Author Archive

The Ring

Many families had an heirloom that is passed on each generation.  Or perhaps it’s a story about an ancestor that is told to each new generation.  In my case it was the ring that was passed on, I being the only son.  Strangely there is no story about the origin of the ring, but there is a very definite duty and tradition that comes with it that is many generations old.

Apparently it had occasionally jumped a generation before someone in the family, and it could be male or female, would take up the responsibility and role again.  We called it ‘carrying the ring’.

In my case I knew the story from childhood onwards as my grandfather – paternal – was the carrier of that time.  Even as a child I had a real feel for it and what it meant.  I understood that the ring didn’t give you power, the ring was power.  That was why we called it ’carrying’.

That sort of understanding is strange, because as a family we never sat and analysed the situation.  It seemed to me I was born with the insights.  Somehow it was a part of being me.  I explained it to myself by likening it to sheepdogs I had seen from pups.  They had an inborn love for herding sheep.  In a similar way I had an inborn understanding and readiness to carry the ring.

But coming back to my grandfather, Nick, had come to England from Italy early in the nineteen hundreds, bringing the ring and a tradition with him.  There was a big enough Italian community in London to understand the meaning and power of the ring, and some of the community knew my family from the past, so knew the tradition.  gradually English people got to know too, so it was never something we had to tell people about or try to convince them.  That all went on around us and them, and the ring had an interesting enough history to tell its own story.

So my grandfather was well known as someone for certain people to seek out.  Don’t misunderstand me, grandpa was just an ordinary old guy, very quiet, occasionally made ice cream, drank a little wine with his cronies, and whose whole life revolved around his children and running his fruit and vegetable shop.  You didn’t need to be charismatic or outstanding to carry the ring.  That was part of what I had understood as a child.  I also knew about how to respond to people who needed contact with the ring.  It was just something I knew about.  Some people might say it was because I had seen it happen with grandpa, but I don’t think so.

Anyway, what I am leading up to is that when grandpa went back to Italy to visit his family he died, and the ring was passed to me.  Everyone in the family agreed that was how it should be.  Of course, you’re probably still wondering what exactly I took on in wearing the ring.  Well, I delayed describing that so I could give a little background.  Also, I’m not sure how well I can describe what the ring does, what its power is.  Put simply, people come and touched the ring when they want to re-establish their relationship with God.  It is probably also true that people touched the ring when they had got to the end of their own resources or strength, and they want to let that power standing beyond their own limitations into their life.

Maybe if I tell you about one such person it will help you grasp what I mean.

There are regular street markets in London that occur once a week.  There was one near us not far from Euston station, on a Tuesday.  I would take the barrow there loaded and sell stuff that was usually just about three things, like apples, bananas and seasonal fruits such a strawberries; things we could offer for a good price.  So on this particular day I was at the market doing a little trade and I noticed a young woman just across the road looking my way.  I knew instantly she needed the ring.  I guess it wasn’t too difficult to tell.  She was in her twenties, slightly built, brown ordinary hair, and she could barely stand still.  She reminded me of a wild animal getting near a person, but who is ready to run away at the slightest move.  I wear the ring on my left hand like a wedding ring.  So I put my left hand away from me, leaning on it and looking in the other direction.  There was a break in the trade, things happen like that with the ring.  Out of the corner of my eye I could see her cautiously approaching.  Whoever had told her about the ring must have told her she didn’t need to deal with me at all.  It was all between her and the ring.  Poor cow was really nervous though, and if I had so much as looked at her I’m sure she would have run off.

Then I felt the light touch and she was off, fast.  But now I could look and she was already shaking, sobbing as she went.  That’s the power of the ring.

This part of it I have thought a lot about.  I have seen it in a lot of people, young and old.  It takes courage and determination to go up to complete stranger and touch a ring he is wearing.  It is only when you are desperate to reach out for help that you are ready to risk looking like an idiot by going up to it stranger, touching his ring, and all that in an atmosphere where most people profess to believe in nothing but pitiless chance.

I have seen it again and again.  Something wonderful and powerful happens to people.  They cry, they laugh, their face shifts and tears ran down their cheeks.  A flood of something runs through them, things, heartbreak, guilt, grief, are washed away.  It isn’t always painless.  I have seen people fall on the ground crying out as things leave them.  And I don’t know if it is the ring, or the fact those people have dared to ask, maybe it is because a stranger knows they’re asking.  Whatever it is, it is a great privilege for me to carry that ring, and to see again and again, how people reconnect to something so amazing, so beautiful.

The Labours of Hero Cules

Cules had managed to walk from Wimpole Street to Baker Street without being accosted by the many possibilities on the way. This was no mean feat as he had only just discovered a few truths about himself that rather put a new perspective on things. One of these being that he was a bubble on the waters of life. This in itself may not seem a thought to be shaken by, until one sees that the bubble has no separate identity apart from the water, and from the commotion that spawned it. At its dissolution it returns to what it has always been – water.

But Cules was not concerned about this at present. After all, he had just braved the memory of having his tonsils out, which anyone will admit, takes courage. Of course if you dont believe in spells, you might think nothing of it. Cules had been bewitched due to the ignorance of his parents in not protecting him from the evil practice of tonsil pulling. It is a dastardly cunning scheme, one of the many practised by Them, of tying ones soul in knots at an early age. So Cules had been taken from his parents (who if they had witnessed it themselves, would never have let it happen), fasted for the purposes of the magic, stupefied into a semiconscious state to make his usually healthy soul open to the spell, then held head backwards against the soft breasts and thighs of a young woman, who was not a virgin, then had his mouth clamped open, while part of his throat was torn out.

Those versed in magic will see the dastardly aim of this particular ritual. Even the uninitiated will clearly see that the stimulation of his fears at the unexpected loss of his parents, allied with the stimulation of his youthful sexual feelings by the bosomy nurse, linking with the pain of his torn throat, while in a condition rendering him unable to remember the evil done, was a pretty potent spell. Some may say that it is not one of the worst spells they can think of. But considering it could be used for mass production, with little or no social risk to those doing it, it has its points.

So Cules, having remembered the whole ritual, thus rendering it less potent, felt himself something of a hero. Recognising that the spell had linked his sexual feelings with the pain of death, Cules was able to defuse some of its power.

He had also uncovered a somewhat less powerful move on the part of one of his female cousins. During his most sensitive years, and while still an unwilling virgin himself, she had stood before him in a dressing gown, and under the pretext of demonstrating a rather rhythmic swimming motion, had let her gown fall open revealing her naked body.

Cules had naturally always remembered this event very clearly. But as his schooling had been rather poor on the soul binding powers of spells, he had not realised its magical influence. Of course it was a lesser spell, performed by a girl new to her pubic hair, and not realising fully her possibilities. Nevertheless it is easy to see how it could fixate the budding energies of Cules upon her lithe young body, and the mute calling into itself issuing from her maturing passions. It would have been a straight love spell were it not for the taboo placed upon cousins by the Holy Ones of yore – reverence to their power. It is at least an example of the influence great ones can have upon all time. Even the youngest child is now bound to feel it is not the thing to lust for relatives in that way.

Getting back to Culess arrival at Baker Street, his single-mindedness was most likely due to having been in the company of a friend. A friend had in fact prevailed upon Cules to accompany him home. However, on arrival at the station, Culess friend took another direction and left Cules to find his own way.

On walking away from his companion, Cules at first thought the magic of the day had faded. But on walking towards Paddington Station, this certainty was gradually stolen from him. This began as he was walking towards a huge billboard announcing the wonders of an Olivetti typewriter. On the billboard a more than life-size young woman was apparently running toward him with her arms stretched out in a loving manner. What this had to do with a typewriter Cules never found out, because the beautiful female suddenly took on the form of Sally running to embrace him. Cules had never properly embraced Sally, but he certainly longed to. He needed her now to love and hold him, for the magic was pulling him backward into his childhood. And when he left, and the young woman was still apparently running towards any person who looked at her, he was gradually becoming younger.

Being five is not in itself a problem. But Cules, swimming through the magic tides that were pulling at him, lost his way in the streets of London. The building of the new overpass to the A 40 had torn away the familiar streets he knew, leaving him bewildered and frightened. Feeling lost, Cules asked somebody on the street what was the way to Paddington station. The woman thought for a moment, then said, “If you go straight ahead and turn left at the next turning you should reach the station.” She then hesitated and said, “Well, you could go that way. But if you go back the way you came, and take the first turning on the right, I think that will lead you to the station.”

Cules, slipping back in years beyond even five, started walking ahead but lost confidence, turned around, walked in the direction he had come, and then stood completely still, more lost than ever. He thought he glimpsed a man in uniform behind him, and knowing magic was illegal in this land, he hurried into the nearest shop doorway, heart thumping. The shop happened to be one selling heavy drills and metalwork equipment. The man standing at the counter looked to Cules as if he were very grown-up and knew his way around London. So Cules asked him the way to Paddington Station. The man said that if Cules turned left out of the shop, took the next left-hand road, the entrance to the station was along that road. Somehow all of the uncertainty Cules had felt disappeared. The man looked so solid and without malice. So Cules left the shop, noticed that the man in uniform was only a traffic warden and not a policeman, and managed to walk all the way to the station without feeling attacked by any further doubts.

Cules lived in Devon by the edge of the sea. But his home in Combe Martin felt to him as he entered the station, as if it were beyond the furthest mountains. Being so young the time that existed between Paddington and home had stretched, and stretched into an unknowable distance. As if they were lions and goblins, lurking fears and doubts scurried about in the shadows of the journey ahead. Nevertheless Cules managed to get on the train and find a seat.

There was in fact only one seat left. It was in the middle of four other people, facing a row of five other people opposite him. Cules made his whole body tight, trying to control the magic tides that were still flowing through him like changing winds and waters. He felt sure that if he didnt do this, the magic would overwhelm him and cause him to cry like the frightened young boy he now was. What made it more difficult was that directly opposite him sat a very motherly looking woman with wonderfully ample bosoms who smiled sweetly at Cules. The magic tore at Cules to fall forward on to his knees and sink his face into her lap so that she would hold and protect him. He had to look away from her and fold his arms very hard to keep control.

Then the train started to move, and this seemed to make things a little easier for him. Even so he wondered with some dread how he was going to make the journey. Then the train entered the long tunnels leading away from the station toward the outskirts of London. Holding hard on to his own arms, Cules watched the darkness outside the window intersperse occasionally with brilliant light as the train passed through the large open air ducts. Suddenly the train entered another of these ducts, and there in brilliant sunlight was a huge billboard with what felt like a direct message from God to Cules written across it in huge letters. It said, “TAKE COURAGE!” Then Cules knew he would survive the journey.

Courage is the name of a British beer.

Long Odyssey

This is important! I must write it down while I can still remember. If I don’t, I may forget and lose it forever.

I can hardly believe this! How is it possible that I could have lived most of my life without knowing who I am? It is so out of the ordinary that I am wondering if I am suffering some form of delusion, or perhaps even madness?

Strangely, that is not important. I don’t feel mad. What I do feel is that I might slip once more into the forgetfulness that has held me captive all my life. That is why I must explain myself to myself by writing it down. Then, if I slip back into the darkness, I will at least wonder why I have written this story.

I am not sure what brought it on. I haven’t been stressed. In fact I have been happy lately. But I began to have fluttering feelings as if I were remembering, or trying to remember something that was on the verge of forming. It was very frustrating, because I was on the very edge of knowing, and yet couldn’t quite grasp what it was I knew.

I have always been a very imaginative person, and I suppose that is why I have given myself so fully to painting. Well, I have made a success of it in a commercial sense. But that isn’t the point. The reason I paint is to make something real that lives inside of me, that I feel intensely and want to give expression to. And that’s how I felt with these whisperings of memory. I would be going about my work and then be overcome by feeling I had forgotten something important. It nagged me. There were even feelings of excitement and joy. At times it was like a beautiful presence, as if somebody I loved dearly was near but I couldn’t see them. I couldn’t see them, but I could smell their perfume, and felt the joy of them being near, the excitement of perhaps meeting them, holding them. That’s how it was.

Then, this morning, the perfume was there intensely, but instead of frustration I suddenly remembered, I suddenly knew!

How can I explain this even to myself? How can I begin to describe what I know myself to be?

Perhaps I can start by saying that if an old friend were standing looking at me, what they would see in front of them is not who I am. If I looked into a mirror and took at the details of my face and my body, and if I thought that to be me, I would be mistaken. That is not who I now know I am.

This is ridiculous – I am going around in circles without saying anything.

I will try again.

I suppose the point of my writing this is an attempt at helping me understand if the forgetfulness claims me again. That is difficult. I cannot say that before I arrived at this memory I would believe what I am about to say. Nevertheless, I must try.

I remembered my home.

No, it isn’t a country, it isn’t a city, it isn’t a mountain or an island in the sea. It is a condition.

How I long to be home now, as I remember it. There, with my kin, naked and without form, flowing with them in the torrential rivers of space – moving and playing as multitudes of birds play in the sky, or fish in shoals dance and whirl. If thoughts were music, then we are like music playing through the world’s, touching living beings, moving their bodies and their lives. In the great body of life stretching through galaxies we are the blood in its veins. And our playing and our movements are an anthem singing through the stars.

Can I have imagined that? For I hear them calling me now. I feel their laughter and their joy reaching for me to be with them. “Come. Come,” they are saying. “Flow with us in the great currents of life again. Leave this life behind. Soon it will be done. Your tasks here will be finished. Let others carry them on, for then you can be with us. ”

And I weep as I feel the tug of their love.

That was my life before this forgetfulness. And I look around and I see that when wild beauty touches people, when drama opens the heart, or song plays through them, they are remembering that star-life. Then they are restless in this sleep of forgetting. They are trying to wake and find their way home.

To remember where you have come from is one thing; to find your way home and to recall your journey to the present is another.

One day, many years ago, I stood high on a cliff a thousand feet above the sea. The air was clear and I could see miles across the ocean to distant hills and mountains. But it is what stood in between that has left such an indelible memory. For across the ocean, in that vast space of sea and sky, all manner of things existed. There were great areas of clear blue sky from which the sun shone onto sparkling waves. The brilliant light gave life to myriad colours, highlighting tiny ships dwarfed by the immensity of the waters. In other places huge dark clouds hung dripping rain, scouring the surface of the sea. And clouds and ships, and sky, and sun gave depth, qualities and distance to the colossal and unimaginable space in which we all exist. Before me the dimensions of dark, of light, of colour, of grey dismal coldness, of enormous space made mighty by tiny ships; huge clouds, themselves dwarfed by the emptiness between them, and distance drawing awe onto the spread of ocean and sky, stretching everything I could see from that hill into space beyond imagining.

And that, in some dim way, describes my awareness of the journey made from home. Instead of immensity of sea and clouds, its enormity was in time, in an unfolding of lives, in a sensing of an ancient past. My being has woven its pattern in and out of the strands of life-and-death. I have been mother and mothered, father and fathered, in all manner of relationships. The spirit of me that lives in all those times has known the flesh of red race and yellow, black and white. But it is the thread that changes its colour and its gender to create the pattern that tells the real story of the journey. And that pattern is akin to standing on that high cliff, knowing the immensity of space, seeing the dark scouring places of pain, and the brilliant colour in times of wonder; knowing the humanity of my existence, its failure and its power, and arriving at humility.

I said in the beginning that I did not know what had brought remembrance to me. But now, as I write, I realise that is not correct. The years have gradually brought me growing awareness of all that I owed to my ancestors. The weather and storms of my life, the sunshine and rain, the loss and the seeking of love, had slowly revealed the roots of the tree that I am. Through those roots I knew my being to be feeding upon the rich soil formed out of all that had lived in the past. I knew I lived on the nourishment of the dead and had entered into the house of the ancestors. And in the grandeur of that house I had found previous dwelling places, ancient graves, the buried drama, the numbed agony and the living spirit of the long dead. The guardian of the threshold led me into my forgotten past. And there beside me in her spirit form my love explored with me.

The rising and falling waves of life; time unfolding from the timeless; the gradual knowing of everything in nothing; the slow realisation of the dance in utter stillness. In essence that is the journey.

And here I now sit in the present wondering why the being that I was vast ages ago journeyed away from home.

As I reach these searching fingers of my mind through the delicate traces of the past to find the answer, I am awed by the enormity of the question. It is so easy to think of our life as existing separate and apart – except perhaps when we act in obvious cooperation through love or work. But my remembrance of things makes that a lie. I have spoken of a thread and a pattern woven through time, and that is near the truth. But even if we grasp that image clearly it is an impoverished view of the reality my vision shows me. For in the long sight that I now have, I see the tapestry of the past and present through which my lives thread their colours, is no less than the multitude of galaxies and dimensions in which we live and breathe. Each twist and turn in the weaving of the thread that I am is never less than an expression of total permeation by the whole. No movement of mine, no act, no thought or moment of existence begins or ends alone. The universe itself, the galaxy, the solar system and the earth, along with all the many creatures and beings who share this moment with me, are the very stage upon which I act, and the life and passions with which I act it. As for the drama I might act upon that stage, how much of it am I the author of?

Tapestry – weaving – thread? They are all inadequate words to describe the fabric of my existence. But these are all I have to tell of the substance, the stuff of which I am made. That cloth of my weaving, patterned as it is by my beliefs, my thoughts and strivings, my fears and longings, is connected in every way, totally enmeshed with every small part of the tapestry of life. My every thought is a twisting loom creating out of the mind of past sages and idiots; my every moment draws from what has been before; all is a dance in the spiral of change. Does not every part of me intermingle with you? Do not my thoughts play at times in your own mind? And you, tell me, are not the strength of my hands and body at times your strength, your power to build and shape? You know my genitals as part of your own body isnt that so? We are always woven together in that way, touching each other, and so on and on into other lives till we see, if we stand back, the whole wonder of the tapestry.

So, the leaving of home? Well, here is the paradox. The falling away from that many dimensioned life came both from personal direction and also out of the changing cycles of the Great Life.

Can there ever be a defined answer to the question of why? Who knows why, when on a journey with a defined destination, we meet someone, or an event happens, and the direction of our life changes. Why? Perhaps there is an answer, but it would need such a total awareness of all that exists to know it, that our rationalisations are vain.

There is a river on which the craft of my existence flowed. And that river was the stream of life. I was a swimmer in it, delighting in its movements, and a kin to all the creatures in it, loved and loving, creating and forming worlds and beings; at one with Creator and creation. Even now my heart leaps at the remembering. My emotions start to sing once more the anthem of our song.

Do you remember too? You and I, in the river that flowed into things? And we became involved in playing, involved in the body of things. The current was strong and we didn’t fight it. We were curious to know each other in the flesh. We knew then with the infinite knowing that was natural to us, that even if we became immersed in the creations of time and space, we would emerge again.

Time and eternity – another paradox. Time gives us beginnings and ends. It brings duration, distance through the sequence of events, and from that partings and meetings, togetherness and loss. And eternity has no beginning and no end. In it there can be no duration and no loss. Time is a gap in eternity. Time enables us to play the extraordinary game of meeting, when there was no real separation; endings when there were never really any beginnings; the experience of death that is really a birth.

So here I am, sharing with you the strange paradox of time and eternity. Here I am, sometimes feeling distant from you when there can never be any real separation. Here we are, experiencing the strange wonder of love between a man and a woman, yet knowing in our essence we are forever merged in bliss.

Here I am, existing without body, without family ties. Yet I am still living the life of someone in this century. Without love I am nothing. Love is the key, and many peoples life is like a prison when they lack it. But without form I have access to everyones life. I can enter into your being, or into that of your children. When I meet you in this way you are all wonderful, shining from your core. Your struggle is unique and I love you and take you into myself. I exist out of each of you. I do not have an existence outside of you. I came into being out of countless lives that cannot be called my own. I am the fire of life in its many forms. I do not organise life, I am life. I am totally out of control. I have no security, only an awareness of each moment, life living and dying each moment, constantly, forever.

Yes, here we are sharing this long yet timeless odyssey.

When Ma and Pa Died

  When you chil’n get quiet enough I’ll tell you how my Ma and Pa died. I ain’t never tol you this one before so you better listen out real good.

See, way back then my Ma and Pa – that’s your grandparents – were real fine. They were big folks. Why, jus for brekfas, between them they would eat the whole side of a pig. That was jus to start the day. So they pretty well impressed anybody who looked at ’em. So when Ma and Pa got feelin frisky that was quite somthin to see. Jus ‘cos she was big didn’t mean my Ma wasn’t sexy. An my Pa, when he got the hots for Ma and they started on in a lovin each other you could hear thunder claps all the way to Mississippi. There was so much flesh flying ’bout what with my Ma’s mighty bosoms, and Pa’s belly, you couldn’t see who was which. Jesus strike me down if it ain’t true.

So one day they really bin holdin out for each other and they started lovin their way straight to the happy place where they didn’t know one from the other, and the thunder started to roll. There was so much flesh a slippin and slidin the whole house was shakin, an us kids were thinkin it was all goin to fall over. But just then Pa started laffin and shoutin, and Ma she wos laffin and shoutin, and an almighty thunder shot out o’ that bedroom an filled the place with smoke and noise. That sure is what happened.

Now this is the ‘mazin bit. You see kids, when the smoke cleared and the noise was gone, all that was left of them was a few bits of arms and legs and other small pieces. They sure as hell had blown the rest away. Jesus strike me down if it ain’t true.

Dark Man in the Light

Lazere stood in the darkest area of the street, waiting and reminiscing. His memory spanned an enormous spread of history, almost a thousand years of continuous life. A mellow mood spread through him like warmth from a fire permeating flesh. Through all those years he had seen himself as a powerful influence in people’s life and faith. It was a role he played with all the skill he had cultivated in his longevity. He smiled, revealing his beautiful teeth, smiling with the pleasure of his memories.

A movement along the street suddenly caught his attention. Without pause his mood had changed to intense awareness, every sense alive and thrilling, hungry, alert. Passion and craving filled him with controlled excitement. His body stiffened and relaxed at the same moment, like a sleek animal crouching to spring, intent and focused. But it was a cat at a dustbin, and Lazere smiled and made a slight rumbling sound in his throat that caused the cat to stiffen in fear and then run hissing and spitting.

He waited a few moments then moved away from his dark place and walked along the street, avoiding the lights as much as possible. Darkness had always been his ally and territory, and he thought of electric street lighting as a curse of the times. There was no fear in him of being seen. A thousand years of life had proved there was little that could harm him. Darkness was an environment he lived in, as a bird lives in the air. It was a setting in which men and women felt the most vulnerable and fearful. It heightened passions and terrors – all of which were more than food to him. The gas lighting of a past century had at least a certain romance, a certain magical uncertainty in its half-light. As Lazere walked he recognised feelings of loss within him that the world had become as it had. How much better when people had lived in superstitious dread even in daylight, and night had been filled with terror, making his relationship with people so exciting and satisfying. Despite being no stranger to many countries and many languages, Lazere thought of himself as a European, and felt the birthplace of his soul was the dark times of Europe when religion had fanned fear, and Lazere’s actions could send whole villages rushing to the church, crying and praying, their faith completely renewed.

Pausing in his reveries and his walking, Lazere sensed a change but could not yet see it with his eyes or hear it with his ears. Nevertheless he trusted the subtle organs of feeling that were reaching out into the environment, tasting, smelling, hearing and feeling the most delicate impressions. Without any conscious intention, but as part of his subtle sensing, he moved his head to the left and suddenly saw the cause of his intuitions. A woman was walking along the pavement in his direction. The road was in a suburban neighbourhood of a small country town. The houses were set back from the pavement, distanced from the road by the lawns and trees. The lights in the road were not intense but matched the sense of wealth and comfortable ease apparent in the style of the houses and orderliness of the gardens. The woman was a living part of the ease and confidence of the neighbourhood. He could feel the touch of anxiety she experienced from being out alone so late. But her full, well shaped body still expressed a relaxed pleasure, intensified by what he knew from his perceptions of her, to be the afterglow of a loving relationship just left.

Lazere’s emotions intensified. The woman’s inner heat of passion and physical pleasure opened up his hunger. He wanted this brown haired, oval faced woman. He longed for her to experience the wonderful awful passion he could give her. She was twenty-five metres away from him now, still unaware of his presence in the shadows of a tree filled garden. The woman had very evident hips, and the wonderful movement of her legs flowing from obvious sexual awareness of her pelvis emphasised the small waist, and her healthy torso and breasts.

From a millennium of experience, from his hunger, and from complete boldness, Lazere wept. At least sounds of vulnerable weeping came from him. They were not loud, but loud enough to touch the approaching woman’s feelings. The weeping had in it the powerful suggestion of someone who has been hurt. Someone who, because of their pain, is helpless and no threat. Someone who feels desperately alone and in need of a human presence and warmth.

The woman stopped. Her breathing changed. The quality of the weeping moved her emotionally, but her anxiety made her cautious. Nevertheless, her own recent pleasure and act of love made her open and responsive. Lazere knew all this. His weeping continued.

The woman stepped forward a pace or so and called out. “Who is there?”

Lazere moved slightly to become apparent to the woman, enabling her to see him in the shadows and gain an impression of him. There was light behind him, so the shape of the tree trunk and his own form now slightly away from it were easy to see. To her gaze his clothes were reassuringly clean and smart. His posture suggested he was not drunk, but certainly hurting inside, his hand on his lower chest as if nursing some deep aching. In fact as he lifted his head to look at her with sad wonderful eyes, he was aching – for her – passionately, burningly wanting her. In fact he moved his hand toward her as if to reach and hold someone who constantly evaded him, and so his hand dropped back hopelessly, helplessly. There was no malice in the movement. How could there be when he could see so well the gentleness in the woman gradually dispel any anxiety she had felt. The rich store of love in her body began to make her bold. Without having a name for it she felt how sweet it would be to give love to a man who was so broken by his emotions. Her own emotions began to rise into her chest and throat, making her voice husky when she asked, “Why do you cry?”

Words, Lazere knew, often lead to unexpected responses, assuming so many meanings in the mind of the listener. So he spoke nothing. But moving slowly more into the light, and with tears rolling down his pale well shaped face, he shook his head in the negative, and put his arms around his body as if he were someone separate holding himself compassionately. His movement did not take him nearer to the woman, but she could see his features more clearly now. He had dark hair and striking eyebrows, contrasting with his pale skin. His face, with its firm muscular jaw and his strong neck, suggested an equally beautiful angular and athletic body. He did not at first confront her with his eyes, allowing her time to gaze at him without interference. Then slowly, still openly weeping with his passion and hunger for her, he lifted his eyes to meet hers. As they met he sobbed with the intensity of his feelings and held out a hand toward her, with a look upon him that he would collapse if she did not hold his arm.

She moved to him and took his hand supportively. The strength and yet gentle contact surprised her. She had unconsciously expected limpness, and instead received an exciting response. His head dropped upon her shoulder and an exquisite sigh and sound came out of him rousing in her the passion a woman feels when she has led her lover to experience a surrender of himself to the shared wonder of mutual blending – to loss of himself in her. She held him tentatively with her head slightly back in order to see him. He lifted his head again and looked back at her, the expression of ache and longing still obvious on his features. Then he held and engulfed her in his extraordinary need and pleasure.

Lazere watched her intensely. He could almost feel her own emotions, so apparent were they in the way she held herself, even despite the darkness. As Lazere held her he knew he must now act quickly. The close intimacy they felt for each other at the moment could not last long. Gently but surely he moved his right hand to her back and his left-hand to hold her arm. With both hands he could feel the rapid beating of her heart in her excitement and apprehension of the moment. This is what Lazere needed. Her heart should push her crimson blood with all the urgency it could muster.

Now, tightening his grasp he pulled her firmly and closely to him. In doing so his posture and attitude shifted. His head lifted to look her full in the face. He felt her body tighten for action, but strangely she did not struggle or attempt to pull away. Lazere was now too fully into his own hunger to ponder this. Regarding her lovely face, head now pulled back slightly from him, he smiled as he turned his head to feed from her exposed neck. It was a leisurely movement. He knew he was strong enough to quieten her if she screamed. So it surprised him, as his head bent to her neck, to feel her right hand reached up to his back and with great strength pull him hard against her. At that same moment something awful pierced his back paralysing him utterly. Then, as she lowered him slowly to the ground, fully alert but paralysed, he heard her shout almost as a cry of triumph, “Contact!”

Within 20 seconds a group of people came running toward them. Unable even to blink Lazere could only see parts of what was happening. The people were obviously a team, dressed in official looking overalls and gloves. He could hear the vehicles arriving also, but could not see them. The woman, called Jan by members of the team, knelt beside him with an overalled man who she referred to as Dominic. She took one of Lazere’s hands quite tenderly, and positioning her head in a place he could see her she said, “I know this is a shock for you, but we mean you no harm, and have no intention of hurting you. But we need something you have. We will explain this when we have you in a safer situation. That is, safer for us.”

Tears were running across Lazere’s face. This time they were not tears of hungry passion but of painful sadness and of terrible loss. Jan wiped them away with a tissue as members of the team wrapped him in some sort of material that held him fast. His silent tears became audible sobbing as the object that had pierced his back was removed. He gathered, from comments made, and questions they asked Jan, that it was an electronic device that acted upon his spinal nervous system, paralysing all his voluntary muscles. He wept at this indignity, at the terrible reversal of roles, from being the one who preyed upon others to becoming the helpless victim.

The transition from a dark road to a brightly lit room was fast. Lazere was placed on a hospital bed in what was obviously a special unit. He was still cocooned in the wrapping that prevented his movement. Jan and Dominic stood nearby looking at him with an expression of mixed triumph and sympathy.  As soon as he was placed on the bed a female nurse came and took several blood samples from one of his hands.  When that was done Jan placed a pillow under his head and Dominic left.

Touching Lazere’s head tenderly Jan said to him, “God, you’re a beautiful looking man.  Do you know why we have brought you here?”

