Sexercise - Tony Crisp

Play Sexual Music

See the other extracts from Sexercise

Masturbation is like making your own music. Through it you can learn to prolong actual lovemaking and avoid premature ejaculation.

These are signs of tension:

Muscular tension. This can be sensed when your partner’s body becomes more rigid, less responsive to your own movements. Sometimes it may feel as if they are resisting you or pushing you away. Sometimes this is more of a feeling than a physical reality.
Holding their breath. This is similar to muscular tension. The body is less mobile and the emotions repressed by not breathing.
Pulling back or going limp and passive. Pulling away, avoidance of meeting face to face, or the absence of any response are all forms of tension. Sometimes a person is frightened of openly expressing their need to pull away. This might be expressed as passivity.

Summary Of Sexercise 11

Choose a partner you know you can be more than casually intimate with. If you are wearing clothes choose ones that are soft and not restrictive of movement and sensitivity.
Talk over the aims of the sexercise with your partner. The aims are to practise how you relate to physical and emotional intimacy - to observe each others response - to give gentle feedback - to explore moving together and the tides of pleasure that might arise - not to move toward actual intercourse.
Stand together in a space and environment where you will not be disturbed for the period of time you decide to practise for. A suggested time is 30 to 45 minutes.
Stand face to face a little distance apart and do not rush into the contact. Take time to look at each other and notice what messages you are receiving from your partner’s face and body. If you sense any absence of ease mention this to your partner. Don’t say it in a manner such as “You are tense!” Express it as your opinion or query, perhaps by saying “I have an impression you are tense - or anxious etc. - is that so?” People are sometimes completely unaware of how they feel, so there is the possibility your partner will deny this yet continue to show signs of shyness or tension. If this is so proceed with caution and simply point out to your partner any obvious signs of their stress such as held breath, stiffness of body, turning away of face, resistance. Don’t use these observations of each other like weapons however. If you do, admit that the direction of the practise has gone astray and start again. This is no different to losing the open relaxed condition and starting again. These are habits that need further practise to correct.
When you are ready move closer and make contact, body to body. Sense how your partner responds. If there is initial tension do not at this point be in a hurry to mention it. Wait to see if being together quietly reduces any hesitation or tension. If the hesitations continue, stop and talk over what was felt in a non critical way.
Be aware of body warmth and each others breathing. Let your face touch that of your partner, and feel the quality of the skin contact. Be aware of your arms around your partner and sense what you feel from their body. Close your eyes and focus on what pleasure or feelings this brings. Let yourself relax into each others presence. If you feel this ease arise start moving the hips in the circling movement already described - the hips circling backwards and down then forward and up. As you are mirroring each other you will need to find a way of moving and breathing that is harmonious. Take your time. Remember you are only practising, so meet stumbles with a creative spirit.
As you find harmony in the movement let any pleasure arising from it flow through your whole body. Do this by melting any tensions appearing in face and pelvis, but also by being willing to experience what arises. Occasionally powerful emotions emerge. This is because pleasure and contact are a great healer and flush out old hurts or fears. If so there is no need to have any skill other than patiently being with your partner, or yourself, as the emotions empty out. Such emotions or fears are the things which stand in the way of intimacy. Their emptying enables closer contact to follow.
Let your body, emotions and voice express the tides of feeling as they rise and fall. Be quieter and slower as the excitation drops. Should either of you reach a boundary, a point beyond which you do not wish to go in the practise, this must be honoured and the session ended. If this happens sit quietly together for a while and then talk over what was felt or realised. It is not always clear why one wants to stop, so no clarity should be insisted on.
Continue until you feel satisfied you have had a meeting and a sharing in the practise. When you finish sit for a while in contact without talking. Then share any comments you would like to communicate to each other. Remember that new experiences take time to digest, so don’t let any enthusiasm or stumble be taken too seriously until days have passed and you have integrated it with your other experience.
Meditate this movement together once you finish. Do this by sitting or resting while in physical contact with each other, then see if you can recreate the feelings that arose.
Do not move on to the other sexercises until you feel at ease with this one.

