Sexercise - Tony Crisp

Sex and Tiredness

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I have been assured, many times, by well-meaning men and women, that ejaculation can never result in tiredness. These well-meaning people have also assured me that if there is any resulting tiredness it is purely psychological, and that to deal with such tiredness or exhaustion one would need to explore it in a psychotherapeutic setting.

My present response to such statements is a gentle smile. Since the very beginning of my sexual activity at the age of eleven, I have experienced tiredness, or even exhaustion, after ejaculation. The tiredness was sometimes so extreme that it blighted my otherwise wonderfully pleasant sexual experience. It led me to avoid a sexual relationship with my wife or partner, and this had extremely negative consequences in the relationship. It also led to years of misery and a sense of inadequacy as a male. So I explored every avenue I could to deal with the problem.

One of these avenues was indeed psychotherapy. I did not explore this tentatively. My problem caused me so much misery I threw myself with abandon into attempting a cure. I plumbed my depths using a variety of approaches. Other problems, such as those arising from infant trauma at birth, difficulties in the relationship with my mother and father, were uncovered and dealt with. But dig as I might, I could never find a psychological basis for the tiredness following ejaculation.

Sex is energy

I did in fact discover feelings of guilt regarding masturbation that were planted with great energy by my mother. But these were gradually dealt with and disappeared. That confrontation by my mother occurred to me at age thirteen. Yet I clearly remember from the very first time I masturbated at eleven, an event showing the physiological result of ejaculation. The tiredness usually takes some hours after ejaculation to arise, no matter how thrilling, full, or otherwise the sexual experience might be. In that early memory, some hours after masturbation I ran to catch a bus. London buses in those days had an open platform at the end that you could run and jump onto. As I ran to jump onto the platform I realised it was really difficult to move my limbs because I felt so tired. Subsequent experiences strengthened the connection in my mind between such episodes of tiredness and ejaculation.

Another factor adds to my viewpoint of such tiredness being physiological rather than psychological. I have always been a very active person physically and psychologically. I love exercise and being fit. Even in my middle sixties I still have a strong muscular body. But throughout my life I have suffered from lack of energy - tiredness. It has always seemed to me that my premature birth has something to do with that. I have no proof of this, but comparing myself with other people I feel as if my body wasn't quite fully formed, and my metabolism is never quite as efficient as it might be. But that is only a guess. What I have observed as a fact though, is that for most of my life I have had to manage my energy like a bank balance. I had to be careful of my expenditure because my balance is so low I easily tipped over into the red. My observation with other people is that they can expend enormous amounts of energy and not tip over into the red. They can stay up late, eat food that is real junk, drink alcohol and get drunk again and again, depleting the resources of their body to deal with the poison, have sex every night, and so on. If I do a portion of that my immune system crashes and I plunge into an infection. But I guess there are many people like myself who have to nurse their energy levels to live a normal life.

What I am leading to is that when my bank balance of energy is very high, I can experience ejaculation and have no following exhaustion. But if my balance is low, exhaustion will follow ejaculation. It throws me right over into the red.

The ‘Bank Balance’ of love making

This leads me to conclude that ejaculation actually involves a large expenditure of energy. If you have a high 'bank balance' of energy, this is like somebody with a lot of money who can spend easily without going into the red and facing problems climbing back into credit again. But if, like myself, you are a low energy person, then orgasm - or to be more precise - ejaculation, leads to some level of tiredness. This is physiological, although it might be made worse by psychological elements also.

Something that is very strange about this is that the mention of tiredness after sex seems to be almost taboo. Whenever I mention it in conversation, as I do where it is relevant, because it has been such an important factor in my life, people maintain with great energy that it is purely psychological. Looking in many sexual handbooks I cannot even find a mention of tiredness in the index or text. Try it for yourself. Do a search on the Internet. If you search for something like vitamins to enhance sexual performance, you will find a whole list of sites to link with. If you put in the words tiredness after sex, you will be lucky if you get four or five sites listed.

It is also strange that I can often observe some males who have assured me they never feel tired after sex, sleeping for most of the next day after they have spent time with a sexual partner. What is the problem here? Why is it such a forbidden thing to mention? Why does everybody try to assure me it is psychological? Is there some fear attached to this?

Any study of wild animals in relationship to their mating habits, shows that some of them die after the mating season because it has been such an enormous expenditure of their resources. Sometimes I wonder if the great pressure underlying advertising and the sale of books on sexuality, stating that sex is nothing but glory and leads to an enhancement of ones being, arises because there is so much profit to be made in that market. Sex is often problematic. It has social, emotional, economic and health factors that can lead to difficulties. If this were not so relationships would be much easier and less fraught.