Lazere didn’t speak.  He looked Jan fully in the face then closed his eyes and shook his head in the negative.

“Haven’t you ever wondered what happened to make you live so long, to make you need people’s blood? Didn’t you ever wonder why your body is so resistant to disease, why it is in fact so perfect?”

Lazere opened his eyes again and once more looked at Jan, meeting her gaze for long silent seconds. “Of course,” he replied.  “But don’t forget my age.  Or perhaps you do not know it. A thousand years separates my birth and education from your world of today. When you have lived so long, the 50 or 100 years of your present theories seem as the blinking of an eye. So I can only see you through the vision of my past experience, wondering if you fear me, or if you plan to kill me as so many of my fellow creatures have been killed.”

Jan smiled and moved to sit where Lazere could see her. “No, we don’t plan to kill you.  Unlike our kind in the past, we are no longer afraid of you. In fact we need you very much. We want some of the things you have – the long life, the disease free body, your prolonged positive and motivated state of mind through countless years, your fearlessness.”

Lazere struggled to free himself, but could not and sank back onto the bed.  “But I could have given you that if you had not felled me to the ground.  You would have that now if you would have let me feed.”

“True,” Jan said.  “But then I too would have to feed from my fellows.  I too would have to be a creature of the night, outcast as if diseased from all those I now love. No. What we want to do is to find a way of separating the positive effects from the negative side of your sickness.”

Lazere’s face showed shock. “Sickness?”

“That’s how we see it,” Jan said quietly. “What we have learned about your kind suggests that sometime in prehistory a virus entered the earth’s atmosphere, perhaps from a comet or meteorite. Luckily the virus gained a foothold in a host.  Luckily because, although the virus drives the host to infect others by drinking their blood, it also carries with it enormous benefits. Fortunately, what were called vampires, were not entirely killed out.  But it has taken us ages to find you. We want to modify the virus genetically to rid it of its negative effects.  We will then infect our children and ourselves with it to gain your strength and longevity. Then we will give it to you to cure you.”

A terrible scream arose from the bed.  Lazere convulsed in his efforts to escape as the scream became words – “I don’t want to the cured!!!”

Notes

The night before last I had a couple of interesting dreams. In one I was a vampire or werewolf – actually the word lycanthrope was one I was using in the dream – and I was also a group of people who were going to catch or deal with this werewolf. As the werewolf I was very traditional and bent on bringing gloom and terror into people’s lives, injecting them with my ‘venom’. But as the group of people I was completely opposite, very modern and technological. We had no fear of the ‘lycanthrope’ at all, surrounded it and despite it trying to do its evil thing with us, we paralysed it with electronic gadgets that affected its nervous system. We weren’t bent on destroying it, just catching it.

Now back to being the werewolf. When these people didn’t flee in terror at my evil posturing and snarling I was really upset. I wept as I recalled my thousand years of creating havoc in communities and in the lives of individuals. My tears were because it was sad to see the passing of such wonderful superstition and its attendant fears and terrors. I had loved the dark ages. I guess I was/am a traditionalist.

As the group of people we wanted to use the ‘venom’ of the lycanthrope. It was as if it had some genetic effect upon people. So we injected some of it into adults and children. The result of this was mostly seen in children in the dream. Small children were now safe to allow to roam the streets of violent cities at night – after all, who is going to attack a vampire or werewolf, even if it’s a nipper? So the one-sidedness of the werewolf was now balanced by human qualities, and vice versa.

A Tear Dropped in the Ocean

 

I met Mr Kanasaki while walking through the Hoganji gardens in Kyoto on the way to work. Although early the air was warm and scented without being heavy, and my feelings were buoyant and hopeful.

Mr Kanasaki is a man of quiet manners and smiles. Yet on this morning he could barely manage to lift his eyes to greet me. This aroused enough concern for me to stop and say to him, “Good morning Mr Kanasaki. Are you well?”

He looked at me with quick movements of his eyes, and I noticed the newspaper he held in his left hand contract. His hand clenched hard on the paper, making small wrenching movements.

Then suddenly he looked at me and said quietly, “My son has been killed in a car accident.” A tightly repressed moan broke through his closed mouth, and he turned his face to the ground and then to the sky, struggling with himself.

In that moment I could not speak. My mouth would not open. My heart could find no solace to offer Mr Kanasaki. I too struggled inside and a tear rolled down my face as Mr Kanasaki stared at me and watched it fall to the ground. He then bowed slightly and walked on.

I worked that day, but could not forget the meeting, and felt deeply disturbed that I could offer nothing of comfort to my friend in his distress. Even when I had finished work I could not be free of the question of what could you offer a man who has lost his only son.

Being unable to find quietness I went into the temple near the Hoganji gardens, and sat before the image of the Buddha. I must have sat for some time and fallen asleep, because my head jerked me awake, and in looking up at the Buddha’s face the smile was very beautiful. It seemed as if he was looking directly at me, and his smile was telling me something that took away my distress. Afterwards it seemed as if it the Buddha had spoken to me saying, “The tear you shed was a small act of kindness. It was a tear dropped in the ocean.”

That was all he said. Yet understanding washed over me with great emotion as I realised that a small act of kindness was like the tear dropped in the ocean. It made not even a tiny difference to the ocean. Yet the act was recognition that we all stand as helpless before life as each other, as ineffective in pain, and yet we are not cowed.

I experienced the realisation that kneeling before a mountain in recognition of its immensity, its brooding power, made no difference to the mountain or to oneself. A flower placed on a grave never brought back the dead. A hand extended to a friend who had lost a son, could not take away the pain. Yet the act of kneeling, the dropped flower, the extended hand, express more than human fear and weakness. They give more than ones own littleness and bring something of the ocean that is nothing and everything into life. However small this drop of the ocean is we give to another person, it is a splendour bursting through into the transcendent moment that is existence.

Then I knew that I was interwoven with Mr Kanasaki’s pain in loss, and intertwined with his life in the shining moment of emptiness.

Anything Will Do

It was one of those long hot afternoons Melbourne gives you as a blessing.  I had been everywhere in my mind and feelings having had the house to myself all day.  Strange the things you can find in your mind if you climb right into it.  That very day I had realised my ability to sink back into the depths of my mind had probably been one of the gifts from emerging prematurely from the womb.  The womb, after all, was where I had been at one with everything.  It was the place I felt at home.  And coming out too early to breathe easily hadn’t aroused much of a desire to explore the world I arrived in.  Much better to keep diving back in, where it was safe.

No matter, I was out now, and seeing the flowers my wife had arranged in my work area were dead, I decided to walk out with the dog to the empty creek and collect some dry grasses.  Maybe I could make a half decent arrangement.

The sun was just beginning to lose its belting heat, and it was good to be out.  There were plenty of different types of grass, so I soon had a handful.  At that point a man stopped on the nearby path and watched me for a while.  He didn’t seem in a hurry.  “What are you doing?”  He asked.

I told him I wanted to see if I could make an arrangement in a vase.  He smiled and said, “I guess anything will do.”

I felt sure I knew what he meant.  He was an old man, and was talking to me as a companion in his years.  So I understood him to be saying that when your role as a parent or breadwinner has gone, you have to do something to occupy you, and almost anything will do.

I nodded and walked up close to him.  He was a wiry, tough looking Australian, but looked beaten about by illness, his facial skin broken and peeling, and his hands too.  He didn’t seem to mind me looking at him though, and told me he’d had two heart bypass operations within the last year.  He went on to say that he had been walking ever since he retired.

Having been roaming about through my own vulnerabilities, I was very open to feeling something of the situation and his courage.  It stirred me looking at his bright eyes and cheeky smile, challenging life to do its worse, but still not break his spirit.

I said to him, “How’re you doing?”

He knew exactly what I meant.  How are you doing in the middle of all this?  He smiled and said he had so many mechanical parts in him now he would probably go on for ages.

I took his hand and shook it to express my admiration for the spirit that shone through his beaten up old body.  Then he walked on and I went home with my handful of grasses, and my memory of an old man’s life worn face.

Sexercises

Introduction

All sex is movement. Sexual movement involves your body, your emotions and your spontaneity. For sex to be more than two people experiencing mutual physical friction, movements of our whole self are called for. In the widest sense sex is much more than genital pleasure between two people. Sex is involved in the way we manage or fail to find a connection with every person we meet. It underlies how we can give and receive in work or in learning from another person. It is also the great secret governing whether we can get the best out of ourselves by creating an inner relatedness in which we call forth a flowering of our own potential through loving ourselves.’

But in a way our sexual urges do not belong to us. This is shown in the records of people who frustrate their sexual energy, who maybe through fear or religious beliefs see it as wrong or sinful or even unhealthy. Such withholding is like holding your breath, a huge pressure builds up. We are in fact a natural animal, a mammal that needs to have sex, or release it in some way, or even direct it into other creative energy. In fact if we do not care for this primal urge it breaks out into neurotic behavior. (Neuroticism is one of the Big Five higher-order personality traits in the study of psychology. Individuals who score high on neuroticism are more likely than average to be moody and to experience such feelings as anxiety, worry, fear, anger, frustration, envy, jealousy, guilt, depressed mood, and loneliness. What used to be called neurosis now falls under the umbrella of anxiety. Wikipedia).

‘Sexercise’ is a way of tuning-in to the secret places of your body and mind, opening them to discover the wonder of your own sexuality, and through that tuning-in to and gently penetrating the secret places of another person. It is fun, it is challenging. It may take you to places you’ve never been before. It will certainly unveil the innumerable mutually agreeable ways you can make love with others and with yourself. It might even introduce you to the magical side of sex that links you with all livng things.

To penetrate these secret places, I am going to start by showing you how to tune into your pelvis. The process isn’t difficult, and the ideas and things to do that are given are not mysterious or outlandish. Some  of the sexercises are very simple, but even the simple ones can profoundly alter the way you enjoy sexual relationships.

Chapter One

Tune-in To Your Pelvis

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

 

• 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.

 

• 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.

 

• 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 ([i]) 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 crate 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 out 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.

Summary of Sexercise 8 – The Whirlpool

• Choose a place and space where you can feel relaxed about doing this movement. If you are wearing clothes use ones which are loose fitting enabling you to move easily.

 

• Stand with feet about shoulder width apart, preferably with feet parallel to each other. Melt tensions from face and pelvis. Also create the feeling of your knees being connected to your pelvis by elastic bands – your muscles. This means your knees are not locked, but are slightly bent and responsive to movement.

 

• Imagine moving your hips around the inside of a barrel or circle. Some people find the image of a whirlpool useful. As you move your hips in this horizontal circle keep your head floating in about the same position. If possible let the knees and ankles respond in a relaxed way to the movement.

 

• Make the circle as wide as you can. This means that when your pelvis is in the forward phase of the circle you trunk will be leaning backwards slightly. When the pelvis is in the backward phase of the circle the trunk will be leaning forwards.

 

• The breath cycle should be to breathe out while the hips circle forwards, and breathe in as the hips circle backwards – or are moving in the back half of the circle.

 

• At about half time stop and move the hips in the opposite direction.

 

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

 

• When you stop, stand or sit and meditate the movement. The aim is to recreate the feeling or sensation of the movement without doing it physically.

 

Whirlpool With A Partner

Done with a partner, the whirlpool requires more skills of co-ordination and relatedness than when you circle your hips alone. The aim is to remain aware of contact with your partner and to tune in to your partner’s movement and timing. It is certainly more fun that the hip circling alone.

Summary of Sexercise 9 – The Whirlpool Together

• You need a partner of either sex. Being a similar height can help but is not necessary.

 

• Choose a place and space where you can both feel relaxed about doing this movement. If you are wearing clothes use ones which are loose fitting enabling you to move easily.

 

• Stand back to back with feet about shoulder width apart, preferably with feet parallel to each other, and link arms. Melt tensions from face and pelvis. Also create the feeling of your knees being connected to your pelvis by elastic bands – your muscles. This means your knees are not locked, but are slightly bent and responsive to movement.

 

• Close your eyes and stand quietly together feeling the warmth and contact with your partner. Drop tension from the face and pelvis.

 

• In this movement neither partner needs to lead, but obviously you do have to start off in the same direction. Imagine moving your hips around the inside of a barrel or circle. Some people find the image of a whirlpool useful. Start slowly keeping awareness of contact with your partner. Keep the open state in your face and genitals. If you lose this stop and regain it before you start a gain.

 

• Make the circle as wide as you can. When your pelvis is in the forward phase of the circle you trunk will be leaning backwards slightly. When the pelvis is in the backward phase of the circle the trunk will be leaning forwards. This means that there will be an alternating leaning back and being supported, and a giving support, as you lean on your partner’s back, or are supported on their back.

 

• Do this slowly and be aware of how you feel as you are supported or giving support.

 

• The breath cycle should be to breathe out while the hips circle forwards, and breathe in as the hips circle backwards – or are moving in the back half of the circle.

 

• At about half time stop and move the hips in the opposite direction.

 

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

 

• When you stop, stand or sit and meditate the movement. The aim is to recreate the feeling or sensation of the movement, and of your relationship with your partner.

 

Open And Moving Together

Because love-making is usually a two way affair, and needs sensitivity to another person’s movements and needs, it is fun and helpful to practise the hip circling movements with a partner. After the Whirlpool try Sexercise 2, the horizontal hip circling with a partner. It needs a little more co-ordination than the Whirlpool, and is a more powerfully helpful movement physically and emotionally. It more directly links with the movements our body wants to make in expressing passion.

Try it first back to back with arms linked. Stand with feet about shoulder width apart, back to back and arms linked. Stand for a while with eyes closed being aware of the warmth and sensations arising from being back to back. Drop tension from your face and pelvis. Let the open feeling pervade you  before staring the movement.

Decide who is going to lead and begin to swing the hips in the forward and backward circle – Sexercise 2 – and see if you can keep your behind in gentle contact with your partner. Start slowly so you can learn to feel the contact and develop the skill of moving together in harmony with each other. Gradually you can achieve a flowing and sensitive togetherness of movement. See if you can do this while dropping unnecessary tension. Leave the belly, chest and head open to any pleasure felt. Let any laughter or feelings be part of what you are doing.

Living processes tend to express in waves. This is true whether we look at things such as our heartbeat, where contraction follows expansion in waves, or in the digestive tract where the wavelike flow of peristalsis moves the food along the gut. In the realm of our personality the wave action of life is felt as heightening and dropping of feelings. So in using this sexercise there may be times when feelings of contact or pleasure rise and then fall away. This is so important we will explore it in greater depth as we use other sexercises. Meanwhile, in this back to back movement, it is enough to notice any highs and lows of contact and go along with them – letting the body express the highs, and perhaps slowing down or express less intensely with the lows. Even if you do not have a distinct feeling of any shift in your own feelings, try doing the movement with vigour, then slow down and do it gently and with sensitivity.

Summary of Sexercise 10 – Tuning In

• This movement can be done with a partner of either sex. It helps if you are either about the same height, or the shorter person stands on something like books to raise the height of their bottom to be in contact with the partner’s. Or the taller person bends their knees a little.

 

Be clear what the movement is. If necessary do the movement alone first. Decide beforehand who is going to lead first in doing the movement. After a period of practise change roles in who will lead and notice any differences.

• Stand with feet about shoulder width back to back with your partner. You will need to make close contact. Link arms, but not too tightly.

 

• Take time at this point to be aware of the contact as you stand back to back. Let tension melt from your body and be aware of the warmth from your partner flowing into you. Stand for a while relaxing into the contact.

 

• The lead person now – slowly at first – takes their pelvis backwards as if sitting down, slightly bending the legs as they do so. Then the pelvis is pushed forward and the legs straightened. The hip circling is the same as in sexercise 2. The difference is that you must become aware of the contact and response of your partner. If this doesn’t happen resistance, overbalance, poor movement rhythm occurs. The aim is therefore to get lost in the awareness of your mutual movement and its harmony. This may need quite some practise, because you are not only seeing if you can move your body in time with that of your partner, but also if you can drop tension and let any pleasure that arises permeate you.

 

• Don’t forget to swap roles at some point in regard to who is leading in the movement.

 

• Once you have got used to the movement, and feel in harmony with your partner, focus on any shifts of feeling as far as pleasure, contact or oneness are concerned. Let your body, breath and voice express these shifts in any way that arises spontaneously.

 

• Although you may get a sense of harmony together reasonably soon, continue the movement for some time. Keep focused on the sense of contact and your enjoyment or response to what is happening between you. Love making is hopefully not something over in two or three minutes. Therefore it is helpful to practise being focused on the act of moving together, and at the same time dropping unnecessary tensions.

 

• Take time after finishing to sit for a minute still in contact with your partner. Meditate the movement together to see of you can recreate the sense of contact. Then talk over what you felt during and after the movement.

 

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

 

Hold Me Closer

 

To deepen your experience of harmony and intimacy, try doing the hip circling face to face with your chosen partner. But take time getting close. Do it sensitively and with awareness. Sense each others reactions. Respond rather than mechanically move. Take time to listen to your own feelings and don’t push yourself to levels of intimacy you don’t have an inner inclination for – nor press your partner to levels you can feel they are disinclined to approach. In practise this means not maintaining physical closeness with your partner if you sense they are not inviting it any  longer. It means being aware of their small reactions such as tension, holding their breath, pulling back or going limp and passive. These are all signs of tension.

Remember also that this face to face hip circling is for PRACTISE. Relax. Enjoy it. Learn from it how to sense your partner and respond in an appropriate way. There may be waves of what I call ‘excitation’. I mean by this greater and lesser arousal or response. See if you can flow with these and relax into quietness when the excitation lessens.

Start very slowly. Take time to gradually move physically close. In doing so don’t concentrate on your thoughts, or even your fantasies. Be aware of how your skin feels against your partner. Watch what feelings and pleasures start to rise. Remain at that point of sensitivity to touching and body warmth for a while. Sense each others breathing and be a mirror so your outbreath is in time with your partner’s inbreath. Let the beginning of the movement be gently sensual.

To let this become the enormous pleasure and nourishment it can be, keep the open state going, and let yourself respond to what you are feeling. At times this might mean that you feel shy or tense. If so pause and admit these feelings to your partner. Such disclosures should not be commented on by your partner, or vice versa, and this needs to be understood at the beginning. Whatever is said needs to be heard and allowed a place in what you are doing, but not remarked upon.

So if I were your partner and the closeness produced feelings of sadness because my relationship had been without closeness for a long time, I would need to say what I felt, and you would need to listen without comment. If there were emotions rising with the feeling, space should be given until the feelings have emptied. Then continue with the movement.

This listening to each other’s body and its signals, each other’s feelings and words, is of primal importance in learning not only to develop a caring relationship with someone else, but also in meeting yourself more fully. This will be covered in greater detail in other sexercises.

With this in mind, gently make contact and let your body feel the open state. Now face to face, close, start moving slowly and sensitively. There may be tides of feeling, of pleasure, rising and falling. Respond to them. Let your body and even your voice or breathing express their rise and fall. Therefore as excitation rises allow the movements to be more expressive. As the excitation drops, allow the movements to be slower and quieter. If you or your partner feel the need to stop the practise altogether, this must be honoured without irritation. But if this happens it would be helpful to sit quietly and close for a while rather than to simply break contact quickly. If you lose the open state of face and pelvis, stop, melt the tension and start again. If the tension becomes intense and insistent this needs another sexercise that will be described later.

At first don’t take the movements into full sexual intercourse, otherwise you will miss the point. Often full sexual intercourse is riddled with habits that decrease awareness – that are expressions of automatic responses. The face to face meeting is to develop sensitivity and awareness – of our own body and feelings and those of our partner. Only take what you have learnt into intercourse when you gain experience and growth in this. So my suggestion is that this movement is used for practise only, to establish a different awareness and habits. If the practise is mixed with actual sexual intercourse, it loses its power as an safe area of practise where one can make mistakes, learn from them and discuss them.

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.
• 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.

 

• 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 had 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. ([ii])

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.

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 out or use your voice in the excitement.

See Tiredness After Sex

 

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 stop 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.

 

Chapter Two

Tune-in To Your Legs

For many years I have helped people discover how to unlock the secret power trapped in their body. The legs are a wonderful example of how, when we relate to our body in the right way, enormous confidence and feelings of positive motivation are released. Also when expressing your feelings freely during love making, your legs play a big part in how you hold your partner, and what position of love making you can move into. Personally I don’t see the various positions of love making as things one needs to use as a sort of gymnasium of sex. But having a mobile body enables you to allow the variety of feelings and urges that arise in the passion and pleasure of love.

For instance, as a man, it is a very beautiful feeling to sit cross legged and have my partner sit naked on my legs face to face, with her legs around my waist. The wonderful mixture of pressure, warm moist flesh and pubic hair against my genitals, and suspended breasts against my chest, is a sensual feast. Without being able to sit in that posture, the nearest one could get to it would be to sit on a stool. But when sitting on a stool, the thighs are not spread open to allow ones love partner to sink deeply onto one.

Sitting on a chair, the woman who cannot let her knees drop sideways cannot truly open her secret warmth and wrap her legs around her partner.

Recently a woman friend, told me, “The first time my present husband had sex with me, he said he had never experienced a woman opening her legs the way I can. He kept saying what a marvellous experience it was. This was because I had practised some leg stretches until I could drop my knees sideways.”

Opening Your Legs

For a woman, opening your legs can be a very powerful sexual signal, and a very deep self offering. If it is done with skill it becomes an artistic as well as sensual act. Sensual pleasure arises mostly from the way flesh touches and moves against flesh. The pleasure blossoms into ecstasy when your emotions blow against the glowing ember produced by feeling warm open lips against flesh, and the ember leaps into fiery flame. But many tender moments of loving sensuality come from feeling your partner’s skin, weight and expanse of flesh against you in unusual ways. What would it feel like to be kissing with lips and genitals, and yet have your partner’s thighs lying against your chest? It’s easy if you can bend at the waist until your head touches your legs.

Without attempting to be a gymnast in love though, here are some ways to bring greater suppleness to your legs.

Summary of Sexercise 1 – Opening The Legs

• Always wear soft loose clothing for these sexercises, not tight corset-like leotards. Or if comfortable, wear nothing at all, or just a pair of briefs.

 

• The movement needs a reasonable floor space, about the size of  a spread single blanket. So stand in such a space where you feel at ease about doing an exercise. then place your feet about double shoulder width. If you have stockings or socks on and your feet begin to slip, take the socks off. It is important to avoid your feet slipping. This could lead to slight injury.

 

• Look to see if your feet are parallel to each other. If they are splayed out straighten them and let the weight load be taken on the outside under-edge of each foot. Do not lock the knees back in a rigid way. Keep the knees ready to flex.

 

• Now let your head droop forward allowing the trunk to follow until your hands touch the floor. If this doesn’t quite happen take your feet a little wider. Then with hands supporting on the floor, slowly take your feet wider apart, maintaining their parallel position and taking the weight on the outside of the foot. Keep moving the feet apart until you reach the point where pain begins in the muscles – probably on the inside of the thighs. Bring the feet a little together from that point.

 

• Make sure the hands are on the floor just under the shoulders. Then bend the right leg at the knee. This will cause the left leg to stretch by dropping the hips slightly. Now straighten the right and bend the left knee in a similar way. The resulting movement is one of swinging from left to right. Repeat the movement until you feel you have well stretched the inside of your legs – probably about five times in each direction.

 

• When finished stop in the central position, inch your feet slightly more together, take your weight and balance on your feet and slowly bring your head and trunk up in to the standing position. Rest.

 

• This stretch is to enable you to take the legs wider apart without pain. It applies to men and women.

 

The main objectives in stretching our legs in a sexercise is to enable the legs to be opened wider, and for the bent knees to be capable of dropping sideways. As an example of this, the classic sexual posture is portrayed as the woman lying on her back with her knees bent and in the air, and the man lying between her thighs. This means for the woman that her thighs are still fairly closed. She has to drop her knees sideways to let the man lie between her legs. If the knees can be dropped further apart, there is a full opening and a comfort in the position. It also means other positions are easy and enjoyable.

Something I have noticed is that even if you can do the postures given only reasonably well in practise, during sexual intercourse the body seems to be experienced differently. One can move into postures easily and often go beyond what was possible in practise without pain. Or if there is pain it doesn’t seem to be noticed. Ones attention is focused elsewhere.

Another two stretches that aid this are ones which are particularly to widen the knees falling sideways.

Summary of Sexercise 2 – The Open Lap

 

• Use this stretch in an open space again, with loose clothing.

 

• Sit on the floor with legs straight out in front. If it is difficult to sit like this without an inclination to lean backwards or forwards to balance, put your hands just slightly to the rear of your behind. Take you weight on your hands and slightly lift your hips off the floor. This lets the weight of your trunk hang from the shoulders and allows the spine to straighten.

 

• Bend your knees and bring your feet toward you so the soles of the feet are together and the knees dropped outwards from the centre to whatever point they will fall. Using your hands, inch your body slowly toward your feet – still with soles of feet together.

 

• Bring your trunk as near to your feet as you can tolerate while the knees are dropped outwards. Then take hold of the toes of your feet with both hands and while holding them straighten your spine. This will probably pull your feet a little nearer. Meanwhile move your knees downwards towards the floor, widening the gap between them.

 

• This is never a very easy posture for most Europeans, but there can be rapid improvement if you do the posture at least two or three times a week and hold for a minute or so. When you begin to feel easy in it and it becomes enjoyable, try keeping the soles of the feet together and lying backwards onto the floor.

 

• Apart from a useful sexercise this posture is also well worth doing for its benefits during childbirth It stretches and opens the pelvic area.

 

Summary of Sexercise 3 – Foot To Thigh

 

• You need a space large enough to sit on the floor with your legs stretched out in front of you.

 

• Bring the right foot toward the trunk, helping with the hands. Take the heel of the foot up as far as you comfortably can into the crutch, while keeping the left leg straight.

 

• Hold the heel well into the crutch and see if you can drop the right knee down toward the floor. If it is difficult, hold the foot in place with the left hand and gently press the knee down with the right.

 

• If the right knee drops easily to the floor, take the right foot in both hands and lift it up onto the left thigh. If possible the toes should be well over to the outer edge of the thigh. Then again see if you can drop the knee toward the floor. Take your time. Your body will respond if you give it weeks instead of minutes. Gradually your knees will open and muscles adapt.

 

• After holding the position for a minute or so put the right foot out on the ground with leg straight again. Now stretch the left foot to the crutch in the same way and repeat the procedure.

 

• End by sitting with legs crossed in front of you. If you can easily do the above stretch it may be possible to put one foot in the crutch – for the man the heal goes under the testicles – and the other heal in front of it. Otherwise put one leg over the other in an easy posture – for instance the left heal touching the right thigh and its toes under the right calf, and the right heal under the left calf.

 

Power In The Legs

If our legs, as psychological and physical sources of power, are not being used properly, we lose confidence in life and in love. Without the power that comes from your legs you lack the ability to stand up for yourself. You cannot pleasurably or playfully meet another person’s power and positive strength. Instead you may feel attacked or demeaned simply through your partner expressing their own vigour of body and mind. Instead of a happy play and creative flux of mutual strength and creativity, one feels attacked, and responds with counter-attack. This is not productive of a happy and surging relationship. Anna describes her experience of this.

My first marriage was one in which I constantly felt I had been aggressive in my behaviour to my husband, Adrian. Throughout seventeen years of marriage he responded to me as if I were attacking him. So much so, and because I had nothing to compare with, I felt I was a destructive person in a relationship.

I left Adrian for reasons other than described and started a relationship with Mark. For a while everything went smoothly and then while walking one evening along a country lane I started talking animatedly with Mark. I was astonished and disturbed when he crumpled emotionally and literally fell in a heap in the road. The thought hit me – ‘Oh God, I’m doing it again. I must be some sort of destructive bitch forever hurting people.’

I wasn’t living with Mark at the time so we parted with me still struggling to understand what had happened. At work the next day I couldn’t help nibble away at the problem as I was going about what needed to be done. In the back of my mind I was looking at the things said, and in analysing them suddenly realised there was something quite ridiculous about feeling I had been aggressive. I had only been talking about things I was feeling strongly, and hadn’t been aiming anything at Mark. This meant that Mark had crumpled simply because I was being my normal enthusiastic, strongly expressive self. I immediately got on the phone to him and said that I didn’t want to develop a relationship with someone who flopped down like a pile of cow dung simply because I had been strong. I explained that I hadn’t even been directing the things said at him, I was only talking generally. He grasped this. We later married and when I stood up on my hind legs and felt good, or angry or strong, Mark was there with me. It was a completely different situation to my first marriage.

What Anna describes is the sort weakness or strength we unconsciously associate with our legs and occasionally with our spine. Expression of these unconscious associations riddle the English language. We see it in such idioms as beings legless; didn’t have a leg to stand on; my legs went to jelly; my legs were paralysed; I couldn’t stand up for myself; felt like I had a ball and chain on my legs. We also talk about being supported in a relationship, or perhaps having to stand alone. All of these refer to the emotions and attitudes which provide or deny not only our confidence, but also our ability to happily be ourselves.

In a sexual relationship, and in sex itself, these attitudes support or reduce our sense of value. They make the difference between a dependent or independent relatedness. They are the point of change which makes the difference between feeling insecure and of little value as a partner, or feeling confident of ones vale and standing, and being able to create mutual support and love. There is a huge contrast between feeling independent and through that choosing to stay in a relationship because you value it, and feeling dependent and inadequate, and desperately clinging to a relationship because you fear alternatives.

We all know what it is like to feel dependent. In childhood we were all dependent upon our parents, and that may have been a happy situation if our parents were caring. As an adult however, it can mean feeling demeaned or abused, because the feeling of dependence may lead us to tolerate behaviour we would not otherwise accept.

Finding our own strength and relating to another person from that power is a wonderful experience. In making love our sexual feelings flow with enormous freedom if they arise out of positive self esteem. We no longer attempt to overpower our partner to become top dog in a contest of will, or to seek to trap or be passive with them because we depend upon them for our own feelings of being wanted.

