8

Sex Is Nature’s Energy Medicine for Couples

Invoking the Passion

Our mothers couldn’t tell us and our fathers didn’t know the secrets of great sex.

—JOHN GRAY1

The best thing to happen to our sex life in the past decade has been to work on this chapter. It has been so much fun! Neither of us is trained as a sex therapist, but we’ve been reading and listening to the best of them and trying out their methods, as well as innovating our own energy techniques, like kids in a candy store after opening the piggy bank.

One of the first audio talks we came upon was by Alison Armstrong, who suggests that most couples, after the initial passion wears off, go about their sex lives backward.² They wait till they want sex before they say yes to it. She impishly advises the opposite: Say “Yes!” first, and often. Then go about creating the wanting. While some couples remain passionately interested in one another’s bodies year after year without consciously cultivating that passion, most do not. A New York Times article summarizing the findings of more than a hundred scientific studies concluded what everyone knows except those in the middle of it: The passion of new love has a “short shelf life.”³ An NBC Dateline survey of 27,500 people showed that two-thirds reported dissatisfaction with their sex lives.⁴

For us, with so much pressure (and pleasure) from our work and so little free time, we were finding that we would choose sleep over physical intimacy, if you can imagine such a choice, or relaxing into a good movie, or buckling under the pressure to squander possibilities for intimate time by returning to the relentless push of unanswered e-mails and uncompleted projects. As we approached the point where we were going to begin writing this chapter, we were wondering, “How are we going to pull this one off without feeling like total hypocrites?”

We did have one advantage over most couples. We could now set aside time for sex as part of our research for the book. So we had the “yes” part in the bag. And after being together for more than three decades, with both of us well into our sixties, getting to an enthusiastic “yes” was not something to take for granted, so this was good. On the other hand, making sex a part of our job descriptions didn’t do much for enhancing the intrigue or passion.

Saying Yes and Then Creating the Desire That Will Fuel That Yes

Couples can raise the passion in one another in many ways. Activities that get you into your bodies—from dancing to massage to mock wrestling—can be aphrodisiacs. Knowing special words or ways of touching your partner can be turn-ons. Armstrong talks about the “jump-start”:

You get a dead battery and you hook it up, and all of a sudden, “Vroom!” It jumps, it just roars to life! So this is really, really important information to share with your partner. “If you touch me like this in this place, in this way, my battery, vroom, jumps to life.” Many men have learned that some women’s breasts have a sensitivity that can create a jump-start, but not all women’s breasts are that way. For some women it’s the palm of her hand . . . rubbing the palm of their hand with a thumb in just this slow way while just looking deep in her eyes. . . . vroooom, she’s jump-started! For many women it’s words. I know a woman where, if her boyfriend says to her “Oh, honey, we don’t have to do anything.” . . . vrooooom! She’s jump-started. Everybody’s different. For another woman, anything said breathlessly, that’s all he’s gotta do . . . or kiss her on the back of the neck. Every woman has her own jump-start. And it’s really important that her partner knows what they are.5

When David puts on soft romantic music, removes Donna’s shoes, and massages her feet, he often scores a “vroooom.” An important exception is in what Armstrong calls the “pumpkin hours.” The pumpkin hours are “when Cinderella’s coach turns back into a pumpkin and can’t give anyone a ride!” Men and women have different kinds of pumpkin hours: “When a man is extremely focused on a project, a request for sex will be terribly irritating to him. For women, if it’s going to cost us sleep—our sleep is so important to us and critical to all our capacities—a request for sex after we’re going down and falling off to sleep . . . that’s cruel.”6

Sexual Desire Problems Are Part of a Healthy Marriage

Waning sexual desire is not only common, it is natural. But it is also stigmatized. People don’t like to admit it, particularly to their partner, and they don’t know what to do about it. If the spontaneous passion and the euphoric cocktail of brain chemicals that often accompany new love are inherently time-limited, how are passion and desire sustained? Passion and desire are sustained by the way you relate to one another in all dimensions—from how you handle differences to how you play to how you grow with one another. Most young people do not enter marriage with the realization that keeping things hot in the bedroom depends on what happens outside the bedroom. David Schnarch, a highly respected psychologist and sex therapist, titled the opening chapter of his best-selling book Passionate Marriage, “Nobody’s Ready for Marriage—Marriage Makes You Ready for Marriage.”⁷ He teaches that being with the same sexual partner for years and then decades can stay interesting because “what makes human sexual desire human is your brain’s unique capacity to bring meaning to sex.”⁸

Schnarch surprises couples who have encountered sexual desire problems by telling them, “everything’s happening as it should!”⁹ He sees sexual desire problems as a normal and healthy part of long-term intimacy, propelling us to grow and to take the next step with each other in the relationship. If we embrace rather than resist them, sexual desire “problems” can help us find a better balance between “two basic life forces: the drive for individuality and the drive for togetherness.”¹⁰ Becoming isolated in your own story or so deeply enmeshed with your partner that you lose contact with your own truths are two common imbalances that work against sexual aliveness within your relationship. Sexual desire problems are a warning light indicating that it is time to rebalance the drives for individuality and intimacy. Re-achieving this balance “lets you expand your sexual relationship and rekindle desire and passion in marriages that have grown cold.” Schnarch goes on to suggest that maintaining a dynamic balance between these forces “is the pathway to the hottest and most loving sex you’ll ever have with your spouse.”11

• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •

How does sexual energy look in the following three states of relationship?

A New Relationship

A single aura surrounds both people, ensconcing them in a world of their own. It is an electric, bright, colorful, palpable, beautiful energy, very alive. Even when alone, the aura of a person newly in love is light and bright, though it is not particularly grounded. Also key for understanding the dynamics of new love, the personal auras of the two partners have not yet connected in the nuanced ways of a couple that has gone the distance.

A Stale Relationship

A collapsed energy is around each of them when they are together. These energies do not reach out for the partner. The energy around the two of them may still be there, but it is no longer animated. It has little movement.

A Renewed Relationship

The energies surrounding each partner are grounded and have become linked in ways not found in a new relationship. A great deal of connection has been established between their chakras, forming invisible lines of communication that are felt at a deeply emotional level. Their auras overlap—bridged with figure-eight patterns—but the energies surrounding them retain more of their individuality than in a new couple.

We recently received a letter from a friend confiding that while she and her husband are compatible in many, many ways, the sexual charge is not there and they have been thinking of separating, despite their mutual affection for one another and their profound love for their two beautiful daughters. Our reply: “You must know that the lack of spark between marriage partners who are great friends is far from unusual. Even as you may be aware or even fantasize that someone could sweep you off your feet, and perhaps someone could, the chemistry of that new love would inevitably be short-lived. The contrast between that fantasy and what you have is a common but misleading way of measuring what you have. That is not to say that the status quo you describe is acceptable. There are important ways it will not sustain you. But it is to say that the status quo need not define your future together.” For taking the full and fulfilling ride of a committed relationship, we offered two mechanical suggestions: that they learn how long-term partners can still stimulate in one another the hormones of romance (here) and that they rediscover one another as sexual beings, as presented in this chapter.

“Just Do It” Doesn’t Do It

If your time together has resulted in waning passion (if you are still hot for one another, just jump to the next chapter), the instruction offered here—that you say yes and then create the wanting—is vastly different from the simpler advice of a generation of sex therapists who counseled, “Just do it.” “Creating the want” makes all the difference. The old theory was that having sex stimulates hormones and brain chemistry that make you want to have more sex. While biologically accurate, it does not take into account that such prescriptions (1) promote impersonal sex, (2) breed further alienation if a lack of intimacy was the source of the low desire, (3) are asking at least one partner to ignore his or her feelings, and (4) are robbing the person who is more desirous of sex of the chance to feel wanted.¹² Meanwhile, there is much to look forward to. Interviewing 150 women ages 20 through 90 about their sex lives, Iris Krasnow found that many in the after-70s group claimed that they are having the best sex of their lives.¹³

A challenge in writing about good sex is that one of the most important principles is to counter expectations, judgments, and notions about “good sex.” Recipes don’t support your spontaneity or internal authority. Nicole Daedone, author of Slow Sex, tells a story of bringing home to her grandmother a dish she had prepared in her home economics class that had gotten her an A. Her grandma took a taste and spit it out, saying, “You killed the food with the recipe!” Daedone goes on to explain that recipes don’t work for sex either, because women:

want smooth, silly sex; we want climactic sex and we want slow undulating sex. We want range. We want gradients. We want sex to move from slow to fast, from hard to exquisitely soft. We want to be surprised by nuance and subtlety. . . . We want to communicate our sensations and hear about yours.14

This chapter would be much easier to write if we could just tell you how to “do it,” but no matter what recipe you follow for good sex, you will be removing the spontaneity, variety, and surprise. To retain these over time requires communication, an easy flow of information between one another. “Give us the time, space and permission to taste a bit of every possible sensation,” advises Daedone, “and to communicate which ones we like.”¹⁵ Many women have been systematically trained to deny what they desire, even to not eat when they are hungry, and cultivating an atmosphere that invites her to put into words what she may not even have been acknowledging to herself opens new worlds for both of you.

