Great Sex, Naturally

Great sex is your birthright; you came into being as the result of orgasm, and your body is perfectly designed for sexual pleasure. You have specialized receptors in your brain, vagina, and clitoris—and throughout your physiology—that serve no other purpose than to give you sensual satisfaction. But even though you were born with the potential for great sex, it’s not a given. You have to nurture your capacity for it, allow it time to grow and flourish, and nourish it with care and loving attention.

Your capacity for sexual pleasure is intimately connected to every aspect of your health. To enjoy sex, you need a healthy mind and body, freedom from pain and discomfort, and the energy to act on your desires. Of course, you won’t be likely to have great sex if you’re chronically ill, tired, depressed, feeling burned-out, struggling with difficult sexual issues, or harboring negative feelings about sex.

But the relationship between your sexuality and your health is far more dynamic than the obvious correlation between your ability to experience erotic sensations and your overall well-being. There are myriad connections between your capacity for pleasure and countless choices you make every day. Everything about your lifestyle—including your state of mind, what you eat, how you exercise, and how efficiently you eliminate toxins—can affect your capacity for sexual pleasure. Over time, you can fully manifest your potential for great sex with the right choices, or you can diminish it with unhealthy ones. Just as people who let their health go for many years may lose the natural function of an organ or system, it’s possible to gradually undermine your natural capacity for sexual gratification with lifestyle choices that relentlessly torpedo your libido. Great sex can be yours for as long as you live, but you have to choose it again and again with a lifestyle that supports it. The choice is yours; choose it or lose it.

Not only does abundant mental and physical health increase your capacity to enjoy sex, but sex, in turn, gives you many health benefits. In fact, a climax a day keeps the doctor away: sex reduces stress, burns calories, increases your circulation (bringing nutrients and fresh oxygen to your tissues), and releases “feel-good” oxytocin and endorphins, as well as prolactin (which promotes calmness and reduced blood pressure). And sex has many other potential benefits as well: it may help strengthen your immunity; aid in pain relief (including that of menstrual cramps and migraines); lower the risk of heart attacks, endometriosis, and preterm deliveries in pregnant women; promote consistent menstrual cycles; stimulate your vagina’s natural lubrication; and prevent urinary incontinence. Some research also suggests a link between frequency of sex and longevity.

Health and sex are, in a sense, mutually reinforcing: the greater your health, the greater your capacity to enjoy sex; and the more you enjoy sex, the greater your health. Health makes you sexy, and sex makes you healthy!

In Part I of this book, you’ll explore the four cornerstones essential for nurturing your potential to have great sex: your mind and spirit, diet, exercise habits, and ability to detoxify. We begin with your mind and spirit because they’re uniquely pivotal; all of the choices that influence your sexual destiny emerge from your mind, after all. Through the power of choice making, your mind will be the crucial determining factor for every one of the tools you’ll discover in this book for building your health and libido. Many of the benefits you stand to gain will be for naught if your mind and spirit aren’t healthy.

Your state of mind is also connected to your capacity for sexual pleasure in innumerable other ways. Not only does your ability to fully enjoy sex require a healthy mind and spirit, the clarity of consciousness to pursue your passions, and freedom from unhealthy emotions, but every state of mind you experience can have profound effects on your physiology and resistance to disease, as well as your potential for great sex. Your capacity for sexual pleasure is inseparable from your mind—in a sense, pleasure is nothing more than the awareness of pleasure—which may make your mind the ultimate measure of pleasure.

In this chapter you’ll explore ways in which you can engage your mind and spirit to enhance your health and change your life—especially in order to create or maintain a healthy love relationship and a fulfilling sex life. By tapping into the strength of your mind and spirit with the thoughts, tools, and techniques in the following pages, you can vastly expand your possibilities for enjoying great sex, naturally.

Your mind and spirit are related to your physical brain, and thus in order to most effectively use the power of your mind and spirit to enhance your libido, it helps to begin by knowing how your brain can affect your sexuality. Let’s take a look at your brain health, and some critical connections between your brain chemistry, your sexual health, and the intense emotions you can feel in a relationship.

All of the steps you’ll discover in the next chapter for building the foundation of your general health and supporting your sexuality with diet, exercise, and detoxification also support your brain health; every feature of your Great Sex Lifestyle is brain boosting. At the same time, improving your brain health gives you additional paybacks everywhere in your life. Neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones play key roles in all your thoughts, moods, and feelings—including your ability to feel love, sexual attraction, pleasure, and orgasm. And as your most powerful sex organ, your brain contains everything you think about sex.

Sex, in turn, affects your brain by releasing the important brain chemicals oxytocin and endorphins, which can improve your moods and elevate your tolerance for pain. And research shows that when you have an orgasm, the area of your brain that controls fear and anxiety is temporarily disengaged, which potentially benefits your nervous system.