Let It Flow

The previous sexercise is vital because a basic part of sex is movement - movement of a most intimate kind. The magic of sex is not only that we can share an intense form of pleasure, but we might be able to do so in a way that fulfils our own needs as well as those of our partner. So our movements need to be self satisfying and yet sensitive to our partner’s action as well. Perhaps this is why dancing has always had the connotation of sex and mutual pleasure.

But there is another important process we are trying to develop in these sexercises. The delight and tension release of love-making is partly achieved by the organs and cells throughout the body sharing the pleasure. Our cells share the work of keeping the body functioning, and they need to share pleasures too in order to maintain health. If the pleasure is only local, just in the genitals, then the satisfaction is only partial.

If the idea seems strange that our cells gain in health from feeling pleasure, remember that long before the arrival of human self awareness creatures were driven by the great power of pain or pleasure. Pain causes every type of living creature, from amoeba to mammal to draw back, to cringe. Pleasure brings about an expansive perhaps even playful state. In the condition of pain or tension, our glandular system and cells produce harmful substances which deplete the health and efficient functioning of the body as a whole. When we are feeling happy and relaxed our glands and cells produce powerfully helpful substances which promote healing and health within our body and mind. Happiness is healing. The writings of Norman Cousins about pleasure and laughter as a healing agent are now part of established thinking. So why shouldn’t sexual pleasure permeating the whole body be a prime healing power? We can all experience the fact that learning to allow love and sexual pleasure to pervade us heals physical or psychosomatic pain, and depression.

You can learn how to allow a more inclusive satisfaction to arise from sex by being aware of your pelvis and face and letting any tensions melt. Doing the movements together from the open feeling, and letting whatever pleasure arises permeate the whole body, is an excellent way of learning this more global pleasure. Often we tend to keep pleasure in just the area of its arousal. So the pleasure of food might be kept largely in the mouth, and the pleasure of genital contact kept in the area of the pelvis. Learning to drop tension in the pelvis and face is the first step in letting pleasure flow throughout our body and act as a healing immersion in joy. Daniel’s description of using this technique gives an idea of what could be experienced.

After learning about tensing and relaxing my face and rectum I realised that I had an almost permanent tension in my genital area. This was especially so during sex. I noticed I tightened and tightened the whole genital area as sexual intercourse progressed. This resulted in a sort of squeezed up, squeezed out orgasm. It was pleasurable in a very physical local way, but also sometimes incredibly painful. The pain was like being stabbed up the rectum, and occasionally I had to kneel on the floor with my behind in the air in an effort to get rid of the pain.

I persisted in learning how to let go of tension while ‘in the act’ so to speak. It took quite a while, but gradually I found that my whole pelvis felt open and responding in a way I had not experienced before. My penis is then something like a tuning fork that is being donged, and the vibrations or pleasure flow right up my body. When this happens there is no pain. In fact it has reached the point now where I feel very emotional in a joyous way and laughter bursts out of me because it is all so wonderful. I then feel very close to my wife, and have a sense of meeting her as if she were a young girl. I don’t think this is my fantasy. I think it is a part of my wife she usually hides, and I am one of the few people who can find her in this way.

In the past I used to go through the motions of being close after sex because I knew my wife needed it, but I didn’t really feel any connection. I was just empty and wanting to curl up in an isolated sort of way and go to sleep. - Daniel.

Playing Ones Own Music

There is a part of love-making that is not simply physical movement. It has to do with the way we communicate emotionally and energetically with our partner. The quality and sensitivity of our movements communicate to our partner in a non verbal way. Our own feeling depth calls an echo from our partner too, if they can respond. Exercising this area of oneself can be done in a gentle way in connection with the first two movements. After finishing the pelvic swing, for instance, I have suggested that one stand with eyes closed and create a visual and physical sense of doing the movement. The idea is to see if you can create the feeling of the movement without doing it physically. This means standing still, but imagining the movement, and creating a feeling of what happens when, for instance, the pelvis swings forwards or backwards. Although this has already been described, it is important enough to mention again in a little more detail.