When you meet at this deep level, each encounter is new and fresh. We originally thought this chapter was going to describe energy techniques that are easy turn-ons to intensify everything from sexual desire to wild orgasms. Push this, feel that. As we delved into the topic, however, we realized that physical techniques that enhance sexual energy are just the icing on the cake. The foundation that lets us soar together over a distance needs to be built on a sense of safety, trust, communication, and deep encounter, all fueled by our ability to enjoy the sensations that travel through our own bodies. As Schnarch puts it, “Techniques make you a technician . . . not a lover.”¹⁶ We read and experimented with so many books and taped programs that had good techniques that we know that information is readily available. What we want to encourage you to do is learn to recognize and communicate about how the energies flow in your body and communicate about them (verbally and non-verbally) so you are able to surf the waves of your sexual energies in harmony and as shared erotic adventure.

Entering the Sexual Zone

Marianne Williamson cautions that “when sex is merely a substitute for communication,” the emotional gap between two souls who long to connect is not bridged. But when sex “deepens conversation,” the body “becomes a door to a realm that the body can’t even enter . . . joining is of the spirit.”17 The sexual act opens energetic pathways that can bring us into states of consciousness that transform the collective field between us. Through sex, your shared biological, psychological, and spiritual energies have an opportunity to align themselves and build on one another. This allows the energies that form the matrix of your relationship to come into greater harmony and depth and for disruptions to be healed. Sex is indeed nature’s “energy medicine for couples.” Yet so often in long-term relationships, its power for pleasure, healing, and transformation is neglected.

Creating the Wanting

Saying yes and then “creating the wanting,” Armstrong’s advice, can turn this around. For us, the practical demands coming our way were unceasing, calling more loudly than the whisper of spiritual possibility or even the opportunities for momentary pleasure. Reflecting on this as we settled into writing this chapter, it became quite clear that if we waited until our to-do list was empty, a future of marital celibacy awaited us. So we started experimenting—with the guiding principle being “be creative, not rote.” Using what we know about energy and passion, we innovated many intimacy dances that will never be repeated or even recalled. One we did jot down as possibly being useful for this chapter was designed for people who, like us, are so busy that some tricks may be needed to break the inertia and get with the program. It is brief and playful, signaling to our libidos that they are on deck. There are a thousand kinds of foreplay. This is just one of them. We found that it quickly shifted our mental states from busy and distracted to connected and ready for more.

PART 1: RELEASING THE DISTRACTIONS

Our first step was to clear our psyches of competing thoughts or nagging responsibilities in order to get on with the business at hand. Energy medicine offers an excellent tool for quickly shifting from a cluttered mental state to a clear one. When you’ve said yes but haven’t yet created the desire, turn to one another and state, honestly and courageously:

“The most compelling thing that is, right now, keeping me from wanting to be in rapture with you is . . .”

This is what you will release with the energy technique. For instance, for Donna last night: “I am finally beginning to unpack from this last trip.” For David: “I feel a lot of pressure to prepare for my talk tomorrow.”

Once you have recognized what is pulling you away from wanting rapture (and how trivial it probably is in relation to feeding yours and your partner’s soul’s longing), you can make an informed choice for intimacy. The distraction may, however, still have an energetic hold on you. To release it, do the Blow-Out/Zip-Up/Hook-Up technique (here), blowing out obligations or other distractions that are preventing you from being able to bring yourself toward intimacy. Situate yourselves so you aren’t expelling these energies onto your partner.

Do this a second time, or more if you wish. Then turn toward one another, let your eyes meet, and bring your hands, with one hand on top of the other, up the center of your body until they come to rest on the middle of your chest. From here, you can go in any number of directions, and with less energetic pull from your day-to-day responsibilities. We suggest you move right on to “Playing in Rhythm.”

PART 2: PLAYING IN RHYTHM

In this shared movement game, one of you will lead and the other will follow, while you both maintain eye contact. Your energies will begin to dance as you stay in sync with one another. It is ridiculously simple but gives a structure from which you can be playful.

1. Put on music that makes you want to move. We still come alive to our old Flashdance and Dirty Dancing albums.
2. Make eye contact and again place your hands over the centers of your chests. When one of you is inspired to move to the music, the other follows, maintaining the eye contact.
3. Continue for as long as you wish, and then return to center, hands still over your chests, keeping eye contact. The other partner can then lead. Continue leading and following as many rounds as you wish.

Without touching one another, you can play with the motion, the speed, and the form. In summary, these two brief exercises—Releasing the Distractions and Playing in Rhythm—can create an energetic space that beckons the wanting. The next step is up to you.

Skin on Skin

Use your body to bring into manifestation the fullness of your love for your partner. Let every stroke whisper with your longing, every expansion of your iris bring through more light, let every brush of your lips administer the healing nectar of the reunion. Imagine . . . that you have been separated for eons, through all time and space, and that this moment has been given to you so that you may discover one another again in the flesh.

—ANAIYA SOPHIA, SACRED SEXUAL UNION¹⁸

Sex invokes such powerful energies that many couples turn the whole encounter over to their bodies. Your body knows what to do with little discussion. But you can also open your consciousness to your partner’s experience, create inroads into one another’s vast interiors, and pave the way for your spirits to connect at ever deeper levels. You can begin at a very basic and concrete plane, which is to learn about one another’s sensations. Your sensations are the language of the energies that move through your body, connecting your outer world and your inner world.

In the simplest terms, touching and being touched generates sensation. Touch, the first sense you acquire, can tell you much about your partner’s inner experience. A great deal of intimate communication is nonverbal. In an experiment where people were blindfolded and touched by someone, they were able to identify the feeling the person had been instructed to express—anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, sympathy, happiness, or sadness—78 percent of the time through touch alone.¹⁹ We are wired to correctly interpret the touch of our partner.

A Kiss Is Not Just a Kiss!

While we are wired to correctly interpret touch, sexual touch can still lead to misunderstandings. Not only can we misread or totally miss our partner’s signals, the honesty inherent in touch may convey information that is awkward or ambiguous. For instance, Schnarch asserts that even foreplay is much more than it appears: “We like to think that . . . foreplay is where couples establish emotional connection and instill feelings of love, arousal, and desire in each other. Too often, however, foreplay establishes disconnections.”²⁰ Take kissing, for example. Pointing out the many meanings that may be conveyed in a kiss, Schnarch describes a range of kissing varieties that can be turn-offs:

• The mushy, limp kiss of passivity and withheld eroticism.
• The impatient kiss of a partner preoccupied with more important things.
• The sloppy, soupy, wet kiss that triggers repulsion rather than desire.
• The rigid-tongued kiss of the mechanical lover.
• The smothering kiss that rekindles childhood fears of an intrusive, engulfing parent.
• The begrudgingly given kiss of the “you can’t take me for granted” lover.21

Kissing is, of course, more often a turn-on, but turn-on kisses also have their own vocabulary, which Schnarch describes as follows:

• The soft but electric kiss of a familiar lover.
• The hard kiss of passion.
• The breathy, languid kiss of tasting and smelling each other’s body.
• The gentle bite on the lip from someone begging to be “rode hard and put away wet.”²²

Think of the ways you and your partner kiss. Do you know how your partner experiences your kisses? Does your partner know your experience? If not, this can be fun to remedy.

Conscious Kissing

Of course you are aware of your own experience during a kiss. When you are also relatively aware of your partner’s, an alchemy occurs that brings another dimension to your kiss. Ellen Eatough is a sex educator who understands the energetic dimension of sexuality. We found her audio CD program “Four Keys to Sexual Ecstasy: Experience Soulful Connection with Spine-Tingling Sex”²³ to be one of the best home-study programs available. She explains how kissing is the most intimate activity two people can do. Many prostitutes, for instance, who will have intercourse and engage in all kinds of other sexual acts refuse to kiss their clients on the lips. It is too intimate. The lips and tongue are among the most nerve-rich and sensitive areas of the body. Since we have an enormous amount of control over them, this allows for splendid “variety, and variety makes our brains light up with arousal.”

Because people in long-term relationships often take kissing for granted, Eatough suggests that couples bring renewed attention to this staple of intimate contact. It can be as simple as the following, for starters:

1. Show your partner how you like to be kissed.
2. Ask your partner to kiss you as you’ve just explained or demonstrated.
3. Tell and show your partner what felt right and what needs adjustment.
4. Have your partner give it another try.
5. Continue until your partner is able to kiss you just like you wanted.
6. Switch roles so you learn how your partner likes to be kissed.

