Sexercise - Tony Crisp

Chapter Two

During my life I have experienced so much anguish and emotional pain in connection with sexual relationship, and have found so much healing, I wanted to write about things I have learned.

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See the other extracts from Sexercise

Sexercise is still being written, still a few chapters to finish. Meanwhile here is an extract.

See the other extracts from Sexercise

As an example of a simple sexercise, whatever position or situation you are reading this book in, take your attention to your rectum and genitals. Notice in general what you are feeling, what the sensation is in that area. Now gently tense the area. I mean by this the sort of tension you create when you badly want to go to the toilet, but are holding back the impulse. Notice how the tension involves other parts of your body and feelings than those directly concentrated on. The abdomen and even the face may change. You may even breathe more shallowly.

After a few moments slowly let the tension drop. Let it melt not only from the rectum and genitals, but also from the face and abdomen. Let the way it influenced your breathing melt also as you drop the tension. In fact let the feeling of ease pervade your whole body. Do this several times until you get a clear sense of the tension and the melting open feeling.

Having done this a few times, if you have opportunity to move, even if it is only your head, make the movement while still allowing the feeling of melting tension to take place. Notice whether the pelvic area tenses again to make the movement, or whether you can let the movement flow out of the feeling of gentle pleasure in the pelvis. If tension creeps in as you move, stop, melt the tension, and start again. Replay it over and over until you can move freely without tensing the genital area.

If you have never tried this before, it is likely that without realising it, before you consciously tensed the area, there was already a tension occurring in the pelvis. In most cases this is reasonably slight, but sometimes there is a powerful habitual tension operating unconsciously. By tensing the area and melting the tension you started to become aware of the tightness, and to melt it.

This simple process of tensing and relaxing the rectum and genitals, and learning to express from the open condition rather than tension, can produce very profound changes in the way we experience sexual contact, and in the way we meet people. This basic sexercise makes it very clear that if we cannot easily move without tensing our genitals and face, any sexual activity, because it involves movement, and movement in relationship with another person, will be inhibited in the depth of its pleasure and spontaneity.

Summary of Sexercise 6 - Melting Tension

- Focus awareness on your genital and rectal area. Gently tense the area to create the sort of feeling one might have when holding back from going to the toilet.

- This can be practised in almost any position or situation in which you can take time to give awareness to your body and its sensations. It will help also if you close your eyes.

- As the tension is held notice how the other parts of the body such as the abdomen, breathing and face react. You may breathe more shallowly for instance, or some degree of tension occur in the face.

- Now slowly let the tension melt. As you do so again notice how the body sensations and tensions shift. Let the feeling of melting tension also permeate the whole trunk and face. Even after the feeling of melting tension diminishes let the open melting feeling remain.

- Repeat the tensing and melting several times slowly. It might be that you realise you have fairly persistent tensions in the pelvis. So repeat the tensing and melting until you can feel a definite difference between the two, and until there is a diminishing of any residual tension.

- Only when you have reached this stage try melting tension in the pelvis and then slowly move some part of your body such as your head or arm. As you do so focus awareness on the genitals and rectum to observe whether tension immediately arises again. If it does, stop the movement, allow the tension to melt and slowly start the movement again. Tensions are often the result of habits, so repetition is important to develop a new habit. New habits take time to learn.

- If you can make a slow movement without the tension reappearing, explore everyday movements such as standing and walking. The aim is to be able to move without the tension - which is a sign of some degree of physical and emotional anxiety or stress reaction - returning.

- Once you have the skill to move and remain relaxed, take this out into everyday life. Drop tension while walking along the street or when talking to someone. You will notice that your posture then changes, expressing a sense of relaxed energy. You will stand straighter, and meet others with more radiance. It doesn't matter if you lose balance once in a while and find tension creeping in. Take your awareness over your pelvis and face again and let the melting feeling spread once more.

- Using the melting of tension while in everyday situations is enormously important. Lots of people can feel at peace away from 'the world' or while not face to face in a relationship. To do the same on the street or in bed skin to skin is a skill of great value. Later we will take the sexercise into the loving meeting and discover its power.

- This sexercise is so important it is worth observing how the genitals and rectum react to normal social activities like meeting someone, working or watching the television. If you continue to melt tension in the pelvis fairly often during the day for a couple of weeks it becomes a habit for your attention to flick over your body checking every so often. The result is that you learn to remain more deeply relaxed in fairly challenging situations.