The sex-related brain chemicals released in your body can vary, depending on which phase of a relationship you’re in. When you first fall in love and during the early stages of a romance, you’re more likely to be bathed by the sex hormones estrogen and testosterone (this is true for both women and men) and the neurotransmitters adrenaline, serotonin, and dopamine. Increased adrenaline can elevate your heart rate and cause you to perspire when you think of your new love. A rise in serotonin may explain, in part, your preoccupation with thinking about him; research shows that serotonin levels of new sexual partners can be similar to those of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. And increased dopamine can incite strong sensations of pleasure that have effects on your brain similar to cocaine (but without harming your body), giving you surges of energy, reducing your need for food and sleep, and stimulating your capacity for focused attention—especially the attention you give to your new relationship.

After the initial stages of love, two hormones appear to play vital roles in the development of long-term attachment: vasopressin and oxytocin. Research indicates that vasopressin, which is released after sex, promotes bonding and devotedness. And oxytocin, the “intimacy hormone” released by both women and men during orgasm, also promotes bonding and deepens feelings of attachment, especially after sex. And your bond grows stronger, research suggests, with each act of lovemaking. In the realm of your hormones, as in so many others, sex connects; the more you make love, the more love you make.

As you continue a relationship, gradual physiological changes occur in a portion of your brain called the limbic system—the “emotional center,” developed in your infancy and childhood. Your limbic system helps you form attachments to others, and plays a part in your ability to find another person attractive and fall in love. During a long-term relationship, you become “limbically connected” with your partner; both of your limbic systems lay down new neural cells, in effect shifting your brain anatomies in response to interactions with one another over time.

Your capacity for limbic linkage explains, to some extent, the depths of feeling and commitment you can experience in a long-term relationship, and why you may feel at times as if your identity becomes fused with your partner’s. As Thomas Lewis, M.D., wrote of limbic connectedness in A General Theory of Love: “Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.” The force of limbic bonding is one reason why it can take years to recover from the loss of a long-term relationship; your limbic system’s circuitry is without its “other half,” the specific person it had formed for.

Being aware of your brain’s natural physiological tendencies can help you understand thoughts and emotions you experience around issues of love and sex, but your mind and spirit are greater than the sum of your brain’s cells, chemical messengers, and physical components. Intimate relationships are profoundly spiritual and emotional, and can’t be reduced to these factors alone. It remains largely mysterious that your evolving mind and spirit can connect with another evolving mind and spirit, love deeply, commit to sharing yourself over time, and express love through the physical medium of sex.

At the same time, by harnessing the power of your mind, you can enhance your natural ability to live in the mystery of love. Let’s look at some important ways you can use your mind to build and maintain a strong love relationship and a healthy sex life. All of them can be put to good use in conjunction with the other tools and techniques you’ll explore in the chapters ahead. While you’re busy building your libido and your overall health, you can be relationship building at the same time!

—Creating time. It may seem obvious that you need quality time alone with your partner, without the intrusions of the world, to have a dynamic, supportive love relationship and experience great sex. Yet many people seem to forget to find time for relationship nurturing, perhaps because they feel caught up in a culture that places higher priorities on other things. One of the secrets of partners who evolve together over many years, and continue to love one another and enjoy a healthy sex life, is creating time to spend together and fully appreciate one another—which means more than just making time for sex.

In the modern world, many couples are separated on a daily basis by work and other responsibilities, but with the strength of your mind, you can turn this to your advantage. Humans are sometimes distinguished from other animals because of our unusual capacity for delayed gratification; we can imagine enjoyable experiences well in advance, and doing so may enhance pleasure. This pertains not only to simply spending time with your partner, but also to sex: in a sense, you can enhance in advance. If you have to wait, let anticipation increase gratification.

—Communication and sex. For many couples in healthy relationships, there are profound connections between the quality of their communication and the quality of their sex life. When you share intimate thoughts and feelings with one another on a daily basis over time—not merely discussions of household functions, paying bills, or material possessions, but your most personal issues—you continue to grow and evolve together, and you become closer in every way, including sexually. It’s almost as if the natural give-and-take of good communication, along with all of its other relationship-building benefits, has an added aphrodisiac effect.

—Sexual trust. Building an emotionally safe, solid relationship can be critical to the health of your partnership and your sex life. Many women have difficulty achieving orgasm, or even becoming aroused, unless they’re in a relationship that allows them to fully let go, trust, and release control. Modern brain research backs this up; brain scans show that during orgasm women—unlike men, who experience stimulation of their “reward” circuitry—have reduced activity in brain areas that govern self-control, moral reasoning, social judgment, and vigilance. Your capacity for pleasure appears to be closely linked with your brain’s ability to release inhibition, suspend judgment, and let down your guard, all of which may be possible only when you’re in a relationship that feels dependable and secure.

—Supporting your right brain. Your brain is bicameral, which means it’s composed of “two houses,” or halves. Each has functions that offer you a different perspective of the world; your left hemisphere is more logical and linear, and your right more intuitive and nonlinear. Many women caught up in the busy world of day-to-day responsibilities function highly from their left brain but have lost touch with the holistic, nurturing potential of their right brain.