You can also experiment with new ways of kissing one another. For instance, you could explore the inside of your partner’s lips with your tongue and then receive your partner’s tongue on the insides of your lips. Or gently nibble and suck your partner’s upper lip. Envision the energy that is moving within you and between the two of you. Let your partner know what feels good. Ancient teachings say there is a subtle nerve connection between the woman’s upper lip and her clitoris. Find out if this is true for anyone in your relationship who has an upper lip and a clitoris.

Ask for What You Want

Use kissing as your training wheels for discovering what pleasures your partner sensually and sexually. Even healthy, relatively enlightened couples often have difficulty communicating what they want sexually or in allowing themselves to be creative in moving beyond established patterns. Among the most important skills for maintaining sexual satisfaction in a long-term relationship is to be able to ask for what you want, to ask for it without a lot of justification, and to ask for it without inadvertently conveying criticism. Your partner wants to give you what you desire. Since your partner usually can’t read your mind, you need to ask for it with words, sounds, gestures, or touch. Crossing the barriers of shyness, modesty, shame, habit, self-judgment, or sense of not being deserving is the path toward ever greater sexual satisfaction.

Talk About Your Energies

Words may not come easily when you step into the realm of describing sensations and energy, but it can be enticing while opening new vistas of intimacy. Be curious. Notice the sensations in your body and describe them. You can focus your attention in ways that make this easier. For instance, put your hands over your chest, your Heart Chakra. This is the home of many emotions. Are the sensations heavy, fluid, agitated, calm? Do you feel flooded? Do you feel empty? Do you feel happiness? Sadness? Grief? Joy?

Still with your hands on your chest, let your eyes meet. Drop your hands. The energies of your Heart Chakras will naturally touch and engage one another, with or without your awareness. Notice what you feel in the center of your chest, what you feel coming out toward your partner, what you feel coming in from your partner, and what you feel between you. Use words that describe the sensations stirred by the energies that are continually moving through your body: warm, cold, liquid, flowing, tingling, pulsating, intensifying, calming, spinning, stretching . . . If words do not come, just gently notice what enters your awareness, moment by moment, as you keep your attention on your Heart Chakra and the space between you.

Knowing Your Partner Intimately

Many couples never really explore one another’s sexual anatomy. In a new relationship, such exploration might push boundaries of intimacy and propriety. However, long-term partners who have never crossed this bridge and developed a comfortable familiarity with one another at the most intimate physical levels have left standing an unnecessary barrier to easy communication about their physical relationship. To be sure, such sharing can feel highly vulnerable and requires that your sense of safety with one another is well established, but it is an exploration well worth taking on.

Start with the conscious kiss and the communication it requires. Then other kinds of touch. (A note from our Etiquette Department: If you are going to enter anything delicate and sacred, be sure your hands are clean and fingernails short.) Knowing that you will be sharing and exploring your most intimate landscape with your partner may also motivate you to learn more about your own sexual anatomy and physiology. You can’t count on what you learned growing up. Nor, until recently, was the wider culture particularly forthcoming on these topics. For instance, the clitoris, the only human body part that exists solely for pleasure, was not even correctly described by scientists until 1998.24 Cultural inhibitions aside, nature was in high gear when designing your sexual physiology, and detailed information about her handiwork is finally readily available.²⁵

Three Kinds of Sexual Energy

As we attempted to pull together our own understanding of sexuality from an energetic perspective, we discovered that teachings about sacred sexuality can be found in at least the Taoist, Tantric, Sufi, Buddhist, Jewish, Pagan, Wiccan, occult, Native American, and Afro-Caribbean traditions. We were particularly drawn to the Taoist and Tantric teachings because of their profound understanding of the relationship between sexuality and the body’s energies in terms that we already use, such as the meridians and the chakras.

The Taoist physicians understood that an active sex life is a vital part of health and longevity, and they studied it with the same determination they applied to every other area of health. In Taoist sexual practices, the focus is on the way energy moves through the meridians, particularly the Governing and Central Meridians that flow along the spine and up through the center of the torso. The Taoist “Arts of the Bedchamber” have been beautifully systematized in a book for Westerners called The Multi-Orgasmic Couple: Sexual Secrets Every Couple Should Know.²⁶

In the Tantric sexuality practices of India, the focus is on an energy known as kundalini energy that is channeled upward from the chakra at the base of the spine, up the spine, through each chakra, and finally reaching the chakra at the crown of the head. The most accessible yet authoritative book we have found on Tantric sexuality as it has evolved in the West is, dare we name it, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Tantric Sex.²⁷

While it is not possible to present these bodies of wisdom and technique for working with sexual energy within the confines of a chapter, we will provide a few insights and exercises that give you a taste of each system. Also, along with the meridians and the kundalini energy that can move up the chakras, another vital energy is involved in sexual activity. It is called the radiant circuits. We will offer a brief introduction to this energy system as well.

The Meridians

The meridians—the pathways that bring energy into every organ of the body—are as basic to sexual activity as blood flow and breath. The primary meridians involved in sexual arousal are different for a woman than for a man. A woman’s energy begins to climb along her inner thighs up into her genitals as well as reaching downward through her abdomen. This energy is carried upward on the Spleen, Liver, and Kidney Meridians and downward on the Stomach Meridian. The lightest upward touch on her inner thigh or downward touch on her abdomen moves the energy along these meridians, building a sexual response. Write that down, fellas. And remember, it’s a feather touch!

For a man in his prime, the Kidney Meridian, which is considered the “Wellspring of Life,” is always at the ready to stream large quantities of vital energy directly to the prostate and genitals, bypassing all logic, reason, or other distractions. It can be triggered by a lover’s seduction, an erotic touch, or a cereal box. Not only are men and women aroused differently in these core energies, they also reach orgasm in different ways. For women, the energies that build toward orgasm are usually slow and not as easily separated from the energies of the relationship. For men, the buildup toward orgasm can be very rapid and less dependent on the energies of the relationship. As Billy Crystal famously quipped, “Women need a reason to have sex; men just need a place.” However, as a relationship develops, these differences recede as the energies of the relationship bring both partners into a more natural harmony.

Two energy channels, the Governing and Central Meridians, connect in both men and women and form a circuit of energy that runs from the sexual organs, up the spine to the head to the back of the tongue to the lower lip, down the front of the body, and back to the sexual organs. Various practices can enhance the flow of this circuit—called the Microcosmic Orbit in Taoist sexual tradition28—which connects the reservoirs of energy in the brain, heart, abdomen, and genitals. Gaining control of the flow in the Microcosmic Orbit is a key in Taoist sexual tradition for progressing from genital orgasms to full-body orgasms to “soul orgasms.”²⁹ In a full-body orgasm, the sexual energy is moving freely and fully through the Microcosmic Orbit. In a soul orgasm, the energy is not only moving freely through your entire body, but the energetic boundaries between the two of you dissolve. The exchange can profoundly expand and transform your consciousness and bring your love to deeper levels.

The energy that flows through the Microcosmic Orbit when it has been activated includes not only the electromagnetic energies that can be detected by scientific instruments but also the more subtle life force called chi. Chi is the vital energy inherent in all of life, though with no instruments that can detect it, Western science denies its existence. But there is an instrument. When you are alive, chi is flowing. When you are dead, it isn’t. Is that so complicated?

The unimpeded circulation of chi, along with balance in its energetic polarities (yin and yang), is considered essential for good health. We can influence the flow of chi in many ways. An old Taoist saying instructs, “The mind moves and chi follows.”30 The converse is also true: Chi moves and the mind follows.

The electromagnetic energy that comes out of your hands can move chi. To explore the Microcosmic Orbit, you can trace it with your hands. Sitting comfortably, bring either hand to the bottom of your sacrum. Very slowly and with a light touch, move your hand up your spine. The electromagnetic energy coming off your hand, not the pressure, is moving the chi. Remember, feather touch. When you have gotten as high on your spine as you can reach, bring your other hand over your shoulder and back to your spine while imagining the energy moving up the gap between your hands. Continue to slowly move your hand up to your head, over your head, down your forehead, and to your upper lip. Now bring both hands to your lower lip and continue down the front of your neck, down the center of your body, to your genitals, underneath the trunk of your body, and back toward the base of your spine. You have just traced the Microcosmic Orbit.

How much you felt or didn’t feel depends on a number of factors, including how kinesthetic you are in your sensory style (chapter 1) and how practiced you are at attending to your inner sensations. The sensations you may feel as the Microcosmic Orbit is activated may be warmth, tingling, or pulsating. If you go over the Orbit a number of times, the energies are likely to become more vivid in your mind, but simply doing the exercise activates these energies whether or not you consciously experience it. The energy generally moves very slowly, particularly at first, so your hands should keep pace. Once you are able to consciously move the energy through the entire circuit by tracing it with your hands, you can experiment with moving it with only your mind.

