What Actually Happens at a Sexual Leadership Retreat for Men?

My name is Taylor, and…

I run a 5-day in-person training for men that’s focused on helping them increase their sexual leadership abilities.

Now you might feel some level of skepticism after reading that line… which would be very healthy in my opinion – healthy to question anyone claiming to teach sexual growth work.

You might also wonder what “sexual leadership” actually means..?

I’ll share my definition below, and rather than asking you to take my word for it, I’ll tell you specifically what we did (the 2026 training already happened), why we did it, and what some of the outcomes were.

Participants in a somatic practice at the 2026 sexual leadership training.

*(Every photos on this page is from the 2026 Sexual Leadership Training that happened in Asheville, NC, USA. This photo was taken during a somatic contact, presence & attention practice we did).

From a top level view, this training combined elements from the following modalities:

Executive leadership coaching
Advanced somatic training
Primal/animal movement games
Embodied shame & desire work
Group reflection & masterminding
Modern sexual growth practices

We studied together, practiced together, pushed each other, laughed, danced, cried, and worked our way through multiple thresholds where each man got to push himself to his edges – to see what he was actually capable of. And…

To be perfectly clear: this was a highly structured, educational training that was non-sexual.

Yes the theme was sexual leadership & growth, but participants did not engage in sexual activity with each other. The retreat was substance-free, governed by clear agreements around confidentiality, boundaries and participant conduct, and all participants had full invitation to sit out any exercise that didn’t work for them – for any reason.

“I felt very safe, at-will, and lovingly challenged in the way I wanted/needed to be without any lines being crossed or threatened.” – Mikhael

Let’s dive in with an important question…

What is Embodied Sexual Leadership?

Embodied Sexual Leadership is the ability to lead yourself and then other(s) – into deeply pleasurable, meaningful sexual experiences, resting in and trusting your body, without collapsing into shame, self-judgment, fear of rejection, or feeling like your body is working against you.

Sexual Leadership does NOT mean controlling or coercing another person.

It means taking responsibility for your own presence, communication, actions, breath, desire, attunement and impact on others – and developing the capacity to lead sexual and relational experiences that genuinely uplift everyone involved.

The term “Embodied” is added in front of “Sexual Leadership” because of the reasons we’ll explore below…

The Embodied Learning Philosophy

This retreat focused primarily on EMBODIED learning (in contrast to just mentally learning concepts).

Why?

Because good sex happens in the body – not the mind. So while learning sexual concepts in the mind is useful on occasion…

The best way to improve your sex life in sustainable ways is through embodied practice.

Here’s what that means:

At this retreat, I guided men through a set of non-sexual practices that involved movement, focus, connection, attunement, self-regulation and externally-imposed pressure – in just the right amount to provide adequate challenge for growth.

Two participants in a leadership exercise at Taylor Johnson's Sexual Leadership Retreat for men.

The only way to be successful in these training practices was to use the same skills & abilities necessary to be an exceptional lover (skills listed later in this article).

These practices were designed in such a way that men WOULD make mistakes, without the added pressure of sexual touch or expectations…

Mistakes can be where the greatest learning happens (when made in a supportive learning environment). It’s after the mistake – in the refinement of your attempt at the exercise – that you build the skill & “muscle” that directly translates to your improved abilities as a lover & leader of sexual connection.

Specific Training Analogy

Because many men like MMA, even those who don’t publicly claim to, I thought it’d be fun to incorporate a MMA training example.

Conor McGregor (one of the most well known MMA fighters of all time) studied more than just fighting technique. At one point he specifically studied movement with one of the best functional movement teachers in the world: Ido Portal.

Ido did not teach Conor direct fighting techniques… Instead, he guided Connor through a set of movement practices & games designed to improve Conor’s overall reaction time, flow, spontaneity and creativity of movement.

These aren’t specific “fighting” techniques, but these movement exercises train a set of skills and abilities that directly improve a person’s ability to fight well. I know it’s a bit crude to compare fighting and sex… but I think the analogy makes sense here.

Pivot back to sex…

Being a truly exceptional lover & sexual leader requires:

Attunement
Embodied ease (deep nervous system relaxation under pressure)
Confidence without bracing
Sustained presence & attention over time
The ability to lead without collapsing
The capacity to create safety for your partner so they can relax
Shameless creativity
Awareness & honoring of what your true desires
Knowing how to act on your desires in a way that turns your lover(s) on and has a positive impact on everyone involved.
The ability surrender and receive too

Online courses and videos are great for learning certain concepts (full body orgasms can be learned in my Orgasmic Mastery Course for example), but…

The art of embodied sexual leadership cannot be built through solo practice and an online course.