This is all interesting or boring theory, but what I want to show you is a way of experiencing and extending the power and confidence of your own ‘legs’. I want to show you how you can stand up, perhaps for the first time in your life. It is a wonderful experience. If you discover this it will certainly change the way you are loved and love.

Count Me In – I’m Standing

As a baby there was a time when you stood for the first time. Perhaps you can’t remember that, but if you have watched a baby do this you can see it is something that produces strong feelings, perhaps pleasure and pride or maybe uncertainty. As a baby we start by not being able to rise from the floor except on hands and knees. So in tuning-in to the secrets your legs have in store for you, I need to have you play with some movements involving standing and going down.

As with the other movements, it is helpful if you are wearing loose soft clothing – things you can move in easily and your body does not feel restricted by. You need an open space about six feet square, or about the size of a spread blanket. It helps if you can move around a little without the fear of banging into something or knocking things over. At first the movements are practised by yourself. When you experience the power of yourself in standing, then you can use the movements with a partner and explore what it does in your relationship or during sex. But by all means practise with a friend or friends who wish to explore these sexercises with you. In this movement however, we are not in close proximity, so need personal space.

It is important to have an environment in which you can feel free to express yourself easily, even to easy expression of emotion or unusual movement or use of your voice. This is more necessary in this sexercise than in the previous ones.

The reason for this need for freedom of expression is that in most everyday situations we are restraining ourselves quite severely, perhaps without knowing it. This is because in many public or even family situations, certain things are taboo. I remember in one work scene a young woman slipped and fell near a group of colleagues. She had previously broken her arm and it was newly out of plaster and tender. In falling she banged her arm and the pain led to instant crying. As I walked toward her to help her up the other people scattered with great spread. It appeared to be from embarrassment that someone cried in public near to them.

Other taboos are the expression of anger, affection or irrational behaviour. There is also a taboo on easy touching outside of a sexual relationship. In this sexercise one of the aims is to create an environment which allows more freedom of expression than usual. This is not only helpful for the sexercise, but also as you learn to create it, it can become a feature of your sexual experience and other relationships too.

To start I want you to stand in your space with feet about shoulder width apart, then drop hips down toward the floor with knees bent in the squat position. At this point we are just trying out the movement so experiment with standing up and squatting down again. If you find it is not an easy position because you have to raise your heals to keep balanced, place a couple of thick books, a rolled up small rug, or a piece of wood to give support. This should make it easy to drop your hips near to the floor without having to worry about keeping balance. In fact unless you can relax in the position reasonably well it will not be easy to complete the last part of the sexercise.

Once you can easily move between the up and down position do the movement fairly vigorously for a minute or so. I suggest starting from the standing position with feet shoulder width apart. Take an in-breath and as you do so take your hands and arms backwards slightly to open or widen the expansion of your rib cage. Let your head drop back a little also, to express this expansion.

From that open in-breath let your breath out through your mouth – in fact blow it out noisily as you drop into the squat position. As you drop let the hands swing forward and up until they are together in front of your chin or face with your elbows bent. This position is quite opposite to the standing, as the head is dropped forward as limply as possible, so your hands may in fact be touching the top of your head. The chest is also contracted and the trunk bent forward.

Without making yourself dizzy by too rapid a movement or too deep breathing, move between these opposites. If you need to rest in either of the positions allowing your breath to cycle as it wishes. Then when ready to continue start from the appropriate in or out breath.

When you feel acquainted with the two polarities of the movement –  the ‘up’ and the ‘down’ – take time to be aware of the different feelings in each. As you near the end of your fast movement slow down. Be aware of what each position feels like by staying in it longer, allowing your breathing to cycle as described above. While in the ‘down’ position see if you can drop unnecessary tension and droop or let go in the way one might in going to sleep. Close your eyes and let the feeling of letting-go pervade you a little. If you cannot possibly do this in the squatting position for some reason, use a low stool or chair to support you so you can allow your trunk to droop forward onto your legs, your head on your knees, and relax. Get a limp ‘rag doll’ feeling.

As you move into the ‘up’ position breathe in and open your eyes. Slightly exaggerate the in-breathe by taking your hands and arms backwards, head up and slightly back, chest open and expanded. In this position be aware of the more open, dynamic and active feelings it might produce for you. The words ‘might produce’ are used purposely because we each have slightly different reactions to body postures. So do not be concerned if you feel quite different to what I have described. This will be dealt with shortly.

To end this part of the sexercise, when you go down, stay in the position and notice whether you have any inclination of your own to move into the ‘up’ position. Take your time with this as it is very important. So far you have done the movement because you have been willing to follow the instructions I have given. But now I am saying do not stand up unless you can notice a real motivation to do so. Don’t do it on automatic.

What is it that moves you to stand up in the morning? It isn’t a silly question. It might be that it is duty, or a desire to avoid losing your job, or habit. Maybe you simply want to go to the toilet. Perhaps you would otherwise stay in bed. In other words you would stay  in the ‘down’ position. The positions in fact represent deeply important polarities in our life such as rest and activity – expression and withdrawal – confidence and uncertainty – waking and sleep.

Taking notice of whether you want to stand up or not is a way of seeing if you are simply going about your life on automatic, or whether enthusiasm and motivation fires you to express. Perhaps when you give awareness to whether you have an inclination to stand up you notice that you want to stay down or sink even further into rest. If so that is quite normal. Sometimes we have been pushing ourselves too hard, or have been pushed by others, and have never allowed ourselves the healing of sinking deeply into ourselves to contact our own reservoir of energy and enthusiasm.

Another response might be that you stand up fast because you don’t like it ‘down there’. This sometimes happens if you associate the ‘down’ position with personal defeat or failure instead of rest and recuperation.

Don’t worry if at this first practise you cannot find any motivation other than an automatic response to stand up. But do take time with it. Wait and be aware of the feelings that arise. If you are lucky you will feel a growing desire to stand, to be ‘in the world’, to be interacting with others with your own strength. If this moves you to stand, you will rise with more of yourself involved than usual. You will feel almost as if you are radiating a sort of ‘I AM’ feeling, ‘I EXIST’. Here is how Cathy describes her practise:-

I had done the standing and squatting movement quite a few times, usually with positive results. This time was so different though. There were several of us practising together, and Tony was leading the group. It took me quite a long time to find any urge whatsoever to move to a standing position. I simply squatted there waiting and wondering why it was taking me so long. As I waited I saw that my life had been plagued with lots of hesitations. For much of my life I had felt as if I had to continually struggle simply to exist. Standing up meant somehow meeting these difficulties and shining through them. Shining through is different to struggling to survive. Did I have whatever it needed to do that? Was there something alive in me enough to break through, like the budding seedling pushes through the heavy earth and reaches up to live?

At the time I didn’t have all those feelings so clearly thought out, but that is what it was like. Then I could feel something stirring in me. Our group was outdoors among fir trees and a warm wind was blowing. It touched me and I could feel that I wanted to be a part of life, to stand up, to be whatever was in me to be. My legs pushed to the earth and my head lifted. As I rose to a standing position tears came to my eyes. What an immense thing this was, to stand, to face all the things that tried to pull me back down, and yet to raise my head and dare. I stood, crying at the wonder of it, realising how long it had taken me to face my own fears, to find independence and stand on my own feet. But then, not only was I standing, but I had the impulse to take a step, to walk. All I had ever done, all I might ever do, was in that step. It was unforgettable.

Summary of Sexercise 4 – Standing

• Decide on giving yourself the freedom to express easily. If emotion, movement or fantasy arises in this sexercise let it happen. In everyday life we hold back much of ourselves because much of what we feel is inappropriate. Unfortunately we may fail to give ourselves a time to be free. Sex is a time to let go completely. This sexercise is a practise run for letting our enthusiasm rise.

 

• Stand in a space in which you can move easily. Wear loose clothes. Have feet about shoulder width apart, and experiment with the squatting movement, dropping your hips down toward the ground. If you need to use something support to your heels, do so. This enables an easier squatting posture. Should this still be awkward for you, sit on a low chair or stool.

 

• Squat and stand a few times to warm up. As you begin to feel at home with the movement do it in time with your breathing. Start from a position of standing with breathe in, arms away from the sides and backwards slightly to open the rib cage, and head slightly back. From that position breathe out through your mouth noisily as you drop down into the squat. As you drop swing the arms and hands forward and up towards the head, bending the elbows. Let your head droop and hold the position for a moment as you relax face and genitals. Then stand, breathing in through the nose as you do so. Swing the hands down and backwards and head up and back to open the chest.

 

• Move between the standing and squatting with some energy, but not so fast as to make yourself dizzy. If you need to you can rest either in the standing or squatting, allowing yourself to breathe normally until you start again from the appropriate in or out breath.

 

• When your body begins to feel at ease with the movement, and you can do it without being focused on the mechanics of it, start to notice what you feel in the poles of the movement. Slow the movement down and pause at each pole. Notice the difference between the standing and the squatting.

 

• Enhance these differences. It may help to close your eyes, droop the head and drop tension while squatting. If you cannot relax in this position try using a stool or a support for your heels.

 

• When you move to the standing position, open your eyes and breathe in. Let yourself feel something of the dynamic action of standing with the chest open and expanded.

 

• When you have become aware of the opposite poles of feeling in the movement, stay down in the squat. Let yourself relax into it. Kneel down or sit on a stool if you cannot relax in the position. Drop your head, drop tension from your face and pelvis. Droop!

 

• Now take time to observe whether there is any motivation to stand. Don’t simply stand up automatically. Notice what it is that makes you want to rise. If you can notice any urge to rise, follow it. Let IT move YOU, rather than simply making yourself stand up. This may take time. Be patient, and don’t be discouraged if you get no clear urge. Simply end the exercise after about ten minutes. But if there is a motivation to stand, follow it until you feel yourself standing with real motivation or enthusiasm. Try it several times until you can feel a different quality in the way you stand.

 

Love Wrestling

In teaching people how to play with and enjoy their body, it often surprises me how impoverished an experience some of us have of touching, exploring, rolling around and tussling with someone else. I shouldn’t really be surprised as the first time I got together with two friends and explored close physical contact outside of sex, I was frightened by the intensity of my own need to be close to and hold the male and female friend who were my partners. Over the years though, this became ease in being close, and a sense of wonder at what depths of myself emerged through undemanding physical contact with others.

A sexercise which is a good introduction to playful contact with someone, and uses the legs to exploring strength and fun in meeting is one I call Love Wrestling.  I call it this because it is non competitive but assertive way of getting close to a partner. It needs a fairly large space. This is important because the fun comes from being able to romp without worrying about hurting yourself on furniture or other objects in the room. Even a space the size of a double-bed blanket is sufficient IF you both agree to stop when you get near the boundary of your space.

If you are wearing clothes make sure they are loose, soft and fairly strong. Stand facing your partner – male or female – and put your hands on each others shoulders. Lean forward and put your head onto the shoulder of your partner. Find a position in which you can brace yourself against your partner enough to be able to push against each other using the strength of your legs. Experiment with this to get the feel of the right position.

Once you feel in contact and braced, the aim is to use your legs to push your partner to the edge of the blanket. To do this you have to be powerful and energetic with your legs, and let their power flow through to your shoulders and arms.

Don’t make this into a serious contest. Enjoy it! But do let your energy really break through. Shout and groan. Growl at each other, pant and rave. If you are half hearted and wimpish with this your partner, even though small, will easily push you over the edge. But if you let the animal in you flow through your body you can find resources of strength and assertiveness.

It always seems to me that if you try to be prim or passive, or are uncertain and let others make your decisions all the time, you will not be able to find strength to resist and push your partner in this sexercise. So you need to let your hair down, don’t be pushed around, get the strength flowing up from your legs and pelvis into your shoulders and arms, put some guts into it.

Do You Have 12 Volt Sex When It Could Be A 100 Volts?

 

Watching how people use their body, it is obvious that some people have never got the whole voltage of their energy flowing into what they do. The movements such people make often seem jelly-like. The movements seem to lack vigour and purpose. Watching a woman or man weight train or move who has learnt to express vigorously through their body is a pleasurable thing. Their strength and personality shine through what they do.

If you lack this sort of vigour, the way you move or remain passive in sex will be jelly like too. The power of your feelings is trapped somewhere and perhaps never engages with your partner or the world. You are most likely having 12 volt sex without knowing it. Believe me, you could be having a 100 volt, or even a 150 volt experience. So try the love wrestling and let your soul shine through in the process. When you have tried love wrestling a few times, change the rules by doing it with your sexual partner and let the course of events move toward sex. But keep the game going. Sex is VERY exciting when it is a wrestle and not easy to get!!

Summary of Sexercise 5 – Love Wrestling

 

• This is a way of using leg strength to express assertion and confidence in meeting a partner in  play and sex.

 

• A fairly large space is needed. For the sexercise to be enjoyable a minimum would be about the size of a double-bed blanket. Even then, move furniture or objects on which you cold hurt yourself, just outside that area, and agree to stop the wrestling when you get to the boundary or the area.

 

• Wear soft loose garments if you are wearing clothes.

 

• You can have the same or opposite sex partner. Stand facing your partner and put your hands on each others shoulders. Then lean forward and put your head onto the shoulders of your partner, and vice versa.

 

• Experiment with the head placing and hands to find a position that feels right. Now brace yourselves against each other, pushing slightly against each other using your legs. This will bring your trunk lower and leaning slightly forward, perhaps bending at the waist a little.

 

• Do a few trial pushes against each other to gauge strength and position before you start pushing in earnest. When you are ready warn each other that you are about to start in earnest.

 

• Remember this is not a contest, so don’t try to injure each other. But do let yourself go as far as the space and environment will allow – i.e. if you have rubber mats underneath in a gym you can be a bit more daring than if you are in your house with furniture near at hand.

 

• Push and dodge to get your partner moving where you want them. Let a few growls out if you can feel the assertive feelings to go with it. Be aware of how you are using your legs and push with them letting their strength flow right up to shove your partner back. It helps to keep the waist slightly bent so you don’t get overbalanced. Be assertive. It means to be forthright and positive, whereas aggressive means to be hostile.

 

• From here on let it be a rowdy game, experiencing each others strength and letting your own meet that of your partner.

 

• When you are good at the game, let the game move toward sex with the person you want to make love with. Get the volts pouring through by wrestling your way into each others body. A little oil on your skin knocks it through to a 150 volt experience!!

 

• As things warm up break the rules! Drop down onto the ground and grapple. The oil will make it very sensuous.

 

• This is so hot I take no liability for what happens. You’re on your own!

 

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Chapter Three

Tune-in To Your Hunger

Hunger is one of the big features of sex. Just as an empty stomach, falling blood sugar or energy brings about the hunger for food, so the influence of hormone levels, glandular pressure and emotional need produce sexual hunger. But sexual hunger also arises out of our identity or image of ourselves. It is easy to see that many people of both sexes view themselves as highly sexual and desirable. This isn’t simply something they think of as a sort of self assessment. If you have a temperament deeply influenced by whether you are sexually desirable, you will probably dress and act in the role. You will fight a long and hard battle with the ageing process in an attempt to remain nubile or virile. After all, without being nubile or virile you would be uncertain of your identity!

Other people see themselves as intellectuals, or creative, and so on. These people wouldn’t need to have sex simply to retain their image of themselves. But beyond such differences there is still sexual hunger.

Especially for women, hunger is a factor in sex in another way as well. If there is an absence of feeling wanted as a woman – not as a person – many women get hungry for food, and start a battle with weight. With this hunger the need is to find the bottom line in the situation. What is it you are hungry for. Is it really food? Is it sex? Is it to feel you are really wanted? Those aren’t always easy questions to answer, but by tuning in to your hunger, and learning to listen to it, you can go a long way to making it a friend instead of an enemy.

Our first movement to express our hunger was – hopefully – to suck on our mother’s breast. Our mouth and tongue are incredibly sensitive. Through them we reach out to the world from our hunger and touch it. Our teeth are a part of this hungry reaching for the world too, and when we express our emotional and sexual hunger, it is often our hands, lips, tongue and teeth we use.

Tuning-in to our hunger helps us to more deeply enjoy the satisfaction and emotional and sensual nourishment we get from contact with our partner. It also helps us to become aware if our needs are being fulfilled. There are subtle but important experiences in sex that we may not be getting. This is a bit like eating nice looking and tasty food which has in it no vitamins and minerals. It looks good, it tastes good, but you gradually feel bad on it. And if you still keep eating it you get sick. Most of us know what it feels like to love someone who is indifferent to us, or whose desires go to someone other than ourself. This can happen to us not only as an adult, but also as a child. The hunger to be wanted and loved can be so great it consumes us.

Are You As Hungry For Me As I Am For You?

 

Recently a divorced male friend, Doug, told me some of the secrets of his sex life. He is a very sexually active male in his forties. Having recently split from a four year relationship, although now having sex with a younger woman, Sheila, he doesn’t allow himself to feel emotionally connected to her. Doug noticed that when he masturbates Sheila, her vagina relaxes and opens ‘like a flower’. When he enters her during sex though, her vagina is often tight and uncomfortable for him.

When talking to Sheila about this, she told Doug that her tightness was probably because she was anxious about letting her emotions flow fully. If she did she would want to be much closer and committed with him than he did with her. Doug had often told Sheila that he was still emotionally connected to his previous love, and didn’t want to make any deep connection to Sheila because of that, and because she was much younger than he.

It is fairly clear that Sheila and Doug are allowing their hunger for each other to be only partially satisfied. The physically sensual side of their relationship appears to be enjoyed by both of them, as well as the sexual release and pleasure they both get. Although they live apart, they meet often and spend time together sexually. But their emotional and social need for each other is not met because of mutual decisions to avoid it.

Doug and Sheila’s situation is fine if they can both remain happy and healthy, and manage to get their emotional and social need for closeness satisfied somewhere and somehow. They are both aware of where the lack arises, and are decisive about it. But if they were not sure of what they were hungry for with each other, and lacked awareness, the situation would be different.

Doug and Sheilah are both people who have a lot of anxiety and feelings of insecurity concerning relationship. This is possibly what makes it difficult for either of them to commit themselves any more fully to each other. According to recent research, only about one or two percent of people are actually born with an anxious disposition. This suggests that however deeply etched the insecurity is, it is still only something that was learnt through difficult childhood experiences. In other words the feelings that keep Doug and Sheilah from getting closer are negative habits learnt in childhood. With a little persistence you can change and create a completely different relationship. Of course it helps if your partner also attempts to be creative in a similar way.

I know this for myself because during a time of great inner pain and depression just after my divorce, I experienced a turning point in my life and relationship that had to do with transforming a habit. The moment occurred as my present wife returned from shopping. I was in our bedroom standing staring out of the window into space feeling dreadful, empty of any pleasure, and without any motivation to do anything. As my wife entered the bedroom I turned my head to look at her. I could see her happiness shining through her body from her upright energetic movements and the openness of her face. It struck me that she was feeling good because she had been out of the house and away from the heavy atmosphere of my depression. But as she took in the story of my position and the window and whatever my own body posture and facial expression was telling her, I saw the enthusiasm drain from her and she wilted slightly like a plant lacking water.

It hurt me to see how my situation affected her, and in that instant I didn’t want to go on building that sort of deadening influence into our lives. I wanted to be a source of pleasure and support, not an eroder of enthusiasm and love. I knew my wife had responded to what she had seen of my posture and facial expression, so I straightened up, smiled, walked toward her and hugged her and told her how pleased I was to see her. The result was extraordinary. Her posture straightened again. Her brightness returned, and she talked with pleasure about where she had been.

I learnt from that experience and repeated it over and over until I actually developed a new way of responding in our relationship. Although at first it was something I acted out from regret at what I was doing, slowly it was no longer an act. Such is the way with habits. At least I saw that what had felt like inevitable parts of my personality that were ME, changing showed my depression and pain was a form of habitual response to events.

Hungry Kisses

Getting close to our partner without any clothes on, and kissing, are ways we can tune into our hunger. I realise you most likely get skin to skin already and kiss. What I am suggesting is to take time with your hunger and let it blossom.

To do this stand with your partner in a warm private place, wearing a single layer of loose easily removed clothing. Slowly make contact by holding each other, but don’t rush this. It is too easy to have sex automatically. All sorts of pressures or expectations push us to ‘do sex’ rather than move to it from our own needs and hunger for it. We may feel that it is expected of us to have sex now we are physically close and intimate, so we simply get on with it. We might feel, even if not admitting it to ourselves, that not having sex would mean we are not capable as a man/woman, and the more often we do it the more woman/man we are. Another pressure to what I call automatic sex is that we might have sex to get something else, like someone’s attention and support. We might allow sex with our partner as a business arrangement to make sure of getting money, a roof over our head, food, or even as an escape from loneliness rather than as an expression for longing and hunger for our partner.

So this sexercise is a way of finding out what hunger and desire we have for our partner outside of automatic action.

Once near to each other, pause and feel each other’s body heat. Notice what you feel as you brush against each other and gently touch lips. Don’t go for the stereotyped TV kiss one sees so much of, where there is an open-mouthed, tongue protruding, massive contact immediately. Wait for your desire to build up and let it express in the contact you have with each other. Hunger for another person is usually felt as a yearning in the belly which often flows up the body to the chest and mouth. Sometimes ones feels it as a sort of breathlessness and a desire to get as close to the person as possible. There is an urge to take your partner into you, like being hungry for them and wanting to take them into your body, or to get into them as fully as you can.

In whatever way your hunger arises, let it direct how you connect with your partner. The urges that arise will lead to semi spontaneous movements, or an urge to touch, rub or kiss.

It may help to let the hunger flow into kissing at first. The kissing then ignites further hunger, so let it flow from there.

If there is no sense of hunger, during the sexercise do not move on to further sexual activity without the hunger. Pause at this very first stage and notice what you are both feeling. Admit to each other what is felt and it will gradually shift. If you find it difficult to find your hunger, read chapter five and use the sexercises given.

Summary of Sexercise 15 – Hungry Kisses

• Stand near each other in a warm place. Wear loose easily removed clothing.

 

• Get closer until your bodies touch. Brush against each other. Feel the body heat generated between you. Gently touch lips.

 

• Notice any desire or hunger this arouses in you for your partner. Allow this hunger to express in kissing, touching or rubbing. If it moves in that direction, let the hunger flow into sex.

 

• Your hunger may at times lead to expressing verbally. Don’t suppress this urge to say things to your partner, even if what you say uses swear words.

 

• If you cannot feel any hunger or desire for your partner, do not simply have sex automatically. Wait and notice what feelings or images stand between you and your partner. Admit these to your partner. This usually shifts them. Read chapter five if you cannot move beyond this point.

 

• The overall aim of this sexercise is to recognise your hunger for your partner and give it more chance to flow into your sexual contact and express through your body.

 

I Want – I Want – I WANT

There seems to be a huge divide between people who spend their whole life wanting and desiring things indiscriminately, even criminally, and those who dare not allow their wanting, or express their desires.

Kissing – Wanting – Bottom line.

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[i]This description of Jean is taken from Robert Van de Castles book The Dreaming Mind.

 

 

[ii] Taken from The New Dream Dictionary by Tony Crisp, published by the Optima imprint of Little Brown, UK.

Chapter Six

Tune-in To Yourself

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Being There For Each Other

Making love to our partner can be just as much of an old habit as going to the corner table when the telephone rings a week after it has been moved to a new site. When my second wife and I started our relationship we decided we would try not to live out the mistakes we made in our first marriages. Some mistakes were obvious. For instance I had allowed small irritations to mount one on top of the other without dealing with them. Then result was that minor irritants combined and formed a huge sense of separation and emotional distance.

But some habits are not so easy to see. Some of them we don’t even know we have until we stumble over them. In trying to be aware of each other’s feeling responses in making love, we slowly formed the agreement that it was okay for either of us to stop at any point if we inwardly felt ill at ease or tense. Without that agreement I don’t think I would have noticed that at the very beginning of sex, at the point where our bodies were touching and starting to be aroused, I felt awkward and didn’t have an inclination to proceed. In the past I had pushed through this feeling without really noticing it. In admitting the feeling to myself and Hyone however, it defined and I realised I felt like a teenager who theoretically knew what movements to make, but hadn’t been helped to find the inner awakening of affection and pleasurable contact from which the sexual act can flow spontaneously.

Because I felt my partner was supportive rather than critical, and because I didn’t try to hide my awkwardness, I was able to stumble around in it for a while until I found an emerging sense of natural warmth and arousal growing in me. I then didn’t need to ‘know what to do’ because my actions and responses became natural expressions of how I felt and the wonder of being close. This showed me that for many years I had been working on automatic – on habit.

The Magic Bed

The closeness we create in bed, or in the act of love, can enable us to find real change, real growth and pleasure in our relationship skills. One of the great sexercises is therefore that of creating an explorative and non critical sexual relationship. If you haven‘t already got that, it needs practise in the beginning. You need to go very slowly because there is a tendency to feel extremely open to criticism or ridicule when exploring sexuality.

Summary of Sexercise

 

• This is to be practised with a partner. The partner can be of any gender. The partner need not be someone you know or have an intimate relationship with. It is however, best if they are seriously interested in learning something of how they react in a relationship.

 

• The aim of the exercise isn’t to move inevitably to sexual intercourse. Even if you are with a partner with whom you know you can arrive at intercourse, don’t have that in mind as where you are aiming at. It is important to meet each other moment by moment rather than pushing toward a goal.

 

• After finding a partner to explore this with you, it is important to arrive at an understanding, an agreement. The agreement is that 1- The sexercise is an experiment and an exploration in regard to relationship. It is not to be taken as in any way binding regarding future relationship. 2 – An attempt to be as honest as possible with each other by not hiding what is felt or thought. 3 – To take responsibility for ones own feelings and reactions. In practise this means not blaming ones partner for what one feels. 4 -The readiness to stop the process at any point if one of you wants this. It MUST be agreed that this can be done without irritation or blame from a partner who might be ready to or desiring to continue. I am not saying nobody should feel irritated or frustrated, but that this must be stated as “I am feeling irritable/frustrated.” Rather than “You have made me irritable and frustrated and need to do something about it.” 5 – Agree that the experiment and agreed conditions should last up to one hour. At the end of that time the sexercise is finished, and there should be a statement to that effect such as “Okay, let us end here.”

 

• Talk over these agreements to make sure you both understand them and see what they mean in practise.

 

• Use a space and environment which is conducive to spending some time together, and in which you will not be disturbed. Sit in facing each other, preferably on cushions on the floor if that is comfortable. You should not at this point be in contact in any way physically.

 

• Ask each other if you are ready to start. If there is agreement continue. If not wait until there is or end the session. Mutual agreement is a fundamental need in this.

 

• Look at each other and as you do so take note of how you feel, what your inner reaction is. Notice whether you are tensed or relaxed. Be aware of your posture and what it is expressing. Perhaps you are leaning back away from your partner. Take note also of what thoughts or memories occur to you.

 

• You may never have done this before, so remember this is an experiment, a time to explore within the protection of the agreement. It is a way of learning. So there may be stumbles and difficulties. These are a natural part of exploring and learning.

 

• Tell each other in an unhurried way what you are experiencing in your body, your thoughts and your feelings. This doesn’t have to be every tiny little thing, just the main trend. So you might for instance say things such as – I don’t feel very relaxed – I keep thinking I ought to be somewhere else – I’m feeling a bit nervous – I have an urge to reach out and hold your hand – my mind is a blank – I keep worrying about my appearance – I feel pleasure at being with you – I notice I’m sitting hunched up as if I am tense.

 

• As you are observing your own responses, part of the sexercise is to give feedback. So if you partner actually said “I keep worrying about my appearance” – the aim is not to simply say a reassuring thing such as “I think you look nice” – but to observe your own responses and state them. So you might in fact notice that you hadn’t really been aware of your partner’s appearance because you were so worried about your own. Or perhaps you actually feel the person does not attract you. Then phrase this in a way to take responsibility for it, such as, “I am feeling I don’t want to be sitting here.” Even if that is the case this does not mean the experiment is failing. Not at all. The sexercise is about observing such feelings, admitting them and seeing what happens next for the duration of the agreed time. Don’t turn this process of declaring your observations into a conversation. Just say what you  have to say in a few words and stop.

 

• Quite enormous changes of feeling can occur as you continue. Often the admitted feelings melt and give way to a new level of response. Some level of intimacy or ease is reached, but not always. Overall there is a movement through subtle barriers that stood in the way of meeting each other more fully. If emotions arise give them to your partner in the sense of allowing them and admitting them. Look at your partner as you do so. Don’t forever be looking away or with closed eyes. You may both move to intimate physical contact. But even this may shift and change as you  take notice of what is felt at each moment.

 

• Undoubtedly you will hit barriers, your boundaries, beyond which you wither will not be able to, or not choose to, move beyond at the time. These are important. If possible define whether it is your choice that you do not go beyond that point of intimacy. Choice is your power and expresses your decisions from which you shape your life in your own unique way. If it is not from choice, then there is some aspect of your experience that is locked out of your decision making, and needs further observation.

 

• A great deal can be gained by using this technique a number of times with the same different people. It enable you to learn to move into and out of intimacy with awareness of what you want and how to admit you want it. The practising brings a clarity of how you handle a relationship, what fears and barriers you have, and also what strong points. Hearing another person’s honest feedback is also a very rare thing. It brings clarity about how someone else is responding to you, and how you impact with others. Later it will be explained how to use this in a directly sexual relationship. Certainly the confidence and information you gain about yourself will naturally spill over into sexual and other relationships.

 

Actually experiencing this form of meeting can be an amazing adventure or a real enlightenment. Here is an account of one such session between Ed and Polly.

I had know Polly for some time, but I had never used this form of meeting. Polly is a divorcee, a nurse, and someone I naturally like. My own situation at the time was of being married.