A series of Taoist practices begins with exercises (such as the one just described) that are designed to bolster the Microcosmic Orbit in your own body. They then progress to sharing the experience with your partner. Unimpeded by clothes, one partner sits on the bed and the other (usually the lighter) partner sits on the other’s lap, maximizing the amount of contact from the pelvis up, supporting each other to the extent you can with your arms around one another’s backsides (see Figure 8-1). Alternatively, you may sit facing one another in chairs or cross-legged on the bed or floor. Each partner activates the Microcosmic Orbit in his or her own body. While this may lead to intercourse that is primed for full-body orgasms, first take the time to get your own energies flowing and share the experience. In the more advanced forms, you bring the energy up your own spine and send it down the front of your partner’s body, meet it at your partner’s genitals, and bring it up your partner’s spine so your energies are merging, facilitating an even more profound exchange.

There is of course much more to the Taoist sexual practices of cultivating spiritual connection. For instance, the man learns how to have orgasms without ejaculating (yes, the two can be pleasurably separated) so that the couple can become “multi-orgasmic.” The Multi-Orgasmic Couple promises that learning how to have “multiple whole-body orgasms” can open the way for you “to harmonize your sexual needs and to reach ever more fulfilling levels of intimacy and ecstasy together.”31

FIGURE 8-1 Joining Microcosmic Orbits. An alternative position is to find balance so you can meet your hands palm to palm instead of around one another’s backs.

The Chakras

Whereas Taoism concentrates on the meridian pathways, Tantric sexual practices focus on the chakras. The seven major chakras are situated at the pelvis (First or Root Chakra), lower abdomen below the navel (Second Chakra), solar plexus (Third Chakra), center of chest (Fourth or Heart Chakra), throat (Fifth Chakra), forehead (Sixth Chakra or third eye), and the top of the head (Seventh or Crown Chakra). According to most texts, sexuality originates and is expressed through the Second Chakra. But Donna sees it differently. She sees the Root Chakra as the seat of sexuality. Wide agreement does exist that the Root Chakra is related to safety and survival. Donna indeed sees primal fear, traumatic memories, and survival strategies as being stored in the Root Chakra. When a person is feeling relatively safe, the Root Chakra is a source of stability, drive, and vital energies that move up the body, feeding the other chakras and empowering them. The genitals and other sexual organs are bathed by the energy of the Root Chakra, so it is not surprising that the survival chakra would be involved with sex, nature’s sweet enticement for actions that ensure collective survival.

Here’s a possible source of the confusion. In many situations, a woman’s Root Chakra will not shift into a sexual response without a sense of emotional safety. A report that the safety check has been passed must be sent downward from the Second Chakra. The Second Chakra is the guardian at the gate that must usually be passed through before a woman becomes sexually aroused in the presence of a potential partner. It is receptive, creative, and full of feelings. The Second Charka has even been referred to as the “second heart.” Babies develop while bathed in its energies. Romance, love, affection, admiration—or at a minimum, a sense of emotional safety—are required before the Second Chakra sends energy back down to the Root Chakra that clears the way for a full sexual response to be generated. Men do not require this two-stage clearance process to become aroused. This basic difference can be traced to the divergent sexual anatomy of males and females.

For men, sexual activity occurs outside their bodies and, once the act is biologically over, it is biologically over. Seed planted. What’s next? Women, however, are not only taking another person’s anatomy into themselves; once the act is completed, a baby that will grow in her body for nine months and eventually be asking to borrow the car may have been conceived. In the wisdom of the body’s energies, which evolved into complex systems with decision-making capabilities, it would seem natural that the chakra that holds the womb (Second Chakra) has some say in who is going to help choose the car the baby will be borrowing. The Second Chakra assesses the potential partner in the moment and decides to send sexual energy into the Root Chakra . . . or not. Of course she can override the wisdom of her body, but indiscriminate sex can be much more costly to her than to him. Just as the meridians function differently in men than women in regard to sexual responsiveness (with the Kidney Meridian capable of bringing men into instant arousal but women needing the energy to also build in their Heart, Spleen, Liver, and Stomach Meridians in particular), the chakras conspire with the meridians in dictating a slower and more studied response in women than men.

The word Tantra, from ancient Sanskrit, means “expansion through awareness.” A core attitude in Tantra is mindfulness: “You pay attention to what you’re doing in the exchange between you and your partner. Being mindful induces a sense of respect and reverence for the experience, which lends itself to honoring each other as god and goddess.”32 Tantra itself is a profound spiritual philosophy and discipline. In its original form, many years of meditation, chanting, and postures that channel subtle energies are combined with initiation and purification ceremonies for worship and expanding spiritual awareness. The Tantra sexual practices that have been adopted in the West “use breath, sounds, movements, and symbols to quiet the mind and activate sexual energy, directing it throughout the body to achieve states of consciousness and bliss.”³³

Many Tantric practices are reminiscent of the Taoist joining of the Central and Governing Meridians to activate the Microcosmic Orbit (after all, they are both working with the same physical and energetic anatomy). These Tantric practices use the breath and the mind to move the powerful kundalini energies that are coiled at the base of the spine, raising them up along the chakras. As the kundalini energy moves up the chakras, it can lead to different levels of awakening and mystical insight until it reaches the Crown Chakra at the top of the head, where it can produce profound mystical experiences. Kundalini is an intrinsic, libidinal force that resides in the Root Chakra. For this reason, Donna sometimes refers to the Root Chakra as the “pilot light” of the chakra system. As the kundalini energy slowly rises through the chakras, it is often accompanied by a wave of euphoria and happiness as well as spiritual opening. We must also note, however, that in rare cases it is possible for it to rise so quickly and powerfully as to overwhelm a person who is unprepared, resulting in a psychological or physical crisis that has been termed a spiritual emergency. Untold numbers of people have been stigmatized and medicated or hospitalized when this has spontaneously occurred in an unusually powerful manner. Counseling that is attuned to this complex dynamic has, on the other hand, been shown to turn spiritual emergencies into opportunities for spiritual emergence.34

Thinking of the Root Chakra as the pilot light that can ignite each of the other chakras and open them to spiritual energies is a vivid metaphor for understanding the Tantric practices designed to raise the kundalini energies. Here is a basic Tantric practice that uses both breath and imagery. Sitting comfortably:

1. Tune into the Root Chakra at the base of your spine. It spins in a circle, creating a powerful, vital force. Think of it as a pilot light igniting the chakras above it. With a deep, slow in-breath through your nose, draw the energy from your Root Chakra up the center of your body, vividly imagining it activating, in turn, the chakras in your lower abdomen, solar plexus, heart, throat, and third eye, and the top of your head. As you breathe out through your mouth, send the energy down your spine to your Root Chakra. On the in-breath, again draw the energy up your chakras. Continuing this loop creates a clear channel in your body through which you can imagine or sense a stream of energy traveling past your chakras, “cleansing, feeding, and fueling”³⁵ them. A variation you may want to try is to take the energy up your spine with the in-breath and down the center of your body with the out-breath.
2. Once you have learned to consciously loop the energies through your chakras as described above, you can use this skill with your partner in some exciting ways. Sit comfortably facing your partner with your spine straight and using the position shown in Figure 8-1, in chairs or sitting cross-legged on the bed or floor. Do the chakra breath while maintaining eye contact and, if your position allows it, with your palms touching your partner’s palms. This practice has three variations—called the “synchronizing breath,” the “reciprocal breath,” and the “circulating breath”—which can be learned in the order presented to get you “connected in a powerful, loving exchange.”³⁶

a. The Synchronizing Breath: Do the breathing simultaneous with your partner. If it isn’t obvious, signal in some way when you are starting the in-breath and the out-breath. Once you are in rhythm with one another, close your eyes and sense into one another’s energy patterns.

b. The Reciprocal Breath: Again breathe in rhythm with your partner, but this time one of you inhales as the other exhales.

c. The Circulating Breath: As you do the reciprocal breath, imagine that you are inhaling your partner’s breath and energy. With your in-breath, consciously bring the energy up from your Root Chakra through the other six chakras as you have been doing. With your out-breath, however, imagine you are sending your energy down your partner’s spine. With your next in-breath, imagine you are picking up your partner’s energy at your Root Chakra and bringing it up through each of your other chakras, and then again sending the energy down your partner’s spine with the out-breath. You are making a loop inside yourself and into your partner.

Such practices, basic to Tantric sex, are applied in creating many forms of loving connection that may or may not involve intercourse or orgasm. Like Taoist sexual practices, Tantric sex is a spiritual path that is oriented toward using sexual energy “as a means to sacred love.”37 Both the Tantric and Taoist sexual systems are disciplines that teach couples to open their hearts and manage the masculine and feminine energies within each partner so orgasms are prolonged and become sources of healing, ecstasy, and sacred love. This is not to say that you should or need to pursue the highly disciplined sexual practices found in Tantra or Taoism to have a satisfactory sex life. These are not paths we ourselves have followed. Rather, we have sought to inform our natural instincts with our understanding of the body’s energies, and we love our sexual relationship. Nonetheless, as Marianne Brandon put it after reviewing a variety of sexual practices and arrangements, “If you wish to engage your partner in a spiritual ride of a lifetime, Tantra may be for you.”³⁸

The Radiant Circuits

The radiant circuits are the energy system of ecstasy. Called the “strange flows” or “extraordinary vessels” by ancient Chinese physicians, they were not given nearly as much emphasis as the meridians. Donna, however, sees them as an exceedingly important system that is directly tied to a person’s health and happiness.³⁹ In addition to activating ecstasy—sexual or otherwise—they also promote healing, generate joy, and orchestrate all the other energy systems into a coordinated dance for maintaining your health. Each of the eight radiant circuits has a pathway that, like a meridian, can be traced on the surface of the skin. Unlike the meridians, however, the radiant circuits are able to jump their paths and go to wherever they are needed or attracted.

