Add Intensity To Life: Pay Attention

I'm reminded of Witness Consciousness today. The world is changing outside of my window. Fall is splashing her golden hues all over the place and this makes it relatively easy to be hyper-conscious of the beauty and life that is all around me. Forget stress, the economy and my messy house - it's gorgeous out there!

It takes many varying practices to become more conscious. Right now I'm paying attention to nature in all of its glory. Last night I was paying attention to breath, sensual sensations and my G-spot. Later today I will even pay good attention to finishing my taxes. It's all the same really.

How does one promote consciously being able to witness ones self? There are many, many ways but I like to use the breath as a starting point. Watching my breath and breathing into my belly - softly, fully - is one of the practices I like. It's like a mini-meditation each time I do it.

Years ago I started this practice and would remember it maybe 20 times a day. I would put post-its on the front door and stickers on the steering column of my car. I would try to 'just remember' - I used all kinds of mechanisms to learn to pay attention to how I was breathing. The interesting thing is that this practice got me used to remembering multiple times a day to just pay more attention to whatever I was doing. The other sure-fire way is to practice meditation.

Research in the past few years is confirming that practices like meditation improve not only focus and attention but that it improves cognition, also. This is not only true of those practiced at meditation but of those new to the practice, too. A study reported in June of 2007 from researchers Amishi Jha and Michael Baime of the University of Pennsylvania found that mediation changes the way the brain works at the level of attention, the ability to prioritize, manage tasks and goals, focus on specific information and stay alert in whatever environment a person might find themselves in. Research has also found that improving attention makes whatever you are experiencing seem more intense.

Once I felt accomplished in my practice of mini breathing meditations, so that I could more fully witness myself, I moved this practice more deliberately to sex. After years of practicing and learning all about my body, my lover's body and all the myriad ways we could pleasure each other I could finally let go of the 'thinking' about those moves and begin to 'witness' my self during sexual experiences. This isn't about judgment or critical thinking or even imagination or fantasy - it's about the gentle practice of witnessing. To witness one simply watches with ease and wonder what is happening to them.

When you get good at this it becomes really useful. If I'm enjoying some great sex and I notice "Oh, that is an interesting sensation. I'm going to breathe into that touch, put more attention on it and see what happens." Or maybe we've gotten ourselves into a new position and I like it but I notice that my G-spot isn't quite being stimulated to my liking. We don't stop what we're doing and find a new position I simply move slightly one way or another to make a subtle shift. If I hadn't been able to gently 'witness' this about myself I could have blamed, gotten frustrated or even quit all together.

It's just like that, simple and useful. The 'witness' helps us to add on to the experience. When you get good at this you can really explore and up-the-ante on your experiences, what ever they are. It's a playful practice that becomes an increasingly interesting sort of arousal stimulator. And I'm using it today because of the beauty all around me - nature is arousing me and I'm using this experience to make it even more exquisite so I can enjoy the taxes and enjoy the garden and enjoy the sex and enjoy this life!

Playfulness - Can Getting Experimental Lead To Orgasm?

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Got Chakras?

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Pheromones – Can You Tell?

All animals use the sense of smell to tell them a lot of information about other members of their species. The only exception to this rule is with dolphins and whales. Their specific ‘noses’ migrated to the top of their heads as blowholes and thus they don’t have the benefit of smell that they once had eons ago. They do have, however, a very sophisticated system based on pheromones, as do the other animals in our fair kingdom.
It turns out that when researchers turn off the nerve in rats that connects the brain to the small, specialized area of the olfactory bulb that understands the signals that pheromones send, the rats don’t mate.

Rats have much better olfactory systems than humans do. Humans, in fact, have lost a lot of their sense of smell to other organs like the eyes. We just don’t need it as much as other animals, or do we? In small studies there is evidence that women on birth control pills have less response to pheromones. These women may be missing some of the important features of sensual attraction. And in a study of erotic dancers it was discovered that tips increased by up to 70% on nights when the women dancers were ovulating. There isn’t anything else that points to why this might be than the presents of pheromones.