- Do not move on to the other sexercises until this one is easy and reasonably habitual.

This first sexercise can also transform your internal sense of well being from one permeated by habitual tensions, to one where a feeling of easy pleasure spills over into the way you move and meet others. Because it is so simple and yet so important I will take time to explain how it works.

First of all we have to remember that our body and mind are not two widely separated things. The way we feel as a person, the wealth or poverty of emotion and creativity with which we respond to people and events, is deeply linked with what is happening in our body. Of course the opposite is true also - what we build in our mind and feelings influences the health and well being of the body. So the pelvis - as are the other parts of the body - is a very real part of our personality and a faculty through which we sense the world.

If we look at what happened to Jean this becomes clear. As a child she grew up with parents who were very controlling and tight people. One of the ways they managed to feel secure and deal with their anxieties was to have a very black and white moral code. Jean was thus taught that sexual pleasure was evil, something that was in some unspoken way bad. When her developing sexual feelings started pushing for attention during adolescence, Jean learnt to control and suppress them by tensing the muscles in her vagina, abdomen and thighs. Despite this she secretly desired a lover, so would fantasy meeting a dominating man who would force her to have sex with him, even if this included a low level of violence. In this way she could enjoy sexual feelings without feeling guilty - after all, she had been forced.

The muscular tensions in Jean's vagina and thighs had not been consciously developed into habits. Jean was not aware of them. But what they did was to prevent her natural warm sexual feelings from emerging and leading Jean through the personality changes that usually arise from maturing sexually. Jean did not therefore develop a positive sense of herself as a woman, and was not warmly sociable or able to deal confidently with other people. She attended a group however, that helped her recognise the tensions and release them. The result was that the sort of physical movements and feelings she had been suppressing were able to emerge, leading her to easier sexuality and sociability.

So, because movements express our feelings, as is obvious when we laugh or cry, withholding such movements unconsciously through tension inhibits our self expression, and therefore prevents the full expression and growth of our personality. This in turn means we do not see and respond to the world around us as fully as we might.

Padlocking Our Love

In quite a real sense tension in any part of the body can have the same sort of effect it had on Jean. It can be like putting a padlock on a part of our personality so that it cannot open and function properly. Imagine putting a padlock on our love and sexuality at the age of twelve, and not taking it off! The changes from inexperienced youth to mature woman or man could not fully take place. The developing sensitivity and confidence that enables us to relate fully to the opposite sex and other mature people is missing in some degree. Missing also is the depth of insight into what people feel when in love, or when caring for their children, or when being highly creative, We might have read how to make the movements of love, but the deeply felt emotions and drives that make it a deep meeting with another person might still be under the lock and key of tension.

Some Eastern cultures depict the personality in a graphic way, and place a lotus flower on parts of the body. Each lotus is said to be a sense organ through which we see the world in a particular way. The flowers in the area of the pelvis represented the healthy sexual energy as a sense organ. Certainly it is worth remembering that if we have failed to experience the feelings of tenderness and passion in connection with the reproductive organs in our pelvis, or if these organs were damaged before maturity, we would also fail to have any understanding of what two people are doing when they kiss, or what parents feel when holding their baby. The organs of the pelvis are therefore sense organs. In this sense - the potential of the healthy functioning of our body leading to fuller awareness of oneself and others - your body is also intimately linked with your personality.

Melting Intimacy

The first sexercise is a key to start opening the padlock that may be holding back your ability to express feelings of intimacy. One of the most important aspects of relationship is the subtle feelings that occur in us as we met and interact with another person. For some years I ran workshops called 'Contact'. The aim was to sit with another person and honestly give feedback about what was happening in yourself as you met and related to the person opposite you. What I saw time after time was that as subtle feelings such as shyness, disinterest or anxiety were recognised and admitted, they melted and one felt an enormous shift in the contact and intimacy with the person. A way of using this will be described later, but I mention it here because the dropping of tension in the way dealt with in Sexercise 1 starts this process of being able to meet someone more fully and discovering an enormous shift in the way you relate to people and opportunity.

