Sexuality is a complicated issue. Because sex, like almost everything in life, is based on a neuro chemical cocktail that includes addictive neurotransmitters, we can always expect the full spectrum of expressions in our human sexuality. We condition ourselves to pump stress hormones like cortisal, pleasure hormones like dopamine and oxytocin and calming ones like serotonin. Each of these has the propensity to be used unconsciously to help us meet our needs socially, physically, mentally and sexually.
If we use sex as the example it’s easy to see how each of us has our own brand and flavor of pleasure. Anyone that has ever had a sexual relationship with another person knows that they didn’t always get their needs met. One person might want to have their feet rubbed while having oral sex while another might want, or maybe even require, being pinched while engaging in some form of sex. It’s all up for grabs but what is true of each of us is that we each drive the experience via the means that we grew to “like” in our brains and nervous system. That means we trained ourselves to have certain experiences that then become necessity if we are to “get-off”.
This can become a problem. It is a big problem today when we consider pornography equals sex education and that the best selling female erotic novel right now is all about sadomasochism. Is this the kind of training we want our brains to develop a thirst for?
Robert Masters, Ph.D., recently posted an excerpt from his book Transformation Through Intimacy on the Integral Life website that addresses all the unconscious reasons we have sex in this modern life and why most of these are, well, not Tantric. Tantra, including Tantric Sex, is about presence. Sustained presence. For most of us sustaining presence during sex is a really difficult thing to do. We’re either worried about something or we’re fantasizing about something or someone but we are decidedly not present to and with our lover.
These things help to keep us focused on our partners while we’re making love: aware breathing; often with our partner and as a practice, eye gazing for extended periods of time, sensate-focus touch practices that have each lover pay attention to their own skin as it is being touched and to the touch they are giving with their fingers and hands and erotically speaking to our lover as we consciously touch them and describing to them what we are doing to them and how it is feeling. There are more but even with these there is an infinite world awaiting that can expand the sexual experience to places that many people didn’t know existed. Places that aren’t limited to everyday sex but to expansive experiences that may include out-of-body feelings, Kundalini experiences, angelic realms, past-life witnessing and even the reliving of wonderful experiences you had as a baby.
Intimacy is our most healing and healthy of pastimes. As social beings we do best when we are a part of the group, the family, the partnership and the love. Teaching our bodies to express the chemicals of love profusely throughout our system is the key to a happy, healthy, connected and long life. The resilience this creates is the antidote to stress, pain and loneliness. Practicing Tantric techniques while making love, or having sex, is about bringing the present moment into the room with you and consciousness is both the practice and the gift.
Read Robert Master’s Bringing Sex out of the Closet here at Integral Life:
http://integrallife.com/integral-post/bringing-sex-out-closet