We sat opposite each other and were quiet for a while. I wanted to be in touch with Polly’s body in some way so I told her and she felt easy with that so we moved closer and held hands. I can’t remember every detail but I remember I was feeling close but without any desire to get closer. Then Polly started telling me she had warm feelings for me. With quite some feelings she said she loved me. I had used this approach quite often so it didn’t knock me back or anything. But in observing my own feelings I couldn’t notice any response to what Polly was saying, and I had the sense she expected a reply. So I said something like, “Well, what you are saying is really strong, but I don’t feel anything like what you say. I just feel calm and observing.”

Polly seemed to experience something powerful and started crying, and when she did that I could feel my own emotions respond. Then she explained that what I had said had suddenly pushed her to remember that this situation we were in was like a replay of something that used to happen between herself and her father. She had felt it as some sort of duty to tell her father that she loved him, but in fact she didn’t have any feelings for him. She had grown to believe her lie though, and it wasn’t until we had started being honest with each other that the lie had been exposed. This relieved me as I couldn’t understand how, if someone felt love for me, I wouldn’t have some sense of it.

After that it was like a wall had been dropped between us. I began to feel feelings of warmth and connection with Polly, and she with me. We played a bit and laughed and put our noses together looking into each others eyes close up. All I could see was one big eye looking straight into me. It was a very nice feeling. Then something amazing happened and I can’t even begin to understand how. Suddenly I was Polly. I was completely in her body although I was physically sitting in front of her. It was one of the strangest things I have ever known. Although Polly didn’t feel it to the same degree, she still felt something big had happened and held me close.

Gradually the feeling got clearer. It was like I was trapped in a woman’s body, and was scared I wouldn’t be able to get out. I realised it was about being born and told Polly. She then held me by wrapping her legs around me so I could really feel a woman’s body holding me tight. Slowly I wriggled free, and in doing so knew that I was facing a fear that getting near a woman might somehow trap me, and with Polly’s help I was finding my way beyond this fear.

Boundaries – are they fear or intuition?

 

Tune in to the sexual power of your pelvis

Tune-in To Your Pelvis 

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

 

• 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.

 

• 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.

 

• 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 ([i]) 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 crate 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 out 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.

Summary of Sexercise 8 – The Whirlpool

• Choose a place and space where you can feel relaxed about doing this movement. If you are wearing clothes use ones which are loose fitting enabling you to move easily.

 

• Stand with feet about shoulder width apart, preferably with feet parallel to each other. Melt tensions from face and pelvis. Also create the feeling of your knees being connected to your pelvis by elastic bands – your muscles. This means your knees are not locked, but are slightly bent and responsive to movement.

 

• Imagine moving your hips around the inside of a barrel or circle. Some people find the image of a whirlpool useful. As you move your hips in this horizontal circle keep your head floating in about the same position. If possible let the knees and ankles respond in a relaxed way to the movement.

 

• Make the circle as wide as you can. This means that when your pelvis is in the forward phase of the circle you trunk will be leaning backwards slightly. When the pelvis is in the backward phase of the circle the trunk will be leaning forwards.

 

• The breath cycle should be to breathe out while the hips circle forwards, and breathe in as the hips circle backwards – or are moving in the back half of the circle.

 

• At about half time stop and move the hips in the opposite direction.

 

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

 

• When you stop, stand or sit and meditate the movement. The aim is to recreate the feeling or sensation of the movement without doing it physically.

 

Whirlpool With A Partner

Done with a partner, the whirlpool requires more skills of co-ordination and relatedness than when you circle your hips alone. The aim is to remain aware of contact with your partner and to tune in to your partner’s movement and timing. It is certainly more fun that the hip circling alone.

Summary of Sexercise 9 – The Whirlpool Together

• You need a partner of either sex. Being a similar height can help but is not necessary.

 

• Choose a place and space where you can both feel relaxed about doing this movement. If you are wearing clothes use ones which are loose fitting enabling you to move easily.

 

• Stand back to back with feet about shoulder width apart, preferably with feet parallel to each other, and link arms. Melt tensions from face and pelvis. Also create the feeling of your knees being connected to your pelvis by elastic bands – your muscles. This means your knees are not locked, but are slightly bent and responsive to movement.

 

• Close your eyes and stand quietly together feeling the warmth and contact with your partner. Drop tension from the face and pelvis.

 

• In this movement neither partner needs to lead, but obviously you do have to start off in the same direction. Imagine moving your hips around the inside of a barrel or circle. Some people find the image of a whirlpool useful. Start slowly keeping awareness of contact with your partner. Keep the open state in your face and genitals. If you lose this stop and regain it before you start a gain.

 

• Make the circle as wide as you can. When your pelvis is in the forward phase of the circle you trunk will be leaning backwards slightly. When the pelvis is in the backward phase of the circle the trunk will be leaning forwards. This means that there will be an alternating leaning back and being supported, and a giving support, as you lean on your partner’s back, or are supported on their back.

 

• Do this slowly and be aware of how you feel as you are supported or giving support.

 

• The breath cycle should be to breathe out while the hips circle forwards, and breathe in as the hips circle backwards – or are moving in the back half of the circle.

 

• At about half time stop and move the hips in the opposite direction.

 

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

 

• When you stop, stand or sit and meditate the movement. The aim is to recreate the feeling or sensation of the movement, and of your relationship with your partner.

 

Open And Moving Together

Because love-making is usually a two way affair, and needs sensitivity to another person’s movements and needs, it is fun and helpful to practise the hip circling movements with a partner. After the Whirlpool try Sexercise 2, the horizontal hip circling with a partner. It needs a little more co-ordination than the Whirlpool, and is a more powerfully helpful movement physically and emotionally. It more directly links with the movements our body wants to make in expressing passion.

Try it first back to back with arms linked. Stand with feet about shoulder width apart, back to back and arms linked. Stand for a while with eyes closed being aware of the warmth and sensations arising from being back to back. Drop tension from your face and pelvis. Let the open feeling pervade you  before staring the movement.

Decide who is going to lead and begin to swing the hips in the forward and backward circle – Sexercise 2 – and see if you can keep your behind in gentle contact with your partner. Start slowly so you can learn to feel the contact and develop the skill of moving together in harmony with each other. Gradually you can achieve a flowing and sensitive togetherness of movement. See if you can do this while dropping unnecessary tension. Leave the belly, chest and head open to any pleasure felt. Let any laughter or feelings be part of what you are doing.

Living processes tend to express in waves. This is true whether we look at things such as our heartbeat, where contraction follows expansion in waves, or in the digestive tract where the wavelike flow of peristalsis moves the food along the gut. In the realm of our personality the wave action of life is felt as heightening and dropping of feelings. So in using this sexercise there may be times when feelings of contact or pleasure rise and then fall away. This is so important we will explore it in greater depth as we use other sexercises. Meanwhile, in this back to back movement, it is enough to notice any highs and lows of contact and go along with them – letting the body express the highs, and perhaps slowing down or express less intensely with the lows. Even if you do not have a distinct feeling of any shift in your own feelings, try doing the movement with vigour, then slow down and do it gently and with sensitivity.

Summary of Sexercise 10 – Tuning In

• This movement can be done with a partner of either sex. It helps if you are either about the same height, or the shorter person stands on something like books to raise the height of their bottom to be in contact with the partner’s. Or the taller person bends their knees a little.

 

Be clear what the movement is. If necessary do the movement alone first. Decide beforehand who is going to lead first in doing the movement. After a period of practise change roles in who will lead and notice any differences.

• Stand with feet about shoulder width back to back with your partner. You will need to make close contact. Link arms, but not too tightly.

 

• Take time at this point to be aware of the contact as you stand back to back. Let tension melt from your body and be aware of the warmth from your partner flowing into you. Stand for a while relaxing into the contact.

 

• The lead person now – slowly at first – takes their pelvis backwards as if sitting down, slightly bending the legs as they do so. Then the pelvis is pushed forward and the legs straightened. The hip circling is the same as in sexercise 2. The difference is that you must become aware of the contact and response of your partner. If this doesn’t happen resistance, overbalance, poor movement rhythm occurs. The aim is therefore to get lost in the awareness of your mutual movement and its harmony. This may need quite some practise, because you are not only seeing if you can move your body in time with that of your partner, but also if you can drop tension and let any pleasure that arises permeate you.

 

• Don’t forget to swap roles at some point in regard to who is leading in the movement.

 

• Once you have got used to the movement, and feel in harmony with your partner, focus on any shifts of feeling as far as pleasure, contact or oneness are concerned. Let your body, breath and voice express these shifts in any way that arises spontaneously.

 

• Although you may get a sense of harmony together reasonably soon, continue the movement for some time. Keep focused on the sense of contact and your enjoyment or response to what is happening between you. Love making is hopefully not something over in two or three minutes. Therefore it is helpful to practise being focused on the act of moving together, and at the same time dropping unnecessary tensions.

 

• Take time after finishing to sit for a minute still in contact with your partner. Meditate the movement together to see of you can recreate the sense of contact. Then talk over what you felt during and after the movement.

 

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

 

Hold Me Closer

 

To deepen your experience of harmony and intimacy, try doing the hip circling face to face with your chosen partner. But take time getting close. Do it sensitively and with awareness. Sense each others reactions. Respond rather than mechanically move. Take time to listen to your own feelings and don’t push yourself to levels of intimacy you don’t have an inner inclination for – nor press your partner to levels you can feel they are disinclined to approach. In practise this means not maintaining physical closeness with your partner if you sense they are not inviting it any  longer. It means being aware of their small reactions such as tension, holding their breath, pulling back or going limp and passive. These are all signs of tension.

Remember also that this face to face hip circling is for PRACTISE. Relax. Enjoy it. Learn from it how to sense your partner and respond in an appropriate way. There may be waves of what I call ‘excitation’. I mean by this greater and lesser arousal or response. See if you can flow with these and relax into quietness when the excitation lessens.

Start very slowly. Take time to gradually move physically close. In doing so don’t concentrate on your thoughts, or even your fantasies. Be aware of how your skin feels against your partner. Watch what feelings and pleasures start to rise. Remain at that point of sensitivity to touching and body warmth for a while. Sense each others breathing and be a mirror so your outbreath is in time with your partner’s inbreath. Let the beginning of the movement be gently sensual.

To let this become the enormous pleasure and nourishment it can be, keep the open state going, and let yourself respond to what you are feeling. At times this might mean that you feel shy or tense. If so pause and admit these feelings to your partner. Such disclosures should not be commented on by your partner, or vice versa, and this needs to be understood at the beginning. Whatever is said needs to be heard and allowed a place in what you are doing, but not remarked upon.

So if I were your partner and the closeness produced feelings of sadness because my relationship had been without closeness for a long time, I would need to say what I felt, and you would need to listen without comment. If there were emotions rising with the feeling, space should be given until the feelings have emptied. Then continue with the movement.

This listening to each other’s body and its signals, each other’s feelings and words, is of primal importance in learning not only to develop a caring relationship with someone else, but also in meeting yourself more fully. This will be covered in greater detail in other sexercises.

With this in mind, gently make contact and let your body feel the open state. Now face to face, close, start moving slowly and sensitively. There may be tides of feeling, of pleasure, rising and falling. Respond to them. Let your body and even your voice or breathing express their rise and fall. Therefore as excitation rises allow the movements to be more expressive. As the excitation drops, allow the movements to be slower and quieter. If you or your partner feel the need to stop the practise altogether, this must be honoured without irritation. But if this happens it would be helpful to sit quietly and close for a while rather than to simply break contact quickly. If you lose the open state of face and pelvis, stop, melt the tension and start again. If the tension becomes intense and insistent this needs another sexercise that will be described later.

At first don’t take the movements into full sexual intercourse, otherwise you will miss the point. Often full sexual intercourse is riddled with habits that decrease awareness – that are expressions of automatic responses. The face to face meeting is to develop sensitivity and awareness – of our own body and feelings and those of our partner. Only take what you have learnt into intercourse when you gain experience and growth in this. So my suggestion is that this movement is used for practise only, to establish a different awareness and habits. If the practise is mixed with actual sexual intercourse, it loses its power as an safe area of practise where one can make mistakes, learn from them and discuss them.

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.
• 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.

 

• 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 had 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. ([ii])

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.

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 out 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 stop 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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[i]This description of Jean is taken from Robert Van de Castles book The Dreaming Mind. 

 

[ii] Taken from The New Dream Dictionary by Tony Crisp, published by the Optima imprint of Little Brown, UK.

Tune in to the sexual power of your legs

Tune-in To Your Legs 

For many years I have helped people discover how to unlock the secret power trapped in their body. The legs are a wonderful example of how, when we relate to our body in the right way, enormous confidence and feelings of positive motivation are released. Also when expressing your feelings freely during love making, your legs play a big part in how you hold your partner, and what position of love making you can move into. Personally I don’t see the various positions of love making as things one needs to use as a sort of gymnasium of sex. But having a mobile body enables you to allow the variety of feelings and urges that arise in the passion and pleasure of love.

For instance, as a man, it is a very beautiful feeling to sit cross legged and have my partner sit naked on my legs face to face, with her legs around my waist. The wonderful mixture of pressure, warm moist flesh and pubic hair against my genitals, and suspended breasts against my chest, is a sensual feast. Without being able to sit in that posture, the nearest one could get to it would be to sit on a stool. But when sitting on a stool, the thighs are not spread open to allow ones love partner to sink deeply onto one.

Sitting on a chair, the woman who cannot let her knees drop sideways cannot truly open her secret warmth and wrap her legs around her partner.

Recently a woman friend, told me, “The first time my present husband had sex with me, he said he had never experienced a woman opening her legs the way I can. He kept saying what a marvellous experience it was. This was because I had practised some leg stretches until I could drop my knees sideways.”

Opening Your Legs

For a woman, opening your legs can be a very powerful sexual signal, and a very deep self offering. If it is done with skill it becomes an artistic as well as sensual act. Sensual pleasure arises mostly from the way flesh touches and moves against flesh. The pleasure blossoms into ecstasy when your emotions blow against the glowing ember produced by feeling warm open lips against flesh, and the ember leaps into fiery flame. But many tender moments of loving sensuality come from feeling your partner’s skin, weight and expanse of flesh against you in unusual ways. What would it feel like to be kissing with lips and genitals, and yet have your partner’s thighs lying against your chest? It’s easy if you can bend at the waist until your head touches your legs.

Without attempting to be a gymnast in love though, here are some ways to bring greater suppleness to your legs.

Summary of Sexercise 1 – Opening The Legs

• Always wear soft loose clothing for these sexercises, not tight corset-like leotards. Or if comfortable, wear nothing at all, or just a pair of briefs.

 

• The movement needs a reasonable floor space, about the size of  a spread single blanket. So stand in such a space where you feel at ease about doing an exercise. then place your feet about double shoulder width. If you have stockings or socks on and your feet begin to slip, take the socks off. It is important to avoid your feet slipping. This could lead to slight injury.

 

• Look to see if your feet are parallel to each other. If they are splayed out straighten them and let the weight load be taken on the outside under-edge of each foot. Do not lock the knees back in a rigid way. Keep the knees ready to flex.

 

• Now let your head droop forward allowing the trunk to follow until your hands touch the floor. If this doesn’t quite happen take your feet a little wider. Then with hands supporting on the floor, slowly take your feet wider apart, maintaining their parallel position and taking the weight on the outside of the foot. Keep moving the feet apart until you reach the point where pain begins in the muscles – probably on the inside of the thighs. Bring the feet a little together from that point.

 

• Make sure the hands are on the floor just under the shoulders. Then bend the right leg at the knee. This will cause the left leg to stretch by dropping the hips slightly. Now straighten the right and bend the left knee in a similar way. The resulting movement is one of swinging from left to right. Repeat the movement until you feel you have well stretched the inside of your legs – probably about five times in each direction.

 

• When finished stop in the central position, inch your feet slightly more together, take your weight and balance on your feet and slowly bring your head and trunk up in to the standing position. Rest.

 

• This stretch is to enable you to take the legs wider apart without pain. It applies to men and women.

 

The main objectives in stretching our legs in a sexercise is to enable the legs to be opened wider, and for the bent knees to be capable of dropping sideways. As an example of this, the classic sexual posture is portrayed as the woman lying on her back with her knees bent and in the air, and the man lying between her thighs. This means for the woman that her thighs are still fairly closed. She has to drop her knees sideways to let the man lie between her legs. If the knees can be dropped further apart, there is a full opening and a comfort in the position. It also means other positions are easy and enjoyable.

Something I have noticed is that even if you can do the postures given only reasonably well in practise, during sexual intercourse the body seems to be experienced differently. One can move into postures easily and often go beyond what was possible in practise without pain. Or if there is pain it doesn’t seem to be noticed. Ones attention is focused elsewhere.

 Another two stretches that aid this are ones which are particularly to widen the knees falling sideways.

Summary of Sexercise 2 – The Open Lap

 

• Use this stretch in an open space again, with loose clothing.

 

• Sit on the floor with legs straight out in front. If it is difficult to sit like this without an inclination to lean backwards or forwards to balance, put your hands just slightly to the rear of your behind. Take you weight on your hands and slightly lift your hips off the floor. This lets the weight of your trunk hang from the shoulders and allows the spine to straighten.

 

• Bend your knees and bring your feet toward you so the soles of the feet are together and the knees dropped outwards from the centre to whatever point they will fall. Using your hands, inch your body slowly toward your feet – still with soles of feet together.

 

• Bring your trunk as near to your feet as you can tolerate while the knees are dropped outwards. Then take hold of the toes of your feet with both hands and while holding them straighten your spine. This will probably pull your feet a little nearer. Meanwhile move your knees downwards towards the floor, widening the gap between them.

 

• This is never a very easy posture for most Europeans, but there can be rapid improvement if you do the posture at least two or three times a week and hold for a minute or so. When you begin to feel easy in it and it becomes enjoyable, try keeping the soles of the feet together and lying backwards onto the floor.

 

• Apart from a useful sexercise this posture is also well worth doing for its benefits during childbirth It stretches and opens the pelvic area.

 

Summary of Sexercise 3 – Foot To Thigh

 

• You need a space large enough to sit on the floor with your legs stretched out in front of you.

 

• Bring the right foot toward the trunk, helping with the hands. Take the heel of the foot up as far as you comfortably can into the crutch, while keeping the left leg straight.

 

• Hold the heel well into the crutch and see if you can drop the right knee down toward the floor. If it is difficult, hold the foot in place with the left hand and gently press the knee down with the right.

 

• If the right knee drops easily to the floor, take the right foot in both hands and lift it up onto the left thigh. If possible the toes should be well over to the outer edge of the thigh. Then again see if you can drop the knee toward the floor. Take your time. Your body will respond if you give it weeks instead of minutes. Gradually your knees will open and muscles adapt.

 

• After holding the position for a minute or so put the right foot out on the ground with leg straight again. Now stretch the left foot to the crutch in the same way and repeat the procedure.

 

• End by sitting with legs crossed in front of you. If you can easily do the above stretch it may be possible to put one foot in the crutch – for the man the heal goes under the testicles – and the other heal in front of it. Otherwise put one leg over the other in an easy posture – for instance the left heal touching the right thigh and its toes under the right calf, and the right heal under the left calf.

 

Power In The Legs

If our legs, as psychological and physical sources of power, are not being used properly, we lose confidence in life and in love. Without the power that comes from your legs you lack the ability to stand up for yourself. You cannot pleasurably or playfully meet another person’s power and positive strength. Instead you may feel attacked or demeaned simply through your partner expressing their own vigour of body and mind. Instead of a happy play and creative flux of mutual strength and creativity, one feels attacked, and responds with counter-attack. This is not productive of a happy and surging relationship. Anna describes her experience of this.

My first marriage was one in which I constantly felt I had been aggressive in my behaviour to my husband, Adrian. Throughout seventeen years of marriage he responded to me as if I were attacking him. So much so, and because I had nothing to compare with, I felt I was a destructive person in a relationship.

I left Adrian for reasons other than described and started a relationship with Mark. For a while everything went smoothly and then while walking one evening along a country lane I started talking animatedly with Mark. I was astonished and disturbed when he crumpled emotionally and literally fell in a heap in the road. The thought hit me – ‘Oh God, I’m doing it again. I must be some sort of destructive bitch forever hurting people.’

I wasn’t living with Mark at the time so we parted with me still struggling to understand what had happened. At work the next day I couldn’t help nibble away at the problem as I was going about what needed to be done. In the back of my mind I was looking at the things said, and in analysing them suddenly realised there was something quite ridiculous about feeling I had been aggressive. I had only been talking about things I was feeling strongly, and hadn’t been aiming anything at Mark. This meant that Mark had crumpled simply because I was being my normal enthusiastic, strongly expressive self. I immediately got on the phone to him and said that I didn’t want to develop a relationship with someone who flopped down like a pile of cow dung simply because I had been strong. I explained that I hadn’t even been directing the things said at him, I was only talking generally. He grasped this. We later married and when I stood up on my hind legs and felt good, or angry or strong, Mark was there with me. It was a completely different situation to my first marriage.

What Anna describes is the sort weakness or strength we unconsciously associate with our legs and occasionally with our spine. Expression of these unconscious associations riddle the English language. We see it in such idioms as beings legless; didn’t have a leg to stand on; my legs went to jelly; my legs were paralysed; I couldn’t stand up for myself; felt like I had a ball and chain on my legs. We also talk about being supported in a relationship, or perhaps having to stand alone. All of these refer to the emotions and attitudes which provide or deny not only our confidence, but also our ability to happily be ourselves.

In a sexual relationship, and in sex itself, these attitudes support or reduce our sense of value. They make the difference between a dependent or independent relatedness. They are the point of change which makes the difference between feeling insecure and of little value as a partner, or feeling confident of ones vale and standing, and being able to create mutual support and love. There is a huge contrast between feeling independent and through that choosing to stay in a relationship because you value it, and feeling dependent and inadequate, and desperately clinging to a relationship because you fear alternatives.

We all know what it is like to feel dependent. In childhood we were all dependent upon our parents, and that may have been a happy situation if our parents were caring. As an adult however, it can mean feeling demeaned or abused, because the feeling of dependence may lead us to tolerate behaviour we would not otherwise accept.

Finding our own strength and relating to another person from that power is a wonderful experience. In making love our sexual feelings flow with enormous freedom if they arise out of positive self esteem. We no longer attempt to overpower our partner to become top dog in a contest of will, or to seek to trap or be passive with them because we depend upon them for our own feelings of being wanted.

This is all interesting or boring theory, but what I want to show you is a way of experiencing and extending the power and confidence of your own ‘legs’. I want to show you how you can stand up, perhaps for the first time in your life. It is a wonderful experience. If you discover this it will certainly change the way you are loved and love.

Count Me In – I’m Standing

As a baby there was a time when you stood for the first time. Perhaps you can’t remember that, but if you have watched a baby do this you can see it is something that produces strong feelings, perhaps pleasure and pride or maybe uncertainty. As a baby we start by not being able to rise from the floor except on hands and knees. So in tuning-in to the secrets your legs have in store for you, I need to have you play with some movements involving standing and going down.

As with the other movements, it is helpful if you are wearing loose soft clothing – things you can move in easily and your body does not feel restricted by. You need an open space about six feet square, or about the size of a spread blanket. It helps if you can move around a little without the fear of banging into something or knocking things over. At first the movements are practised by yourself. When you experience the power of yourself in standing, then you can use the movements with a partner and explore what it does in your relationship or during sex. But by all means practise with a friend or friends who wish to explore these sexercises with you. In this movement however, we are not in close proximity, so need personal space.

It is important to have an environment in which you can feel free to express yourself easily, even to easy expression of emotion or unusual movement or use of your voice. This is more necessary in this sexercise than in the previous ones.

The reason for this need for freedom of expression is that in most everyday situations we are restraining ourselves quite severely, perhaps without knowing it. This is because in many public or even family situations, certain things are taboo. I remember in one work scene a young woman slipped and fell near a group of colleagues. She had previously broken her arm and it was newly out of plaster and tender. In falling she banged her arm and the pain led to instant crying. As I walked toward her to help her up the other people scattered with great spread. It appeared to be from embarrassment that someone cried in public near to them.

Other taboos are the expression of anger, affection or irrational behaviour. There is also a taboo on easy touching outside of a sexual relationship. In this sexercise one of the aims is to create an environment which allows more freedom of expression than usual. This is not only helpful for the sexercise, but also as you learn to create it, it can become a feature of your sexual experience and other relationships too.

To start I want you to stand in your space with feet about shoulder width apart, then drop hips down toward the floor with knees bent in the squat position. At this point we are just trying out the movement so experiment with standing up and squatting down again. If you find it is not an easy position because you have to raise your heals to keep balanced, place a couple of thick books, a rolled up small rug, or a piece of wood to give support. This should make it easy to drop your hips near to the floor without having to worry about keeping balance. In fact unless you can relax in the position reasonably well it will not be easy to complete the last part of the sexercise.

Once you can easily move between the up and down position do the movement fairly vigorously for a minute or so. I suggest starting from the standing position with feet shoulder width apart. Take an in-breath and as you do so take your hands and arms backwards slightly to open or widen the expansion of your rib cage. Let your head drop back a little also, to express this expansion.

From that open in-breath let your breath out through your mouth – in fact blow it out noisily as you drop into the squat position. As you drop let the hands swing forward and up until they are together in front of your chin or face with your elbows bent. This position is quite opposite to the standing, as the head is dropped forward as limply as possible, so your hands may in fact be touching the top of your head. The chest is also contracted and the trunk bent forward.

Without making yourself dizzy by too rapid a movement or too deep breathing, move between these opposites. If you need to rest in either of the positions allowing your breath to cycle as it wishes. Then when ready to continue start from the appropriate in or out breath.

When you feel acquainted with the two polarities of the movement –  the ‘up’ and the ‘down’ – take time to be aware of the different feelings in each. As you near the end of your fast movement slow down. Be aware of what each position feels like by staying in it longer, allowing your breathing to cycle as described above. While in the ‘down’ position see if you can drop unnecessary tension and droop or let go in the way one might in going to sleep. Close your eyes and let the feeling of letting-go pervade you a little. If you cannot possibly do this in the squatting position for some reason, use a low stool or chair to support you so you can allow your trunk to droop forward onto your legs, your head on your knees, and relax. Get a limp ‘rag doll’ feeling.

As you move into the ‘up’ position breathe in and open your eyes. Slightly exaggerate the in-breathe by taking your hands and arms backwards, head up and slightly back, chest open and expanded. In this position be aware of the more open, dynamic and active feelings it might produce for you. The words ‘might produce’ are used purposely because we each have slightly different reactions to body postures. So do not be concerned if you feel quite different to what I have described. This will be dealt with shortly.

To end this part of the sexercise, when you go down, stay in the position and notice whether you have any inclination of your own to move into the ‘up’ position. Take your time with this as it is very important. So far you have done the movement because you have been willing to follow the instructions I have given. But now I am saying do not stand up unless you can notice a real motivation to do so. Don’t do it on automatic.

What is it that moves you to stand up in the morning? It isn’t a silly question. It might be that it is duty, or a desire to avoid losing your job, or habit. Maybe you simply want to go to the toilet. Perhaps you would otherwise stay in bed. In other words you would stay  in the ‘down’ position. The positions in fact represent deeply important polarities in our life such as rest and activity – expression and withdrawal – confidence and uncertainty – waking and sleep.

Taking notice of whether you want to stand up or not is a way of seeing if you are simply going about your life on automatic, or whether enthusiasm and motivation fires you to express. Perhaps when you give awareness to whether you have an inclination to stand up you notice that you want to stay down or sink even further into rest. If so that is quite normal. Sometimes we have been pushing ourselves too hard, or have been pushed by others, and have never allowed ourselves the healing of sinking deeply into ourselves to contact our own reservoir of energy and enthusiasm.

Another response might be that you stand up fast because you don’t like it ‘down there’. This sometimes happens if you associate the ‘down’ position with personal defeat or failure instead of rest and recuperation.

Don’t worry if at this first practise you cannot find any motivation other than an automatic response to stand up. But do take time with it. Wait and be aware of the feelings that arise. If you are lucky you will feel a growing desire to stand, to be ‘in the world’, to be interacting with others with your own strength. If this moves you to stand, you will rise with more of yourself involved than usual. You will feel almost as if you are radiating a sort of ‘I AM’ feeling, ‘I EXIST’. Here is how Cathy describes her practise:-

I had done the standing and squatting movement quite a few times, usually with positive results. This time was so different though. There were several of us practising together, and Tony was leading the group. It took me quite a long time to find any urge whatsoever to move to a standing position. I simply squatted there waiting and wondering why it was taking me so long. As I waited I saw that my life had been plagued with lots of hesitations. For much of my life I had felt as if I had to continually struggle simply to exist. Standing up meant somehow meeting these difficulties and shining through them. Shining through is different to struggling to survive. Did I have whatever it needed to do that? Was there something alive in me enough to break through, like the budding seedling pushes through the heavy earth and reaches up to live?

At the time I didn’t have all those feelings so clearly thought out, but that is what it was like. Then I could feel something stirring in me. Our group was outdoors among fir trees and a warm wind was blowing. It touched me and I could feel that I wanted to be a part of life, to stand up, to be whatever was in me to be. My legs pushed to the earth and my head lifted. As I rose to a standing position tears came to my eyes. What an immense thing this was, to stand, to face all the things that tried to pull me back down, and yet to raise my head and dare. I stood, crying at the wonder of it, realising how long it had taken me to face my own fears, to find independence and stand on my own feet. But then, not only was I standing, but I had the impulse to take a step, to walk. All I had ever done, all I might ever do, was in that step. It was unforgettable.

Summary of Sexercise 4 – Standing

• Decide on giving yourself the freedom to express easily. If emotion, movement or fantasy arises in this sexercise let it happen. In everyday life we hold back much of ourselves because much of what we feel is inappropriate. Unfortunately we may fail to give ourselves a time to be free. Sex is a time to let go completely. This sexercise is a practise run for letting our enthusiasm rise.