All eight radiant circuits are activated during any ecstatic experience, but one of them, the Penetrating Flow, plays a special role in sexual activity. As its name suggests, the Penetrating Flow penetrates. It directs energy into every cell, muscle, bone, organ, meridian, and chakra in your body. It may be active or dormant at any given moment. When it is weak or blocked, people feel depressed or empty inside and sex may feel hollow. When the Penetrating Flow is strong, sex will be ecstatic as the energies deep inside you are catapulted throughout your body, activating your emotions and your love, and awakening you to your spiritual depths.

You are stimulating your Penetrating Flow whenever you feel joy, gratitude, or curiosity. Savor a sunset; delight at a seashore; contemplate the stars; appreciate your partner. The stronger your Penetrating Flow, the more that sexual activity can catapult you to extraordinary realms. In addition to seeking mental or emotional states that cultivate the Penetrating Flow, you can strengthen it like a muscle using some simple physical exercises. You and your partner can get a feel for the Penetrating Flow if one of you lies facedown and the other places one hand on the sacrum and the other at the top of the back. Gently rock the sacrum for three to five minutes. When you have finished, lift both hands simultaneously and let your partner bask in the tingling feeling. You are experiencing the physical activation of your Penetrating Flow.

Here is an exercise you can do for yourself that also strengthens your Penetrating Flow (breathing slowly and deliberately):

1. Lying down, place your palms on your back at your waist with your fingertips touching.
2. Lightly move your fingertips down to the bottom of your sacrum.
3. Slowly draw your hands up over your hip bones from back to front and down to either side of your groin. Rest in this position for two deep breaths.
4. On the next in-breath, slowly draw your hands straight up your body, over your stomach, to your breasts, up your neck, to the bottom of your jaw.
5. With a slow out-breath, let your hands slide back down to your Heart Chakra, with one hand on top of the other. Rest them there as you take several deep breaths and experience the sensations of your Penetrating Flow after having been activated by physical touch.

These three energies—the meridians, chakras, and radiant circuits—are always working behind the scenes, but they become charged and operate in a powerful natural harmony during sex. This brief introduction to the role of each in your sex life gives you a peek into these invisible forces and a few simple techniques for exploring and enhancing each.

Before Your Bodies Touch, Your Energies Meet

With a dozen women’s magazines at checkout counters giving sexual advice on any given day, we feel a bit squeamish about offering the following little bits of guidance, but some basics are not obvious to everyone and they do make a difference. These are a few brief tips from hundreds that could be mentioned, selected because they are so important to understand and because they can have an immediate impact on your personal and shared sexual energies.

Don’t Make Her Orgasm Another Job for Her

As the culture turned a valuing eye on a woman’s sexual pleasure, an extra premium was placed on her orgasm. This may, paradoxically, have become a formidable obstacle to her pleasure. The energies of sex are, at their best, a full-bodied unscripted experience, and feeling pressured to have an orgasm works against everything that orgasms are about. As Alison Armstrong put it, “Men could have more sex if they would let women have fewer orgasms.”40 Because his partner’s orgasms have become a source of validation for a man, “he will keep you up all night until you get this ‘treasured result.’ It leads to women faking it just so they can get some sleep.” The pressure for a woman to have an orgasm makes sex a job. The underlying lesson for a man is to understand that women want far more to feel treasured than to get that orgasm. Ask your partner which she would choose: having an orgasm every time or feeling loved, adored, and precious every time.

Don’t Let the Tabloids Define Your Satisfaction with Your Sex Life

Just as the culture’s valuing of a woman’s sexual pleasure inadvertently turned having an orgasm into an expectation and a job, widespread media discussion of “good sex,” “great sex,” “making her scream,” and “driving him wild” can cause us to negatively compare our sex lives with what everyone else seems to be doing or at least is expected to be doing. Holding expectations that are not based in the reality of who you are and who your partner is, of what you need, and of what you really want is a powerful way of draining the energy and joy from your love life. Intimacy counselor and media columnist Mary Jo Rapini closes an article titled “5 Ways to Keep the Sparks Flying in Your Marriage” with fair warning about this issue:

Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, sex, whether it is hot or not, is the opinion of the couple. Many couples have sex once a month in the same position and love it! Others feel unloved if it isn’t every day. . . . You don’t need to swing from a chandelier to be happy.41

If you and your partner are both satisfied with your sex life and have persuasively conveyed that to one another, that is enough. When either of you feels it is time to amp it up or spice it up or give it more time and attention or change patterns that have developed, the need for new talk or new action has entered your interpersonal field.

There’s a Place for “Quickies”

John Gray points out that a woman is generally open to occasional “quickie sex” when she feels emotionally supported in the relationship and knows that at other times she will experience regular healthy “home-cooked sex” and occasional “gourmet sex.”⁴² Your own energies and your partner’s energies not only fluctuate within each of you, but they meet in a thousand different ways. Sex also has its seasons. You are likely to go through dry spells as well as periods of increased passion. Sex has many paces. Let the energies of the moment influence your sexual experiences rather than relying too heavily on familiar patterns. Although there is comfort and value in familiar or habitual ways of having sex, they do not necessarily propel you to encounter one another at the deepest levels.

Soft Touch; Hard Touch

While sexual energies move through the body spontaneously, partners can direct and intensify their flow through touch. Most people, however, assume their partner likes to be touched the way they themselves like to be touched. While this may sometimes be true, physiological differences between men and women make it less likely. Men have tougher skin; a woman’s skin has more sensitivity. Many men like deep, firm strokes while many women like a lighter touch. Find out what your partner likes. Know that this may also change depending on the area of the skin, the level of arousal, and simply his or her mood at the moment. So develop some verbal and nonverbal cues that help you to know if you are delivering what your partner desires and to help you let your partner know what you desire about this many-splendored thing called touch.

Awaken Your Energetic Awareness

By attuning yourself to the energies that move through your body, you can awaken your awareness about them. Build a habit of mindfully noticing your inner world. Sit still and note the subtle sensations that move through your body. If they are too subtle for you to register, physical movement activates the flow of energy. Here are three simple ways to make it easier to focus on your energies: (1) Follow your breathing with your awareness and notice how your breath enlivens your body; (2) flex your back to stretch your spine (think of a cat stretching) and notice how your energies respond; (3) contract your abdomen with each in-breath and notice how heat begins to build. What does this have to do with sex? The more you are in touch with the energies that stir in your body, the more that energy guides you as you build, control, and release waves of passion in harmony with your partner.

Correcting Your Partner About Sex May Not Be the Correct Way to Correct

No one likes to be criticized. Judgment about your partner’s sexual skills or performance is particularly sensitive. It tends to bring out the person’s worst rather than best performance. How do you convey, without the jab of criticism, that you want something that is different from what is happening? If you can energetically attune yourself with your partner, the whole interaction changes. You are not breaking into someone else’s space but participating in high-level teamwork. Suppose you want your male partner to caress you in a certain way. If you have established a harmonic energy between you, it is not jarring to gently move his hand to the spot where you want to be touched or to whisper what you would like him to do. You can convey what you like with words, gratified sighs, or movement so that there is reliable communication about what you are liking. For sex to stay hot, much is about maintaining the quality of your relationship, but it is also about how you communicate about the mechanics.

The Pleasures of Slow Sex

One of Donna’s nominees for Most Instructive Song of All Time Is “I Want a Man with a Slow Hand.” The key is attunement. His impulse may be to generate more sensation. Her need is to be met at the shores of the slow undulating waves flowing from her Root Chakra. Met. Not hastened. Not forcing the waves to be anything but exactly what they are. When she is saying, “Don’t move, don’t move,” she actually means, “Don’t move!” Don’t go faster. Don’t increase the pressure. Just believe her. Don’t move.