In the pelvic swing for instance, there is a subtle sense of thrusting and giving while the hips swing forward, and a withdrawing as the hips swing back. So in the meditation, see if you can alternate these feelings in yourself. If you need to make the movement to feel this, do so. But drop the movement as soon as you can and make it as much of a feeling exercise as possible.

What you are learning to do in this meditation of the sexercise is to swing your inner mood or sensations from one state to another at will. Like learning the ‘open state’ in the genitals, this is of enormous importance. Our ‘natural’ way of relating to the world is to rely on an external stimulus to arouse us in some way. Our moods are often governed by events that occur, lifting us up if the event is something we enjoy, or producing a depressed state if the event is something which worries or concerns us. These mood swings or changes are rather like notes on a piano being struck. The piano simply responds and plays the sharp or flat or harmonious chord. In this sense the piano is ‘at the mercy’ of whoever plays the keys. Similarly we are usually ‘at the mercy’ of whatever events play the keys of our own inner feelings and responses. In the case of a lover or marriage partner, we may depend upon their good feelings toward us to find our own happiness. This is fine while the partner still gives us our needs, or is good enough to play harmonies on our sensitive emotions and body. But it is awful if they withdraw for any reason, or their tendency is to bash out conflict and pain on the keyboard of our body and psyche.

Learning to press our own keys and play our own music not only helps us be less dependent on others for our well-being, but when we do relate to others, it is far more enjoyable. We are less prone to being hurt by the other person’s changes. Being more in charge of our own responses also means we have some ability to direct what keys we wish to be stimulated in the relationship - not simply the ones the partner may care to play.

Although the meditations on the sexercises cannot be claimed to give us mastery over our psychic keyboard, they do bring us awareness of what the swings of mood and body feel like, and how to shift them to some degree. They DO help you to be able to shift out of a negative or frozen feeling state. They DO help you to find balance between the opposites of highs and lows, attraction and withdrawal, giving and taking, that are so powerful in your life and the life of all of us.

Playing Oneself With Skill

One of the first ways most of us learn to make love with another person is through fantasy while masturbating. If we accept that masturbation is our way of practising love-making without the difficulties that might occur when we are face to face with a ‘real’ person, we can use it creatively. The difficulties you might face while flesh to flesh with a partner can be practised while alone playing your own music.

While the practise area of masturbation isn’t going to provide a way of learning all the skills needed to become more fulfilled in love-making, it can certainly be of utmost value.

Boons Of Masturbation

There are several ‘boons’ or benefits to gained through masturbation. The first great boon is that we can do it alone without pressure of someone else's expectations about our performance. Equally important is that we are not pressurising ourselves through trying to live up to what we think or feel our partner is going to expect of us.

Secondly, masturbation is also a way of keeping oneself alive sexually, exercising ones ability to respond, to become excited and flow up the scale of pleasure. Some people suffer guilt about sexual enjoyment, and masturbation offers a way of meeting this guilt and dispersing it.

Thirdly, masturbation allows us freedom to practise and develop skills. Developing the skill of relaxing and building pleasure step by step might be difficult to learn unless one has a very skilled and understanding partner. The safe area of masturbation lets us practise skills that can be used later in a face to face relationship.

So in approaching masturbation as a learning process, it is helpful to drop cares of the day and social expectations, and consciously create an environment in which you are going to give yourself pleasure. Take time with yourself, recognising that the deeper levels of sexual experience can only surface when we relax and drop away our preoccupations with the everyday world of work and the demands of other people. It helps to imagine oneself leaving the everyday world behind by entering a special room, and gently massaging oneself with cream or oils. Massage sensitive areas away from the genitals to start with, the face and feet and thighs for instance. This is to slowly awake the fire of pleasure that you are going to blow into flame. So approach the genital massage at first only with passing caresses.

