Get In Touch With Your Heart Through Lovemaking
Written by admin on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 in Your Sexuality.
Powerful and passionate sex touches us like not many other things do. It removes us from our regular, controlled state of being, and allows us to release our senses, breathing, emotion, and heart. This can be so lovely and beautiful, but also disturbing or exposing.
When we truly make love, when we surrender deeply to our instinctual selves, our body‘s senses, our aliveness and our hearts, feelings come up. It is our heart opening, our emotional filter disabling, our trust acting, that allows for truly great sex, and this also opens the door to our feelings spilling out, which is sometimes unwanted. If you want sex that is sacred, if you want to make love in a way that‘s divine, you need to truly understand what effect emotions and feelings have on your lovemaking.
Even if you are an expert lover, emotions can make or break the best sex, as you probably have experienced firsthand sometime. We must allow our emotions to play their role in sacred lovemaking, or no sexual know-how, Tantric technique or special energy exercise will have any real meaning. Fully opening into divine sexuality is all about trust. Without it, any knowledge or expert technique is in danger of remaining rote and mechanical.
The reason people do not have deep and fulfilling sex is often because they don’t trust this emotional movement. {Yet the more we open sensually, the more the shadow side of ourselves will come up also – that is, the unlived, unresolved and unhealed parts of us. This is especially powerful in the case of trauma survivors, but it‘s true to some degree for almost everyone}.
{It is impossible to open your heart selectively. You can’t open just your “sexy, happy self” and keep other aspects under wraps. If you try to do that, sex will be mediocre at best. If you want to go really high, you need to be willing to go deep as well. If we do not resist this movement of emotion, then grace can open up within us. The metaphor for this truth—that we must embrace our shadow side in order to transcend it—is the beautiful lotus blossom that rises out of the murky mud}. Through loving sex we can help heal our bodies, our hearts and our entire beings.
Cindy and Thomas are a particularly touching example. Even though Cindy enjoyed sex, sometimes her pleasure switched rapidly to fear if the sex got a bit wild and intense and she became close to orgasm. Because she was ashamed of her fright, instead of allowing fright to show, she unconsciously shut down at that point, stopping her pleasure. Of course this frustrated not only her, but also Thomas who felt that he could never satisfy her, which he took as personal failure. When we explored a little what Cindy is natural impulses would be in those situations, if she did not totally shut down, we discovered that she felt herself wanting to call for help, but of course she felt that she could not do that.
So we negotiated that when this came up next time while they were lovemaking, that she had permission to let herself call for help and that he would just hold her and love her with all his heart and body. They also agreed that he only would stop the lovemaking if she expressly asked him to. When they did this, she ended up tear uping in her lover is arms many times, while he soothingly murmured loving words of reassurance to her. Their sensual enjoyment and relationship improved right away, and dramatically. She was able to have quite beautiful, intense orgasms and she started truly loving sex.
The body follows the heart; when the heart is open the body opens too.
Our great mystics and spiritual experts knew this. And our most famous poets down the ages often speak of this too: how joy and rapture are entwined with longing, rage, grief and despair. {Embracing your emotions is going to improve your sex life, whether these feelings are joy, fear, bliss, rage, sadness or love}. I mean this very literally.
Allowing emotions to well up while we’re sensual is important for good love making. Of course this contradicts the perfect picture of romance and scorching sex that we have in our heads. It is especially wearying when we consider that the feelings that may come up for us could be anger, fear, grief, or other less acceptable ones. Yet there is so much erotic juice held in feelings, so much intimacy to be gained from allowing them, often especially from the ones that we try to restrain because we consider them unfit for the bedroom.
{It is this holding on to that makes sex be less then fulfilling. When we don’t allow emotions to well up in us, we go numb instead. All of a sudden, from one to moment to the next we don’t feel anything where before we were quite alive. Men and women tend to react quite differently in this situation}.
{The mistake men often make is that they know something is missing, they can feel that sense of numbness, but they don’t know why it came over them, so they go for purely physical gratification. They go for the orgasm. In the long term they might reach out for sex toys or resolve to learn some fancy new expert sex technique, or they ask their partner to go to an S’n’M club, and so on. These can all be great fun things to do but they might not give you what‘s missing.
Women for the most part react in a totally different way. When women can’t feel and go numb they are done, they just lose interest in sex. They have the proverbial headache. And so they do not get the intimacy and passion that was possible either}.
So make a little more room for your own emotions and those of your partner in your sex life. You won’t need to stop the lovemaking when something comes up. You can sob and make love. You can cry, and giggle, and enjoy pleasure all at the same time. Letting your tears flow is such a healing force. You can also feel rage and make love simultaneously. This can be quite wild and you may need to negotiate with your partner beforehand what is acceptable and what is not. More often than not, our partners have more room for our emotions than we do.
{For example, if you find yourself getting angry in the middle of making love, let your partner know and ask them if it‘s OK to go with it. don’t hurt each other. You can experience the energy of anger without hurting someone. You can growl, you can grunt, you can hiss. It can be a big turn on and a lot of fun! Enjoy it as energy and let this energy arise until it changes again. Great intimacy can be invoked if you both allow your feelings to flow freely as they come up during making love}.
{I was working with a young couple where sex hadn’t been good for some time. Through discussion it became apparent that when the lovemaking became deeper, she felt anger rising in her. She felt the urge to hit her partner, push him away, and yet still make love with him. So we negotiated that she’d have permission to do exactly that, with two conditions: she was not to hurt him in any way; and if she had the impulse to push him away he would hold her even more strongly instead, so she could feel his love}. Both of them said that their sex life had never been better from the first time they tried this.
{Ultimately it‘s the ability to surrender and to let go of control that makes for great sex. It is ok to tear up or chuckle at the same time as you are in a passionate embrace getting close to orgasm. It is ok to growl and hiss or to tremble and shiver in fear. When you are willing to let your emotions flow, like clouds passing across the sky, and you feel safe with that, you come to trust that they make for scorching, beautiful sex. These emotions are like a thunderstorm or a rain shower that washes everything clean}. Feelings can be navigated in way that they are not hurtful or traumatizing, but rather enriching and enlivening. {Let your emotions be like the weather, do not avoid them, do not seek them out, just let them come and go}.
{It‘s not only the darker feelings that we are afraid of. Many of us also fear being somehow “too much”, [too intense, ]and so what we usually suppress is missed joy, laughter, and bliss. Most of us carefully control the noises we make: we have acceptable sex noises and unacceptable ones, right? Of course it is good to be considerate of your neighbours, but whenever the circumstances allow, it is great if you can just let go}.
{If your partner is experiencing feelings welling up as you are making love, you can be supportive by letting him or her know that it is ok. Giving and receiving permission is sometimes all that is needed to relax and let love flow through}.
{The reason I call this kind of lovemaking a spiritual practice is because, like any practice, it involves developing certain muscles, certain abilities and skills over time}. In the same way that it takes a little while to get the hang of meditation, or when you’re not in shape and you start working out you don’t become strong overnight, so it is with sacred lovemaking. {It takes regular practice to become better, and eventually, an expert. In this case you are developing the muscle memory to be able to be fully aware your senses, sensitivity and intuition, emotional transparency[, an “open book”], intimate communication, and the ability to trust and surrender}. {Your sense of sacred lovemaking will grow with practice, and with time, you will enjoy not only more pleasure, passion, love, and delight, but also you’ll experience the transcendental waves of loving rapture and ecstasy}. You can open yourself to all that is sacred in life by learning to make love in this way.