Holding Hands Is Foreplay

In more than one language, the term for sexual relations translates into English as “going on a journey together.”43 It’s an apt image, and foreplay prepares the emotional path for that journey. Intimacy counselor Esther Perel observes, “Foreplay starts at the end of the previous orgasm.”⁴⁴ Speaking about the “myth of spontaneity,” she notes that “we like to believe that sex arises from an impulse or inclination that is natural, unprompted, artless.”⁴⁵ In our busy lives we become impatient when time, effort, and consciousness are required to cultivate what we think should be spontaneous. But in a long-term relationship, preparation ignites sex more often than spontaneity, and that preparation doesn’t usually start in the bedroom. Caring touch generates oxytocin in men and women. Holding hands is foreplay. Hugs are foreplay. Loving words are foreplay. Smiles are foreplay. Unexpectedly doing a job your partner usually does, like washing the dishes or taking out the trash, is foreplay. Keeping your energies in sync with one another is foreplay. Agreeing to protect the time and space for intimacy is foreplay.

Trust and Safety Are Foreplay

Trust and a sense of safety develop with the accumulation of experiences demonstrating that you each hold positive intentions for one another and that you convert those intentions into effective actions. Enhanced cooperation, freely shared information, mutual problem solving, and intimacy are emotional prerequisites for a rich sexual relationship. Being made to feel safe and loved throughout the day is foreplay. Ellen Eatough points out that trusting yourself and feeling safe with your partner as you open to pleasure are necessary if you are to surrender control, which is “ultimately required for orgasm.”46 Safety allows you to let go without fear of being judged or being taken advantage of as orgasm brings you beyond the familiar boundaries of your ego to the vulnerable space of uncontrolled excitement.

Keeping Your Energies in Sync Is Foreplay

When you and your partner are in harmony, in sync with the nuances of one another’s behavior, your brain waves begin to oscillate in rhythm with each other. You literally get onto the same wavelength. When your biological rhythms resonate, you feel intimate, even without saying a word. An intimate conversation, deep eye contact, and breathing in rhythm, in or out of the bedroom, are three ways that people can attune to one another. Why is this foreplay? As Eatough cautions, if you don’t get in sync early on during lovemaking, “you may feel a sense of being oddly disconnected and unsatisfied even if you had a great orgasm.”⁴⁷

Foreplay in the Bedroom

As you enter the arena for naked intimacy, foreplay becomes the art of arousal. We have seen how a woman’s physiology—as well as her chakras and meridians—do not usually bring about sexual arousal as quickly as a man’s. Discussing how skills in building and circulating sexual energy apply to every stage of the sexual act, from arousal to the many kinds of orgasm that are possible, Eatough notes that foreplay can “close the typical gap in arousal rates and meet in the erotic middle.” She tells men that “verbal expressions of love and tender caresses, gradually becoming more sexual, are more likely to arouse than a direct hit to our genitals. In fact, touching our breasts or genitals too soon can make us unconsciously contract, and then we have to work harder to get over that, before we can really get ‘into it!’”⁴⁸ So start even bedroom foreplay by expressing appreciation to her. See her well and let her know what you admire. Take the time to let her feel your love. Move slowly into touching and kissing, starting with her extremities, perhaps stroking her hand or kissing her cheeks. Only move toward her center as her excitement has started to build. It is in opening a woman’s heart that her sexual energies begin to flow.

What to Do with Your Mind during Sex

The mind can go to a million places, from checking off things on the to-do list to being totally absorbed in the passion of the moment. Sex at its best is an exquisite dance between skilled control and no control. If you are swept away by the passion of the moment, surrender to it. If not, you can direct your mind to numerous juicy choices. Erotic fantasies are a popular choice, but as Nicole Daedone cautions, “fantasy is a way we step out of our experience of sex, rather than stepping further into it.”49 You can, instead, focus on the energies in your body and let them tell you what is next. If that is too subtle, you can enhance your breathing. Your breath is a powerful tool for circulating sexual energy. Take a slow, deep in-breath through your nose. Fill your belly and lungs. Release it even more slowly through your mouth. Continue breathing in this rhythm until you become lost in whatever occurs next. Deep breathing not only circulates pleasure, it also keeps you attuned to your body and makes it easier to stay in sync with your partner.

Sexual Wounds and Their Healing

Sexual intimacy is inextricably linked with emotional vulnerability. The Root Chakra—the root of sexual energy—also governs safety, danger, and threat. It will close down to sexual pleasure if sex becomes associated with threat, criticism, or abuse. When a woman takes a partner inside her body, it is her Root Chakra that is entered. She is immediately opening herself to the possibility of being impregnated and dependent on a partner. As a result, if the male’s pattern is seduction-sex-abandonment, for many women, this amounts to a form of abuse. She is wired for seduction-sex-partnership, and when partnership is not the outcome, a deep sense of betrayal may be the lasting impression even if her conscious mind can fully understand and accept the rules by which the man is playing.

In Donna’s practice, innumerable female clients confided to her that while they enthusiastically participated in the free love movement of the 1960s and 1970s, they came away damaged. Swept up in the excitement and freedom of the times, they overrode their deeper instincts. They wound up with hurt, self-judgment, and a diminished capacity for sexual pleasure. A more subtle form of this scenario can occur even within a marriage. If there is little emotional connection, having sex can feel like a violation. In one woman’s words, “Our foreplay leaves me feeling ‘played’ and manipulated. He thinks that if he touches me in a certain way, that will turn me on. If he kisses me in a certain way, that will turn me on. But when we are so distant from one another in every other way, I don’t want to be turned on by him. Sometimes if the foreplay does get me aroused and we go on to have sex, I feel that my body has betrayed me.” She is not alone. Many women report that they don’t want to have sex with someone who has been an emotional stranger all day.

Sexual encounters with men who are disrespectful, mean-spirited, or more overtly abusive can leave lasting harm on a woman’s ability to be free and enjoy sex, even if she subsequently establishes a relationship that is loving and deeply respectful. Many of Donna’s female clients complained that their sexual energies were turned off. Their work with Donna didn’t erase the lessons of the past but rather was focused on reversing the damage. Sexual energies can be reawakened. Donna’s book Energy Medicine for Women presents several simple energy techniques that can reopen a woman’s sexual channels.50 A case history described in that book shows how a therapist used energy psychology to help a woman overcome the wounds of severe childhood abuse. It follows to demonstrate the power of an energy approach.

Sandy and her partner came to one of our colleagues for premarital counseling.⁵¹ Among the issues they were concerned about was their sexual relationship. Although Sandy had been married before, she found herself reacting with uncontrollable negative feelings when her fiancé initiated sexual play. He was willing to be patient, kind, and understanding, and he seemed genuinely interested that sex be a shared experience. While she freely acknowledged that she had no problems with his attitude, she still would usually become upset and turned off by his overtures. They asked for help with this problem, and a private session with Sandy was arranged.

When she came in, the therapist gently asked, “Is there something in your earlier years that you could talk about?” She immediately burst into tears. Red blotches appeared on her skin, and her words were punctuated with heavy sobbing and gasping as she began to relate her story: “When I was seven years old, we lived in [a small rural town]. One day my stepfather took me for a walk down a country road. It was in the summer. We hiked up the side of a hill. Then we stopped. Then he took off all my clothes. Then he took off all his clothes.”

At this point she was scarcely able to breathe. The therapist stopped her and said that it was not necessary to go any further. He had her state her distress rating about the memory, which obviously was a 10. He then led her through the Tapping Sequence. Her intensity dropped from 10 to 6. At this point, an Acceptance Statement that began “Even though I still feel overwhelmed . . .” was used, followed by another round of tapping. This time the intensity fell to 2. Then another Acceptance Statement was introduced, beginning with, “Even if I never get completely over this . . . ,” and a last round of tapping.

By this time, Sandy was breathing quietly. Her skin was free of blotches, her eyes were clear, and she was looking at her hands, lying folded in her lap. The therapist said, “Sandy, as you sit there now, think back to that hot summer day when your stepfather took you for that walk down that country road. Think about how you hiked up the side of that hill until you stopped. Think about how he took off all your clothes. Think of how he took off all his clothes. Now, what do you get?”

She sat there without moving for maybe five seconds, then looked up calmly and said, without excessive emotion, “Well, I still hate him.” The therapist, after agreeing that hating him might be a reasonable response and possibly a useful one to keep, then asked, “But what about the distress you were feeling?”

Again she paused before answering. This time she laughed as she said, “I don’t know. I just can’t get there. Well, that was twenty years ago. I was just a little girl. I couldn’t protect myself then the way I can now. What’s the point in getting upset about something like that . . . I never let that man touch me again, and my kids have never been allowed to be near him. I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem to bother me like it did.”

After this single session, she no longer experienced negative feelings in response to her partner’s sexual advances. On a two-year follow-up, she reported that the problem was “good and gone,” and her partner, now her husband, confirmed that there was no sign of the former difficulties. Notice, also, that by the end of the session she was speaking of the trauma almost casually, and she was placing it into a self-affirming framework: “Well, that was twenty years ago. I was just a little girl. I couldn’t protect myself then the way I can now.” Such shifts in relationship to a traumatic memory that has been emotionally cleared with a therapist who uses an energy approach are not unusual, and they can give you a new lease on your sexual life.