Eastern teachings on sexual harmony

However, before you read on, I must say that I am mentioning these things because I found a way through the problem, and I want to express the many aspects of the situation before I come to the point of sharing the solution I found. My reason being that there is so little written about this subject and I wish to explore it with you.

If you have been researching this area of tiredness after sex for any length of time, you will probably have encountered ideas arising from esoteric Chinese beliefs, yoga disciplines such as Tantric practices, and other ideas about the subtle energies within human beings. My experience of these teachings is that they can be highly exaggerated, strangely mysterious, or downright misleading. However, within some of them there are pointers of real practical help.

Of course, some of these comments apply to the thousands of straightforward books about sex. Perhaps one of the most misleading approaches to sex is presenting it as the be all and end all of life. Again and again it is suggested that if only you could do it all correctly, or had a large enough penis, you would have a majestic relationship and have achieved spiritual enlightenment. This goal orienting, this dangling of carrots, is a great snare that you may become entangled in.

Yes, I do now experience wonderful orgasms without tiredness. But I experience similar wonderful feelings while walking in my garden, seeing wild animals, or achieving something I have been working toward. Looking upon sex as a means toward final life happiness is as much of an illusion as thinking that having a certain amount of money, achieving fame, or getting a good pass in your studies, will resolve all your pains and life difficulties. Like every other aspect of life, sex can be a great pleasure or a great misery. But it is not something to hang your hopes of happiness on.

What the eastern teachings do state clearly again and again however, is that sexual activity and especially ejaculation uses energy and can be depleting. They describe sexual activity as one way of expressing the potential that lies at your core. A way of picturing this is to think of your psychobiological energy as building up, rather as it might in a battery. But it is better to think of it as a wave rolling in toward the shore. But in this case it is more like waves depicted when showing sound or radio waves. The wave builds up its crest, and then the wave discharges its power and is flattened. In a sense, the energy is grounded, rather like it is when lightning flashes. With sexual energy the grounding or discharge that happens in ejaculation can become the basis of another physical life form – a baby.

The wave theory of sex

What the eastern teachings suggest is that the energy should not be grounded or discharged. It should be lifted up to its peak, and then, instead of discharge it can be held there and pushed higher. If this can be achieved we burst into a new dimension of experience and expression. In the natural course of life, if your energy is left to do its own thing, it will usually build up its wave height, and then discharge in some way. The natural processes in you attempt this because one of your main drives is reproduction. But just as we have learned to understand natural processes such as electrical discharge, and use them for our own purposes, such as light and heat, so also the natural flow of psychobiological energy can be used in a way to leap beyond its habitual course.

Remember that your psychobiological energy expresses in many different ways. It can express as motor energy in muscular movement; it expresses all the time as the self-regulating processes of regeneration and repair in your body. It expresses as the urges you feel, to eat and breathe, to make love and to communicate. It is the energy behind your emotions, you're thinking, speaking, and behind the higher functions of creativity and inspiration. What the eastern teachings say, and I believe rightly so, is that if this psychobiological energy is redirected in the right way, then it can lead to what in the east is called Liberation or Enlightenment. What this means is that you arrive at an enormous synthesising of your whole life experience, and understanding beyond rationalisation, in which you know your essential self.

But perhaps the most important thing to recognise here in regard to this energy and the subject of sexual tiredness is that the psychobiological energy is the way that Life itself expresses. It is the energy that forms and maintains your body. Of course you could call it a process rather than energy. But it is still a process that moves, that directs, that effects change. So bear with me if I use the word energy. It is also the energy lying behind emotion, thinking, fantasy, dreaming, and the whole realm of experience we call self.

This is important to recognise. The reason being that if your energy is grounded, or discharged time after time, there is less chance of it building up to flow into different forms of mental and emotional activity. As Freud so rightly pointed out, frustrated or repressed sexual energy can easily become neurosis. It is the energy of life and flows into mental and emotional experiences that seem completely real, completely absorbing. So if you take the path I suggest that enables you to achieve an orgasm without ejaculation, you must understand that it will challenge you in certain ways.

