Title: Visionary, Professional Cuddler

Gender: Male

Location: New York, NY

I’m a sex and relationship educator (read ‘geek’) based in New York. I’m most widely known as the co-creator and spokesperson for this global, social-phenomenon known as Cuddle Party.

Part communication workshop, part ”social laboratory,” Cuddle Party is fulfilling on my mission to teach men and women how to live more self-expressed, more fulfilled, healthier lives through welcomed, affectionate touch. Three main points make up the core message of my educational work:
1. Touch is a basic human need that people must meet in order to live healthy, happy, fulfilling lives.
2. In today’s modern world, most people arent getting enough touch.
3. An abundance of welcomed touch and affection is possible through better communication skills, skills that most of us werent taught growing up.

By focusing on these points, I hope that my efforts are changing the way people view and think about touch, especially sustained, affectionate physical contact, also known as “cuddling!”

My interest and expertise in touch, intimacy and affection grew out of a unique journey: I amassed an extensive knowledge of the martial arts as a young adult (two black belts and a brown belt). Eventually I became increasingly interested in how to put people back together rather than how to hurt them. My curiosity led me to ten years of study (and still going!) in massage, yoga, and other alternative methods of healing. This coincided during college with a foray into one of the worlds oldest therapeutic professions: I started bartending! My empathic nature, love of people, and sense of humor made me a perfect fit for the social needs of bar life (as well as my love for Bailey’s in my coffee).

After fifteen years and hundreds of thousands of conversations about people’s relationships and sex lives, I quit bartending to pursue a career in what I realized was my passion: intimacy, sexuality, and how it all fits in with people actually living their lives. I set out to work with people and their relationship needs, counseling them in how to create more fulfilling lives. I also began designing workshops and educational programming to foster this work. In my interactions with educators and healing practitioners and in working with laypeople, I began to see a common thread: a near-universal lack of healthy touch. Even the massage thereapists weren’t getting their touch needs met! If they were suffering from lack of touch, what about everyone else?… The idea for Cuddle Party was soon to be born!

In the three years since launching Cuddle Party with Marcia Baczynski, I have personally cuddled over two thousand people, have trained and certified facilitators from all over the world to run Cuddle Parties, and have appeared on television, on radio and in print in more than fifteen languages and twenty-three countries world-wide.

I believe that understanding one’s needs for touch, and creating the safety and structure to get those needs met, are the building blocks for healthier, more self-expressed lives. I belive that an individual, when they realize that their feelings of skin hunger are normal and learn the skills and ways to get their needs fed in healthy, nutritious ways; that they can create a better world for themselves. And this goes for everybody. In creating a better world for ourselves, we create a better world for all of us, a better world, period. It only sounds crazy because we’re not taught to think we can ~really~ change the world. Well, I think we can, and I’m doing it one hug at a time! Will you come join me?

: )

Member Since: Tuesday, March 28 2006

Last Visit: 268 days ago.

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