When Softness Finds You in Ridiculous Ways

There are moments in life when softness doesn’t arrive as a gentle breeze.

It arrives like a frog.

A big, round, slightly comedic frog with tiny arms and absolutely no capacity for control.

That was me somewhere between Lisbon and Paris…

In a tiny ceremony room. Wrapped in blankets.

Letting ancestral medicines show me the part of myself I’d been dancing around for years.

And she said:

Enough armour.

Enough holding.

Enough tightening your jaw and pretending your tenderness is a liability.

Tonight, you are a frog.

At first I laughed. Hard. Then the symbolism landed in my chest like warm rain.

Because the frog version of me was unguarded, curious, trusting, and beautifully ridiculous.

She didn’t know how to grip anything.

She couldn’t strategize or perform.

She had to soften because there was no other way.

And in that softness, my whole nervous system exhaled.

The Softness Men Secretly Crave

Most men who come to me for tantra massage in Perth don’t walk in announcing that they want softness.

They tell me they want confidence.

Or better intimacy.

Or less stress.

They tell me they can’t feel enough, or they feel too much, or they don’t know what their body wants anymore.

But underneath every single one of those longings is softness.

Not weakness.

Not passivity.

Softness.

Softness is what happens when the body stops bracing and finally begins to trust.

Softness is the moment a man realises he doesn’t have to impress me.

Or perform.

Or hold everything together.

He gets to arrive as he is.

In the massage space, using warm lotion and slow rhythmic strokes, I watch men discover the truth of their own bodies again.

Their breath deepens.

Their shoulders settle.

Their nervous system remembers safety.

Their pleasure becomes fuller, wider, less pressured.

Softness is not a technique. It’s a permission slip.

Why the Armour Gets Heavy

Most men learned at a young age that their value comes from doing.

Achieving.

Providing.

Holding it together.

Not needing anything.

But bodies tell the truth.

Even the most successful, confident, outwardly composed men arrive carrying subtle tremors:

A tight belly.

A collapsed chest.

A breath that stays too high.

A jaw that never fully unclenches.

These are not flaws.

They’re signs of a nervous system that has been in effort mode for too long.

Our true power comes when we stop micromanaging our lives and begin responding from the deeper intelligence of the body. That intelligence always speaks through sensation. Through breath. Through the places that ache for tenderness.

And that’s what the frog brought me back to.

The version of myself who isn’t trying to hold the world up with her arms.

A version many men forget they’re allowed to inhabit.

Life in Motion: Suitcases, Airports, and Surrender

Right now, I’m living out of a suitcase.

Moving between Airbnbs.

Flowing through airports.

Stopping occasionally at my storage unit holding my belongings.

I used to think that instability meant danger. Now I feel the opposite.

I feel alive.

I feel held by something larger than my plans.

Softness didn’t make my life smaller. It made it spacious.

It taught me how to trust what I cannot control.

And it revealed a truth I now see in every man I work with:

You don’t need to achieve to be enough.

You don’t need a perfect plan to belong.

You don’t need control to be safe.

Your safety begins in your body.

Your belonging begins in breath.

Your confidence grows from the inside out when you let your armour melt a little.

A Practice for You: The Soft Frog Breath

Here’s something you can try at home tonight. It’s simple and deceptively powerful.

Sit or lie down.

Place one hand on your belly.

One hand on your chest.

And imagine, just for a moment, that you have tiny frog arms.

Arms too small to grip anything.

Too adorable to hold tension.

Let yourself breathe in a way that matches that image:

Unarmoured.

Silly.

Soft.

Completely incapable of controlling anything.

Notice what happens in your belly.

Maybe fear? Maybe surrender?

Notice the warmth rising. Or notice the tingles.

Notice the tenderness. Or notice the tightness.

Just notice and allow your breath to go right into it.

Breath super deeply into that place in your body.

Really accepting fully what is here now.

Then, take a small pause at the top of the breath.

And when you cannot hold it anymore, slowly let the breath out through your open mouth.

Letting out your sound. Let your sound tell your story.

This is softness entering the body through a doorway your mind never expected.

You Are Already Whole

The biggest gift of becoming-amphibious in Europe was realising that my life is already whole, even in the middle of uncertainty.

And that’s what I want the men of Perth and Western Australia to feel in their own bodies.

In the massage space, in daily life, and especially in intimacy.

When softness returns, masculinity stops being something to prove.

It becomes something to feel.

Something to enjoy.

Something that deepens connection instead of protecting it.

So I’ll ask you the same question I asked myself in ceremony:

What part of you is ready to drop its tiny armour and become softly ridiculous and beautifully free?

If that pulls at you, even quietly, I would love to work with you.

With love,

Kali 💛