Men’s Ancestral Programming; Women’s Ancestral Programming

The old quip that “God gave men two brains but only enough blood to run one at a time” has been excruciatingly played out in innumerable broken relationships and the downfall of many a politician. It is also a source of tension in the psyches of men and women and even many happy relationships. Marianne Williamson describes the dilemma in evolutionary terms: For our distant ancestors, “nature needed men to go from one woman to another, impregnating us as they went along to propagate the species. And women needed to settle down with the children, to nurture them so that they would grow into adulthood. Those impulses running through our systems for at least a few hundred thousand years turned man’s instinctive response after sex into, ‘I gotta go,’ while a woman’s still tends to be, ‘Let’s settle down.’”52

Whatever the evolutionary contributions to tension in male-female relationships, nearly half of marriages in the United States end in divorce,⁵³ and infidelity is one of the most frequently stated reasons for divorce.⁵⁴ In one survey, 74 percent of men and 68 percent of women said they would consider an affair if they knew they would never get caught.⁵⁵ Attraction to others is a powerful and often unacknowledged energy in many relationships. It plays out differently in men than in women, and it can be a challenging issue for couples who are committed to going the distance with one another. This closing section of the chapter grapples with the biological underpinnings of this energetic conundrum.

Why Men Stray

A study that interviewed 120 young men about their relationships found conflict about fidelity to be a common theme. Emotionally they wanted to be monogamous, but their brains still craved sex outside their relationship. After a romantic phase of six months to two years, despite the love and intimacy they had come to share with their partner, their discontent grew until it felt like the relationship had placed them in a “form of socially compelled sexual incarceration.”56 They did not want to break up with their partners, but even as the emotional bonds deepened, a cognitive dissonance occurred (in this case, wanting two things that are mutually exclusive) as they tried to reconcile their sexual desires with their desire not to hurt their partner and honor the social mandates of a committed relationship. Simply stated by the investigator, they “want something they do not want.”⁵⁷ Making matters worse was that they feared telling their partners about their desire for sex with others. Because of cultural beliefs that equate such desires with depravity or at least no longer being in love, regardless of the strength of the emotional bond, they feared that their partners would break up with them if they were honest. Cheating seemed less risky to the stability of their relationships than honesty, giving them a chance to have sex outside the relationship while maintaining emotional intimacy with their partner.

According to neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, “both men and women have a deep misunderstanding of the biological and social instincts that drive the other sex.”⁵⁸ For starters, a human male produces enough sperm in two weeks to impregnate every fertile female on the planet,⁵⁹ and men have two and a half times as much space devoted to sexual drive in the brain area where lust originates as women.⁶⁰ With forefathers who pursued fertile females having been selected to pass along their genes, modern men are physiologically primed to respond to appealing sexual opportunities independent of their values or druthers. Across all cultures, men evolved to focus on features that indicate health and fertility. Firm ample breasts, a small waist, flat stomach, full hips, clear skin, and facial symmetry add up to a look that “tells his brain that she’s young, healthy, and probably not pregnant with another man’s child.”⁶¹ His primary “mate-detection circuit comes prewired” to notice women with these physical characteristics, and when it does, “his brain’s ‘must have’ sequence” is, at least for a moment, triggered.⁶² A high-octane mix of testosterone and dopamine bathes brain regions that fuel his cravings for the blissful euphoric experience promised by the raw data his eyes are sending to his visual cortex. The attraction is magnetic. Like it or not, these rude physiological facts are ingredients in the male’s side of the physical-psychological-interpersonal-social-spiritual-energetic stew called marriage. In energetic terms, it takes, as we showed earlier, little provocation for a man’s Root Chakra energies to rush up to his Heart Chakra and surge “out of his body like a heat-seeking missile speeding toward a near stranger” (here).

Why Women Stray

Our culture’s assumptions about monogamy are captured in the popular ditty (often incorrectly attributed to William James), “Higamous, hogamous, woman is monogamous; hogamous, higamous, man is polygamous.” For more than three decades, David has invoked this to explain peculiarities of his gender as well as to give himself license to keep some measure of self-respect amid feelings and urges he would prefer to no longer be experiencing. For Donna, it gave license for her to assume that males were an inferior, lascivious, unconscious lot, not wired to really love. David wanted to counter this viewpoint, sensing that it somehow did not reflect favorably on him, but he would be muted when the discussion would progress to rapists, plunderers, and philanderers as cases in point.

For the umpteenth time in our long relationship, we were having the higamous/hogamous discussion when David, who had been reading about the biological underpinnings of sexual behavior in animals and humans for this very chapter, decided to take a new tack in trying to defend himself from Donna’s “holier than thou” attitude. Donna was not aware of any urge to not be monogamous within her primary relationship (unless she had been abandoned—physically or emotionally), and she viewed men who didn’t hold to the same standard with contempt. That is not to say that she wasn’t aware of her attractions to other men. She was, and she had no compunction about freely sharing such feelings. She had, in fact, recently mentioned how drawn she was to the mathematician and cosmologist Brian Swimme while we were watching a DVD of his, The Universe Story.

David said, “Okay, let me give you a hypothetical. Imagine us living as we do, happy with each other. Brian Swimme is living next door. He lives alone. He has respectfully signaled to you that he finds you attractive. I am getting old and able to make love only occasionally. I also travel a lot. Are you still monogamous? Or say we’re younger. . . . We’ve had two children with severe congenital health problems. You desire a third child and everything in you wants this child to be healthy. You are walking by Mr. Swimme’s home one day while I am at work. He looks so healthy and so strong. He invites you in. You are in the fertile time of your cycle. Are you still monogamous?” Donna: “Okay, okay, I get it! A woman’s hogamous can go higamous. But men who fool around are still jerks!”

After working intensively with hundreds of women, we believe that women stray outside their primary relationship most often because they feel unloved or seek affirmation their partner is not providing. Variety, excitement, waning passion, and revenge are other reasons women give for cheating. Personal histories that include parental or other abuse can also make commitment to one partner difficult. Beyond these more obvious explanations are biological predispositions that may influence a woman’s motivations in ways that are outside her awareness. Females in the wild generally choose their mate based on whether he has “what it takes to be a good protector and provider.”63 That is still our basic programming. Interestingly a woman is not necessarily primed to select the genetically superior man.

• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •

While everyone is unique, here are some features that stood out when, at a party, Donna compared the energies of men and women who were obviously “on the make.”

Men on the Prowl

If men only knew how unattractive their energies are when they are trying to be suave and debonair for the purpose of seduction, they would take a different tack. The strongest energy emanating from a man who is making an uninvited pass comes from both his Root Chakra and his Third Chakra, which is at the solar plexus. The energy feels aggressive yet strangely impersonal. It has an air of manipulation and dishonesty and a desire to overpower and win at all costs. Part of what makes it so unattractive is that it is not deeply connected to him—it starts on the surface of his body and moves out from there. Its color is usually in the range from sharp yellow to brown. The energies of a man who is genuinely and deeply attracted to a woman have a very different quality. While they also come out of his Root Chakra, they come out of his Heart Chakra as well.

Women on the Prowl

I usually see a receptive rather than aggressive energy. The energy coming out of her heart is large and open, ready to take in and embrace the energy of a suitor. This energy has an air of hope and excitement. Once she is interested in someone, however, this energy becomes more focused. It moves out from her Third Chakra, which carries strategic energy, often geared toward playing to the man’s ego. I can’t exactly describe it except to say that I have seen women follow this energy in their behavior. And, embarrassing as it should be to men, it often works.

In fact, dominant males who are genetically superior often “have a tendency for lower parental investment.”⁶⁴ Single women can smell this, literally. Subtle body odors provide women with a surprising amount of information as their brains respond to cues about whether a man is nurturing and will stick around to help raise his offspring. Preferences also change with the time of the month and with marital status. Yes, scientists actually study these things! Dominant, genetically superior males (who are less likely to help with parenting) literally smell better to women who already have stable partners than they do to women who are unpaired, particularly during the time of the month that they are fertile.⁶⁵ Why might that be?

One of nature’s first priorities in designing women was to favor the survival and success of their young. Once having secured a reliable partner, a woman who is open to a dalliance with a genetically superior man can improve the chances of genetically superior offspring. With nature having set it up so that men don’t know if their partner’s child is theirs, combined with a bit of deception, she can pass on better genes while being supported by the unsuspecting and characteristically more faithful partner. Given all of this, it is not surprising that a good deal of human history has been shaped by fuss about paternity. Another practical reason for a woman to indulge in secret liaisons, beyond psychological benefits such as adventure and affirmation of attractiveness, is to ensure that she will indeed be impregnated. Another is that a clandestine lover may bring gifts that will benefit her and her children, which in our ancestors’ time usually meant food. Her genetic programming not only drives her to find a mate who will help her raise her young, it then drives her to see that those young have the best genes and resources she can attract.

