A New Purpose for Sex: Unplug Into the 'Now'

When we first fall in love sex is often a fevered, fumbling and sometimes unconscious act. All of our interest is focused on the object of our love and we are overwhelmed by it with a constant awareness process of the beloved. It's satisfying, to a point. After a period of time things slow down and you're left with finding new, edgier and slightly exciting things to do to keep your interest from waning.

Doctor Helen Fisher would say that you have left the Dopamine era of new love and entered the bonding phase where Oxytocin plays the favored part. Dopamine drives desire and the satiation of that desire by some kind of a reward. The 'reward' in new love is the attention from the other and the continued feelings that the love chemicals pump into your brain and body. This often drives sex. Oxytocin comes into play when the couple moves to the next step of setting up a household and possibly having a child.

Long lasting love, or pair bonding love, is associated with the time needed to, at the very least, raise a child to the age of about four or five years old. In ancient times that is the age that the child could keep up with the 'tribe', fend for itself in some ways so that the mother may not need the father's care, especially if there is tribal or societal care to help raise the child. Our love interests still run on old scripts from thousands of years past! But there is evidence that things are changing.

Ok, let's keep that intense, new love stuff, the dopamine high. Then, if two people decide that they are very much in love and want to move to the next steps of relationship the 'cuddle' affect takes over. And though sex may slow down the bond between the lovers gets tighter. Then a few years go by, there are babies and careers and a mortgage and responsibilities galore. Time seems to have disappeared and stress can seem to take center stage. What does love look like now?

It turns out our brains are growing and changing all of our lives. Scientists didn't used to think this was so. They are proving themselves wrong and it now has a name: plasticity. With recent studies on meditators and yogis showing marked increases in brain volume, increased immune response and the ability to show higher cortical, or executive function control, all the reasons for being in the present time or Now are coming to bare. And the practices of Western Tantric Sex can bring you into the Now with some of the benefits the meditators derive from exactly the same Now-ness.

People who meditate can quickly access the Theta Wave state that is indicative of deep relaxation. Deep breathing, mindful relaxation techniques, massage, yoga and no-goal Tantric sex practices can bring you to a super-relaxed state of mind. Once you have these experiences available to you in your growing, plastic brain you'll be able to draw on this relaxation, and low-stress condition, whenever you need to.

Set 30 minutes a day aside for practicing being in the Now with your lover. Make Love be a meditation, of sorts, at least some of the time. This is a more feminine approach, guys, but that doesn't mean hot sex is going to be a thing of the past. It just needs balance, like everything in life.

Begin by positioning yourselves so that you can gaze into each others eyes. This begins the oxytocin drip and re-enforces bonding between you. Oxytocin increases calm, trust, empathy and generosity too.

Breathe together. This synchronizes the heart, body and emotional state and lowers blood pressure. You can 'spoon' or sit opposite each other for these practices. In the 'spoon' position add slow, gentle pelvic rocking, in unison, as an advanced practice. This will relieve the stress of the day on your lower back in addition to putting you more in synchronization. You can set an intention, and vision it together, if you'd like, also.

Design a gentle massage exchange. Even if this is simply 10 minutes apiece it can transform you both, especially when done every day. Reverently start with adoring your beloved by softly touching their face, neck, eyelids, ears, lips and cheeks. You can then move to their arms, legs, torso, breasts, back, feet and buttocks. Don't strain, this is to be relaxing for both of you. It's about the skin-to-skin touch and not necessarily a deep tissue massage. You may even include a bit of soft fur, silk fabric, rose petals or a feather to massage with sometimes. Relax.

Take 30 minutes, every day you can, for this kind of recharge. Make a study of it and experience the differences you'll feel by the end of your experiment. Create your own super-relaxing practices that work well for you. Bring an attitude of focus, relaxation, mindfulness and reverence to the practices. If a great sexual experience sometimes follows then wonderful, but take the pressure off to start, because life seems to be about the pressure these days so let it happen naturally.

3 Easy Steps to Recharging for Two with Tantra

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Kissing Lessons

Kissing is one of the most sensuous, erotic and thrilling things couples can do together. It can be done just about anywhere. So, what’s to keep you from being a great kisser?

Many men and women complain that their lover doesn’t know how to kiss very well, and that their kissing actually turns them off. How do you kiss? How does your lover do it? Has your technique gotten a bit stale and is there something you can learn about kissing?

Our mouths, lips and tongues are alive with nerve endings. Voluptuous lips are one of the sexual stimuli that turn on both men and women. We wouldn’t love eating nearly as much if we didn’t like the texture of things in our mouths. Kissing has an erotic power over us and the better you are at it the more you’ll get kissed. The pleasure you can deliver and derive from kissing can be expanded to take on an importance of its own. Take a step back to ‘innocent mind’ and start over to find the thrill in it again.