 

• Stand in a space in which you can move easily. Wear loose clothes. Have feet about shoulder width apart, and experiment with the squatting movement, dropping your hips down toward the ground. If you need to use something support to your heels, do so. This enables an easier squatting posture. Should this still be awkward for you, sit on a low chair or stool.

 

• Squat and stand a few times to warm up. As you begin to feel at home with the movement do it in time with your breathing. Start from a position of standing with breathe in, arms away from the sides and backwards slightly to open the rib cage, and head slightly back. From that position breathe out through your mouth noisily as you drop down into the squat. As you drop swing the arms and hands forward and up towards the head, bending the elbows. Let your head droop and hold the position for a moment as you relax face and genitals. Then stand, breathing in through the nose as you do so. Swing the hands down and backwards and head up and back to open the chest.

 

• Move between the standing and squatting with some energy, but not so fast as to make yourself dizzy. If you need to you can rest either in the standing or squatting, allowing yourself to breathe normally until you start again from the appropriate in or out breath.

 

• When your body begins to feel at ease with the movement, and you can do it without being focused on the mechanics of it, start to notice what you feel in the poles of the movement. Slow the movement down and pause at each pole. Notice the difference between the standing and the squatting.

 

• Enhance these differences. It may help to close your eyes, droop the head and drop tension while squatting. If you cannot relax in this position try using a stool or a support for your heels.

 

• When you move to the standing position, open your eyes and breathe in. Let yourself feel something of the dynamic action of standing with the chest open and expanded.

 

• When you have become aware of the opposite poles of feeling in the movement, stay down in the squat. Let yourself relax into it. Kneel down or sit on a stool if you cannot relax in the position. Drop your head, drop tension from your face and pelvis. Droop!

 

• Now take time to observe whether there is any motivation to stand. Don’t simply stand up automatically. Notice what it is that makes you want to rise. If you can notice any urge to rise, follow it. Let IT move YOU, rather than simply making yourself stand up. This may take time. Be patient, and don’t be discouraged if you get no clear urge. Simply end the exercise after about ten minutes. But if there is a motivation to stand, follow it until you feel yourself standing with real motivation or enthusiasm. Try it several times until you can feel a different quality in the way you stand.

 

Love Wrestling

In teaching people how to play with and enjoy their body, it often surprises me how impoverished an experience some of us have of touching, exploring, rolling around and tussling with someone else. I shouldn’t really be surprised as the first time I got together with two friends and explored close physical contact outside of sex, I was frightened by the intensity of my own need to be close to and hold the male and female friend who were my partners. Over the years though, this became ease in being close, and a sense of wonder at what depths of myself emerged through undemanding physical contact with others.

A sexercise which is a good introduction to playful contact with someone, and uses the legs to exploring strength and fun in meeting is one I call Love Wrestling.  I call it this because it is non competitive but assertive way of getting close to a partner. It needs a fairly large space. This is important because the fun comes from being able to romp without worrying about hurting yourself on furniture or other objects in the room. Even a space the size of a double-bed blanket is sufficient IF you both agree to stop when you get near the boundary of your space.

If you are wearing clothes make sure they are loose, soft and fairly strong. Stand facing your partner – male or female – and put your hands on each others shoulders. Lean forward and put your head onto the shoulder of your partner. Find a position in which you can brace yourself against your partner enough to be able to push against each other using the strength of your legs. Experiment with this to get the feel of the right position.

Once you feel in contact and braced, the aim is to use your legs to push your partner to the edge of the blanket. To do this you have to be powerful and energetic with your legs, and let their power flow through to your shoulders and arms.

Don’t make this into a serious contest. Enjoy it! But do let your energy really break through. Shout and groan. Growl at each other, pant and rave. If you are half hearted and wimpish with this your partner, even though small, will easily push you over the edge. But if you let the animal in you flow through your body you can find resources of strength and assertiveness.

It always seems to me that if you try to be prim or passive, or are uncertain and let others make your decisions all the time, you will not be able to find strength to resist and push your partner in this sexercise. So you need to let your hair down, don’t be pushed around, get the strength flowing up from your legs and pelvis into your shoulders and arms, put some guts into it.

Do You Have 12 Volt Sex When It Could Be A 100 Volts?

 

Watching how people use their body, it is obvious that some people have never got the whole voltage of their energy flowing into what they do. The movements such people make often seem jelly-like. The movements seem to lack vigour and purpose. Watching a woman or man weight train or move who has learnt to express vigorously through their body is a pleasurable thing. Their strength and personality shine through what they do.

If you lack this sort of vigour, the way you move or remain passive in sex will be jelly like too. The power of your feelings is trapped somewhere and perhaps never engages with your partner or the world. You are most likely having 12 volt sex without knowing it. Believe me, you could be having a 100 volt, or even a 150 volt experience. So try the love wrestling and let your soul shine through in the process. When you have tried love wrestling a few times, change the rules by doing it with your sexual partner and let the course of events move toward sex. But keep the game going. Sex is VERY exciting when it is a wrestle and not easy to get!!

Summary of Sexercise 5 – Love Wrestling

 

• This is a way of using leg strength to express assertion and confidence in meeting a partner in  play and sex.

 

• A fairly large space is needed. For the sexercise to be enjoyable a minimum would be about the size of a double-bed blanket. Even then, move furniture or objects on which you cold hurt yourself, just outside that area, and agree to stop the wrestling when you get to the boundary or the area.

 

• Wear soft loose garments if you are wearing clothes.

 

• You can have the same or opposite sex partner. Stand facing your partner and put your hands on each others shoulders. Then lean forward and put your head onto the shoulders of your partner, and vice versa.

 

• Experiment with the head placing and hands to find a position that feels right. Now brace yourselves against each other, pushing slightly against each other using your legs. This will bring your trunk lower and leaning slightly forward, perhaps bending at the waist a little.

 

• Do a few trial pushes against each other to gauge strength and position before you start pushing in earnest. When you are ready warn each other that you are about to start in earnest.

 

• Remember this is not a contest, so don’t try to injure each other. But do let yourself go as far as the space and environment will allow – i.e. if you have rubber mats underneath in a gym you can be a bit more daring than if you are in your house with furniture near at hand.

 

• Push and dodge to get your partner moving where you want them. Let a few growls out if you can feel the assertive feelings to go with it. Be aware of how you are using your legs and push with them letting their strength flow right up to shove your partner back. It helps to keep the waist slightly bent so you don’t get overbalanced. Be assertive. It means to be forthright and positive, whereas aggressive means to be hostile.

 

• From here on let it be a rowdy game, experiencing each others strength and letting your own meet that of your partner.

 

• When you are good at the game, let the game move toward sex with the person you want to make love with. Get the volts pouring through by wrestling your way into each others body. A little oil on your skin knocks it through to a 150 volt experience!!

 

• As things warm up break the rules! Drop down onto the ground and grapple. The oil will make it very sensuous.

 

• This is so hot I take no liability for what happens. You’re on your own!

 

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Surviving Love and Relationships

Click the following to quickly find the chapters:

Growing up to Love – Ages of Love – Lifeline Of Love – Connection Means Life – Our Old Brains – Growing up to Loving – So What do We Do? – The Old Story – The Tools – To Love or Not to Love – That is the Question – The Long View – Homecoming to Love – Scanning the Future

  Growing up to Love

A loving relationship is one of the most sought goals. It is also one of the most difficult to attain and maintain. A major reason is that most of us fail to understand some of the fundamental aspects of what makes us love, and what might make us destroy what love we give or receive. To call most of today’s relationships loving is incorrect. They are often best described as featuring possessiveness, jealousy, fear of abandonment, emotional blackmail, aggression, and huge dependence. If things go wrong retaliation, blaming, anger, malice and open warfare frequently appear. Or if one partner leaves the relationship there may be enormous pain, the sort of pain a child feels when abandoned by its parent. All of these are the emotions and fears that are part of baby and child love, along with sibling rivalry. How else can you explain the emotional devastation that frequently accompanies the break-up of a relationship?

In fact Dr Harville Hendrix, like so many other experts who have investigated the ups and downs of love and relationship, says that when it comes to love many of us have not managed to develop emotionally beyond childhood. Hendrix is a psychologist specialising in marital therapy, and is the author of four books on relationships, including Getting the Love You Want, a guide for couples that became a New York Times Best-seller and sold 1.5 million copies in the US.

Also, not only may you not have grown emotionally beyond childhood, but very often the lessons in love you picked up from your parents or carers, leave you in no fit state to really love an adult partner.

Perhaps you are like our friend Michael. He falls in love, begins to get close, and even manages a heterosexual physical relationship, but then the pain and confusion hits him and he pulls away fast. With Michael it is easy to see the reasons. He was put in an orphanage at an early age and was never in a relationship in which he could learn to love without fear of losing. That fear arose from the pain of having lost his first and most important love – his mother. He never had the chance to grow beyond childhood dependence and needs. As soon as he gets emotionally close to his woman it opens the wound of pain from those years of abandonment. Unable to face the enormous emotional pain of childhood he pulls away.

But sometimes the reasons are obscure or forgotten. Even so, many of us either cannot manage a full heterosexual relationship, or can only manage one filled with insecurities, jealousy, the need to make our partner into a satellite who can never be allowed real freedom, or even the anger and hurt that leads to violence. Some of us constantly feel a victim to our partner’s independence because of our own insecurity and emotional dependence. We blame them for all the hurt felt and changes made.

To get a grasp on your own skill in loving, it is worth briefly considering the levels of love we pass through in childhood, and what we might achieve in real adulthood.

  Ages of Love

The many years of psychological research enable us now to definitely know the minutes, hours and days that followed birth, are of prime importance in the fundamental development of relationship. This is true of most warm-blooded animals, and some cold-blooded. It is vital for us mammals to experience a powerful and lasting bond with our parent or parents. This bond has to work both ways, otherwise the newborn baby will soon die. In human terms this means the parent(s) must want the infant as much as it wants them. Without this strong bond there is not a full satisfaction for either the baby or the parent. This need for complete bonding has arisen out of millions of years in which without it the baby would die. For a baby this bonding means being close to its mother all the time – flesh close if possible.

Although as a baby we have no verbal language and thus no thoughts, we are still highly intelligent in an instinctive way and can learn. We can also makes decisions, just as animals make decisions, by learning to avoid pain or dangerous situations or forms of relationship. So if birth has been a tough journey, or if the bonding and warm body of mother is not there after birth, the ‘life decision’ can well be that of withdrawing from involvement in living and relating. If we put this into words it could be, ‘I am not welcome here. Everything hurts. I don’t want to go on with this.’

Often this creates a huge conflict that for many people is never resolved. On the one hand childhood has helped us put in place decisions that tell us close relationship is full of pain or actual danger, as with children who are beaten or abused. But real pain can arise from much more subtle things such as emotional and physical distance and absence of appreciation and support. An intellectual and emotionally distant parent can create as much pain as one who beats. Then, alongside those inbuilt urges to avoid full relationship, and innate in us, is the drive to procreate, to enter the intimacy of a sexual or emotional relationship. These push us into the very horror of what engraved past experience tells us we must at all costs avoid. The result – difficulties in relationship.

At this earliest stage of love there is TOTAL dependence. That is a difficult place to be if your need isn’t fulfilled. If there is still a scar in adulthood from lack of bonding and warm love it leads to great vulnerability in relationship, and an urge to never quite make a full connection with anybody. The love is dependent, jealous, possessive and fearful. There might be genital connection, but not a full giving of oneself to another.

  Lifeline of Love

There is another aspect of this early love that is often never understood or written about.

Birth demonstrates to us some wonderful things about the mechanisms of love we might take for granted, but that are true at many levels. The forming baby links to its mother through the umbilical cord. This remarkable link brings nourishment to the forming child, and is again an enormous self giving of the mother’s being to that of her baby. In a very real way, the umbilical cord is the flow of life. If it were cut without any substitute the baby would die.

At a psychological level losing the connection gives rise to the fear of dying. Having the connection brings the ability to meet life’s difficulties with confidence and resources.

Love – the giving and receiving from each other – and connection, are vital to survival.

Having been witness to many births a very obvious event is the cutting of the umbilical cord. What is not always so obvious is that the baby almost immediately tries to reconnect. It does this in two ways. Firstly through the mother’s breast. Through that connection it again receives nourishment, but it also receives in the milk things that help it meet the infections and threats confronting it in the external world. Again, the connection means survival.

  Connection Means Life.

At an even more subtle level another connection is attempted that isn’t always achieved. The baby attempts to form a living bond with its mother. In all mammals this level of connection is vital. Without it the baby will die unless it forms that bond with another adult. However, the bond is not simply that of having someone to feed you and protect you from harm. That simply feeds the infant body. But within that body is an infant consciousness, a living, feeling learning, and wonderful being. This ‘consciousness body’ also needs feeding to survive and grow.

These fundamental facts of biological and psychological life go on being true up the scale of human experience. They may not be as visible as the physical sperm and ovum merging, or the umbilical cord, but if you examine your own feelings and experience you can probably see them yourself. Understanding them and working with what is understood is vital for surviving in a changing world. A baby certainly faces change, and so do we. Love is fundamental to life. We need love, and we need connections.

We know that if we do not feed the baby and protect it there will never be the full development or flowering of it in a physical way. That is equally true of the infant consciousness, and the bonding it is attempting is the formation of another type of umbilical cord, but this time a more mature one that flows two ways. If this does not form the child will be as restricted in the growth of its psychological and spiritual potential as the infant body is when not fed.

This connection is subtle, and if it could be seen, it would appear as a cord of energy connecting mother and child, or carer and child. Through it the child and mother exchange vital psychological and spiritual nutrition. If the mother is emotionally, intellectually or spiritually impoverished, then so will the child be – and by spiritual in this context is meant an awareness that extends beyond the mother’s physical senses, her external environment, and the limits of her own mind and understanding.

What the baby learns at this point about making a connection at this level forms the foundation of all later relationships. However, like any living and growing thing, what is established or learned at this basic level can be extended and transformed later as long as the feelings evoked at the time can be met.

Although this new umbilical cord is subtle, we can of course see when such a living link exists between mother and child. The exchange of glowing pleasure in each other is obvious, as is its absence. With such a positive experience of relationship the baby soon starts, as it grows, to reach out to others to enjoy the wonder of that exchange with those who can respond. Even when very small such children reach out their arms to those they recognise as being able to exchange what we usually call love, but might be defined as a sharing of their own feelings, responses and pleasure, at a physical, emotional and mental level appropriate to both of them.

Tragically, if this early connection does not occur in a satisfying way, even though the child’s physical environment is fine, it may find it difficult or sometimes impossible to risk the building of such an intimate connection with others.

Those are the growing buds that later flower as fully as they can into adult love. Fortunately, even when there have been missing areas of nourishment in the flow from our parent or parents we can extend some degree of connection with others who can nourish us more fully in our emotional, mental and spiritual development.

However, the joy or pain of relationship we learn in the early attempts at bonding leave lasting patterns that can either be built upon, or act as huge difficulties. Such a negative influence can leave a variety of responses to seeking or finding love. Considering that the earliest stage of love is enormous dependence and fear of abandonment, this, or the avoidance of further loneliness and despair can haunt adult relationships.

Because of the child rearing methods in western countries, and because of the preponderance of nuclear families that make it difficult for a child to find a nourishing connection elsewhere if its parents are not fully engaging, many of us become adults for whom love is difficult. We take it as natural that loss of our partner can result in prolonged pain. Jealousy and fear of abandonment are accepted as normal, even though they are obviously traits from early childhood. Inability to find meaningful and supportive relationship is almost an epidemic. And unless we can find ways of dealing with or healing those early wounds we cannot fully and creatively meet the confrontation with change. A part of our nature will still be looking for the love we missed, the nourishment we never had, the glow of wholeness and pleasure that comes from knowing love.

  Our Old Brains

Most of these responses to relationship go on under the surface of our awareness. They occur in older levels of the brain, and we now know there are at least three levels of brain. Beneath the large brain we use to speak, problem solve and deal with being self aware, there are two older brains. These are the mammal brain, and the reptile brain. Both of them are still very influential in directing our behaviour without us being aware of where our impulses, reactions and inclinations are coming from. Mostly we rationalise them by telling ourselves ‘that is what I wanted to do’.

The mammalian brain deals with the intricacies of social behaviour, top dog – under dog relationships, emotions and caring for offspring. The reptilian brain is basically dealing with survival, reproduction and flight or fight reactions. i

These old brains are always on the alert. They constantly pose the questions, ‘Is it safe? What am I learning from this? How shall I respond next time?’ Hendrix says they put people into categories. They ask, is this someone to nurture, be nurtured by, have sex with, run away from, fight, submit to, or eat? It is from those impulses the baby learns, and they are only slowly transformed as the baby absorb language and grows toward maturity. Like any mammal, conditioned reflexes are imprinted within us from hard experience. So the lessons learned are still active in adulthood unless made conscious and changed – or our brain connections re-wired. ii

Therefore the baby level of love is completely dependent upon the loved person for its needs, physical, emotional and social. Great anger, jealousy or pain occur if the loved person relates to anyone else, is lost, or there is a threat the carer will leave. In an adult this enormous feeling reaction may also be felt at a time of emotional withdrawal of ones partner, even if there is no sign of them withdrawing physically.

The baby has a desire for unconditional love and a need to be always with the loved one. In an adult only capable of this level of love, sex may be a part of the relationship, but the main need is a bonded connection. Possibly the greatest fear, a fear that can trigger great anger or an enormous desire to placate or earn love, is the threat of being abandoned or the bond severed in some way. If you experience great jealousy, possessiveness, fear of abandonment or desire to placate or be violent with your partner, you are still in the throes of baby or childhood love. Great pain if your partner leaves or dies has the same roots.

A woman who described two such relationships said they were very passionate. The men were incredible emotional, passionate and aware of her connection with them. But one of them, when the woman’s mother visited and took her attention and time, wept because for a while there was less emotional flow between them and less attention given to him. In two relationships of this type that she described, both the partners lacked practical abilities, and did not manage to actualise their talents in the ‘world’. So although the relationships were satisfying emotionally and sexually they did not last, as they never managed to manifest anything solid in the social and material side of life.

Adolescent love is typified by initial uncertainty or clumsiness concerning emotional and sexual contact. There is often the desire to explore many relationships, and you are still finding out what your boundaries, needs and ability to attract and relate are. This is a time of great sexual drive, and your partner will probably be loved for your own needs. For example you want a family and so love your partner to gain that end. Or you love the partner because in that way you can get away from your parental home. This is a level of growth that gives rise to great romantic feelings and spontaneous love that are difficult to maintain in face of difficulties.

Adult love is shown by a growing sense of recognition of your partner’s needs, yet not denying your own. You have the ability to be something for your partner’s sake without losing your own independence or will. You have become aware of the issues that colour or influence the relationship, and are able to deal with them as partners through open and honest communication and support. You are independent and yet are capable of closeness together and are caring sexually through discovering your partner needs and vulnerabilities. There is no attempt to own or control your partner in a fully mature relationship.

  Growing up to Loving

Moving beyond the sort of love that is still at the baby or child level first needs the admittance that you are still reacting to love from early patterns and life decisions. It is vital to define what those patterns or life decisions are, otherwise they will unconsciously dominate the way you choose a partner, and will flood old disruptive emotions and fears into all you attempt in the relationship. The self-watch and imagery approaches described elsewhere can be great tools in arriving at such insights and definitions. So when you observe yourself in the sort of painful, blaming, jealous or possessive response to your partner take time to ask yourself where the feelings are arising from using those tools. (See: Exercise Four; Self Observation.

A great deal of insight into your patterns of response can arise from an honest assessment of your own romantic history. What type of partner has attracted you – even temporarily – and who have you felt ready to explore a relationship with? Such a review will help you become aware of your predispositions and patterns.

Theories of what attracts us to a partner suggest a man is attracted to a classically beautiful and healthy women, especially if she shows indications of being in peak childbearing condition. The same theories say that women are attracted to men for different reasons. They instinctively choose mates with leader or outstanding qualities, the ability to dominate other males and bring home real substantial rewards. Therefore it often happens that an ageing wealthy executive is as attractive to women as a young and handsome, but less successful, male.

However, there are many things that filter such possible urges. Our own self image if it is low might well stand in the way of going for someone more successful or socially achieving. So, physical attractiveness, personal confidence, social rank, financial status, property and goods, all act as powerful barriers or attractors, depending on your own situation. Pride or embarrassment at how we feel our mate will be seen by others also plays a part.

What attracts us might therefore be a lack of status or confidence, and this because of our own situation and self image. However, a major conclusion Hendrix reached was that after years of theoretical research and clinical observation he was led to see that we are each looking for someone who has the predominant character traits of the people who raised us. He goes on to link this with what had been presented above regarding old childhood decisions and wounds.

He says that from his clinical experience with thousands of couples who have stated what they want from their partner he concluded that what is driving them is a compelling need to heal old childhood wounds. iii In most cases this is not because we were abused or traumatised by our parents. However, it is almost impossible to have our enormous needs for contact and security fulfilled in a modern family setting. Being raised in a primitive tribe where, as a baby, we were carried next to our mother’s breast till we are emotionally ready to begin separation, would be ideal. Most of us are still yearning for what we didn’t get. We seek a partner urged on by such yearning. Strangely, we mostly seek someone as damaged or inept as we are. If we don’t know how to love, we find just such a partner. We long for them as an infant does, and are open to the same misery and pain when it doesn’t work. And unfortunately it is almost impossible to find a mate that will be for us the loving parent/partner who will caringly raise us from the emotional age of a child. That is a job for us to do – raise our own child.

We may think ourselves adult, we may be in responsible and top paid jobs, but when we enter a relationship the truth of our inadequate and infant coping strategies is revealed. The misery and pain we feel after the initial utopia of falling in love, the return to the Garden of Eden, confronts us again with the need to help our own inner child grow toward adulthood.

Unfortunately, the partner your inner longing felt sure would make everything fine, is having the same problem.

What follows is that we return to using all the tactics we used as a child in our attempts to get the love and attention we so desperately needed – anger and placation are two fundamental ways. Buy flowers, cook great meals, be caring, or feel frustration and rage. We cry, withdraw, try a new approach, experience depression and even try being alone to see if it helps. Then a feeling of failure or inadequacy overcomes us. Maybe we or no-good as a person. Perhaps it is that we are un-lovable and we feel guilt and shame. If that doesn’t satisfy we turn to blaming. It is all our partners fault. However, if you fail to understand this situation, if you do not have the tools, this struggle can go on, and on, and on, with partner after partner.

  So What do We Do?

Whatever partner we are with we still carry our problems unless they have been resolved. Also, nature itself is dynamically in states of opposition that attempt resolution. It is a resolution that never arrives. Thus the earth swings around the sun. The great ocean currents are constantly on the move as warm and cold meet. Compatibility is impossible. Marriage simply puts us into close contact with challenge. To meet this needs real personal and interpersonal awareness – self awareness. It need honesty of a type you may previously not have developed in yourself. It calls for this honesty to be used in communication of great intimacy in which, although great emotions may throw their lightning bolts, there needs to be underlying good will – in fact love and respect.

This awareness, honesty and communication needs to be learned. It is not usually natural to us. Learning it immediately confronts us with the enormous defences we usually live within. We find ourselves face to face with shocking revelations about ourselves, and the opening of doors that reveal secrets that are difficult to speak or even feel. This growing up, this move toward real adulthood is only for those who are determined enough and strong enough to move through their own defences, lies and unconsciousness toward their own truth. It is for those who can actually admit to themselves and their partner such things as – ‘I am being defensive. This really frightens me. Sorry, but I am blaming you again. Be careful, I am feeling enormous anger. I know this is in regard to my mother/father, but you are now in the place of them. I have cut off from you emotionally and sexually because I have been hurt too many times. I am trying to move through this, but I feel so incredibly vulnerable. This is hard to say, but I feel inadequate – a failure – unwanted and unlovable. Try to understand that emotionally I am only two.’

In such exposure by both partners we come to see that love, marriage, or partnership, is about learning to support each other in what is needed to take the amazing journey toward adult love and adult life. It is hard, but as we move on the journey, what we find is truly amazing. We slowly recreate ourselves and discover the holy secret that is self.

We need every resource we have to make this journey toward wholeness in love. Even our partner, as caring as they might be, cannot be seen as the all dependable source of parenting for our own inner child. You must yourself help to raise your child. You must parent yourself. Compassion for each other must emerge.

All your rational skills are needed to do this. It needs clear awareness of what is involved, and what ones unconscious child can do in a relationship and what its needs and emotional responses are. On top of that you have to state exactly what is happening to you in any encounter, and change the habitual response of anger or defensiveness to another less fraught response. What you are dealing with are lifelong habits that have been unconscious. The first step is to recognise them, and the next step is to make a different linkage. So instead of feeling guilty and defending yourself by being angry, you could admit to your partner what is happening and being felt and suggest another way of dealing with what you are both facing.

As an example of what the lack of honest and in depth communication can do, a few weeks after their marriage, Tim got into bed with Peggy and found her withdrawn and unapproachable. Previously they had enjoyed frequent love making, but now Peggy wouldn’t be touched, she wouldn’t speak to him, and making love was out of the question. Eventually Tim managed to get an explanation. Peggy said she would have nothing to do with him because he had argued with her mother. The row had been about Peggy’s mother attempting to dominate their newly founded household.

Tim wanted them to make their own decisions, but Peggy said unless he changed, there would be no sex. Tom felt he could not change and develop their life together as he wished it to be while his mother-in-law was running the household. Peggy therefore maintained her no sex policy for six months.

The event took place twenty years ago. The intimacy and trust that were emerging in their relationship never fully returned. Unfortunately almost anything we feel strongly that conflicts with our partner cannot help but change the subtle feelings of warmth, respect and pleasure that are basic in sharing not only our body, but ourselves. In a long relationship even small unresolved conflicts or hurts build up into a wall that separates, even while sleeping in the same bed.

 The Old Story

In human life I have had this insight or feeling that each woman – and I suppose each man too – has an innate feeling that they have something very precious to offer.  In a primitive way they sense they have something extraordinary.  Because awareness is so centred in the personality this often causes great confusion or pain.  The woman for instance links this feeling with love, or wanting to be loved.  She knows she has something splendid to give, but she confuses it with her personality, perhaps even with her body and its outer appearance.  But the treasure of course is her genes, her amazing and precious eggs.  With a man of course it is living seeds he carries as sperm.  These are unique treasures that we hold within us.

In the widest sense life simply urges us to procreate and play with these infinite patterns and possibilities.  We, in being involved with this, have a personal experience.  But why?  The sex urge pushes us because of the sense of wonder that we carry within us, to be recognised, to be wanted, to be treasured and loved.  If we are healthy we are crying out, “Me!  Me!  Me!”  Of course all natural things do that.  Plants cry out with their colours and perfumes.  Women do it with all manner of clothes, colours, perfumes, hairdo’s and makeup.  Men do it with physical display, poses of power, social positioning and recognition of, or feigning recognition of, a woman’s unique wonder.

Of course, some women and some men give out the, “Me.  Me” signal a lot stronger than others.

How many girl’s dreams have been dashed when her period has started after being in bed with a pop star or man she really connected with?  A leader figure perhaps?  How many caught fire when the period didn’t come?  They knew they had the fire burning inside them.

I suppose much of that drive is to explore the possibilities of one’s own uniqueness – to play it out.

  The Tools

With the sort of difficulty Tim and Peggy found themselves in there has first to be the decision in both of them that they want to repair their loving connection. This is often the first step in actually moving toward a mature love, and the child in us often does not want to let go of hurt feelings and forgive. After all, we may have been hurt so many times that we are very cautious about opening ourselves to that possibility again. Some tools that may help are as follows. They need to be practised as most of us do not have these skills naturally. These approaches were developed many years ago in such groups as re-evaluation counselling, but Hendrix calls them ‘dialogue’, and they can be understood as listening skills.

To start with you have to understand that in using these tools as a couple you are going to create a different setting than the normal everyday scene in which talking to each other often leads directly to disagreement and argument. This is like entering a circle in which all weapons are left outside. It is helpful to have practised the ‘self watch’ method before you use what follows.

Step One: Sit with your partner in a comfortable way and in a setting you will not be disturbed in. Decide who is going to start, and what the issue is you want to explore. Only deal with one issue at a time, not all the pains you might be blaming each other for.

The partner who is going to speak now says what they need to without any interruption – that means NO interruption. If you are the one speaking you say what you want to without blaming your partner for your hurts or what you feel. You do this by explaining what you felt in what happened. So instead of saying, ‘You walked out and slammed the door in the middle of me trying to talk with you and made me feel shitty for the rest of the day,’ you could say, ‘When you walked out the other day and slammed the door while I was trying to talk with you, I felt as if a door had been slammed on my feelings of connection with you.’

As the listener you do not respond until your partner has finished. Then you repeat what you understood was said. This is not a game of win or lose. It is about real working partnership, so if your partner does not agree that you understood what was said, they should repeat the bits you failed to grasp until you can repeat clearly what their statement was. Very often we don’t listen, but are just waiting for them to finish so we can put forward our own argument. This requires us to actually take in what our partner is saying and what they need.

You then change roles and repeat it the other way around.

Step Two: When you have learned how to do that to your mutual satisfaction you now actually change roles. You get up and sit where your partner was sitting. Then you see if you can be them as fully as possible. This is not about repeating what they said accurately, it is about sympathetically or even empathetically seeing if you can feel what it is like to be them, and speak or express from that place.

The first step was about learning how to listen and actually hear each other without argument or conflict. This step is concerned with learning how to understand your partner, to stand in their shoes. It might take a while to learn, but believe me you have it in you to do. You cannot live with someone and have any degree of sexual relationship without absorbing an enormous amount of insight and knowledge about them. Maybe it happened out of the corner of your eye, unconsciously, but it happened. Now you are tuning into it and letting your partner see and know how much they have entered into you. As with the other skills, it needs practice, but you can do it.

