourselves and each other, What can you give with a full heart? We need to know, Who is this for? Having choice is a neurological and relational capacity that can only be built with practice. With all our deeply wired neural grooves, we will keep on going into habits of enduring. We wont know what we authentically want. We will be afraid to change our minds. We will act out cultural scripts and unconscious entitlements. A trustworthy guidance system within and between us needs to be cultivated with patient repetition, guided by the resourced understanding you will glean from this book.

Betty writes, As we learn to notice what we want, to trust it, value it, and communicate it, the experience of receiving opens up into a rich, deep, gorgeous landscape. In this landscape, we will also enjoy the experience of giving fully and freelyno longer coerced by expectations and prerogatives but instead by knowing, communicating, and experiencing the pleasure of giving what we can authentically give with a full heart. This is a landscape of deepening self-trust, trust in trustworthy relationships, and trust in the web of life and death. Thanks to Bettys work, we are empowered to challenge thousands of years of conditioning about how the world works and create relationships and communities that are truly consensual. This is a gorgeous landscape of pleasure where we can feel and follow our inner Hell, yes! and have that wanted and welcomed. It is a sustainable landscape where vulnerabilities and limits are honored and courage and freedom can flourish.

In a mentor supervision session, Betty once guided me, It is so easy to think we are being victimized when we are not. It is also so easy not to recognize that we are being victimized when we are. Lack of awareness and precision about consent, obfuscation of vectors of privilege and oppression, and a dearth of embodied experiences of respectful relationship all combine to create confusion. Blame, shame, dissociative compliance, ineffective complaints, and misplaced resentments all are signals of unsafety. But without methods to practice discernment, and choose effective actions for real change, we stay trapped in a fear-based world, hurting ourselves and each other. Wheel of Consent practices empower us to notice the difference between real dangers we must courageously face and potentially loving relationships we can carefully cultivate. This is an instruction manual for enduring love.

Caffyn Jesse
Author of Science for Sexual Happiness ,
Healers on the Edge, and Elements of Intimacy

Introduction

An Inquiry

I nstructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be amazed.
Tell about it.

Mary Oliver

This book is an inquiry into receiving and givingwhat they are and what they are not, how they work, and how to fall in love with both of them, equally and completely. It teaches you a practice of taking turns with a partner or practice buddy based on using touch, but also possible without touch. In the end, it is not the ideas here that will change you. Its the practice. What many of us have learned from this practice has made receiving and giving clear, real, and liberating, and developed generosity and integrity. Further, it sheds light on the dynamics that underlie all relationships, whether sexual, social, business, or political, and that is what most inspires me about it. Welcome to the journey.