These Forces Play Out within You in a Way That Is Unique to You

To become conscious of these forces in a manner that will be useful, the starting point is not only to read about their place in human evolution, as presented above, but also to recognize how they may or may not influence you at this point in your life and in your relationship. They do not operate in equal measure in all people or consistently across time. For instance, you may be a man whose sexual interest focuses only on your partner, or you may be a woman who can enjoy multiple sexual relationships with no emotional commitment.

Instructive here is a story Brizendine likes to tell of the side-blotched lizard. The males use three different mating strategies, and the tactics they use match the color of their throat. Males with orange throats guard a group of females, and they mate with all of them. Males with yellow throats sneak into the “harems” of the orange-throated males and mate with their females whenever they can get away with it. Males with throats that are a brilliant blue are wired for an entirely different strategy: They mate with only one female and guard her ardently. From a biological perspective, Brizendine concludes, these are three “successful mating strategies for lizards and for human males, too. I affectionately call my husband a blue-throat.”66 With humans, however, whose throats are not conveniently color-coded, the truth is that imprints for more than one mating strategy are probably fighting it out, or have fought it out at least at some point in your life. Bringing your consciousness to the battle makes a beneficial resolution more likely.

Does Monogamy Best Serve the Man, the Woman, Both, or Neither?

The above discussion shows that higamous/hogamous may not be the final words about male and female sexual drives after all. In The Myth of Monogamy, evolutionary biologist David Barash and his wife, Judith Lipton, a psychiatrist who specializes in women’s issues, note that the traditional belief is that in nature as well as in civilized society, the female’s “yearning for cozy monogamous domesticity was supposed to be as strong as the male tendency to mate with as many different partners as possible.”⁶⁷ DNA analysis and related technologies have, however, found that even in the relatively few animal species that were believed to be monogamous, “females are not nearly as reliably monogamous as had been thought . . . they are active sexual adventurers in their own right.”⁶⁸ Bird species that had been seen as being among nature’s prototypes for monogamy often have eggs spawned by more than one male in the same nest, “tell me it ain’t so” sentiments notwithstanding.

If aspiring toward monogamy, as Barash and Lipton and many other social scientists have concluded, goes “against some of the deepest-seated evolutionary inclinations with which biology has endowed most creatures, Homo sapiens included,”⁶⁹ why is it the bedrock of our culture? Not only does the Sixth Commandment demand “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” the Tenth Commandment prohibits you from even enjoying the fantasy. This has, however, proven to be difficult to legislate. Anthropologists and historians of family and sexual arrangements have had to recognize that “the triumph of monogamy” has also been the “triumph of” unfaithfulness, marital deceit, and dishonesty.70 The title of the section of our workshops that addresses these issues is called “What Was God Thinking?!”

Given the power of the male’s proclivity for conspicuous and relatively indiscriminate fooling around, monogamy is often thought of as an arrangement that benefits women more than men. Historically, however, monogamy actually protected the interests of men more than of women. According to Barash and Lipton, having no restrictions on male sexual activity “is a disaster for most men.”⁷¹ The reason is that, unchecked, a small number of dominant males tend to reign over most of the females. While modern laws and mores counter this tendency, it was dramatic in many preindustrial societies. One of the most beautiful love poems ever written, The Song of Songs, is attributed to King Solomon. He was apparently writing from experience. The Old Testament reports that he had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, an innovative strategy for not being tempted to break the Sixth Commandment. Among the Incans, the four top political officials in a region (from petty chief to chief) were allotted seven, eight, fifteen, and thirty wives, respectively, while the emperor kept thousands of women.⁷² Those of you who are good at math can see the problems this might cause for men in the middle or lower ranks. Monogamy also helps ensure a man’s paternity and the inheritance rights that go with it. In addition, monogamy keeps the father around to protect his offspring against the little quirk in the brains of male mammals to kill the infants of other males,⁷³ a credible threat when living in nature “red of tooth and claw.”

Meanwhile, Barash and Lipton go on, if a woman plays her hand well, the arrangement allows her to be impregnated by men with superior genes and higher status than her own while ensuring that she and her offspring will be provided for by a man inclined to make a strong investment in progeny he believes to be his. Oxytocin is a powerful propellant for women to bond with one partner, but the historical record as well as evolutionary biology suggest that both men and women are wired, though in very different ways, for sexual liaisons outside their primary relationship. As we look at these scholarly conclusions, we ask ourselves, “What’s wrong with this picture?” A lot, actually, if you are wanting your relationship to take you to the most profound depths that two people can reach together.

Will Self-Defeating Impulses Always Run the Show?

Here’s some good news. In a carefully documented scholarly paper called “Is Biology Destiny?,” philosopher Phil Gasper concluded that “the key to our ancestors’ success was their enormous flexibility and ability to learn, not patterns of behavior hardwired into their brains.”74 The male inclination to spread his seed far and wide may be powerful, but it is not a biological imperative. The female inclination toward suitors other than her partner may be powerful, but it is not a biological imperative. As our brains evolved and increased in size, no longer were rigid biological programs the basis of social behavior. We are endowed with the neural connections, logic, and memory to steer beyond the hazards inherent in our biological instincts. We are capable of navigating in ways that are not bound to outmoded strategies in our hardwired biological programming. Even as legions of conflicting biological and social forces are scurrying around in our psyches when we commit ourselves to “till death do us part,” the evolutionary advantage of the human brain is in its enormous flexibility. Polygamy is a choice. Monogamy is a choice. Most of the women we know are less driven by the pursuit of better genes than by the pursuit of attention, love, and affection.

Monogamy vs. Monotony

Monogamy, if from the heart, is an agreement to enter into deep communion with another human being. . . . While the mortal mind sees monogamy as a feast for guilt, the divine mind sees it as a feast for love. At the level of our souls, we do not want monogamy in order to imprison each other, but to free each other—to create a context where the deepest level of safety might occur . . . that the deepest level of growth might occur.

—MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, ENCHANTED LOVE⁷⁵

Our teen years were shaped by the sixties. As our outlooks were developing, we were exposed to free love, women’s lib, open marriage, and the impact of contraception on sexual attitudes and behavior. We will admit to having considered numerous arrangements during our long and tumultuous relationship. But we are fully convinced at this point, and have been for many years, that every attempt to support freedom and variety through sexual liaisons outside our relationship had high potential for creating pain and distance. The damage would far outweigh the fleeting pleasures and even the deep soulful connections. In whatever way they operate within you, sexual drives are powerful forces that can be (1) squandered, (2) used in ways that are divisive to your primary relationship, or (3) channeled in ways that deepen it and make it more wondrous. This is why we have learned to enjoy sharing any attractions with one another—recall Brian Swimme—rather than trying to suppress them or allow them to take us in directions that divert us from intimacy.

We realized long ago that if we want our partnership to grow closer and more profound, our priority, even when things become strained or stale between us, needs to be on renewing the vitality of our own relationship. While it requires some chutzpah to broadcast that we have discovered what was right there in the Sixth Commandment all along about sexual relationships outside a marriage, we are also broadcasting the deep but elusive truth that monogamy need not equal monotony. Keeping our relationship fresh and vital keeps each of us fresh and vital.

Marriages that have gone the distance in a manner that supports each partner’s growth tend to remain interesting and exciting. Sue Johnson, who developed the most effective approach to couple counseling that has been investigated by scientific research, observes that “hot sex doesn’t lead to secure love,” but rather “secure attachment leads to hot sex” as well as to “love that lasts.”76 Couples whose love does last have developed a sense of deep understanding, safety, and soul connection—all of which play into the fact that many women report that they enjoy sex more after years of marriage than they did when they were first married.⁷⁷ As Mary Jo Rapini observed: “My husband says things and touches me now in a way that is much deeper than when we first married. . . . Our way of communicating is different than it was. I get him, and he gets me. Couples who have been happily married for a long time understand the concept of feeling ‘freer’ with marriage than they were being single.”⁷⁸ Asked about his many opportunities to stray while discussing his fifty-year marriage with Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman replied, “Why go out for a hamburger when you have steak at home?”⁷⁹ Channeling your passion into your relationship brings out the beauty in your partner and your partnership.

We are not saying or even feeling that our path should be your path. If you have found a better arrangement, go for it! We know of polyamorous arrangements that were done in a manner that felt sacred to the participants. But if you want to use your sexuality as a sacrament for the deepest spiritual connection available to you and your partner, monogamy paves a path that can lead there. Writing about sacred sexuality, Anaiya Sophia states it strongly. To enter “the space of deep communion” allowed by “the penetrating process of sexual intercourse . . . there must be no other man or woman on the sidelines . . . The back door of your sexual exchanges needs to be firmly closed for this sacrament to work alchemically. . . . Energetically this sacred act can only take place when we close the back door and cast instead a sacred circle.”80

On to Chapter 9

Your sexual relationship is the first of the mutually created aspects of love we are addressing in this final section of the book. Building a conscious partnership is next.