Embodied sexual leadership is a relational capacity. And strengthening relational capacities requires in-person practice with other humans – with pressure added in just the right amounts to help you grow.

What We Actually Did at the Retreat (Example)

The photo below shows a moment at the retreat where I taught a a leading/following exercise using a wooden staff.

In this exercise, one man led another through a set of slow and intentional movements, while the other man practiced following. On the outside, it might not look like much… but what happens on the inside can be massive.

The man in the leadership role gets to confront everything in him (patterns, beliefs, fears, etc) that shows up when he’s in any leadership role (including sex), and the same can be said for the man in the following role. It’s an embodied analogy for what happens in sex – just without sexual contact or expectations.

Taylor Johnson teaching a somatic exercise with a retreat participant, connected via a wooden staff.

Here’s why that matters: usually, when you’re leading a sexual experience, there’s so much pressure to perform or be good that your patterns/beliefs/fears just show up and you can’t really learn anything from the experience…

When you slow it down (without erotic expectations or sexual interaction), you can actually feel your own patterns of leadership at play. And because you’re practicing with a real human in real time, the learning happens as a felt sense IN your body, not as an idea in your head. This is embodied learning.

One of the men at the retreat said this exercise was one of the most important experiences of the whole week for him. In it he realized on an embodied level (felt, in his body) the amount of pressure and impatience he brings into sexual experiences with his wife. And in that same moment, he got to practice/train something new: leading with a relaxed, clear, direct focus that put zero unnecessary pressure on his practice partner.

When the retreat ended, he went home and initiated one of the most beautifully sexy experiences he’d had with his wife in a loooong time – because he understood in his body, how to do it differently. Not as a concept. As a choice. Connected to a new embodied understanding of what was actually needed.

“This helped me understand what my partner has been asking for through my own direct experience.” – John

The Core Training Areas at the Retreat

When you read this section, consider that it might be tricky to fully appreciate the importance of these concepts without having the embodied practice we did at the retreat.

What I’ve learned and observed over personally studying and practicing this work for 17 years (and teaching it full time for over 7 years), is that the following core areas are the fundamental building blocks that create exceptional lovers.

You’ll notice that none of these areas sound like typical “sexual techniques,” and that’s because they’re not. Exceptional sexual technique falls flat without the core foundations described below.

Body As Ally

Many men struggle with their body not doing what they want during sex: premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction, performance anxiety, etc. Most men respond by “working against” their own body, which only deepens the mistrust.

You can’t lead a sexual experience from a body you don’t trust. No matter how well you mask it, your partner will feel it, and it will negatively impact your experience together.

Every day at the retreat, we worked on building a felt sense in each man that his body was and is a strong ally, not an obstacle (the primal movement games played a big role in this, where we got to simply play, have fun, and be in bodies together as men).

Participants taking a moment to feel sensations during a solo somatic exercise.

Contact

Contact is the moment your awareness touches another person’s. Eye contact is the clearest example. It can be vulnerable, exposing and exciting – and most people in the modern world break contact quickly when it happens – because of how raw and confronting it can feel. There’s a problem here though…

Good sex requires sustained contact. Sustained contact with attunement, relaxation, care, desire and trust… and this kind of contact is a muscle that can be trained (which we did every day).

Attention

Most of us are walking around with some form of “attentional injury” – meaning our capacity for sustained attention has been fractured somehow… Our world is overrun by notifications, social media algorithms, sexualized advertising and endless stimulation… This is the perfect recipe for society-wide fractured attention. There’s a problem here though…

Fractured attention makes good sex and good contact nearly impossible. Trained attention is one of the most powerful and sexy gifts you can offer a partner (and the world).

Leadership Capacity

Leadership is a muscle. Your ability to guide another person through an experience while staying connected to your own body, your own desire and your intention, can be trained like anything else.

Through practical exercises, we strengthened the muscle of self leadership and leadership of other. Every day we trained the embodied aspects of containment, attunement, transmission, evocation, directed attention and the ability to receive. All are crucial to exemplary sexual leadership.

