In this conversation I sat down with Lara Kolesar, a bodyworker and embodiment facilitator who has been part of the Heart iQ community since 2014. Lara developed a practice she calls the Art of Ecstatic Touch, and what struck me most in talking with her was how she thinks about the relationship between the body, touch and what she calls aliveness.
Touch as a way of paying attention
Lara trained for over thirty years working with people who had chronic pain and low back issues, and she found that the biggest shifts happened not through mechanical correction but through helping people reconnect to their sense of touch as a kind of bodily vocabulary. That observation led her toward a broader practice focused on helping people, particularly women, feel grounded in their bodies and connected to what she describes as their creative power, their intuition and their sensual intelligence.
Lara speaks mainly about her experience working with women. She also describes working with men and recognises that the setting and the quality of trust affect how people experience touch.
She begins with ordinary sensory attention: noticing the texture, weight or softness of fabric, for example. In her approach, this is a way to become more familiar with sensation before exploring contact that may feel emotionally significant. The conversation presents her experience as a practitioner, rather than a diagnosis of anxiety or dissociation.
Understanding resistance
The part of the conversation I found most useful was how Lara talks about resistance. She is careful not to use the word armour, because for her that word can itself create more contraction, more sense of something wrong that needs fixing. Instead she frames resistance as a concentrated form of aliveness, something that took energy to build and is often protecting or guarding something important. Her view is that trying to get rid of resistance is, in effect, trying to get rid of a part of yourself, and that a gentler approach is to get curious about it, to treat it almost as something you want to know rather than eliminate.
She described this as first anchoring to a felt sense of your own aliveness before you go toward the resistance, so that you are not just associating yourself with the guarding. From that grounded place, she suggests approaching resistance with curiosity, letting it reveal what it might need rather than pushing it away.
Choice and support
We also touched on polarity, and Lara's sense that the masculine can act as a container for a more wild, live feminine force, both between partners and within a single person's own inner structure. She was clear that this inner container matters so that aliveness does not simply become overwhelming or feel like something happening to a person rather than something they can be in relationship with and have choice around.
What I take from this conversation is less a technique and more an orientation: that the sense of touch can be a direct route back into feeling more alive, and that whatever resistance shows up along the way is not a problem to be removed but a form of intelligence asking to be understood. Any touch needs to be welcome, with room to decline, pause or change what is happening.
Partnering With Resistance
- Anchor first to a felt sense of your own aliveness
- Notice resistance as it arises, without labelling it armour
- Recognise resistance as a concentrated form of aliveness rather than an enemy
- Get curious about what it is guarding or protecting
- Let it reveal what it needs instead of trying to remove it