Repeat this until you are mutually satisfied. This may take many sessions, but it is a pathway to real marriage. It leads to the recognition that your partner is not you. They are a wonderful unique being who you have chosen to build a life together with. If you truly meet this unique being, then you can develop ways of living together and working toward a future with each other. From the understanding arrived at you can begin to make adjustments to how you deal with each other and your way of life together. As one woman said, ‘When I tried to explain things to my husband he would just grunt. In fact that was the nickname his friends gave him, ‘Grunt’. If I was enthusiastic he would tell me to shut up and be quiet. But now I am with a man who listens and appreciates me. He explains his difficult responses if we hit them, and tries to understand mine. So I feel so much love and support now.’

Heart to heart communication between family, friends and associates is still a problem for many people. Some further tips on creative and healing listening are:

1) Take time fairly frequently to really share your feelings. This involves exposing what you feel, your vulnerabilities and failings in some degree. If you find it difficult to talk about such things as love, sex or anger try using an analogy. A client, when asked what his difficult was with his wife appeared to talk abaout soemthing else. He told how he often went to lean on his garden fence, and sometimes a woman neighbour goes by and they talk and laugh together. He obviously didn’t know how to define his problem, but the story told it all. He needed more times of happy talking and laughing with his wife.

2) We all want to be heard, but often we don’t let our partner finish a sentence or explore their theme. We don’t participate, or maybe we pull back because feelings other than positive ones disturb us. It is enormously healing to be able to accept your partner’s pains as well as happiness. So a great way to help them unfold their feelings is to ask questions that show interest, and not criticise or pull back from their difficult feelings. Also, what are they suggesting ‘between the lines’ of what is being said, and what is their body language saying? Occasionally summarise what words and body have revealed and give feedback.

3) Have controlled arguments when needed. We cannot agree with each other all the time, and creative arguments can unveil important realisations that were lost in difficult feelings. Such creative arguments can only occur if you both avoid blaming your partner for what you feel. Better to say ‘I’ instead of ‘you’. Avoid criticism, contempt and defensiveness. Keep in mind what you are trying to resolve, and that you ARE trying to resolve it rather than win an argument, so take stock every so often.

4) Great and deeply satisfying communication is a skill and needs us to learn to meet each other from a different standpoint than we may have learned in life so far. It is not simply conversation. It is communication. To emphasise this it is worthwhile suggesting you spend a certain time together in this way. For instance most of us are reared in a way that suggests things can be right or wrong, and that we are either good or bad. These types of judgements and attitudes do not allow great communication.

Supposing, as an example we say to a child, ‘You are really naughty.’ If we took time to really examine what was happening, it might be that we felt anxious or angry about what the child did. So creative communication needs you to say just that. ‘I felt really scared when you did that.’ Or perhaps, ‘I am feeling so tired and vulnerable at the moment I keep snapping at you,’ instead of, ‘If you don’t stop upsetting me I am going to kick you.’

  To Love or Not to Love – That is the Question

There are skills to use and things to recognise even before you enter a relationship though. Recognising your ‘age of love’ as described above is a first step. From that you will be able to predict what you are going to need or be like in the partnership.

Barry, a forty four year old man we worked with, had cut off from his mother emotionally at the age of five because she threatened to abandon him. His cut off was so extreme he married but never managed warm feelings in the relationship. When he did start loving he realised he was still five emotionally and needed to learn how to grow up within the marriage. He managed this by honestly admitting his difficulty and defences to his wife.

Another helpful approach prior to any real connection is to look at the track record of the person you are thinking of starting a relationship with – and of course also your own. ‘Falling in love’ is no real guide to the success of the relationship. The hormonal rush that is behind such feelings, the crazy hopes and dreams, the sexual impulses, the loneliness, along with the childhood and ‘older brain’ urges, can all lead you into a labyrinth. So check out if your partner has already been through several or many failed relationships. Are they independent emotionally and economically? What resources as a person will they bring to the partnership – and of course, what resources and track record will you bring? What is the emotional age of both of you?

If it is possible for you both to take a long cool look at such questions and talk over how you can deal with them, you have a lot more chance of success. But beware of this silly idea that ‘love’ will change your partner and heal their damaged soul. A couple we know fell into that trap. The man tried to tell his new partner that he experienced a life long sexual problem. The woman assured him she would soon help him overcome that. She never did and it became a mutual agony.

  The Long View

You also need something of a long view, again difficult when you are ‘in love’. This is like people refusing to talk about death. We are all going to meet it, so why not face it now and work out a strategy to deal with whatever your feelings are?

Relationships, whether heterosexual or homosexual, fail, even with the starting point of intense love. Figures differ from fifty percent failure in the US, to one in three in the UK. Hetro or homo are about the same. Statistics show there is a huge decline in marriage, with a swing to living together without the ceremony. Also there is a massive increase in adults without a partner. It has risen from six point five to thirty percent since 1960.

To avoid recognising that the social and personal climate surrounding marriage in our own times has changed is to invite heartache and feelings of failure. Best to recognise that a huge percentage of marriages and partnerships founder, and being human you face that possibility too. With that in mind you can start your partnership with understanding and planning in place to meet and deal with difficulties as and if they arise. In the US a pre-nuptial agreement can save a lot of misery and causes for anger and conflict. But in English law such agreements are of little value under current law.

Of greater benefit though is honest discussion of exactly what you both expect of your partnership. Do you want children, and how many? What things do you need or want that make you happy (I love having a birthday party – I love lying on a warm beach – I love being alone sometimes – I really need to feel wanted and attractive to you – I want to have children but go to work – my gret love is art/music/writing, so I need a lot of time to spend with that). Emotional needs are important and if not met you or your partner cannot help but start to look for them elsewhere. It is like being very hungry. You will look for food.

So identify your emotional needs at the start, and if you find that difficult, get help from a trained marriage counsellor. Dr. Willard Harley, after interviewing hundreds of people about their needs, found that the most universal were:

Admiration, affection – physical and emotional, conversation, domestic support, family commitment, financial support, honesty and openness, physical attractiveness, recreational companionship and sexual fulfillment. So take time to define for each other how you relate to these needs. Talking them over is a beginning of real intimacy other than sex. How do you want to deal with your personal incomes for instance? Men often accept they will share it, but women have been found to feel differently about that.

Harley found that the top of the list of needs for women was completely different than that for men, and the recognition of that in partnership is very important. So before you even start a relationship it is worth remembering that what holds a couple together isn’t just one thing such as good sex or having fallen in love. In the UK statistics show that men and women aged 25 to 29 have the highest divorce rates. This shows that it is first time marriages and partnerships that fail most frequently. So you both need to understand that unless you fulfill everyday needs as well as sexual and emotional, there will be big gaps in satisfaction.

Of course, the same thing applies if you have had a series of relationships that break down. Don’t take it personally by believing you are a failure, or start blaming all your partners. The truth is more likely to be either that you haven’t learned relationship skills, that your emotional age is still very young, or that you keep relating to a particular type of person. Take advice on this. iv

Also, don’t measure yourself against your parents or grandparents in terms of how long their marriage lasted. Cheryl Turner, head of public policy for Relate, the marriage counselling charity, said the increase in marital breakdown is related to a “changing society” in which life was “moving at a faster pace. As this happens, the pressure on families grows.”

Figures also show that many of us are much more independent financially and emotionally than in the past, and this means we want and expect different things from a relationship than our parents or grandparents. Again this points to the need to be very clear at the start about what you want in a partnership. Such clarity may not be ready made. Perhaps you need to be in a relationship before it clarifies, so don’t rush into marriage. If possible try living together.

Observation has shown however that living together often goes well. Troubles start as soon as marriage or commitment takes place. 

  Homecoming

Living within modern western culture we are bombarded with a mass of conflicting ideas about love. From the images and drama, songs and impressions we gather from films and TV, we may see love as meaning passionate sex, or what is called ‘falling in love’. But if we look closely at these we see that passionate sex does not in any way mean the couple can maintain a caring relationship. In fact many marriages based on this model of love quickly break down. Also, ‘falling in love’ is much the same, and is better understood as a flood of hormones exciting emotions. This doesn’t have much to do with love. Considering that we can see such breakdowns going on all around us, it is still strange to hear women excited about finding the man who ‘falls in love’ with them – i.e. who has a temporary rush of hormonal activity.

Yet love is everywhere in nature and in natural processes. But to see it we need to define love in a different way. We need to define it as the merging together of two distinct things into a new whole. Or a simple definition is: the ability to give of oneself with few conditions. It does not mean, “I will give myself to you as long as I can let all my childhood dependency, unfulfilled need for love and attention that I didn’t get from my parents; and all my fears of being abandoned, all my need to possess you and have you do exactly what I wish, be projected onto you.”

Mature love is when we accept that the person we care for is a separate and unique individual with their own needs and directions in life.  We do not love them “if”.  We love them simply because they are who they are, and we allow them the freedom that hopefully we give ourselves.  This is an unconditional love.  It doesn’t place the conditions on the other person of only being loved when they remain our satellite.  When we do that we make of them a possession, somebody manipulated by our own moods, emotional blackmail, or underhanded tricks. So sexual and emotional needs should not be confused with love.

Love is what happens to the sperm and ovum when they meet. They completely give themselves to each other and form a new being. That is how nature loves. Love is the unconditional love a healthy mother gives to her baby, whether that is a human or wolf mother. In this sense love is one of the most primal and powerful forces in life.  But it is not the love of men and women who feel they have found their soul mate and yet have not lived with them.

  Scanning the Future

The long view also tries to scan future trends. The move toward independence and being married but living in different houses or parts of the world is only one facet of the changes going on. When our ancestors married for life they often didn’t live very long. Young brides in different cultures was often accepted because of that shortness of life and the prevalence of disease. Longer life offers more choices in a variety of ways. But the future will open even greater opportunities and/or challenges, depending upon how things develop.

Whatever the future might bring, you are facing change now, today. And one of the biggest hurdles to meeting personal or social change is that we tend to hang on to the past. However, the influence of the past is often difficult to recognise, and we need to be aware of it before we can let go of its influence. Perhaps one of the first signs of past attitudes and behaviour weighing us down is in a feeling of struggle, of conflict or lack of ease in what we are trying to do, or the way we are trying to live.

Marc is as an example of this, he is a man in his late fifties with two previous marriages that had lasted in total for nearly forty years. He tried to be committed in a new relationship. Commitment had always been second nature to him with his two previous partners. Now, although the desire was still in him, he couldn’t maintain any desire for it. What he eventually realised was that an emerging drive toward independence was pushing away his old feelings. What made it difficult was that his parents had been together all their life. So Marc was applying that standard to his present situation and choices, making him judge himself as failing in some way. Marc wasn’t failing, he was evolving.

Present and future times will offer us, and maybe even call upon us, to break free of old patterns of relating. What this means in practice we will have to wait to see, but it is worth remembering that there are already many marital styles. In the west we have somehow taken on the attitude that monogamy is divinely ordained. Of course that is the Christian view. However, Islam teaches that polygamy is divinely blessed.

If we cut through this fog and look at how these different practices originated, they arose out of environmental and racial needs.

Recent documentaries on tribal life showed clearly how polygamy in such groups was a powerful force in child care, women’s support, and leaving no one unmarried and uncared for at the death of parents. It worked well in a group that had no social welfare and survival in a harsh environment that was hard for all. An argument against polygamy is that of females being subordinate to males, but in some cultures the polygamy is that of a woman having several male partners.

This is not said to promote polygamy, only to show that different styles evolve in different situations. The point being made is that the future may well push us into very different needs. Be prepared to let go of the past and innovate! Recognise that such innovation might be hard, so be ready to evolve.

Fundamentally a partnership is about mutually seeking support in meeting your own needs, and therefore surviving more comfortably in life. If you can accept that, then remember that mutual support can occur in many different ways.

More than anything else, accept that you are both female and male. Integrate your innate opposite gender. Become both male and female. Avoid the awful separation many of us exist in. Integrate, not separate. Transcend the old barriers and gender formulations. Become whole. See: Bliss.

This is not done by becoming butch, dressing up in a woman’s clothes, being transsexual, or being fixedly heterosexual or homosexual. It is arrived at by an inner process of real acceptance of your unique core self that stands beyond gender, culture, and even your body.

Love is a great force in nature and the universe. It does not belong to you, but flows through. The flow may at first carry debris from your life experiences. Unblock the flow! See: LifeStream.

Sex and Homeostasis in New Guinea

Michaela Denis, in her book Leopard In My Lap, tells of an interesting practise used by the Chimbu people of New Guinea. One of their ‘dances’ takes the form of the men and women sitting around the edge of a large hut. They are arranged alternately male and female, the men facing the women. With accompanying drumming they gradual­ly draw close and the men passionately rub noses and faces with the woman on their right, then the one on their left. This carries on for a long period and with obvious pleasure and ardour. The dance seems to be a way of safely allowing the sexual feelings within a group to find expression.

In the ancient world a great many of the ways people used coex was within a religious framework. The unconscious was allowed to express within accepted symbols and boundaries. Frequently the practitioner held the belief structure that it was a god or a spirit which expressed through them. Given the manner in which the unconscious expresses itself in symbols and readily takes up and uses any available belief system, such practices still obviously remain as self regulatory. In Man and His Symbols Jung tells of a Hindu widow who capably directed her household and employees by going into a trance and speaking with the same confidence, voice and authority as her dead husband. After all, she had lived with him many years, and his mannerisms and attitudes were well recorded in her un­conscious. By allowing her being to express itself in that way, she maintained an equilibrium which might other­wise have been difficult.

Love Sex and Desire

Whenever someone says they love me, or I hear the same thing said to someone else, it leaves me feeling confused.  What the hell do they mean?

Recently, in getting to know a middle aged woman, I think I moved a little nearer understanding.  The woman, Janet, is intelligent, willing to frankly talk about her thoughts and feelings, so we could honestly explore issues some relationships never confront.

Work had brought us together, and although there was mutual attraction, and Janet very much wants a partner and sex, we decided it would complicate our relationship if we slept together.

Human nature isn’t that simple though.  Making a decision doesn’t mean it is easy to maintain or without complications.  The mutual desire for each other didn’t go away.  Cooperating on the work brought growing awareness of each other’s qualities and the powerful way we complemented each other and connected.  So why were we still holding each other at arm’s length?

Janet and I went for a walk and she brought the subject up again.  She said, “I really don’t like sleeping alone at night, so why are we not sharing a bed?”

Her question was more of a further inquiry than a demand.  We had already honestly compared our personal standpoints.  Janet, despite in no way being monogamous, was looking for a committed partner who she could respect, find attractive, and share sex and daily living with.  For myself, I was not looking for a committed relationship, had never felt at ease with an exclusive monogamous connection, and love living alone.

Janet has a history of becoming deeply emotionally entwined with partners.  It was obvious to us both that getting any closer than we were could mean that I would easily live a separate life, and Janet would once more find old wounds, created in past relationships with males, opened again to hurt.

But there is level after level of how love, sex and desire work to connect or push us apart.  Our walk and talk uncovered more of the geography of these territories.  One of the levels relevant was our age and past experience.  For instance we had both been previously married and had raised children.  Those needs and desires had already been met and satisfied.  If we were in a younger age group, the desire or need for that level of relationship would have created a very different critique of what love, sex and togetherness meant.  Even so, no matter our age, we were both still human.

So in her further analysis of our situation Janet went on to say, “I can see that maintaining a non sexual relationship protects us both from switching on certain reactions that getting closer through sex would produce.  For a start, sleeping with you and then having you disappear off to live your own life apart wouldn’t be tolerable.  Also I couldn’t cope with you having other women in your life.  But there is something beyond that.  It isn’t that I want any more children, but when a woman really connects with a man it calls up those primal feelings that sex is really about.  At the moment we get on well, but if you became my sexual partner, I would start questioning whether you are a fitting mate.  Do you measure up to what I would look for in a man to father my children?  Could you measure up to what I have achieved or aim for in my life?  Maybe those feelings wouldn’t be completely conscious, but they would show in the way I saw you.  I have seen it in the past.  I can start to get critical and bitchy.”

This immediately reminded me that Janet was still mourning an unconsummated relationship with a high flying businessman.  Apart from the fact he didn’t want to maintain or deepen a relationship with her, I could see he fitted her measure of a man more fully than I do.  I am no businessman.  I have no big house in town, and I am not a high flyer as she or he is.  Interesting though to see what constitutes what we name as ‘love’.

First, it is obvious love means different things to different age groups, although there is crossover.  Also the example we looked at is just about Janet and me.  Changing personal details radically alters the equations that make love.

If we use another hypothetical couple this becomes clearer.  Let us say that Simon is successful financially and has work bringing social status.  However, as an ageing male he is still emotionally immature, and really needs to have a motherly type of love.  In the past he was in relationships with women who worked in similar financial and work situations as himself, and such relationships were never successful.  But he has now met Betty, younger, not as successful, but with very warm and caring love.  She is thrilled at having a man who is established and secure in the world.  She admires him and loves him to bits.  Not being ambitious like his other partners she doesn’t mind staying at home and providing his physical and emotional needs.  He is also willing to support her desire to have a child.  With his other partners he lived a life in which there was frequent conflict of interests and needs.  With Betty he and she can relax, feeling secure in their support of each other.  Out of this flows their form of love.

If we are going to succeed in the special form of love we need, then we must start by being very clear about who we are, and what style of life and relationships we can maintain.  Janet and I had both gained a lot of self awareness from previous relationships, and we had always tried to be honest about why we succeeded or failed.  And I am talking about learning, not blaming.

Straight communication is vital too.  It is who you are and what you do that are the foundations of a relationship.  If I had made out I was good at, and desired, a committed relationship, and gone on to have sex with Janet, only then revealing by my actions what my real motives were, it would have led to real bitterness, resentment, pain and the destruction of a good work relationship.

If you are unclear about who you are, a good psychotherapist could sum you up in one or two sessions if you asked them.  Or perhaps your close friends would tell you if you explain why you wanted to know.

There is another facet to love that a lot of people do not want to admit.  It is what I call the “business of love”.  My second wife didn’t like it when I explained to her that two of the things that glued us together were that – at the time – she had a car and I didn’t; and she was successful and stable in her work.  But although she would have preferred me to only describe my romantic reasons for our form of love, I know that if I had not been good at home building, earning a wage, and trying to face personal problems, she would have seen me as a second class male.

There IS a business side to love, and it is important to clearly make out your shopping list when you are looking for a partner.

Thinking about love in those ways set me wondering what love might be like outside of all the small print, all the personal and idiosyncratic needs, desires, fears, age, social status, and so on.  I guess it would be the sort of love that doesn’t say, “I love you because.” It would simply be saying, ‘I love you.”

Interview with a Sex Worker

What do you think was the beginning or background to your becoming a sex worker?

Sometimes things like this start when you are very young.  I was a very chubby kid and was taunted about that.  Also, it wasn’t that I was taunted by the adults in my life, my friends and relations, but they reminded me constantly that if I got fat when I was older than I would never find a husband.  I was told again and again that I would then be on my own for the rest of my life.

So, I suppose it in a way those things started me off in the belief that I wasn’t attractive, and I wouldn’t find anybody who would want to be with me.  So this led to feeling that I was physically repulsive.  Then as I matured sexually I felt sure I was not attractive to the men I found appealing.

Then, I did marry quite early.  It is mostly because I found someone who seemed to want to be with me.  Then after all those years of being with my husband, who actually didn’t find me attractive, and never said anything or made any suggestion to indicate he found me attractive, I believed I wasn’t good enough.  The things he did say indicated that I was the lucky one to be with him.  He led me to feel the he was doing me a favour and nobody else was going to come along who would want to be with me.

I guess that was why I married him, because I felt, “Oh my god, he’s willing to marry me.” I felt that perhaps I could do worse, so, married him.  Then he told me later that he didn’t love me and he wished he hadn’t married me.

None of that made me feel very good, but then I was stuck with him for 10 years.  At the time I thought, because I have slightly old fashioned views about marriage, that we were together until death do us part.

So, what was it like being with him for those years?

Well, my sex life with him was just that – sex life.  There was no love life.

What would you say the difference is?

Well, he would fuck me, until he was satisfied.  He had no regard for what gave me pleasure sexually.  He just wanted to fuck.

What do you mean by that?

He wanted to get his dick inside me as quickly as possible and then fuck away until he came.  He didn’t want to please me.  He didn’t want to caress or cuddle me.  I used to try to guide him as to what I liked and what I didn’t like.  I gave very obvious signals to say, “Yes, this is what I like,” and yet he still reverted back to doing the things I didn’t like. 

For instance, the instant I would jump into bed, after a busy, busy day, he would leap in and grab my tits, as if that was an immediate turn on for me.

That just did not turn me on.  But in his head my tits, my nipples, were “on” buttons.  You know, give them a squeeze and she will immediately be turned on.  That was how ignorant I thought he was when he came to sex or love making.

In fact, there was no love making in our marriage.

So, to cut a long story short, that went on for many years.  At that time I felt like a zombie.  I mean, during the time we were having sex.  I wasn’t getting what I wanted, but I felt like I was doing my wifely duty.  He said sometimes, “It’s my right.”

When I finally left him, I left believing I would never ever have sex again with anybody.  That was a big decision to make, because I was only 29.  But, the reason I had that belief was because of all the things leading up to it.  You know, the business about nobody finding me attractive.  I mean, I was a big girl.  I did get quite large.  Having been told over and over again I was fat, I believed it.  In fact, I did get really fat because I lived up to all the nonsense people were telling me.  So after I left him, I believed I would never ever be with anybody again.  Also, I find it difficult to have real sex with anybody I am not in love with.

But, actually, it didn’t take long for me to realise that was a load of bollocks.  I went travelling for a few months after the break, and that was a really, really liberating experience.  I discovered that while I was having fun and away from work, from all those boundaries and restrictions, from him and his family, there were lots of guys who found me attractive.

Because I was in holiday mode, there was always glorious sunshine, and the scenery was wonderful, it was quite romantic.  So I was feeling good about myself as well, and I actually shagged about a bit.  I was careful with protection and all that, but it was so liberating.  I realised that I am attractive.  So that’s true, it was a really good experience.  Then, for the next several months, or maybe for several years, I settled back into normal life and working.  So I guess I went through my teenage years in my early 30’s, in as much as that was when I discovered alcohol for the first time, and learned to enjoy going out and letting my hair down a bit.  Until that point I had been a little bit up tight. Being that free really helped me.  I have alcohol to thank for that because it helped me be able to let go.  I know some people can do that without a crutch like alcohol, but for me it is really helpful.  I really thank alcohol for that.

So I really went a bit mad in my early thirties, raving, recreational drugs, getting drunk, in some ways being a revolting teenager.

I felt as if I needed to do it.  I couldn’t bear the thought now, but at the time, every time I attracted a different male it helped me feel good about myself.  It felt like one more notch – not in terms of achievement, I shagged one more man – but in the sense that it was one more person who found me attractive enough to sleep with me.

But that soon wore off, and I realised that as far as it giving me happiness was concerned it was just a physical thing.  But one day I was working and it was a quiet day – I was working as a receptionist at the time, and the woman I was working for came out and sat at the desk where I was.  We started chatting, and saying things like, wouldn’t it be great if we had enough money to do this or live there.  We became easy with each other, and I said to her that yes of course I would love to have earned lots of money. 

What was your financial situation at the time?

Well, it was okay.  I was still working.  But it wasn’t brilliant.  Things hadn’t been fantastic though, after I split up with my husband.  I realised after he had gone that he had been squirreling money away without me knowing.  But I didn’t have savings or anything.

Then she said something strange to me.  She said, “Well, you know, you are sitting on a goldmine.”

I thought, what on earth is she talking about?  I looked down at the decrepit funny old chair I was sitting on wondering if she somehow meant that.  I stood up and looked because I was so confused.  So I said to her, “What do you mean I’m sitting on a goldmine?”

She said, “It’s not the chair and you silly tart.  I am talking about your minge you idiot.”

At the time I didn’t know what the word minge was.  So I asked her, or she said, “It’s your fanny girl.”

I was so innocent in many ways about things like that I had to ask her to explain.  And she said to me, “Don’t you see, you could be on the game earning money from having sex.  It’s what you’re doing anyway, and you might as well get paid for it.”

My response was to say to her, “Yeah, right!  Someone like me, a bit frumpy and dumpy. Who’s going to want to pay me for sex?  I couldn’t do that anyway.  Surely you have to be a gorgeous looking woman.  You know, tall, slim, blonde.”

She just laughed and said, “Are you joking?  Have you really looked around on the Internet, and looked at the magazines?  Some of those women are absolutely disgusting.  They are gross.  If they can do it, you can definitely do it.”

My first response was to feel there was no way I could ever do anything like that.  But, strangely enough, I was also kind of fascinated.  And, as it turned out, 20 years earlier she had been on the game.  At the time I didn’t know what that expression meant but she explained that it meant selling sex.  She had done quite well from it financially and so could explain to me how to go about it.  She knew the ropes, so we had lots of fascinating conversations.

Then, one day she made a suggestion, she told me that she had a little flat in London that she didn’t use and suggested that she and I do it up and then place an ad to see what happened.  So, being a little bit inquisitive, adventurous, and wanting to try something different I decided to go along with it.

That’s what we did.  We spent a lot of time and effort doing up the room like a parlour, with all beautiful lighting and decor.  We furnished it nicely as well, and it really looked stunning.  It wasn’t some sleazy little hovel, we made it look really high class.

Then we placed an ad in a magazine and waited to see what would happen.  Obviously I changed my name, and the woman who was encouraging me said she didn’t want to do it herself, but she would answer the phone and arrange things for me.

I didn’t know the lingo, and apparently when people ring there are certain things they ask, or words they use which are part of that scene.  Those words are used because there are certain things they wouldn’t openly say over the telephone.  So she dealt with all that and described me to the men enquiring.  She would tell them what I would be wearing, then she would get them to come to the phone box across the road so that we could see from our window. We could look out and I could decide if I was ready to have sex with them.  Also we could see if they were really coming along and not simply wasting our time.

That was a very interesting time.  I went along with it and got glamed up so I was looking very glamorous.  I had really lovely clothes, my hair all up, with beautiful earrings – it was all very, very interesting.  I met some amazing characters.  Some of the people maybe only came to see me once; some came more than once, and some came on a regular basis.

I didn’t do it full time.  It was about once a week, or once a fortnight depending upon how often I felt like doing it.  But I got a few regulars, and that suited me really nicely, because I got to know them.  I got to know what they liked and what they didn’t life.  And if there was somebody I didn’t like because they were smelly, or if they had dirty fingernails, I didn’t have to see them.  I chose to do what I wanted to do.  I didn’t feel pressured to doing anybody if I didn’t want to.  I didn’t want somebody touching me if they were unclean.  I was really fussy.

What was it like with your first client?  Was it like having sex with somebody who wasn’t paying?

Well, what I learned about myself at that time, was that all the years I was with my husband, who was just fucking me, I had learned to switch off the emotional side of things.  So in seeing my clients I realised that I was easily able to do that.  So I didn’t find it difficult at all.  I found it really easy.

Also, because I like people, and because I like to please people and to help people feel good about themselves I found that the people I was seeing were really keen to come back and see me again.  They could see I was interested in giving them what they wanted.  That wasn’t necessarily always about sex.

Some of the guys didn’t want sex.  They wanted to lie down with a lady and just hold me.  All they sometimes wanted was a cuddle.  I found that really very moving, because this whole thing about men only thinking about sex, and having a one track mind, I didn’t find to be true.  I think that’s kind of a sad stereotype.  I discovered that it isn’t true, and some men don’t act like that, and because they are single they have a need to be held, and to be touched.  Sometimes they want to be caressed and to be treated like they are lovable.

Or sometimes, if they are an older person and can’t get an erection, they still have a need for the human touch.  I loved it when people like that came to me.  They would openly say to me, that they love the way I made them feel special, or that I was pleased to see them.  In some cases they said it was just a wonderful thing to lie down with me, relax and have a conversation.  They loved to feel the warmth of my body against them.  For me, that really was very nice.

Perhaps this is just my opinion, or maybe it’s something I heard, but some people in the sex industry say they have rules such as no touching, no kissing, but it sounds as if you were ready to be touched or to touch them.  I have the impression, from what I have heard, that the client must not touch or interact with the woman apart from the genitals.  So they would perhaps be masturbated, or have oral sex, or plain straightforward sex.  Is that right?

I think everybody sets their own rules.  I certainly had some ground rules as well.  I wasn’t going to kiss anybody.  To me, that was way to personal, way too intimate.  You don’t know where those people have been.  I don’t want to catch anybody else’s germs.  So I wasn’t kissing those men, and I didn’t want anybody going down on me either.  It was always, always with condoms.  Some guys would be ready to pay double to have sex without a condom.  My feeling was, “You must be joking mate!  Not on your life!”

Okay, so it’s interesting what you have said about your background, about feeling unattractive, so, before I ask anything else, what did you get from being in the sex industry?

It’s unbelievable really.  I was apprehensive beforehand as to whether I would be good enough, or whether they would find me attractive.  They might look at me and walk out the room.  I spoke to a couple of my best friends before I did it, and they said to me, “Girl, you don’t have much of an opinion of yourself, and this could be really damaging to your morale and you’re emerging self.” And I just felt well, my gut instinct is telling me to do it, and I did it.

I think, in that respect, it was the best thing I have ever done.  I couldn’t believe how confident I felt, and how many guys found me really very physically attractive.  And I was plump.  But, not everybody likes skinny women.  I hadn’t realised that.  Some guys like really large women.  In fact some guys like older women.  So it really made a big difference, and I am really pleased I did it.

Strangely enough, I felt really confident.  It’s weird, but I feel more confident when I am having sex with guys in that capacity, than I do when I’m with somebody I really fancy.  I still feel very self conscious physically, and yet I didn’t when I was working.

