Library
Modalities of intimacy
Every existing modality of intimacy trains something essential — and leaves something dangerous untrained. Understanding the landscape is the first step toward integration.
When we talk about "modalities of intimacy," we're talking about the primary containers humans currently use to practice meeting intensity with another.
Each modality trains some capacities and leaves others underdeveloped. Most are single-axis — body, mind, spirit, emotion, or power — and were never designed to be comprehensive.
The Institute makes sense once you see that no existing modality trains the whole capacity of intimacy.
Romantic Partnership
Long-term intimate relationship, typically monogamous. The most common container for intimacy practice — and often the least trained.
Trains
Family & Attachment
The foundational container. Where we first learn what intimacy is — for better and worse. Intimacy by inheritance, not by skill.
Trains
Friendship & Peer Intimacy
Often the healthiest space — and still limited. Where mutuality and play thrive, but depth may be capped to preserve harmony.
Trains
Therapy & Clinical Modalities
Including somatic therapy, attachment therapy, trauma work. Essential but structurally one-directional.
Trains
Tantra & Sacred Sexuality
Lineage-based traditions working with presence, energy, polarity, and ritualized intimacy. High capacity, often low regulation.
Trains
BDSM & Kink
One of the most advanced intimacy technologies — siloed and stigmatized. Explicit about what others leave implicit.
Trains
Plant Medicine & Psychedelics
Containers for ego dissolution, emotional truth, and communal witnessing. Depth without relational scaffolding.
Trains
Spiritual & Devotional
Paths working with surrender, reverence, meaning, and transcendence. Intimacy sometimes displaced upward.
Trains
Wellness & Self-Help
Coaching, self-improvement, personal development. High accessibility, often low relational depth.
Trains
Performance & Creative
Art, dance, theater, music. Often intense, fleeting, and unintegrated — but alive with embodied presence.
Trains
Pattern Recognition
What becomes obvious from the map
Across all modalities:
Eros, power, ethics, and nervous system regulation are almost never trained together
Repair is rarely institutionalized
Integration across contexts is absent
Responsibility scales poorly beyond small groups
Charisma substitutes for structure
Each modality holds a fragment of the lost technology.
None holds the whole.
Find your position in the field
The assessment maps which modalities have shaped you and where your developmental edges might be.