Something else that occurs as one practises the technique is that one develops the skill of self-observation. I mean by this that by monitoring whether ones pelvis and face are tense or relaxed, you are learning to observe things in yourself that may never have gained attention before. This can slowly bring about enormous changes in oneself as the underlying causes of tension and anxiety in a relationship may be observed as the tension is melted. In fact Sexercise 1 can be carried forward in a way that moves into deeper intimacy and self-observation. But before it can be used in that way other things need to be learnt. These will be looked at now.

Love Making The Natural Way

Movement is not only exercise, it is also the way we express ourselves. If we are unimaginative we might see the pelvis as simply a bony bowl-shaped container for our abdominal organs, and an anchor for over fourteen muscles. It is the one part of our skeleton which is furthest removed from animals, and women are more human than men in the radical shape of their pelvis. If we see pelvic movements as only a matter of muscles, bones and viscera, we miss much of its mystery. We might in fact miss finding one of the secret places of the body.

When animals make love, the movements they make are a spontaneous expression of their own inner feelings and urges. They are not the result of reading about the right position and optimum performance in a do-it-yourself sex handbook. In a real sense the life process is making love through them, just as our own life process breathes us. As humans we have the ability to interfere with such natural movements. We can hold our breath for no other reason than we want to. Or we can add our own values and judgements to our natural drives by accepting or rejecting them. Frequently, because the subtle sexual drives are more easily restrained than our breathing, our life style or attitudes lead us to frustrate the spontaneous pelvic movements necessary for pleasure and release.

The spontaneous movements which can accompany love-making arise out of our feelings and physiological drives. The muscles express these movements. If we restrain our innate drive to make such movements, muscular tension can arise. Because the urge to breathe is very pronounced, if we hold our breath the tension is felt very quickly. But with pelvic tension the build up is slower. Lower back pain is one of the signs of the slower build-up of tension in the pelvis, or elsewhere. Tension and the lack of mobility in the pelvic area can also cause the flowing pleasure and release of love-making to be diminished. What could be a melting pleasure and tenderness throughout the whole body, becomes just a local genital sensation without accompanying emotional pleasure. The flowing feelings of bonding and care, apparent even in animals, do not emerge. The sense of going beyond the boundaries of your own personality and touching a wider experience of life does not arise. There is a crude but potent description of this meeting of bodies only. It is called a 'no handed wank.'

Having taught people these sexercises for many years, I have seen that when the tensions in the pelvis are actually released, a subtle but physically apparent vibration frequently occurs in the pelvis and moves up the trunk. This is most often experienced while relaxing, during a deeply felt contact with another person, whether sexual or otherwise, or while waking from sleep. So conversely, if you have not experienced this vibratory and healing flow, there is probably residual tension in your pelvis. This flowing energy or release appears to be linked with deep inner feelings and perception. Perhaps a sense of merging with ones partner.

Move The Hips - Shake It On Out

Moving our hips can shift such tensions, aid lower back pain, and certainly increase our mobility in love making. Not only that, but one feels good afterwards. The most directly helpful movement is to stand with feet about shoulder width apart and swing the pelvis backwards slightly, hollowing the lower back. Let the knees bend and the behind go backwards as if you are going to sit down. As the trunk begins to tilt forwards start pushing the pelvis forward while slowly straightening the knees. This brings you back to an upright position. Now start the 'sit down' movement again so the backwards and forwards swing of the pelvis becomes a flowing circle. It expresses the swinging pelvic movement occurring in spontaneous sexuality. If you have tension or stiffness in the pelvis and lower back the movement will be jerky or difficult to start with. Practise will gradually loosen the area though.

Things to watch for are whether the pelvis actually swings, and whether the forwards and backwards push get stuck at any point. If the pelvis is swinging the lower back will hollow and straighten; and if there is adequate forwards and backwards push the trunk will incline slightly backwards and forwards also. For instance, if you are pushing the hips forward and the trunk is in an upright position rather than inclined slightly backwards, you are restrained on the forward push. If you are in the backward swing and your trunk is not slightly inclined forwards, then you are restrained on pulling back. The vital factor, however, is whether the pelvis will swing backwards and forwards. To test this after you have become reasonably fluid in the movement, stand with your back against a wall, and place a hand in the small - or hollow - of your back. Lean back against the wall and while keeping contact between the wall, your hand, and the small of your back, swing the pelvis forward and backward. This will require some movement in the knees, but your back and even your head, should remain against the wall as the pelvis swings away for an inch or so. Swing the pelvis backwards and forwards in this way to see what sort of flexibility you have in the lower spine.