You did say that you shut down your feelings in a paid relationship and in your marriage.  Has that got anything to do with it?

Possibly, because I didn’t need to impress those people.  If they don’t want to come back again they don’t have to, and I am not trying to attract them.

But, I went on to work for an agency. Working for the agency was similar, and that really was good for my confidence.  In the agency there was myself and another girl, and she was probably half my age.  She was tall, and slim, and blonde, and absolutely gorgeous.  I thought to myself when I saw her, “Oh my god what am I doing here?  They are all going to want to see her, and I am going to feel like the frump.”

Then one day a young guy came, and I suppose he was about thirty, or maybe mid twenties, and after seeing us he chose to see her.  I felt quite relieved in a certain way that he wanted to see her.  I didn’t think I would be able to satisfy a much younger guy.

Actually, I’ve just remembered, he asked for me to join.  He actually asked for a double.  I thought, oh my god, I’ve never done a double before.  I didn’t know what, exactly, I was supposed to do.  I didn’t even know really what it meant.  I guessed that he wanted us both at the same time.  It shocked me into worries about what I looked like.  I felt that he would see that my tits were all saggy, and that I had got cellulite on my thighs.  I have never felt like such a fool.

Anyway, this young guy had a problem getting an erection.  He couldn’t get any response.  It wasn’t just because of being with us, it was a general thing in his everyday life.  But in realising this and seeing his difficulty, I remembered back to when I was shagging about in London, when I was with a guy who was a diabetic, and couldn’t get an erection.  Yet I was still able to bring him to orgasm.  So I thought I would do whatever I could to help this guy.

This gorgeous young thing was doing what she did, but I could see she wasn’t putting anything into it.  It was all very mechanical.  You know, his dick was in her hand, and she was trying to jerk him off, but nothing was happening.  He was just like a limp sausage.  Then he asked for me to take over, so I put a condom on him, a lovely fruity one, and gave him some oral stimulation, and I think some hand relief, and actually, he ejaculated.  So he got pleasure even though he didn’t manage a hard on.  He was delighted.

That left me feeling really good, because I was able to give him something.  For me sex isn’t just a physical thing, it was also an emotional thing too.  So I felt really good.  I know for me, it is not just a physical thing.  It is so much more than that, and so many guys just don’t realise.

You have said that your sense of yourself changed, but yet you were still uncertain in relationship with somebody you liked or wanted to be with.  So being with these other men and realising that you could really give them something satisfying, did that change the way you felt about yourself?

I suppose overall it’s made me more confident.  I do know that, at least, I am attractive to men.  But sadly, most men that I meet who are physically attracted to me, are not really attracted to me as a person, they simply want a screw.  So now I know I can physically attract men, even though I am now in my forties. I seem to attract a lot of younger men, as well as men of all ages.  I find that, yes, I can attract men very easily.  But I don’t seem to attract men who want to get to know me as a person on a deeper level than just physical.

What does that mean?  Okay, I can understand that men might want to just have sex with you, but what do you mean by “getting to know you”?  What does that mean in terms of relationship?

Well, it means respecting me for who I am and what I believe in, or what I like to do and what I don’t like to do.  It’s about finding out what makes me happy and finding out what makes me tick.  Finding out what my interests are, and actually respecting my choices in life and the paths I have taken.  I find that I meet guys who are physically attracted to me and want to have a good time, but once they’ve had a good time they move on.  Or if I don’t give them that good time sexually, some of them get quite shitty.

So, getting to know you and appreciating you as a person, would mean that whether sex was good or bad, they like being with you as a person.

Yes.

You said there are things you have learned about yourself – I mean you talked a bit about your early years –but are there things you learned about yourself from being in the sex industry?

Well, I learned that I could quite easily pick up on what was turning on the different guys I met.  I easily understood what it was they wanted.  For instance, one young guy came to see me, and he was a regular.  It was while I was with the agency, so the other girls knew him.  He was just the loveliest and sweetest guy, but lacking in confidence.  He wasn’t particularly nice looking, and maybe that was why he lacked confidence.  But he obviously had a need.  He didn’t have a girlfriend, and he had a physical condition that he was really embarrassed about.  It was that his balls had lumps on them.  They were lumps under the skin, they weren’t growths.  They weren’t sores, he just had a very lumpy balls.

He said to me, “Look, I’ve got this problem, and I can absolutely assure you it’s not contagious, it’s not a disease, there is nothing wrong with me.  I’ll keep my underpants on if you want me to, and so you don’t have to see me.  What the other girls do is for me to keep my pants on and just take my penis out.”

And I just knew that, what he really wanted, was just to be appreciated, and made to feel that he was completely okay and normal, and that there was nothing wrong with him.

So I said to him, don’t be silly, take your pants off.  There is nothing wrong with you, what are you on about?  He was just a lovely guy and appreciated everything that I did for him, whether it was helping him off with his tee shirt, or just being gentle with him.  It wasn’t that I treated him like a child, but he was so grateful that I was appreciating his body, and he touched me in a way that was equally as gentle.  He wasn’t groping for my tits, or groping for my clit, as so many clumsy men do.  He was touching my back and my shoulders, and appreciating touching a warm woman’s body.  And I was doing the same for him.  And he had his underpants off and he had his big erection, and I put the condom on, and I got on top of him, and just very slowly, and very gently – not that I had to be gentle at that time – but that was how I was feeling, rather than full on raunchy sex.  It seemed to me that what he really wanted was to have a nice slow fuck.  And that’s what we did.  I could just tell that he needed that more than he needed anything.  And that gave me an enormous sense of satisfaction.  He virtually had tears in his eyes afterwards.  The other girls had just given him hand relief while looking away.  With them he had to keep his balls covered up because they looked funny.

Other guys had different things.  There was one guy who came to me, and as he was taking his clothes off, he was asking me, “So, how old were you when you first had to go to the doctors for a gynaecological examination?”

At first, I thought, “What is this guy about?” But I realised, okay, so he’s got a bit of a doctor, gynaecological thing, maybe that’s his fantasy.  And I met a lot of guys with fantasies, and it was easy to go along with them.

I kind of felt it was a bit thick, but I thought, well if that’s his thing, and he’s paying me, and it’s not doing anybody any harm.  So in the case of the gynaecological guy I that’s what I did.  I think maybe he also asked me how old I was when I first had my period, and did I have to have an internal examination.  He wanted to know how often I had to go for my cervical pap tests, and what was it like.  So I explained how I had got undressed, and the doctor put this metal forceps thing in.  This conversation was going on as he was actually penetrating me.  It was all going on very slowly because he was furiously taking in everything I was telling him as well.  What I was saying was the thing that was getting him going.  I don’t understand the psychology of that, but in that way it was easy to get him going.  Talking in that way helped him to really get into it.  Strange!

Early on you were talking about your relationship with your husband, and that was, as you called it, “Just fucking.” You said it didn’t fulfil your needs.  So I am wondering, in terms of the fact that you have experienced a lot of men as partners and in the sex trade, what would you say to men to help them understand a woman’s needs?

 

You have just described quite different types of men, so in general what would you say?  What would you say if you go to teach somebody to approach a woman?

Good question!  What I see is that with some guys it just comes naturally.  They know how to make a woman feel good.

 

Okay, but what is different between them and somebody who doesn’t have the that understanding naturally?

I believe there are different personality types.  There are four different personality types, and one of them is the real relationship person.  That type is really interested in what makes people tick, and what gets people going, and what makes people tingle.  Those people, I think, or more likely to be the ones to understand how to get a woman aroused.  They would be the ones who would probably be the more romantic type.  They would know that to turn a woman on, it’s not just about jumping into bed and grabbing her tits, it’s more about the build up to the event.  Maybe in the afternoon, or the early evening, and running the hot bubble bath, or some romantic gesture.  It could be just a lovely kiss on the neck while she’s cooking or preparing a meal, give her a lovely cuddle or buy her a small gift.  Even saying something nice to her, or a kindness, or any sort of gesture that makes her feel special and loved.  The guy could even do a chore that she hates so that she knows he loves her.

Then it’s more likely that she is going to be in the mood later on.  That is the type of person who is most likely to be interested in how other people tick.

Then there is the type of person who is just very theoretical.  They are the, “This is how it is done because I read it in a book” type of person.  Those are the types I find very difficult to be with physically, because they’ve got a fixed mind.

It’s like they are thinking, “Step one.  Grab her clit and wiggle it a little bit.  Then she will probably go ‘Oooo ahhh’ and you stick your dick in.”

I’m not joking!  Some guys are literally like that.

Do you remember the last time we met, and I went out with that guy I met at dance?  He was exactly like that in bed.  No foreplay at all.  He didn’t even understand the concept.  You know, just get it in!  Wow!

So they are the theory types.  Maybe they are the real intellectual types, or just the ones who read about how to do something.  They read an instruction manual and think they know how to do it.  Whereas the other type, the more relationship type, they might be someone who learns from experience.

Then there are the hygiene types.  They are like, you know, no touching, because she might be dirty.  That is really freaky.  And we are not necessarily talking about guys who pay me.  I am talking about guys I’ve had sex with in a personal one to one relationship.  Can you imagine it –I’m thinking to myself, hang on, you want to put your dick into me yet you don’t want to touch me?  How weird can that be?  I don’t know how on earth they think they can turn somebody on when they are not even going to touch them.

I get the impression, from the last two types you described, the technical type for instance, the “this is how it is in the book” and the “hygiene” type, there is something missing in their character that the relationship type have.

 

You have said that they are more into relationships, and are observing of what happens in a relationship, but is that because they are more feeling?

I think so.  But obviously, there can be a little bit of combination.  I suppose it is pretty narrow minded to say that there are only these types, that type, and another type.  There are overlaps, but generally speaking I think it’s the relationship type who are the better lovers.  But the others, I think, can learn it if they want to.  If somebody wants to know, how to be a good lover, what I would suggest if a guy came to me and said, “Please help me.  I have this gorgeous girlfriend and I want to satisfy her, what would you teach me?”

Well I would say, it’s not that cut and dry.  You can’t just say, do this, and this, and this.  Everybody likes something different.  I would probably sit down with him, over two or three hours, and have a really, really personal in depth and intimate conversation about the physical side of sex or love making.  I would ask a lot of questions and give a lot of examples.  And one of the examples I would give that comes to mind, concerns a guy I was seeing for a while with whom I had an active sex life, that in the end I had knocked on the head, because he just did not get it.  He was doing things I didn’t like.

Such as?

Well, when he was going inside me, somehow he managed to get his fingers round the back of me, and would try to massage my arsehole.  I would say to him, “Oh, no, no.  Not for me.  That’s not my thing.” But he would keep trying to do it, every single time.  He would get his fingers round there, and I would pull his hand away, getting really annoyed with him.  But he wasn’t listening.  He said something about his ex girlfriend really liked that.  I said to him that I wasn’t his ex girlfriend.  I don’t like that.  It’s a turn off for me.  It just doesn’t do it for me.

So what you’re saying is that you really have to listen and to watch your partner’s reactions to show you what is happening.

Yes, you’ve got to really listen.  I know I make it very plain. I think I make it very obvious when I like something, and try to put more emphasis on what I do like, so they feel good.  But if they do something I don’t like I try to just very gently steer them away so they don’t feel put down.  And it’s the same with me, if I think I’m doing something that is pleasing to the guy, because other guys have liked it, and they don’t like it and they tell me, I take that on board.  At least I think I do.  I might get it wrong sometimes, but I do try to take it on board.  I couldn’t stand it if they were thinking, “What is she doing, I am not enjoying this.”  I would hate that.  I don’t want to be considered a bad or inconsiderate lover.

But it does amaze me how many guys simply do not listen.  So, number one is, listen to what your partner is telling you in words, or in sounds, or movements.  If someone pulls your hand away, don’t keep putting it back.

Going back to my husband, over the seventeen years we were together, I can’t tell you how many times I said to him, groping my tits does not turn me on.  It actually turns me off.  When I jump into bed after a very busy day, all I want to do is to spend at least a minute just chilling out, melting into the mattress, relaxing, before any action takes place.  So, when I jump into bed, and next minute whoomph, my tits are being squeezed and being milked like I’m a cow – I felt like I was a cow.  I must have taken his hands away hundreds of times, and said, “Will you please just let me relax, just for a minute.  Just hold me for a minute.  Give my shoulders a massage, because they are really tight.”

I explained to him that when I am sexually aroused, at that point, yes, I love my breasts to be caressed.  It heightens my arousal, it heightens my pleasure.  But, if I am just neutral, and not turned on, and my tits are grabbed, it’s a turn off.  If there is a sliding scale, and zero is in the middle, and the opposite to arousal is on the left, and arousal is to the right; if I am in the middle and somebody grabs my tits, I swing to the negative arousal.  I just want to close up like a clam.

This has happened so many times with so many guys that I think it’s important for guys to understand.  I pull their hand away, again and again, and still they go for the tits.  So I am much more inclined to pursue a sexual relationship with those who will listen, than with those who don’t.

This is very strange to tell, but when I was married and had “sex” for all those years, we did things in bed that left me feeling used and abused.  I felt like I was just being fucked.  I felt used as a wife.  Yet when I was on the game, doing sex work, I felt much more appreciated, much more respected, and I could do, or not do whatever I wanted.  So if somebody wanted to do something I wasn’t prepared to do, I wouldn’t do it.  That was because I knew I was my own boss.

So, is what you are talking about connected with an equal relationship between partners?  As you said, you felt your husband was just using you.

Yes, and part of the reason for that was that I have never had an orgasm.  So, the fact that he was never able to give me an orgasm, in his mind, I think, led him to feeling, “What’s the point in me making an effort.  She’s not going to have an orgasm anyway.”  I would say to him, yes, but I can still enjoy sex!

I’m not saying that every time we had sex it was absolutely unbearable.  There were times when it was really enjoyable.  But, he still didn’t really give a shit.  As long as he came, that was it.  He didn’t really care if I was in mid pleasure stream or what.  It just didn’t matter to him.  It was all about him and his sexual need.

I just felt so much better about myself as a person on the game, and I never ever once felt used when I was doing sex work.  For the first time, I felt like a real woman.

Okay, another question I was interested in is connected with what we talked about in connection with what a man might learn about relating to a woman physically, but we haven’t said so much about the relationship emotionally.  You have talked about your sex work and what you were doing physically, but it sounds as if you were also expressing your feelings with them.  You were dealing with them at an emotional level from what you say, because you understood their needs and how they felt.

 

So I wonder what you have learned about men.  Not just their sex life, but men in general.  I wonder what you have gathered over the time you were a sex worker, that has helped you understand marriage and life.

I think I have learned things.  Some men that I met I felt that I was able to help them on the particular path they were on.  This was mostly in terms of their confidence.  I know it’s a common belief that all men are out to shag anything in a skirt.  In fact there are a lot of men out there with no confidence at all sexually.  That’s why I think some of them do go to see sex workers.  I know I had some guys who felt inadequate; felt they didn’t actually know what to do.  And because they were so honest, and vulnerable, and they felt they could open up to me, because they saw me as a real human being, not just somebody who wanted their money – I suppose, in a way, I became a bit of a counsellor.  For those guys, I know, I helped them to gain confidence sexually.  I helped them to experience what to do when, hopefully, they did meet a girlfriend.

With the other guys, I know that they felt their seeing a sex worker was keeping their marriage together.  One guy in particular loved his wife to bits.  They had lovely children, they had a nice life, but she had decided, when they had their last child that they were not going to have sex any more.  He had a high sex drive, and so seeing me kept his marriage going in one sense.  The fact that he was having his needs met enabled him to stay with his wife.  She didn’t even want to be cuddled or held by him, and he was a very loving guy.  He was a caring, sensitive person, and needed to be held and wanted physically and emotionally.

Do you think that some women don’t understand that it is not simply the man’s personality that pushes him to need sex?  It is his body that he has to cope with.  His whole glandular system pushes him towards that release, and if he doesn’t get it reasonably regularly, enormous tension even neurosis can build up.  I know some women also have a high sex drive, but it seems to be some sort of stereotype for a number of women to talk about men as if, as you say, they will shag anything in a skirt.

Exactly.  That is something I really did learn – that everybody’s needs are different.  And going back to that particular married man, I learned a lot about him because we saw each other for about five years.  I found it so interesting that his wife had decided, just because they had had their last child, that there was not going to be a sex life ever again.

Obviously, because she no longer had the sexual appetite, or even a desire to be touched or held, automatically that meant that from her point of view, her husband didn’t have those needs either.  He used to cry sometimes in my arms.  He used to cry, because he loved his wife so much and his family life, and he didn’t want to break free of the family life, but it was painful for him to think that he might have to spend the next 20 years, as a highly sexually active man, not having sex.  So I think for him, seeing me on a monthly basis, held his marriage together.

I know that I am not seeing him now in that way, but I know he goes round and sees lots of women.  He was seeing me, exclusively, other than his wife, for that time, and now that we don’t have that relationship, he is shagging about.

He is not in a relationship with anybody particular, but he pays to go and see a lot of women.  I think that’s really sad because he is not getting the satisfaction he needs.

I am not sure if you will understand this question, but when you look at the way society views sex workers –  for instance that man’s wife would probably be horrified if she knew – because that is a public view of prostitution.  So it is generally accepted that if you are married, then you honour your wife or husband.  Do you think there is anything wrong with those attitudes?

Do you mean the women’s attitudes?

No, just at the general social attitudes towards sex outside marriage.  It is considered wrong, and prostitution is illegal in this country.  I wonder how you see that.

I think I can understand why it is frowned upon.  In some people’s eyes, paying for sex is automatically associated with hookers on the street who are looking for quick money for drugs or to pay off their pimp.  The location, or the surroundings, you know, in a dark alley, or wherever it might be is far less than salubrious.  So the whole association is that it is dirty, sleazy and unclean.  So I can understand why people with those associations see prostitution as such an ugly and bad thing.

But of course, there are other sides to it.  I don’t associate what I did with that at all.  I would never walk the streets and meet people in their cars and things like that.  I have heard of people and some I know, who have done that, and have ended up being raped and physically abused.  Horrible things have happened to them.  It is almost like asking for trouble.  But they were people who have been desperate for money for drugs.

I know of a woman who agreed to have anal sex in the back of someone’s car in London for six pounds.  It was unprotected as well.  Six pounds!?  She was so desperate for money.  To me that is really sad, and those type of people need help.

And the guys who shag women for six pounds they are fuelling this terrible industry.  If they had any real feelings or morals, they wouldn’t do it.  That is my opinion.  So I don’t have much respect for someone who would go and be with that type of person.  Whereas I do for someone who says, I’m single, I’m shy, I haven’t got any confidence, I’ve got my needs, and want a cuddle, I want affection and I want sex.  Even if they don’t want perfection some of them just want sex.  They are in there for the sex, and that’s fair enough.  They are honest and say,  I need it, and I’m happy to pay for it.

They would go somewhere, or they will ring someone – okay if some of them have their sick fantasy or whatever – but at least they are being honest about it.

I don’t think I have really answered your question but they’re just thoughts I have.  Why am off on something else.

Well, you are suggesting that our society is in many ways dishonest.

Yes, I suppose they feel they have to be because, if you were having a family Christmas dinner with somebody, and I asked you if you had met somebody, you wouldn’t say, “Oh yes, I’m fine because I go to see a prostitute.”

The conversation would just stop dead, wouldn’t it?  In most family circles it would anyway.

That is because our society closes certain doors, and in some societies women have several husband’s, and in some societies men have several wives.  In China at one time the man could have concubines.  The women were not on the street then and were part of a family group.  They were looked after, they were fed, and it was an acceptable part of the community.

Exactly, there was nothing sleazy her about it.  It takes the sleaziness out of it completely.  Some animals are monogamous and some aren’t, and I don’t think humans are monogamous animals.  We all have different sexual needs.  And at different times of our lives we have different sexual needs.  They are not always sexual needs.  Sometimes they are very physical needs.

Yes, and emotional needs are very pressing too.

As I said, I had some guys really open up to me.  I had so many guys say to me that they had never been able to tell anybody else about the things they were saying to me.  I felt like, wow, I’m virtually a stranger and you are telling me these things.  It was really personal stuff they were telling me, about how they felt, what was happening to them, and their feelings about not having a girlfriend.

I felt it was quite an honour to be in that situation where I could be that person who helped them.

So, it sounds as if you were working as a real professional.  Is that how you felt?

 

I certainly got a lot of satisfaction from that work.  And I don’t mean just sexual satisfaction.  I got a lot of satisfaction generally.  However, there are a lot of arseholes out there as well.

I am talking about the guys.  Some of them get off on ringing up and then not arriving, and that was happening more and more.  I found that I was having too much of my time wasted.  So, the guys who were coming to me on a regular basis, I just let them know that I wasn’t going to carry on, either with the agency, or with the setup that the friend and I got together.  So with the guys that I could trust I gave them my personal number and we worked that way.  With those people I saw them at my place.  Maybe they came once a month, or once a fortnight for a while.

Beware of Love

Love and relationships are the most complex experiences we can meet in life.
The following stages of love may help in defining this.

Baby love:

Completely dependent upon the loved person for ones needs, physical, emotional and social. Great anger, jealousy or pain if the loved one relates to anyone else, is lost, or threatens to leave. In an adult this enormous feeling reaction may also be felt at a time of emotional withdrawal of the partner, even if there is no sign of them withdrawing physically. There is a desire for unconditional love and a need to be always with the loved one. In an adult with this level of love, sex may be a part of the relationship, but the main need is a bonded connection. This is sometimes felt as a need to have the loved person want you as much, or as desperately, as you want/need them. Obviously many people never develop beyond this level.

Possibly the greatest fear, that can trigger great anger or an enormous desire to placate or earn love, is the threat or fear of being abandoned.

Adolescent love:

Initial uncertainty or clumsiness concerning emotional and sexual contact. Desire to explore many relationships. Still finding out what ones boundaries and needs are. Great sexual drive. Partner will probably be loved for dreamers own needs – for example the dreamer wants a family and loves the partner to gain that end; the dreamer loves the partner because in that way they can get away from parental home. Great romantic feelings and spontaneous love which are not easy to maintain in face of difficulties.

Many women often remaing at this age, and search for romantic teenage love dreams their whole life, causing much emotional pain. Men may not move from the very genital phase of this period, so go on a life long search for the next woman’s vagina to fill with their dreamed of big penis and great manhood.

Adult love:

Growing sense of recognising needs of partner yet not denying ones own. Ability to be something for the partner’s sake without losing ones own independence or will. Becoming aware of the issues that colour or influence relationship, and meeting them as partners. Independence and closeness together. Caring sexual partners through discovering each others needs and vulnerability. It can lead to needs and directions that are not considered natural. For instance many people desperately want a partner, but those who have developed an adult love can live easily without such need.

At this level of love we offer freedom to those we love, and of course we therefore expect freedom in return. But that can be very painful to those who are still in other ages of love. Very few people grow beyond the baby stage, therefore the pain when a partner dies or leaves.

Example: As I examine these feelings I don’t see it to have any relevance to the ideas of male dominance. I feel it is equally true for women. It is not the case of, look, I am your man, therefore I have sexual rights to you. It has got nothing to do with that. In fact, that is out of date. The relationship should be nothing like that. The relationship that I sense arises out of a feeling for and caring for each other and being mutually supportive. It arises out of recognising each other’s actual human needs for warmth, for sex, for being affirmed. If we want to call that love, well and good. Except that love is sometimes often associated with possessiveness, domination, and childlike dependence on one’s partner. To me, this new sort of love – or maybe it’s an old sort of love – is a type of organic Christianity. It is a type of love and care that takes account of one’s real needs as a person and as a member of society.

But it is important to realise that we are all dual beings. We exist strung between enormous duality – sleep and waking, male and female, pain and pleasure, light and darkness, life and death, and death and resurrection. To be whole we need to accept and meet these opposites. In the pursuit of love we need to recognise that that we must integrate the other gender to become whole.

What happens in a relationship that doesn’t integrate ones own inner opposite is that when we take a person into a close partner we actually integrate them into us as our male or female. Then if the relationship breaks up it feels like a part of us has been torn out – painfully. If we have become whole however, not such pain can occur, for we have our own inner male/female. See archetype of the anima and archetype of the animus

People say they are falling in love or that they are ‘making love’ when actually they are having sex, often without any care for each other and are driven by the instinctive drive to mate. But unlike many animals and birds which are very choosy about their mate we are lost in dreams and desire for sex.

Most of us so not fall in love but fall into infantile or childlike behaviour and so in films and the media it is shown as normal to ‘fall’in that way and normal to suffer the pains of childhood – most likely through not being mothered as the baby’s instincts tell it it should be. See A Pygmy Model for Beautiful Parenting

Okay, so it’s a strange title, Beware of Love, but it’s true. When somebody says they love you they are usually telling a big lie.

What they really mean is, “I will be nice to you and share myself with you as long as you do exactly what I want you to do.”

In detail this means that I will have all those exotic and erotic feelings about you as long as you don’t dare look at another person, and as long as you fulfil all my needs of dependency, fear, and all the other hang-ups I don’t really admit to myself.

That is the baby stage of love.

The word love in the English language is a crazy word. If you look up its meaning it simply says that you love somebody, or care about them. That is really no definition at all. And when most people tell you they love you, what they really mean is, “I will let all my childhood dependency, unfulfilled need for love and attention that I didn’t get from my parents; and all my fears of being abandoned, all my need to possess somebody and have them do what I wish, and of course all my sexual needs, be projected onto you”. That is one hell of a load to put on someone – and to carry.

Most of us have not actually matured to the point of being capable of love. The very roots of love arise out of the incredible survival drives of a baby totally desiring its mother to give utter and complete attention to it. Without that attention, millions of years of survival in harsh environments, tell the baby it will die. So it holds on to that connection with its mother or carer with every jungle trick it knows. These includes tantrums, acting out sickness, sulking, anger, emotional cut off to see if the parent still cares; and if you haven’t outgrown those, then you will use them in your adult relationships.

Quite honestly, few of us have outgrown them, so we are mostly five or six year olds when it comes to the business of love. I remember a man driving many miles to consult me because, as he said, “My wife is going to leave me if I do not change.” He explained that his wife said that he was so jealous that if she talked to another man it would cause a row. So I asked him to remember the first time he felt like that. It took him a while before he said, “I was about five”. I then explained that he had not learnt to grow emotionally since then. I also explained that I, in my mid forties, had married again, and discovered much to my horror that I had regressed to a four years old in relationship to my wife, and I needed to be near her and follow her around. Realising what was happening I started leaning to grow, and went through childhood, teenage and on. the man went on his way with a new intent.

Often we make a satellite character of the person we “love”. In other words we try to make them swing around us in the way that suits our emotional and physical needs. Notice how many people have breakdowns, depression, or even commit suicide when their partner leaves them, goes with another person or dies. Those things point to pretty desperate internal situations – in other words the baby level of feeling response.

What ‘lovers’ are really saying is, “I will love you if – if you don’t go against any of my childhood needs – if you remain my possession – if you don’t do those things that remind me I am a vulnerable baby and open up that incredible pit of feeling.”

Mature love is when we accept that the person we care for is a separate and unique individual with their own needs and directions in life. We do not love them “if”. We love them simply because they are who they are, because we respect and admire them, and we allow them the freedom that hopefully we give ourselves. This is a level of unconditional love. It doesn’t place the conditions on the other person of only being loved or lovable when they remain our satellite. When we do that we make of them a possession, somebody manipulated by our own moods, emotional blackmail, or underhanded tricks. If we are grown up in love and our partner leaves us or goes with someone else, having matured we will have already seen that as a possibility (come on, look around. There are only a few marriages that survive). It will mean difficult changes, but not ‘heartbreak’, not depression or long years of grief. It will also mean that because we love that person we will continue to be interested in their welfare and be glad if they are happy.

To grow up and become a mature lover takes courage. Each time we try to possess the other person, lash out at them through jealousy, curtail their life through our fears and insecurities, we need to stop and say, “This is childhood behaviour. I will not let this anger, possessiveness, jealousy or emotional blackmail be perpetrated on the person I presumably love. I will face this and deal with it as a problem in my character, and will not rationalise and excuse it by saying to my partner that I love them. That is an underhanded excuse. It is not love.”

Love for someone can be a strange thing, wonderful but sometimes painful. I have traced love back into the deeps of dreams and myself, and I found that although love has many faces, your mother or  partner for instance, it has in the end only one source and it flows through all if we allow it. So don’t be hard on yourself, but let love flow through until it becomes one great love that is everyone – it is Life itself.

So, how about it? How about growing up?

Also we are always alone. It is that which drives us on to seek others so frantically. If we love, it must be out of this realisation of aloneness and death, of not being, of the Nothing. Then human existence is seen as a poignant togetherness against the nothingness that is actually everything. All importance and rigidness drop away, and there is only a tenderness.

See Learning to Love

Male or Female – The Gender Struggle

I dreamt I was in a garden…

I dreamt I was in a garden with an old man, a young boy and a young man in his thirties. The plot of land had something of the feeling of an allotment. It was well tended, and I had the sense the young man had been doing most of the work on it. The soil was rich but at the moment dry. A few shoots were just breaking the ground from hundreds of bulbs which had just started shooting.

The old man was kneeling at the edge of one end of the oblong plot of land. He was digging up bulbs one at a time and looking at them, then putting them back in the soil again. As the soil was dry he had to dig the hole a bit bigger to get them back. The bulbs had good roots and the shoots were firm. I was agitated about the old man digging them up though, and felt he should let them be. This seemed to link with my own propensity to dig up seeds when I was younger, to see if they had germinated.

The young boy was simply watching and was quite shadowy. The younger man was simply getting on with whatever work he was doing. I spoke to him after leaving the old man.