Greater energy will heal and unveil weaknesses

I needed to be specific about this to help you clearly understand the situation. If an enormous amount of energy is passed through any machine or circuit, the weak parts will be revealed in some way. In the human being the build up of psychobiological energy actually attempts a revitalisation and harmonising of mind and body. But in doing so it pushes toward consciousness the problems, such as childhood trauma, limiting ideas and concepts or beliefs, and physical problems, that stand in the way of that revitalisation. It doesn’t simply wipe them away. It pushes them into your awareness, into your life experience. Previously they were unconscious and buried within you prior to the energy buildup. There is usually resistance toward meeting such feelings or problems. And if they are not met and dealt with, the energy might flow into the craziest of fantasies or beliefs.

There is a simple way of dealing with that possibility. It is to remember that the energy or process behind your existence is life itself. As such it is enormously creative. It has in it the power of life and death. Every possible experience that human beings speak of arise out of it. There is nothing other than the process of life. Everything relates to it. Therefore you, as an expression of that Life, are also incredibly creative. With the energy of your Life you can create a heaven or hell in your own experience. You can create a sense of God or the devil, angels or demons, and death pits or exuberant life. So as long as you remember that whatever you meet is a projection, a manifestation, of your own creativity, and you own it as such, you will be able to handle the enormously increased potential arising from the following practices.

It must be understood that the things I am about to describe are principally for the male. However, some of what has already been said, and some of what will be described, can be useful for a female to use and understand.

Don’t spill your wonderful life energy

The natural inclination in sexual orgasm has been described as a wave that presses mightily toward discharge. There is a tremendous urge toward ejaculation in the male, and in the female a discharge of lubricating fluid and other excretions. In the male, every natural urge is toward planting his seeds, or laying his eggs. In the woman there are similar urges, but toward wanting the male inside her and urging him to fertilise her. Obviously, for personal reasons, these urges are often frustrated in one way or another to avoid pregnancy and its consequences, or because of psychological distortions.

It is very important to understand these natural urges in yourself. If you are to succeed in moving from the misery of exhaustion after sex, you have to learn to work with these waves of energy within yourself, and not to be in conflict with them. What you will learn is not massive control, but the gradual development of a new possibility in your experience of sexuality. In fact you will learn to gradually lead the drive to plant your seeds - the cresting wave - up into your being as heightened feelings, instead of it spilling out of your body in the discharged wave. You will do this by learning to masturbate in a new way.

So, to start with, recall to memory the times and the experience of ejaculation. Remember those moments when your body reaches the cresting wave, like going past a point of balance, and dropping into full of ejaculation. It is that point, that balance, that we have to work with. The urge to go past that point of balance is intense and natural, but that does not mean it cannot be changed. Evolution in humans and animals only occurs because there are almost unlimited possibilities of change and development. This means that although it is natural for you to fall over the edge into its activation, this can be changed. It is a part of the possibilities you hold within yourself.

One of the things that getting near to that point of balance without tipping over into ejaculation causes, is massive fantasy. This arises anyway as sexual energy rises in its cresting wave, but it is stronger when you get right up to the crest. The fantasy takes hold of your mind and emotions and makes almost any woman appear wonderfully attractive. It makes attractive women appear like angels, angels you must make love to. If there are psychological distortions however, the desire to love turns to aggression.

The learning experience of masturbation

The change that you can bring about is that instead of toppling over the edge into ejaculation, the energy that produces ejaculation and such fantasies is redirected into an internal and heightened experience of orgasm without ejaculation. This is done by what I call playing on the edge. I sometimes think of it as dancing on the rim of the volcano without falling in. This is done by using masturbation as a practising of the new approach. Personally, I don't think this is worth trying with a partner to start with, only once you have learned to master it through masturbation.

The practice is as follows:

1) You need time alone during which you will not be disturbed. This can be anywhere in which you feel secure and can relax.

2) Before you even start you must learn to relax. Relaxation is a key feature of transforming your sexual impulse. Without relaxation the experience of sex remains genital, and it is difficult for it to transform into non-ejaculative orgasm. Rather than attempt to teach relaxation here, and make this feature very wordy, I suggest you inquire into relaxation elsewhere. See:

3) So, in a relaxed state, touch your body - not genitals yet - slowly and gently. The aim is to gradually awaken the pleasurable feelings in yourself and to relax you further. If you enjoy cream or oil being rubbed on your body, do this to yourself and slowly move to touching your genitals. It doesn't matter in the least if no erection occurs. It is an exercise in slowness, relaxation, and the development of pleasure.