When you have finished the movement stand with eyes closed and imagine yourself doing it. I call this 'meditating the movement'. The aim is to recreate the feeling or sensation of the movement without doing it physically. So with this movement see if you can create the sensation or inner feeling of the pelvis pulling backwards and down, and then forwards and up. If this is difficult do the movement again and notice how different it feels to thrust the pelvis forward, than it does in pulling it backwards. The forward and backwards feelings are two very different aspects of how we express ourselves sexually. We may be stuck in a pulling back feeling, and our body may express this with a retracted pelvis. Or we may be locked in a thrusting forward feeling and posture, with a slightly hollow chest. The meditation helps find balance between these opposites.

Summary Of Sexercise 7 - Hip Circling

- If you are wearing clothes when doing this sexercise, make sure they are loose and comfortable. The environment needs to be one in which you can feel relaxed and have space to move in and feel good. Pleasant but non-demanding music in the background may help with the atmosphere. But make sure it isn't the type that grabs the body to make it move to a particular rhythm.

- Stand in your open space with feet about shoulder width apart. Check over your pelvis and face to drop unnecessary tension.

- Swing the pelvis backwards as if you are going to sit down. This should cause the knees to bend slightly and your trunk to tilt forwards. Now start to push the pelvis forward and upwards, trying to make it a flowing movement. As this happens the legs straighten and the head and trunk move to a position of leaning slightly backwards when the pelvis is in its most forward position. When the movement is liquid this causes a wave-like flow up the spine.

- You are now at the upright position, so continue this into the sitting down position and follow through again into pushing the pelvis forward. The aim is to keep the hips circling, with the trunk loose enough to flow with the movement. It may help to imagine a circle and move the pelvis around the circle.

- If your lower back or pelvis is stiff or the movements hurt, start gently and continue until the movement gradually massages the pain or stiffness. Do not be afraid of some discomfort.

- If the pelvis is swinging properly the lower back will be slightly hollow as the pelvis is pulled back, and this will change to a slightly convex shape as the pelvis pushes forward. Test this by standing with your back against a wall, and place a hand in the small - or hollow - of your back. Lean back against the wall and while keeping contact between the wall, your hand, and the small of your back, swing the pelvis forward and backward. This will require some movement in the knees, but your back and even your head, should remain against the wall as the pelvis swings away for an inch or so. Swing the pelvis backwards and forwards in this way to see what sort of flexibility you have in the lower spine.

- In this movement if the trunk is not held rigidly the rib cage contracts as the pelvis swings forward, and expands as it swings backwards. Therefore the breath cycle is to inhale as the pelvis swings backwards. Exhale as the pelvis swings forwards.

- Continue the movement for about five minutes - or longer if you are enjoying it.

- Meditate the movement.

- Do not move on to the other sexercises until this one is easy and reasonably habitual.

Pain - Pain - Go Away

If you can barely move the pelvis forward, gently continue trying to swing the hips to start the body becoming more flexible. The body is a living and responsive thing, so even if there is very little ability to move the lower spine, or if you have injured this area at some time, continuing with the practise gradually leads to improvement. If this causes pain, keep moving to the boundary of the pain. Gradually the boundary retreats as the body responds and become healthier and more flexible. The pain may simply arise because this part of your body has not been moved sufficiently to keep it mobile.

On the other hand, as you get the movement flowing, if there are any feelings of pleasure generated, let them suffuse the body.

The Whirlpool

Another helpful movement that can be done with or without a partner is 'the whirlpool'. It is a movement that also relates to the mobilisation of the pelvis.

The easiest way to do this is to stand with feet about shoulder width apart, then imagine you are moving your hips around the inside of a large barrel, or that you are waist deep in a whirlpool that is swinging your hips in a circle. Keep the head floating reasonably steady. This is not quite as specific as the first movement, but still causes the pelvis to swing, and limbers-up the spine also. Whatever direction the whirlpool takes you, don't forget to circle in the opposite direction also.

The benefits of this movement are that, like Sexercise 2, the pelvis is mobilised. Physical stiffness is loosened. Tensions resulting from emotional restraint or sexual repression are worked on and brought to the surface to release. This allows the natural feeling responses to sexual relationship to be opened to more fully.

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