Then I was walking along a wide pathway between the backs of well to do houses. I was alone and no other people were walking. It was daylight, quite bright. I wanted to stretch my arms wide as I walked but found that I could not straighten my arms. As I tried I felt pain and struggle, but could not straighten my arms. I looked at my right arm which was bare, and the strain to reach out sideways was so intense the veins gradually became more and more visible, even the fine ones. Then I walked to a fence, still with my arms bent, and held onto the top edge and leaned away from the fence. My arms straightened easily and relaxed. Now I could reach out, and it felt as if my arms were extending longer and longer. I reached up and touched trees and blossoms. I felt very happy and relaxed.

Taking the inner path of dreams…

I want to explore the dream about the old man and the garden. But something that had been on my mind for a while was to check my sexuality. I notice how much spontaneous fantasy I still experience about having sex with females other than my wife. So I want to check whether I am repressing my sexuality – or at least look to see the state of affairs in this area, as I hadn’t looked at it in any depth for a long time.

Another issue is one I am always looking at and constantly seek an update on – it is what have I learned from the years of my life?

I started exploring by considering the dream of the old man pulling up bulbs to see if they were growing. I had a strong feeling and image of the soil being deep and rich, really wonderful, although this puzzled me as in the dream it was dry and quite hard because of the dryness.

The strongest feeling realisations were connected with the bulbs. It felt as if they represented things I had done in my thirties – the younger man – which are now about to produce great changes in my life. I sensed that I had an enormous amount within myself which had never been known before, just like a seed which has never produced all the potential of its growth, so appears to be a small dried up insignificant piece of matter. This potential needs the right environment and conditions to express. Of course we all have an amazing potential, but like with me, it hadn’t been put in the right situation to grow.

I feel the conditions are now right for it, and my potential is emerging. The part about the arms is to do with peoples boundaries, the fences, attitudes they separate themselves from others with. People use many different types of fences. I am becoming more aware of these and learning to approach people despite them.

I had a slight resistance to looking at the dream in any more depth. I was feeling a ‘what about me’ emotion, but thought that the dream was, is, me, so what is the problem?

I imagined myself in the role of the old man and hoped it would show me what is good in my life. That was why I was digging the bulbs up. As the old man I felt shrivelled up, ageing, old. (I am in fact 55).

From those feelings of ageing I wanted something to look forward to, something hopeful. Something of a resistance emerged to younger people as I was feeling this. I want to push them away because I cannot – or feel I cannot – partake of their pleasures and opportunities. I feel this is a young person’s world and I feel I cannot have it. This produces in me a feeling of vulnerability, rather as one might feel when ill, sensitive to the push and shove of things. So I want to see what is good in my life, what pleasure there is or might be in it. Is there something hopeful to live for. I feel as if I am shrivelling up. So I dig up the bulbs.

This led me to the knowledge that I am in an established marriage of this age group. I have lived through my twenties and thirties and feel I can no longer have anything from that period. Mostly I think this has to do with sexual relationship and the closeness this brings. At my present age and situation I feel isolated from all this. I have learned to live with this, I am not crippled by this isolation I experience or have created for myself, but I look back and occasionally miss the opportunity to try out different sexual contacts. It’s no good looking back as I have had it – missed the opportunity. (Later in life it was no so and I experienced wonderful lovers.)

What I do with these feelings is to erect a sense that younger people look at me and see me as a somewhat serious, miserable old bastard, someone who has no links with their life or way of life. So I close myself off from the opportunities that might be there.

As I write this I believe I must be an extraordinarily disciplined person to live in this isolation I have created. It is an isolation arising out of very powerful experiences in my life. Starting right from the age of three when I was put in a convalescent home and started trying to be independent of my connections with my mother and needs for other people. Then it strengthened when I cut off from my mother at six, and became a way of life in which I was and am very independent of others. The love of my children and my sexual drive kept me bridge building with others. Now though, without sex or children I think I have become in some ways more isolated.

There is something more than the anger and isolation going on in the dream though. It is about living the person that I am now. And I do find this confusing, living the me now. I want to clarify that.

I am more than a dried up old man….

For instance the person I am now, rather than the person I am from all the past experiences of pain, does not have the limitations usually imposed by the sense of ageing. The dream recently of a woman I worked with, W., shows my sexuality very alive and functioning. I had sex with her in the dream. I see this shows my female self as fully alive. I know that when we meet someone of the opposite sex we turn on a sequence of sensations, of feelings and sense of self we call love. There are ready-made images and hopes for reward that are released when we start a relationship. It is rather like conditioned responses that flow out automatically when the right button is pressed.

I know the sequence, I watch it in other people, Ann S. for instance, puts kisses on the bottom of her letters, and I wonder what she is doing. I can let myself get excited at that and get nice feelings going. I want to learn to deal with that contact well. I don’t want to exploit it, but I do want to make use of it, enjoy it, and get satisfaction from it in some way. Somehow I feel I am not used to this much control – being able to work with these feelings and turn them on or off.

Am I a man – or am I a woman …

At this point in exploring the dream and my responses I suddenly felt myself as a woman. I realised that I have become a woman. It was quite a shock to feel this so clearly, and I didn’t want to look at my wife who was with me. There was an impulse to cover it up. I said, to her “I am the object of my desire”. I can have my own orgasm as I did in the dream with W. This connects with the dream in which I held the young woman and felt her orgasm as my own.

This led on to feeling the powerful drive to guard my eggs. As the woman I feel strong animal urges to protect my unborn young, my eggs, with my life. I felt as if I were crouching over my eggs, guarding them, warding off anything and anybody. I then went through a fantasy, or action replay, that at first I only slightly identified with, but gradually really felt as my own. It was the feeling of conflict over who a baby belonged to. I could experience the deep connection in me with ‘my’ baby, and the struggle with some other person about whom the baby belonged to. I was saying, this is MY baby. It’s mine. Look, you can see the likeness, it even looks like me. It’s mine! I really felt as if someone had tried to take my child from me and I felt the torment of that.

This switched to feelings about my own children, particularly my sons. The odd thought arose in me that they desperately needed a mother. I said, what does it mean they desperately needed a mother? They had a mother. Yes but they wanted somebody they could suckle up to.

Here I experienced a clear sense of the physical closeness and body contact I wanted to give my children, and they needed from their mother. Then I went through real anger about my wife. I had let her be in the mother role, but in watching her with my son D. I saw how her intense anxiety had made her inadequate. I was desperately frustrated at seeing my woman fucking up my babies. Having been hurt as a baby and child I wanted to keep my children from that sort of harm, and here she was living out the sort of fears that had led my mother to cripple me emotionally and sexually. I was so angry that my rage led to the desperate act of me pushing between her and the children. I supplanted her, putting my body and soul in between the children and her. I was saying to them here is my body, you can eat me. I love you so much I give myself to you completely. Drink my blood, I am yours. I love you.

In this way I had deeply taken on the female, mother, role. I had done this not simply in a surface way, but deeply into my psyche. I had undertaken a coup d’etat with my wife, trying to take over her place to avert the harm I felt she was doing. And although I had become deeply feminine, this had been done as a strong male act out of anger and care. I felt it as beehive stuff where one queen usurps another.

What is the difference between a man and a woman….

I wondered though what was the difference between this and being a male. I had thought I had been a male. Now I see that I am a woman, and I deeply identify with it. As the woman I don’t have any desire to be a man, or want a man. All I want are my children. I have eternal life when I give myself completely to my children. I am deeply satisfied in this act of womanhood.

An insight arose about not wanting to ejaculate, one of my biggest pains in sex. As a woman I don’t want to lose my eggs. I want to keep them and nurture them to growth. This may explain why I have such an experience of depletion when I ejaculate. This feels right but it was not a conclusive insight. But it did make sense in regard to what is happening to my wife and myself, where I have no interest in sex. Or rather, I have interest in sex, but I don’t want to lose my eggs. Although, when I consider this situation I see it as more to do with personal feelings about my wife being so dry in the sex act. This makes it for me a rather mechanical thing. First of all there seems to me to be no passion in her to desire sex. So it is me who makes the approach and has the desire. As already said elsewhere, this after some years has led me to no longer reach out to her. The physical dryness means one has to artificially deal with the situation.

In looking at just what is the difference between being male and being female, I started by feeling that my love for the children led me to want to make myself available to them. If I had breasts I would have fed them when they needed it. But as I went deeper I felt that the male lays the eggs and leaves them. He can go to woman after woman and leave his eggs. There may be some connection, but not in the same way as with the woman. The woman doesn’t get rid of or leave her eggs. She holds them in her body and lets go with some measure of difficulty. But a difference of greater magnitude is that the woman gives herself deeply to her child, to the point of offering her body as sustenance. This seemed the major difference.

It was this last point that was important in something else that I realised. I had actually become a woman in that deep sense – to the point where I was willing to feed my children with my body. Therefore I didn’t want to give my body or its energy particularly to anyone else. So although I had a male body I had a female psyche. Conversely though, someone might give birth to a child through a female body, but they do not have a female psyche, so cannot or do not give themselves to their child in the way it instinctively wants or expects. This seemed to me an important factor in today’s world where the genders have become so muddled. Many people are claiming to be mothers who although they have a female body, are not actually women, and are not a real mother.

There was a very definite realisation that taking on the role of the woman for a male has a negative influence on their sexuality. I felt the same would happen for a woman who took on the male role. The woman would care less about children and parenting. She would, as a male, be inclined to establish easy relationships for sex, without the drive to nurture in the same way she would as a female. For the man, loss of interest in sex cuts down drive to have genital contact with a woman. There might be problems over ejaculation also.

I wondered what effect this has had on my children. I didn’t see any clear information, but I did feel it would be no problem if the children understood what had happened, i.e. if I explained what I had tried to do. But I had so deeply identified with being a woman, and found it so satisfying that it was difficult for me to want to get back into standing in the male role. I did think the children might be confused when approaching a woman though.

I also felt confused because of my identification. At one point I suddenly said THIS IS YOUR FATHER SPEAKING. It was a way of being able to find my male self, still capable and strong. Although I had become a woman, I had never lost sight of my maleness, or what I had done.

All I know is – I love my children….

I felt great love for my son S, and said, ‘You fucking wonderful person. I love you dearly as you came out of my body. I don’t know what is going to become of you, my little egg. I love you so much, but I must stop digging you up to see how you are growing.’ I saw the connection here with the dream again, where the old man is digging up the bulbs to see how they are doing. ‘S, you need to mourn the death of Mrs. P. She died a few days ago. I gave up that role a few days ago.’ This was an acknowledgment that I was letting go of the mother role in regard to my children.

Something else began to arise now. I saw that I had learned to be my own mother since an early age. This had arisen out of being put in the convalescent home, and had deepened when I purposely cut off from my mother. I had been my own mother, and it was here the beginnings of my femaleness had begun. I felt this strongly and quietly, but with anger cursed my mother for her part in my becoming a woman. ‘Fuck you mother. Why did you do it?’

I had a sense that my mother wanted always to be in control. She couldn’t dare to let me be a man. What with being an infant mother to myself, then bringing myself up from six, followed by being the mother to my children, my male life has been truly screwed up. ‘I feel sad about that. In fact I feel sad about all of us because of the injustice of life and the casualties we become. It’s called human life.’

I looked at what I felt was a male role. A woman comes along and she says ‘Stoke it away. Stoke it away.’ So the male goes, ‘Let me in – in out, in out, stoke it away’. Next woman, ‘Stoke it away, in out, in, out, stoke it away. 1 2 3 stoke it away. Yeah, yeah, I’m going to sleep, wake me up when something interesting happens’. That’s how I feel. How boring. I’m turned on when someone loves me, but don’t get thrilled at this ‘stoking away’.

Back to the male again, he’s saying, I’ve got the blossom – vagina – in my sights now. I’m focusing in. My god what a beautiful woman you are. You are a hugely desirable female – that is the message about being male. This works because you have the magic password. But I want to know what the alternatives are. I’m not into saying the magic passwords and bonking away. Nevertheless I have a male body and I have to deal with the drive to do just that – bonk a hugely desirable female.

Mother taught me hard – don’t trust a woman….

Added to this I learned not to trust a woman. My mother taught me hard and good that the person you loved could just give you away, that she could torture you to make you conform. It’s a fucking shit. When meeting a woman who professes love I tend to say inside myself, ‘Yeah, yeah, you love me. I’ve got it. Yes, sure you love me. Sure, I understand. Join the queue. I’ll believe it when I see the payments. I’ll look it up next month when the accounts come in. I’ll see what you paid in. Okay love? See you.’ Anyway this is the shape I am, part man, part woman, the love part of me twisted up. What about down there, the sex organs? Can we get a dollop of love going for this poor bugger?

So I’ve been sad. Finished. Have a laugh. Join the human race, the multi gendered, many shaped, distorted human race. ‘What is the name of this game?’ Being a human being is a new one on me.’ It’s not good enough being like that, with a slightly bitter feeling about the world. Even if I have to say so myself, it’s not right. You’ve got a woman who’s full of love, and you just don’t know how to get it out of her.

I went to the toilet at this point and felt confused about my role. I could feel the strong attachment to the female mother role. I didn’t want to give it up. I had enjoyed it so much and got so much out of it I didn’t want to lose it. But this left me feeling uncomfortable about living as a male and particularly living as a male with my wife. What sort of arrangement was it to live with a woman but prefer not to be a man – at least, not sexually? There was no way I wanted to lose my seed, my eggs. While in the toilet however, I realised I didn’t want to be stuck either in the male or female role, I wanted to be whole. The memory of my dream arose again and I said, ‘I want to be a man, I want to be a woman, I want to be the young boy, the old man. I want to be an animal and a spirit. I am all those things, and it is wonderful. I love it.

So am I genuinely a 100% male, or am I a fucked up version because of my experiences as a child? I asked this of myself and opened to my inner feelings to test the truth, to see if I was hiding something from myself.

When I did this I felt as if I were taken into the temple of life before the ageless ones and animals and they looked at me. In their presence I felt I was wholly male. They ‘said’ to me, ‘You are a man. You fight alongside the rest of us. You’re in there with the men. You’re in the men’s pack.’ So I got my colours from the man pack.

I want to find out whether I am truly a woman too. Have I got my colours from the women’s pack for caring for my kids? The ancients said, ‘You’ve got a vagina, there’s no doubt about it. You know exactly what it’s like to be a woman. You know what a woman longs for. You are a woman. You know all about the cycles and all the periods of growth through puberty, womanhood and old age. I can’t distinguish you from a woman. In fact you are a fucking fine woman. You trained for it.’

So have I got my badge? ‘Yes you’ve got your badge’.

So how about the animals? Am I an animal? What do I need to have done to be an animal? I need to have reproduced; I need to have succoured my mate; I need to have cared for my young; I need to have learned what it is to die.

Yes, I am a fully-fledged animal. I have met birth, struggle, mating, dying. I am a fully-fledged member in the lodge. If I go into the beaver lodge I am a beaver. I love you beaver. I am also a snake. If you come near my eggs I will kill you. I have so much venom here I could tear you apart! Even though I am old, at any moment I can switch into the fight mode, touch the animal fight or flight feelings.

What I don’t clearly see or understand is what are the possibilities in modern society for a person like me? I am a fully-fledged functioning female, male, animal, child – the universe. Now what do we do? Looking around on the edge of the jungle, what do I do? Do I follow my instincts? Do I grab a portion of territory? Dive into the females, what? I am trying to learn.

I went on to feelings and realisations about my marriage. I am married. It is a major achievement in my life. It cost a lot one way and another. I honour my wife. But I look at what happens in general relationships. When we use sexual flirtation in meeting the opposite sex, it is like I tickle your vagina, you tickle my balls as we pass. Then we go on as if nothing has happened. If you love me, or I you, I want to make it more permanent and public. But perhaps it is a token gesture and I need to grow up a bit in this area. But I need to learn more about this.

I am both a man and a woman…..

What I realised from the above is that the way to deal with sexuality and affairs is to make them public, let people know you love and admire the person, not hide it. The pain and difficulty mostly comes from hiding it and trying to make such relationships exclusive as if they are ‘wrong’ in some way.

At one point here I was wondering, because of my sense of varied roles, especially the male and female, what is really the difference. I wondered whether there was little difference. On exploring my insights and feelings though I felt there was a very real difference, but a person with a female body is not necessarily a woman; and a person with a male body is not necessarily a man. The male might have very full female characteristics in their personality or psyche, and the female might be a man in their psyche.

The difference I realised was this. It was deeply biological and instinctive as a pattern. But the pattern was one that did not depend upon the physical structure of the creature. Perhaps there is more survival value in the male sometimes being able to succour the young, and the female being able to take a less bonded role. In any case the male can lay his eggs and move away without feeling completely connected with the offspring. The woman feels completely connected with the eggs, so much so she cannot move away or leave them. When the young are born she will give her own body to sustain them. She will give her life for them, feed them her blood if necessary. She will guard them and stay with them, feeling that life has nothing to offer outside her offspring.

Many women do not have such a connection, so cannot really know what it is like to be a woman. But many men have this connection, and so are women. Many women have a male psyche, in that they can leave their eggs and offspring, so have a male psyche. To be a real mother one has to actually be female, and to be a father one has to be male.

The problem is to properly acknowledge my femaleness as a male I might get labelled gay or homosexual. For a woman to properly acknowledge her maleness she might get labelled butch or lesbian. Those labels do no apply. There is a vast difference between being a woman in ones psyche and being effeminate or gay. There is a vast difference between being male in ones psyche as a woman, and being lesbian or butch.

For myself I am a functioning dynamic male who took on the female role because, rightly or wrongly I felt my spouse was inadequate in that role as a mother. So I learned the role and really involved myself in it. This information about roles is vitally important in today’s world for many reasons. Many people do not find themselves in rigid gender roles as in the past, so need a clearer understanding of this side of themselves and what it means.

Such reversal of the role in the psyche can radically alter the way one presents oneself sexually and socially. If one has not acknowledged this it will lead to confusion about oneself, perhaps even a sense of failure in sexual heterosexual relationships. One might pull away from contact with the same sex – i.e. male psyche woman with a male/ male gender – female psyche man with a female/female gender.

Being male and female is not a sickness….

So one must recognise all the traps one might get into because of this, such as believing one is not adequate as the gender male or female; feeling one is injured, sick or traumatised to make one not functioning in the norm of the physical gender one is; that one is an outcast from ones gender, as can happen with the labels such as lesbian or gay. I feel there should be an acknowledgment of the fact we can have these different roles in society without the need to label one in a way that suggest being out of the norm.

As an individual who has made a role shift, we may need to acknowledge the pain or anger that may have been the motivation for the role shift at its inception, along perhaps with the sense of injustice and pain that may have accompanied the shift within us away from our physical gender.

I personally feel, after the pain and hurt, and the anger and injustice had been felt, that my mother did me a favour. The reason being that I have stolen a march on a lot of people. I look around at the struggle a lot of people have about having a role other than their physical norm, and I wonder what the struggle is about. I have been a male and a female all the way along since childhood. What has fucked me up at times is that I had not fully acknowledged the development of my ‘female organs’ as it were. Having acknowledged them it is a wonderful feeling. I knew I had female organs. In many dreams I look down and see I have a vagina – but I had not acknowledged the struggle and anger that had gone into developing them – as a male. So I can honestly and lovingly say that I no longer need to completely identify with being a male or being a female. I do not need to identify with any one of those genders. I love both of the genders.

At this point I explored once more – one of my favourite themes – the honest relationship between the sexes. My main statement was that if we are honest, the main drive in sex is toward reproduction. As a person we relate to this in a number of ways. We may lie to ourselves and see our sex drive as something to do with our own self-esteem or importance, as is expressed in one of the meanings of virility. We may use sex drive as a means of manipulation or weapon or as a means of income. We may lie about our intentions suggesting we will support and care for our partner in their dealings with their own sex drive, but in fact not caring for them or the consequences of the sex act.

I suggest that if and when people are more direct about their basic drives and life, they will ask each other – who are you? This means are you married, do you have a lover? Are you fucking about with men/women without a supportive relationship? How many children do you have, what do you work at? Who are your family, and so on? Out of this we have a clearer view of who we are dealing with and can develop a working relationship. I feel that there is a huge dishonesty because these important factors are not revealed. They are considered to be personal and private. Not at all. They are the most important areas of information that are public domain. The reason people hide them is because they know fully just how important they are.

As near as your own heartbeat….

For a while I drew near the awareness of ‘God’. I wanted to be able to have a clear view of what this experience was and how to describe it. It seemed to me that there was no great astral, ethereal being we call God. In my awareness I sensed that there was something connected with the living bodies and minds of things. It was something like music in the sense that out of the many separate instruments an overall sound arises. Or it could be like the body that comes about from the unity of countless cells, yet is different than any single cell. A reality that does not have its base on any one thing, yet has existence nonetheless. So I saw God as a reality that is as ever shifting as music because of the changing face of physical events and mind arising from it. This thing ‘God’ is as near to us and as practical as our own heartbeat. If we feel our heartbeat and honestly ask ourselves what causes our existence, do we really know? We probably have some formulaic idea such as chemical or biological processes. But neither chemistry nor biology explain the full answer. What is at our base is a mystery, and it seems wise to me to stand before that mystery humbly and open to it in our dealings with everyday life.

My sense of God did not present itself as something that was an ultimate being causing all things, but as an intrinsic aspect of what exists, and that exists because of reality, and acts upon it. You can never grasp it because it always moves and evolves. I felt it to be like wind. Could I be the wind? It is featureless yet touching and influencing things.

Then a strong image of a snake arose. The influence of God, of the featureless power that can enter a human life and transform it was like a snake. The snake can bite you, and its venom may flow throughout your being and kill you. Most of us are very frightened of this. The reason being that the venom will take away your personal boundary of self. It melts the boundary of egoic self-interest, and personal connections with family and children, with choices in action. It replaces the personal interests and fears with a self that is part of the one great life. So the fear of the snake is not because its venom is deadly, but because it transforms. It turns you into a being who is part of the whole. It robs one of the artificial walls placed between self and the collective pool of life consciousness.

I realised I had thought about this a lot already and that losing ones identity meant in this case not being tied to ones family so rigidly, no longer relating to people as if from a single fixed gender, also there is the possibility of getting insight into the person you are meeting more fully, because the artificial barriers of gender, family ties, nationality and creed have been dropped. These barriers prevent us from actually knowing each other very fully in everyday life, and are operative in most of us without our realising it.

As I think about this I wonder whether this is part of the way we create identity. It appears to be made from many sources. For instance the family physical inheritance plays a very great part, as does the information of behaviour repertoire handed to us when young. The cultural patterning given with language shapes our mind, and the chemical importance is also being seen lately. All of these produce the person we call I. Yet the ‘I’ is capable of being radically shifted, simply by taking a drug or medicine, or being in a very different environment. This often reshapes the way we see ourselves, so an evolution in the process of identity building has occurred. Identity in the end is not a set of beliefs or behaviours. The I is not limited to these.

What does letting the mystery of Life in mean…

So as I faced this part of the exploration I wondered what I would be saying goodbye to if I allowed myself to be bitten by the serpent and its poison transform me. I felt that although I would lose my old connection with my family I would bring them a lot more than in the past because my being would itself be much larger and connected. I saw this as if I were living in a courtyard, and that courtyard was my family life, my work life, and was made up of my sympathetic connections with my children and the powerful bonds that led me to favour them over others. If these bonds dissolved they would no longer be favoured above others out of the same powerful ties. The ties would dissolve, but of course they would still be people I had a lot of connections with because of friendship and common goals, etc. So I would relate to them out of something other than family feelings. We would be drawn together or pushed apart out of the same influences that attracted or repulsed in general.

I felt then that I wanted to be bitten by the snake. I trusted the larger life. I want my life to have connections with it and my actions to flow out of these wider connections.

At one point it was like being shown something. On my computer I have a small program to do my accounts on. I take a lot of time putting information into this program to keep my accounts straight. It was as if the wider life said to me – ‘You don’t need to look after your own affairs all the time in this individual way. There is a wider life in which the ‘accounts’ program is built-in. Every action you do, every interaction is recorded automatically, and so you no longer need a personal piece of software.’

Something that came over very strongly in this – although I have met this before – is that one has to become a harmless person to have access to the wider life. Either that or one is made into a harmless person. I don’t think one could accept the wider life if one still wanted personal power, domination over others or to remain uninfluenced by things outside of ones limited personal interest. In my own case I felt or experienced that this harmlessness was also linked with loving, or having a strong sympathetic link with a very wide variety of human types. This also meant being able to love the various aspects of oneself. For instance could I accept the female aspect of myself? Could I accept the potently sexual male I am?

Caring and honesty are a part of this acceptance into and by the wider life. One needs to be honest in ones dealing with other people and oneself. This is obvious in that the wider life IS made up of other people. Unless one has achieved a trustworthy place in the hearts of friends and those near you, then you are obviously not let into the deeper aspects of their life because they cannot trust you with little things, let alone their soul or affections. This led on to seeing that there were various levels of marriage arising from this trust. There was a form of marriage that spanned time and different personalities one might assume. In this form of marriage you had learned to trust someone so well you had agreed deep within self to unite your life with them for ones entire existence. This was not a conscious decision and ritual. It happened because there was nothing between yourself and the other person that could interfere with continued sympathetic contact no matter what the life situation. It didn’t matter what the gender situation was between people who married in this way. The link was one of care and trust, and I felt it spanned many physical existences.

I had a slight sense of a new body forming in me, of my old self dying, fading away, and I am looking for the signs of a new birth. But this alliance with life needs a conscious agreement. One needs to come before life and say I want to love and live honestly like life does. I trust life. I give it myself. It is a decision about being for life/society or against it. One cannot be both. This means that whatever is mine also belongs to life. My money, whatever I own is not totally mine because I have given my-self.

As a person however I still find it difficult to completely believe this. In the terms of the automatic and built in program instead of my own personal software, I can see my own software working, but I cannot yet see the automatic program working to tally all my actions and transactions. I do see however that if it is to work you must let other people know what you are doing, as a friend did when we tried to sell our home. He simply let as many people know as possible, and what we wanted came about. This happens not because others want to give you what you want, but because they trust you, and they want the reverse of what you want. i.e. B and F wanted to buy our house. and we wanted to sell it.

Stretching beyond old boundaries….

I then thought of the dream again. I entered into the part where I was trying to stretch my arms out and found it incredibly difficult and painful. This I could feel was to do with feeling I can’t do it. I’m too old to extend myself any more than I have already. I need to turn to my fellow human beings and ask for help. I went off on a line of thought about people in the village. For instance I thought of the woman Sam, who to my mind is living from her emotions and sexual drive. She has huge breasts and behind, and physically, hormonally, is under completely different urges than myself. I couldn’t see what connection I could make with someone like Sam. I didn’t even feel a sexual desire so there wasn’t even that connection. I thought perhaps it could be my head and her arse that formed some sort of wholeness. That’s how some newspapers present themselves. Women with huge tits on the covers appealing to people at a certain level or response.

So how do I feel about making a tenuous connection with my neighbours? In the dream I manage eventually to get past my own pain and inability to stretch out by taking hold of someone’s fence and leaning back. Then my arms stretched out easily and I could reach up and extend my arms as if they were elastic. I could touch the blossom on the trees. This suggests that I can reach out much further than I thought or felt. I can do it by first making some contact with the boundaries between myself and other people.

I thought back to an earlier part of the session in which I had realised my feelings about my wife and how I had taken on the female, mother role. I questioned myself as to whether I was backing my woman, or whether I injected something into the situation that wasn’t there. I immediately felt very angry again about what had happened, and what I felt she had done to the children. I felt I couldn’t just stand by and let her do what she was doing to the children. I didn’t have a substitute mother to give them, so I stepped in and tried to become the mother myself. I had made a mistake of trusting my eggs with this woman and I didn’t like her after-care, so I stepped in and tried to supplant her.

Looking at this situation and realising how much I had tried to be a good parent brought about a reaction from within myself. I felt cynical about myself and put it into words as – What a hero you are. Always being the big man. Let’s wave the flags for being so good. Shout hurrah because he’s such a hero.

No need to put myself down – or raise myself up….

This led me to realise how I put myself down such lot. It wasn’t good to do that. I didn’t need to put myself on a pedestal, but I didn’t need to bash myself and make myself look stupid either. I had actually fought hard to attempt to give my children more in the way of love and care than I had received from my own parents. Certainly I had dealt them a terrible blow in leaving them, but I had also given a great deal of myself and been creative in enriching their lives as fully as I could. I needed to acknowledge that about myself.

I see my life as a flowering. I have taken the values and ideas of the past and re-evaluated them. I have found meaning and reason in areas of superstition. The ‘flowers’ will produce seeds for future growth. I am not alone in this. I am one of many people restructuring, understanding a true sense of religion, one that works, with a view of the naked reality under all the shapes. And I want the reality under the shapes to fill my life. I want the honesty and goodness of it to flow through me.

I have to acknowledge the desire for the women in my life. This acknowledgment is a part of the honesty and the connection with the wider life. I do honour the connection and the love. I look at some of the connections, like G, and I am sorry I wasn’t of greater good to her. I was lonely at the time and didn’t know what I was looking for. Nevertheless I made the connection. They are all a part of my wider life and I have disqualified myself from the connection through my judgements and defensiveness.

The people we have loved are what have given each of us the wideness of our life. If our love has been narrow and restricted, then that is the nature of our wider life. I remember the crippled men in hospital I learned to love. I thought it was normal to love. I learned to love dogs. I still feel the hurt of stifling the little mouse we put in the box with too tight a lid. I feel sorrow about that.

Every person and creature we acknowledge and love becomes a part of our wider life. Sometimes I am a bit clumsy but I want to learn. I want to foster the openness of my heart. People like T down the road who flirt with me – all of that goes toward the bigness of our being. T. has been an important part of my life, as has been J. and AC and my other friends.

In the end, such friendships and what one does in and with them, is the very essence of a wider and fuller life.