4) Make slow movements across the penis rather than up and down. I call this "playing the guitar". It can excite the sexual pleasure without leading directly to ejaculation. Gradually make this movement more intense. Use the tips of your fingers to press hard at the root of the penis, still crossways. One of the things you are aiming at is to reduce sensitivity, and this rough handling can help to do this. It thereby enables a much fuller contact with your partner before any process of ejaculation occurs.

5) Now you are reaching the point of the exercise. Slowly make the movements more intense. Do this until you begin to get near to that point of balance, the crest of the wave, that leads to ejaculation. There will be an intense urge to complete the process, and thus ejaculate. But before you get to that point, stop, relax, let the whole urgency of genital feelings gradually melt and slow down.

6) When your being has pulled back from that crest, start again. Move toward the crest of the wave once more and draw back. Do this three times. And DO NOT take the process to the point of ejaculation. When you are with your partner and get near the edge, pause, relax until the urgency subsides. Perhaps there will even be a lessening in your erection. This is okay. Slowly resume your love making. Each time you drop back from the crest your ability to express full movement, and to experience powerful pleasure and ecstasy will increase.

7) There is a difficult point here that you must gradually learn. As already stressed, every urge in you will push you toward ejaculation. Of course there is a certain satisfaction in the ejaculation. But there is also a satisfaction in heightened feelings of pleasure. So what you are trying to do with this practice of dancing on the edge is to gain great satisfaction without falling into the volcano. This can only be done if you learn to gradually relax more and more until the excitation in your body can express very fully. I need to be specific about this so you will understand what is meant.

Relaxation is a major key

If you cannot let your body's excitation lead to spontaneous movement, spontaneous sound or moans, then you still have had a lot to learn about relaxation. Relaxation means freedom. It is the freedom to move, to cry out; and especially the freedom to feel extraordinary depths of emotion, fantasy or inner experience. This freedom is a key factor. Without it you will not reach the enhanced sexual orgasmic experience that is possible through non-ejaculation. All that will happen is that you will feel frustrated because ejaculation has not taken place, and there has been nothing else to satisfy you.

The practice of non-ejaculative masturbation, dancing on the edge as I have called it, will take some time to become accustomed to. Don't forget that your body is gradually learning a new skill. Give it time. Do not be discouraged by failure. Even when you have learned the process well, there will still be times when your body actually needs to ejaculate. You will know when this skill is being learned because sometimes you will reach great pleasure without ejaculating, and you will feel satisfied afterwards.

You must remember however that you have frustrated one of the most urgent drives in nature - the drive to procreate and to do that by planting your seeds. Therefore, afterwards, your sexual feelings will be heightened. Your erections do not disappear simply because you have experienced orgasm. When you apply this to your partner, even when she is satisfied, your erections will still be maintained.

In fact, I believe some cases of inability to attain an erection, are due to unacknowledged depletion from too frequent sexual activity with ejaculation. Erection returns once the frequency of ejaculation is lessened.

Dancing on the edge of the volcano

As you practice this non-ejaculative masturbation and learn to draw back from the edge and relax, a turning point occurs. Your sensitivity decreases in terms of the urge to ejaculate. Gradually you go right over the edge without ejaculation. In other words you move beyond ejaculation into enormous orgasmic feelings that flow right through your body. In fact this is an important point because, through your relaxation, you need to learn to allow the pleasure to flow up your body rather than out of your penis. If you are blocking this through tension, or by not allowing your body and feelings free expression, this point of transition cannot occur. But when it does, it is an extraordinary experience. You are them ready to begin to enjoy that freedom with a partner.

Do not be upset if you cannot immediately transform your ability in masturbation to non-ejaculative orgasm with your partner. Be patient with yourself. Also, help your partner to understand your need to stop and relax at certain points. If you have a partner who frantically wishes to push on with powerful movements at the point that you need to slow down, then you will simply be frustrated in your efforts to experience this new pleasure with each other. If you can work together however, then your partner can also move on to full enjoyment of multiple orgasms without your needing ejaculation. This is because after a certain point you can completely allow your own full movements, and the movements of your partner. In fact tremendous joy comes from being able to move on and on without tipping over the edge.

Now I find that I can have more orgasms than my partners, because they are still experiencing their own form of ejaculation.

I have kept the instructions simple. Remember that it takes time to learn. Give yourself that time. Practice until you can get to the edge and draw back again and again. When you can manage that together with your partner you will have a completely new sense of yourself, and an open doorway to a new experience of life.

Tony's in print Books in the UK or USA

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