Lesson One: Wet your lips generously, right now. Use your tongue and moisten them well. Put your lips together in an exaggerated pout. As you pout, rub the insides around on each other and feel the silkiness of your own inner lips. Imagine kissing that part of your mouth. Now, again exaggerating the pout, part your lips slightly so you can just suck a little air in through the opening. That is how your lips should feel when you are about to kiss someone: moist, juicy, voluptuous, open, and inviting.

Lesson Two: Kiss the back of your own hand as practice. You should leave a wet mark and make a small, seductive smack as you finish it. Slight suction can be felt when a full set of lips meets the skin. Attitude plays a big part in kissing, too. Are you being seductive and coy or lustful and aggressive? Practice different attitudes while sucking and kissing various exotic fruits, such as a mango, a peach or nectarine, or maybe papaya. Peel the skin away and practice different styles of kissing while you’re eating it. Nobody is going to see you, so go for it!

Lesson Three: Try recreating your first kissing experiences, as mentioned above. Tell your partner that you want to practice with them. Pretend you know nothing. Ask for pointers. You want to be a great kisser! Surrender some of the time. Be aggressive at other times. Dance back and forth with soft, slightly open, moist full lips.

Lesson Four: Don’t introduce your tongue until after you’ve been kissing for a while. Wait until you and your lover yearn for it. When you do start tongue play, do be playful. Tickle and tease. Run the tip of your tongue around the inside of your lover’s lips. Give them a little tongue, then pull back and nibble at one lip. Run a finger erotically across their inner lips and then leave it in the corner of their mouth while kissing them. This gives a sense of urgency to the deeper kisses and adds extra sensuousness to the act.

Lesson Five: In Tantric practice the lower lip on the man provides a direct channel to his sexual organ’s excitement, so gently suck and kiss his lower lip. For women, the upper lip connects energetically to the clitoris so as the woman sucks the man’s lower lip he can gentle suck her upper lip. Nibbling and soft biting are kissing techniques from the Kama Sutra and definitely apply too!

Lessons Six Through 1001 (as in the Arabian Nights Tales): Sensuously introduce warm chocolate, juice, or a liqueur into your lover’s mouth before kissing. Share it back and forth. Lick the drips off of their lips in the most luscious way you can. Use your soft lips to kiss your lover’s body all over. Ears are highly erogenous, so kiss, lick, nibble, suck and bite an ear lobe and breathe softly into the ear. You can create even more sensual pleasure if you slip down and kiss and bite their neck. Get creative and have fun!

If YOU have any great tips on kissing please, let us hear them!

The Yoga of Sex Muscles

Today's PC muscle exercises, or Kegel exercises, are not the ones your mother might have done. Oh no, they've been upgraded a whole lot so it's surprising that they aren't considered one of the "yogas". The truth is that they are a type of yoga. Mindfulness, along with these physical exercises, was taught by many ancient traditions for both men and women.

Dashing off a couple of squeezes here and there is not what I'm talking about. Learning and practicing the correct way to do Kegel exercises isn't hard but it is important to do them right for the desired physical benefits. There are many reasons to do these little gems of internal exercise. They radically improve arousal, blood flow to the pelvic region, strength of grip of the phallus during intercourse, bladder control, amount of orgasm and strength of orgasm, lasting longer, stronger erections, prostate health, thickness of pelvic floor muscles, health of internal organs and more. I recently had to have a sonogram of my lower abdomen and the doctor exclaimed, with some excitement, that my uterus looked like that of a 35 year old. I'm quite a bit older than that, and have had three grown children too, but I attribute this to years of doing my Kegels.

I began doing Kegels many years ago because I wanted to tighten my muscles for more "feeling" during sex. Then I began to get into the more subtle facets of using those built-up muscles to explore the "courtesan" in me. Many stories exist of women so highly trained that they could grip a man's phallus and not let go until they chose to. The Kama Sutra lists the sex technique Vadavaka as "The Mare's Trick" and a skilled woman could rhythmically and consciously massage and "milk" with her pelvic muscles. What the literature doesn't tell is that by learning and enabling this set of muscles the body core becomes more stable and healthy.

However, the yoga part has to do with the awareness and mindfulness that more advanced practices bring. Learning to do PC muscle exercises correctly is the first step to learning how to employ "bandhas" during regular yoga practice or even breathwork (pranayama) and meditation. By locking the pelvic muscles, and visualizing the upward movement of energy throughout the inner body, the topography of the interior organs can be felt and explored. This is called proprioception. Proprioception - from Latin proprius, meaning "one's own", and perception - one of the human senses. This term is often referred to only for outer limbs but it pertains to our inner topography as well. When we pay attention we can begin to feel our bladders, uteruses, prostate glands, cervixes, many of our organs and other soft tissues. This, in turn, aids visualization and potential healing.