The spirit of this is wonderfully expressed in this fantasy described by Christopher. ((1))

The imagery arose spontaneously and got more specific. I watched/experienced an exquisite Japanese ritual of meeting, touch, massage, that is leading to sex. The beauty of it is in understanding how wise and artistic the whole approach is. I see the slowness and gentle touch is to lead the awareness out of being bound by everyday affairs. It diffused my concentration on particulars of external life and gradually opened my senses to feel and allow pleasure. It helped me drop fixation on externals and allowed me to drop boundaries until I sensed myself as in a semi dream state. This allowed my feelings about sex to be not just a particular thing, but something that connects my body with a huge process which I shares with all nature. My partner is then not simply a human being, but the very essence of the female principle, merging with me.

I feel myself being put in a warm pool of water like a large tiled bath. Young women come into the water with me and touch my body. It is very sensual but not directly sexual. They rub me with oils and hold me. Slowly I feel myself relaxing and drifting into a sense of floating in the pleasure.

I laugh at the way the unconscious presents imagery. It is so wonderfully versatile, sensitive, artistic, crude - a master of imagery. The laughter is because the fantasy now changes, presenting me with the view of a hot dog being fried slowly in a pan on a stall. As I watch I feel or realise this is the heating up of my sexual feeling, getting me excited, the preparation for sex seen from a different perspective.

Now I feel ready to meet the woman. I feel as if she is a queen. I understand this as meaning that any woman is a queen when we make love to her, and should be approached as such. As I accept the approach of the queen I experience a subtle buzzing which starts in the area of my genitals and fills my whole being. It is not simply a physical sensation in the sense of something vibrating my body, it is also a feeling of pleasure. It produces a sensitivity, a state that responds more excitedly to any external contact. I have a feeling that this is like being the genitalia of a plant or some natural thing in that I have the awareness of how my whole being is connected with what is happening. I am vibrating in connection with the opposite - the female. My pelvis actually vibrated and shook with this. Somehow I felt that my vibrating, my fullness with life in its sexual phase, stimulates the female, and she in her fullness stimulates my aliveness. If she is dead my aliveness gains no response and so doesn’t fully express or realise itself. I go to meet the queen alive in heart, in mind, in genitals. Christopher.

This extract is taken from The New Dream Dictionary by Tony Crisp, published by the Optima imprint of Little Brown, UK.

Christopher’s fantasy is a form of masturbation in that it was a deeply felt sexual experience occurring without any contact with another person. As can be seen, it gradually led Christopher to an acutely receptive and sexually alive state. In doing so it gave him the experience of what this was like. If that had never happened he might never have known the enormous possibilities of his own sexual excitement. He might have still believed sex was only a genital experience, something that happened below the belt, the only art of sex being physical movements, positions and staying power.

However we gain experience it is still valid and useful. So another boon of masturbation is that it can enlarge our experience. Of course what we gain without a partner will still have to be taken the next step of using it flesh to flesh. Nevertheless, if pilots can now train to fly using the virtual reality of a computer-generated flight simulator, one can learn sex from the virtual reality of a sex simulator like masturbation.

Summary of Sexercise 12 - Masturbation

Use masturbation as a source of healing pleasure and extending experience and fantasy.
Approach masturbation slowly. Drop thoughts and cares of everyday life. You can aid this process by changing clothes, or having a bath.
Undress and in a warm place rub yourself with oil or cream. Do not directly stimulate the genital area to start with. Work toward the genitals slowly, giving yourself gentle pleasure by touching and massaging your face, chest and legs. Move toward a feeling of deep relaxation in which your attention is absorbed in the physical sensations of pleasure aroused and any fantasy that connects with it.
When you reach the state of relaxation in which you have less sense of boundaries, then slowly bring yourself to orgasm while dropping unnecessary tension from face and pelvis. In this way see if you can allow the excitement to flow up into your belly and chest. If you keep your face relaxed your mouth may open spontaneously to express the pleasure. If there is any urge to do so let yourself cry our or use your voice in the excitement.

Surfing Sexual Excitement

For men the next step in masturbation is especially important in moving beyond premature ejaculation. It is also an important general help in learning to arouse and meet sexual excitement and rides its waves. The aim is to get to the edge of ejaculation and relax back without climax. By learning to do this several times you gain the ability to ride the waves of pleasure without being swept away by them. Eventually of course one eventually allows oneself to be swept along by the cresting excitation into orgasm. There is a lot to be gained by riding the waves and dropping back however. In actual contact with a partner, this experience of prolonged yet controlled excitement gives one a much longer and more satisfying sexual experience. The orgasm is then much more mutually agreed rather than something that one is pushed into by not being able to ride the physical excitement.