If you’d like to discover the more subtle world of pheromones take a sniff behind your lover’s ear or underarms after they’ve been working in a warm environment for a few hours. Make sure they don’t have cologne on – it covers up scent and pheromones (so don’t wear it guys!). Does the scent turn you on? In a blind study women who, unbeknownst to them, either smelled a man’s pheromones or a more neutral scent, while trying to assess the attractiveness of pictures of different men always rated the men higher in attractiveness when they smelled the pheromones. It just turned them on more!

So, how do you get some of those pheromones? Don’t wear cologne or perfume. It interferes with our olfactory senses. Kiss more. Nose to nose gets us up close and intimate with the pheromones that are near our necks, ears, hair and nose. Those little chemical messengers don’t have to travel as far to reach their goal, either. Take more time to use your nose, even if you don’t think you smell anything while cuddling. Keep doing it because they are there. Treat your lover to a non-visual sensual date sometime. Blindfold them and bring out different pleasant scents that you can gently wave in front of their noses to tempt and mystify them. Suzie Heumann

What Do Singing, Throats, Orgasm and the Vagus Nerve Have To Do With It?

It’s fairly gorgeous in Sonoma County this time of year and the days are getting warmer. This afternoon I rode in my car with my windows down and the radio blasting. The song was Tina Turner’s What’s Love Got To Do With It. It doesn’t matter as much what song it was as that it is a full-throated, lusty song, one that you have to open up your mouth to sing and open it big. And you have to open up your throat, too.

When we open up to sing that fully, especially songs that have a deep, lower resonance to them, we are triggering and using our vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is a big one. It’s long and it branches a lot of times as it snakes throughout our body. You can look it up on any resource site to understand it better.

But what those research sites don’t say is that not only does it innervate the throat and chest, it is directly connected to the cervix and uterus. What does this mean for women’s pleasure? Beverly Whipple and Barry Komisaruk have investigated the vagus nerve and deep vaginal orgasms in women who have spinal cord injuries. This spinal cord compromise causes them to lack feeling in their lower extremities, thus not allowing them the capability to feel orgasms by other nerve structures. The vagus nerve doesn’t travel through the spinal cord, however. Deep, penetrative sexual activities trigger orgasm via this nerve, even in these women, and they can feel the orgasms.

Here is what I am speculating: That opening up the mouth, chest cavity and orgasmic capacities via the vagus nerve may lead to powerful orgasms and possibly multiples and female ejaculation. When women emit deep, low sounds from their abdomens and with their mouths wide open this can sometimes lead to longer lasting, powerful orgasms and even female ejaculation. This all makes sense if you consider that the vagus nerve connects all of these functions, throat, chest, cervix and uterus, and that when they are utilized to the fullest extent of the nerve, and all of its endings, the nerve becomes so activated that it produces out of body pleasure that is more than the sum of its parts, so to speak.

I had a direct transmission of this ‘action’ years ago from Caroline Muir but I have puzzled over it until I learned about this nerve. During some filming with the Muirs that my husband and I did, I noticed some deep, moaning sounds she had made during her orgasms and ejaculation demonstration. Her mouth was wide open and the sounds were coming from down deep inside her abdomen. Making these kinds of sounds also causes a ‘pushing’ down or out, as in childbirth, of the pelvic floor and genitals, giving even better access to the depths of the yoni. You can even feel this when you are simply singing full-throated songs. The diaphragm pushes downward on the pelvis. I tried copying her sounds and had an immediate experience of multiple orgasms and female ejaculation that continued unabated for a long time. How and why would these conditions all work together to produce such extremes in orgasmic pleasure? Is the vagus nerve the ‘unusual’ suspect?

So, any thoughts or similar experiences would be interesting. I don’t care how speculative they are, I would love to know other’s thoughts on this subject.

Suzie Heumann