“The work specific to sex and sexuality was helpful, but the work to build self confidence, containment, and my own grounding was especially beneficial to me.” – Jono

Positive Self-Regard (Self-Love)

This one might make some people shake their heads, because it’s so cliche in the self-development world… but in the realm of sexual growth and embodied leadership, it’s incredibly important. Here’s why:

Unshakeable confidence is built on positive self-regard (self-love). Your ability to lead yourself and others into edgy experiences without collapsing is dependent on strong positive self-regard (self-love). And – self-love is NOT binary. Self-love is a capacity that can be strengthened with practice. Without it, shame, self-judgement, and fear of rejection quietly run the show.

Strengthened self-love IS what allows a man to confidently go after the experiences and relationships he wants.

Community & Environment

One of the biggest benefits of doing this work in person is the community/team of men that gathers together. Truly epic men show up to do this kind of work. There’s a real “mastermind” element to this training. When a group of skilled, successful and similarly motivated men gather, we get to lift each other up and challenge each other in ways that just aren’t possible alone or online.

The location (the gorgeous mountains of Asheville, NC) and the food (top-level chefs with top-level ingredients for every meal) mattered too. They gave us the container to actually rest, integrate, and be nourished between moments of deep work.

Integration: Bringing the Work Home

One of the most important elements of this training (in addition to the embodied learning experiences) was to ensure that every man had a concrete action plan in place to integrate everything from the retreat back into his normal life.

Men completing a reflection and integration worksheet at the sexual leadership training.

This plan included practices, action steps, support structures and ways to measure success going into the future (so men could tell if what they’re doing actually is successful or not). We developed these plans throughout the retreat, then shared them with the other men for support, feedback and accountability.

On top of each man’s action plan, everyone learned a set of relational exercises & tools they could take back into their sexual relationships – to immediately have a set of fun & meaningful experiences they could lead their partners through.

Early Results (1-2 Weeks After the Retreat)

I do my best to measure the effectiveness and impact of every program I run, using before/after questionnaires that are built on standard self-report scales.

Before the retreat I asked men to complete a 21-question sexual leadership self-assessment. Within the two weeks following the retreat, all participants completed the exact same assessment – to get quantitative data.

*DATA NOTES: The data below was collected from the 15 participants at this retreat (excluding 3 assistants from the 18 total men who participated in the retreat). So to be clear and fair, it’s a relatively small sample size, this data relies on self-reported metrics, and the “after” data comes from just one-two weeks after the retreat ended. I will collect the same set of data again in a month – to get what I believe will be a more realistic representation of the lasting impact of this program – and I will publish that data in a followup post.

Three data highlights:

100% (15 of 15) of participants said the retreat was worth the investment.
100% (15 of 15) said they would recommend the retreat to a close friend.
100% (15 of 15) improved their overall sexual leadership capacity — with the group’s average score rising 42%, from 3.7 to 5.3 on a 7-point scale.

But perhaps more importantly…

Below you’ll find 4 sets of visual graphs that show before/after retreat data.

HOW TO READ THE DATA: For each of the following before/after pairs, I will list a category (title), then show you the exact prompt from the self-assessment the men responded to (they were asked to rate how strongly they agreed or disagreed to the prompt), then will show you the before & after data comparison with statistics & charts.

Body as Ally

“My body feels like an ally during sex, not something I’m managing or fighting against.”

Before the retreat, 7% of men agreed or strongly agreed. After, 60% did.
87% of men improved their rating on this question.

AFTER:

Bar graph showing the

*Again, all graph pairs came directly from the pre and post retreat self-assessments of the 15 participants (excluding 3 assistants from the total of 18 attendees). Only 4 out of 21 data points are shown here. When the longer-term data comes in, I plan to publish the entire list of data points.

Thinking About Joining the Next Retreat?

This training is for men who are willing to be challenged (physically, emotionally and mentally), men who recognize that play and connection are important parts of learning, and men who want to step in and do the work needed to create the sex lives and relationships they truly want.

Men connecting in a reflection exercise

“This retreat completely changed my beliefs around what it means to be a man and how expansive sex can be.” – Juan Pablo

This training is NOT for men who: are looking for sexual connection with other participants (this is not allowed at the retreat), who are in an active psychological or logistical life crisis, who believe women are less than men in terms of intrinsic value, or who disrespect anyone’s sexual orientation and/or relationship styles.

At this training you will learn and practice THE foundational ways of being an exceptional lover – so you can take this back home to your partner(s)/lover(s).

Join the 2027 wait list

Once you’re on the list, you’ll be the first to know when the dates for the 2027 sexual leadership training are set.

Learn more about the training here: The Embodied Sexual Leadership Training.

Please share this with any man who you think would benefit.

Thank you.

-Taylor