There are movements which I call ‘playing the guitar’ that are helpful in producing high stimulation and pleasure without the massive push to ejaculation. One may even reach an orgasm without ejaculation. To use these movements it is necessary to approach masturbation in the way already described in Sexercise 7 - that is, slowly and by touching and massaging the rest of the body first, especially the face, chest and belly. This is because the more one pleasures oneself before the major event, the less tensely sensitive and reactive one is. The sensitive edge is taken of the trigger so it doesn’t fire at the first touch. This means one can stretch pleasure and explore its many aspects. Some of the pleasures of sex lie in the extremes of slow tenderness and explosive frantic movement. The further one extends the time making love the lower the ‘hair trigger’ becomes for the man, and the longer the touching and stimulation becomes for the woman.

Therefore although ‘playing the guitar’ is principally for the man, the practise of riding the wave and dropping back is also good for a woman to learn. If you as a woman press toward your own pleasure through powerful movements too soon, you may carry your man to his climax also, and rob yourself of a more prolonged pleasure and a longer or repeated orgasm.

To practise this rising and falling of pleasure you make crossing movements on the penis instead of the traditional up and down masturbatory movements along the shaft of the penis. At first these crossing movements need to be glancing touches to take the edge off the tense pleasure that may have built up in the genitals. As you relax move the finger tips across the penis rather like strumming a guitar. Playing the fingers across the base of the penis can activate a centre of pleasure that exists just above the testicles or where they join the shaft of the penis. As you call this pleasure into action and the heightened sensitivity drops, the fingers can be moved in a deep or even rough crossways rubbing.

As you can feel your body starting to move toward ejaculation - stop! Relax. Let the pleasure subside. When it has dropped start again slowly. Play this pleasure with awareness. Mix tender movements with rough and hard action. Remember that after ejaculation the pleasure subsides, but if you can get to the edge of the volcano and dance on the rim, the pleasure goes on and on.

Summary of Sexercise 13 - Playing Genital Music

Use some small ritual like a bath or changing clothes to drop everyday thoughts and feelings.
Undress and in a warm place rub yourself with oil or cream. Do not directly stimulate the genital area to start with. Work toward the genitals slowly, giving yourself gentle pleasure by touching and massaging your face, chest and legs. Move toward a feeling of deep relaxation in which your attention is absorbed in the physical sensations of pleasure aroused and any fantasy that connects with it.
Now massage the genitals, but at first very gently to take the ‘hair trigger’ off your genital sensitivity. Keep checking to see if you are dropping tension from pelvis and genitals.
As you feel yourself relaxing and becoming less sensitive, use the ends of the fingers to ‘strum’ the base of the penis. You will have to experiment with pressure of the fingers in this strumming to find what brings pleasure but does not lead directly to ejaculation.
Play the pleasure so that it builds, but as you feel yourself getting near the point where the body goes into spontaneous ejaculation stoop and let the pleasure and your body slow down and sink to quietness. When quiet start again and build up the pleasure.
If possible play the pleasure in its mid range for some time. By mid range I mean not too near the edge of ejaculation. As sensitivity decreases you can be quite rough in movements, even grasping the penis. This expresses the explosive side of sex, and one learns to tolerate this while still being relaxed. Drop tension from the face and pelvis until it becomes habitual.
Dance on the edge of the volcano without plunging in as long as you can, coming back to relaxation. It might be that you experience an ‘energy orgasm’ without a physical orgasm. In the energy orgasm one experiences the excitement and emotion of orgasm without the physical ejaculation. If this satisfies you it is okay to stop when you are ready with culminating in ejaculation. If you need to however, move through to fulfilling your body in a full orgasmic experience.

Are You A Sexual Athlete?

