The Seven Veils of Intimacy: An Interview with Nadine van der Rest An Ancient Path Back to Sacred Connection

Most of us learned sex the way we learned to run for a bus: fast, goal-oriented, no time to feel our feet on the ground. We rushed toward the finish line before we ever asked our bodies what pace they actually wanted. Culture told us sexuality was either shameful or a performance, and rarely both tender and true. Nadine van der Rest believes there is an older, slower way, one that was mapped out by the Taoists 2,500 years ago and is only now finding its way back to us.

In this Umaversity masterclass conversation, host Jo Sarah, founder of Umaversity, sat down with Nadine van der Rest, a love and intimacy therapist with a private practice in Amsterdam, to explore The Seven Veils of Intimacy: A Wordless Path to Sacred Connection. Nadine works with couples and with women individually who are navigating sex, intimacy, and the tangled dynamics that come with both, and she has spent the last five years bringing this Taoist ritual into her practice and her own life.

"The foreplay, no, the foreplay is the play." — Nadine van der Rest

How did your journey with the Seven Veils begin?

Nadine found the framework almost by accident, five years ago, in one of the only articles that existed on the topic at the time. "Something just opened inside of me," she said. She was already working as a relationship therapist, but she felt her toolkit ran out right where her clients needed her most: in the deepest layers of their sexual and emotional lives.

Before she brought it to a single client, she tried it herself. With a partner she had just met, she walked the full seven months, one veil per moon. "This period of my life was one of the most juicy, most exciting, most alive periods that I've ever felt," she said. That lived experience is what convinced her this wisdom needed to travel further than one Dutch therapy room.

What exactly is a "veil," and why seven of them?

Think of each veil as a layer of clothing the two of you agree, together, to remove, not from the body first, but from the nervous system. The ritual is built on one core principle: aligning emotion with sexuality, instead of letting sex race ahead of the heart. In modern relationships, Nadine sees this gap constantly, one partner reaching for sex to feel close, the other needing closeness before sex can happen at all, and the two circling each other for years without ever meeting in the middle.

Traditionally, the full ritual takes seven months, four weeks per veil, but Nadine is no purist. She has guided couples through it in seven weeks, one week per step, with real healing to show for it. "As long as you take from the steps what you can take from it, then it works," she said.

You speak about slowness as the whole point, not a warm-up. What does that look like veil by veil?

The seven veils build like tide coming in, not like a countdown to a finish line.

1. Presence — Only eye contact and hand-holding. No kissing, no hugging, nothing rushed. This is where safety and trust get planted like seeds in soil.

2. Attunement — Touch above the clothes, a first kiss on the mouth. The body starts telling you, in its own quiet language, where it feels safe and where it doesn't.

3. Waves — Real kissing, bodies explored fully clothed. Desire is allowed to rise and fall like a tide, built up and let go, without needing sex to release it.

4. Restraint — Underwear stays on, everything else can be touched and kissed. This veil asks for real self-control, and teaches you to hold and direct your own life-force energy rather than spend it all at once.

5. Her rhythm — Full nakedness, oral sex, and as many orgasms as a woman wants. Men wait here. Because female arousal often needs far more time to fully open than male arousal does, this veil rebalances the pace around her, not around performance.

6. Depth without release — Penetration is now part of the picture, but ejaculation is not, yet. This builds a kind of patience and attunement that most couples never get to practice.

7. Integration — A fully woven sexual life, including ejaculation when it's wanted, not required. From here, you can move freely between all seven veils for the rest of your life together.

What about women navigating this without a stable partner?

Nadine was asked exactly this during the live Q&A, and her answer was grounded rather than prescriptive. This is a sacred process, she said, not something to introduce to someone you barely know. Rather than asking for a seven-month commitment upfront, she suggests simply naming the idea out loud and watching how the other person receives it, then offering to slow things down together, one small step at a time, instead of the whole ritual at once.

When you feel rushed, that is the moment to go slower, not faster.

For women building careers, families, or businesses at full speed, this reframe can feel almost radical. Nadine's advice translates well beyond the bedroom: build the container of safety first, communicate the pace you actually need instead of the one you think is expected, and treat your own arousal, your own energy, your own yes, as something worth protecting rather than rushing past.

What did practicing this teach you personally?

The fifth veil changed Nadine the most. Even as a trained intimacy coach, she noticed she was still having sex faster than she truly wanted, an old, unconscious imprint rather than a real choice. Slowing down there, she said, brought her face to face with "where I was still giving myself away sexually. And I didn't want to do that anymore."

She also pushed back gently on the very word we use for what comes before penetration. "It's so stupid that it's even called foreplay, as if that's not what it's about. The foreplay, no, the foreplay is the play." For women, especially where clitoral pleasure is concerned, that so-called warm-up often is the main event.

A gentle reframe to carry forward

If you are moving toward a new relationship, or trying to rekindle depth in a long one, Nadine's invitation is to build your own village of safety before you need it: name your pace out loud, protect your boundaries without apology, and let all of it be messy, the tenderness and the desire and the awkward slowness together. You are not behind. You are the author of your own sexual story, and you get to decide how quickly the pages turn.

About Nadine van der Rest

Nadine van der Rest is a love and intimacy therapist based in Amsterdam, where she runs a private practice supporting couples and individual women through challenges in sex, intimacy, and relationships. She also leads group workshops and events, including regularly for Umaversity. Her approach bridges ancient Taoist ritual with modern relationship therapy, making a 2,500-year-old practice feel warm, embodied, and entirely relevant to how we love today.

Want to go deeper? You can rewatch Nadine's full masterclass inside the Umaversity app, and join the Umaversity community for more conversations like this one throughout the year.