In studies with athletes, scientists have discovered that they can improve the muscle strength and performance skills of the athletes by up to 15 percent when they use visualization to imagine their muscles growing or their game improving. This is also the case with learning the relaxation techniques that go with mastering ejaculation control. This pertains to pelvic muscles too. Evidence is growing that we create our own realities by our thoughts and actions, at least to some degree. We can take advantage of this fact to enhance the experiences of our lives.

Here we are on earth. We have a life that we have created to the best of our abilities. Yet both learning new "things" and refining what we already know are very important aspects to a cultivated life. This is what mindfulness is and what further refinement is when we are constantly improving our ability to "know" our selves. It is always interesting to me that many people believe that sex is not a worthy path to knowledge. Better put, that it is something that should only be spontaneous and free. That can be true some of the time but when we focus our minds, bodies, and spirits on sex, the sky can be the limits on how we do it and what outrageous consequences can come from it. Studied and practiced, those consequences can help integrate the mind and the body far more thoroughly.

Here's a very thorough Kegel lesson I wrote and I know you can find others around the Internet, also. This one has the basic practices, inquiry questions and advanced steps for visualizing and moving energy.

Jivamukti founder David Life says it very well in this quote on YogaJournal.com: "Through gradual refinement, mula bandha becomes less muscular and more subtle, energetic, and etheric. This movement from outside to inside, from mundane to rarefied, from unconsciousness to enlightenment, is the basic pattern of transcendental yogic awakening. On an energetic level, mula bandha allows us to feel, restrain, and then direct our energies toward enlightenment. Finally, when practicing mula bandha on the highest level, the yogi sees the Divine in all with equanimity and detachment."

Partner As Guru:Relationship As An Evolutionary Tool

Suzie Heumann

I once proposed to my husband that we choose 'Devotion' with a big 'D'. I meant that we would be completely devoted to each other 100 percent. Let me define that a little further. That would look like we idolized each other. We would see each other as God and Goddess and there wouldn't be any 'if, and or buts' about it. Period.

One of the ways I defined it meant that we could make 'loving, critical assessments' of the other. You got it - criticisms - and the other would lovingly take it for what it was - a guru-like practice that the criticized one needed to hear and subscribe to. Yeah, right. I was quite naive. That was a long time ago; we've been married for 30 years!

I had an agenda. I wanted him to love me unconditionally because I felt that I had loved him that way for many years and he hadn't reciprocated the way I wanted him to. This is unconditional? Obviously this isn't the way to heal from whatever it was that caused me to even think I could get what every woman (and man for that matter) fantasizes about and thinks they want - pure devotion. Ah...

Devotion might look like what a student has with a teacher or an aspirant has with a guru. Of course, the teacher must be true and of a high mind and the guru must be of the best kind with the highest goals of his or her student's in mind. What of two lovers, partners and couples; can they be each other's gurus? Is it possible to move the obstacles of family history, culture, one's own agenda, hurts, disappointments and all the rest of the deeply embedded stuff we bring along with us aside and actually guide our partner along in life?

Lover as guru might be possible if the couple sees themselves as divine manifestations of the cosmic couple: Shiva (the male principle in Hindu cosmology) and Shakti (the female principal). Seeing and holding ones self and lover as the cosmic couple representing universal energy might hold a clue to this transformative process. The polarity or dualistic aspects of everything around us from male and female, God and Goddess, fire and water, truth and lie, giver and receiver - are only outer manifestations of the universe creating an interesting life for us. The cause of suffering, however, is a perceived separation of the self from the universal.

What if you really, fully embraced 'Partner/Lover as Guru'? Watch this short video of a conversation I had with Mark and Patricia who are a well-known Tantric teaching couple. They have some spirited words of wisdom for us all:

Sensual Intimacy Video

So, what would life look like? For one thing you would have to put aside ego and reaction to criticism. In fact, better yet, you would not have the concept of 'criticism' running your emotional process. Relationship would need to feel like a loving parent or grandparent who cares, has compassion, understand your hurts, lets you speak and listens to you, holds your hand when you need it and lets you struggle when you don't. Your guru would have loving words to direct, console, teach and guide you and you would have the skills to receive and to give back in turn. The separations of jealousy, anger, fear, desire, envy and pride wouldn't hold much weight. Trust would grow strong. Helping others, not just your own partner or family, would become easy and effortless.

When you see yourself as an intrinsic part of everything and representative of everything it becomes easier to hold the influence that you might have with others to a higher standard. Each partner might try to take the other higher and have the other's evolution in mind. Life would become more of a collaboration and dance. Each generation beyond ours would become more empowered, more trusting, more loving, more compassionate.

How do you do this even when you don't want to? Can you step up to the plate, even a little?