There is one more sexercise to end this chapter on the pelvis. It relates directly to the hips and genitals. To understand the usefulness of this we have to remember that sex is partly an athletic event. Staying power is helped by being able to easily relax while love-making, and the ability to move into certain postures. One of the most helpful of these is being able to bend the trunk backwards. Mobility in this can be gained by sitting on ones heels on the floor, placing hands on ankles, then raising the hips so the trunk is arched and head hanging backwards. The helpfulness of this is due to the pressure it places at the base of the male penis when either of the partners incline backwards during coupling. The pressure decreases sensitivity and increases length of lovemaking for both partners. It also adds pressure and so in some phases of love-making, brings an intensification of pleasure and penetration. If relaxation during movement is used with this posture, along with spells of quiet every minute or so, it is a great aid to satisfying ones need for a long loving contact.

During sex the man moves into the posture while kneeling facing each other and coupled. The woman uses his body for her own enjoyment. If you are the female partner you can be very active and enjoy the powerful penetration this posture gives, without your man feeling he will explode too soon into ejaculation.

Summary of Sexercise 14 - Bending The Branch

Sex has more creative variations if your body is flexible. Backward flexibility enables you to use a posture that is helpful in increasing length of sex and penetration.
On a carpeted or padded floor kneel down with knees and feet together. With your trunk in the upright position lean to one side and slightly backwards to place your right hand on the right ankle. With this support lean back wards a little further and place the left hand on the left ankle. If this is not possible see description of alternative below.**
As your body adapts to the posture let your head slowly drop backwards while you take the full weight of your trunk with your arms and hands on ankles. Let your pelvis push slightly forward and up. In other words the pelvis moves slightly in the direction the knees are pointing, and the spine curves a little more.
Let your breathing come as it will, and hold the posture for as long as is comfortable.
A variation of this posture is to kneel with the feet and knees slightly apart but with the toes towards the other foot and touching. This forms a sort of cradle into which you sit. Then support yourself with your hands on the floor behind you as you lean backwards. From that position you can either raise the hips up and forward with head back - or lower your trunk backwards to the floor. Obviously this supposes you are reasonably flexible. But even if you are not, regular practise of leaning back to the point where pain begins, and holding the posture for a while, will soon enable you to go fully back.
When you are comfortable for a reasonable time in any of these postures you can use them during love making. They can be used in various ways. For extending male staying power the man should be the one to lean backwards while the woman moves as she wishes on his extended branch.
The woman can use any of these posture to enjoy the variety of pleasure arising from different sorts of body contact. The posture of taking the spine right back over the cradle of ones feet is very useful for raising the hips and so giving greater penetration and pleasure. It also gives the ability to lift the hips even further at any time.
** If these postures are difficult an alternative way of mobilising your spine is to practise a similar position with the help of a partner. To do this posture/movement you need to stand on a surface which is not slippery. If necessary remove socks or stocking. Ideally it is done either with bare feet on a non slippery surface, or with trainers which have a good surface grip.
Stand facing each other with hands clasped in a firm grip. The person who is supporting you - the helper - stands with one foot placed between your own parted feet, which are about shoulder width apart. The helper’s other foot is placed back so he or she can lean back onto that foot to take your weight.
You now drop your head backwards and allow your pelvis to move forwards slightly so you lean backwards supported by your helper’s hands. Do not do this suddenly. Move into it slowly to feel how far back you can go comfortably. DO NOT SIMPLY LEAN BACKWARDS WITHOUT BENDING YOUR PELVIS FORWARD. If you do your body weight will pull your helper on top of you heavily.
When you are ready to come out of this backwards bend, squeeze your partner’s hands as a signal and let him or her slowly pull you into an upright position.
As you get the feel of this posture it is wonderful to do with as much upper body relaxation as possible, especially as your helper pulls you up. Keep your eyes closed and relax for a while when you are up, to let yourself absorb the wonderful feeling this posture gives. If you are supple and let your pelvis swing forward and legs ‘strong’ rather than limp, you can easily go right back so your head touches the floor. Coming up from this far back is a wonderful feeling as long as YOU DO NOT TRY TO PULL YOURSELF UP. You must let your partner pull you up. Otherwise your leg strength will pull your helper flying over onto you.

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