In My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor describes how, after being trained to rely heavily on her left hemisphere as a brain scientist, she experienced a stroke that damaged her left brain and opened her eyes to the workings of her right hemisphere. During her recovery, while her right brain dominated, she experienced blissful sensations of love, compassion, peace, and interconnectedness with all things. Her descriptions are reminiscent of the teachings of Eastern religions and ancient meditation practices on becoming “one” with the cosmos.

Tapping into the right side of your brain can help you maintain a balanced life, improve your sense of well-being, and nurture your capacity for a healthy intimate relationship. It can also get you in touch with “the sensuality mentality”—your natural ability to experience all the joys of loving sexual union. Your two-sided brain is exquisitely designed to allow you full awareness of sexual pleasure; it is, if you will, your great sex duplex. But for many women, it’s the power of the right brain that allows them to experience pleasure while disengaging from other mental activities, in a sense liberating sexuality from intellectuality.

You don’t need to have a stroke to cultivate the potential of your right brain; you can stimulate its neuronal circuitry with virtually any activity that gives you a temporary reprieve from tasks governed by your left brain and engages your natural intuitive powers. In addition to meditation, examples include art, music, dance, yoga, and many forms of spontaneity and play.

The quotation at the beginning of this chapter says it all: your “mind is the most powerful instrument in the universe.” You can do practically anything you put your mind to, and you can put your mind to practically anything. Your thoughts influence your feelings and behavior from one moment to the next, so at any point in time you can change your thoughts and change your life. As Louise Hay has written in Heal Your Body, “by changing our thinking patterns, we can change our experiences.” Your conscious intentions and beliefs can shape your destiny, and you can choose happiness, health, beneficial relationships, love, and sexual fulfillment. The most important step you can take to enhance your sexuality is to consciously choose a set of thoughts and beliefs that will create, not negate, great sex—in short, a credo for your libido.

This is underscored by an understanding of how your brain functions. One of its most wonderful qualities is plasticity—its capacity to be malleable and changeable. By consciously altering the thoughts that dominate your life, you redirect your perceptions. Over time, this changes neurochemicals released, and reshapes your brain’s circuitry by creating new nerve tracks and altering your very cells. By choosing new thoughts, you can thus “rewire” your brain, override old patterns of thinking and behavior, and ultimately transform your relationship to the world and to your sexual partner.

The key to choosing new, more health-affirming thoughts is becoming conscious of your present thinking patterns and choices and how they may be affecting your health, relationships, or sexuality. By increasing your awareness, you can discover areas where you may be unknowingly working against yourself—for example, with thoughts that subvert your health or sabotage a relationship—and replace them with thoughts you need in order to make better choices. As Wayne Dyer says in his book There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem, it’s a matter of keeping your focus on what you want in your life: “If your thoughts are on what you don’t want … you will act upon those thoughts and more of what you don’t want will keep showing up.” You’re well on your way to achieving a great sex life if you simply keep your eyes on the prize.

Let’s look at some do-it-yourself methods you can use to clear your mind and get in touch with the life-altering potential of your thoughts to support a relationship or your sexuality:

—Making time for change. This means setting aside quiet times to calmly reflect on your life and examine your thought patterns. It’s about using “mental floss” at least once daily to clear your mind of all the accumulated debris and distractions of commercials, television, magazines, computers, e-mail, social media, and cell phones. By getting away from all of the mental chatter, and disconnecting from the potential negativity of anything that might trigger you emotionally, you can concentrate on whatever positive changes you want to generate for your health or your sex life.

—Affirmations. You can use positive self-talk—words repeated aloud or in your mind—to free yourself from negative thoughts and focus on your goals. Consistency is helpful; you need sufficient repetition over a period of time for the positive effects of affirmations to permeate your consciousness and bring about changes in your brain. Examples of affirmations include: I make choices that benefit me, I excel at reaching my goals, I take care of and nurture myself, I choose radiant health, I focus on the positive, and I achieve my dreams. Examples pertaining more directly to your sexuality include: I fulfill my sexual nature, I’m destined to attain my ultimate sexual satisfaction, My body effortlessly manifests sexual pleasure, I love the expression of my sexual energy, A wonderful, loving relationship happens naturally for me, and I can create whatever degree of love and sexual fulfillment I choose.

If you ever catch yourself having a self-deprecating thought, make a point to assert affirmations that correct it. You can also use affirmations at any other time—for example, while you’re stuck in traffic, or waiting for an appointment. They may be particularly effective when you awaken in the morning, and your mind is like a blank canvas. One of my patients—who’s not only a strong swimmer but also an exceptionally healthy, loving, and kind person—recently turned 90. Her secret? It turns out that for many years, during her morning swims, she has said to herself, in rhythm with each stroke, I’m strong, healthy, loving, kind.

—Meditation. Many meditation techniques that focus on breathing can be calming and clarifying, and help you get in touch with your mind and spirit—and their ability to shape your health and sexuality. For starters, try this simple technique: For a few minutes each day, sit comfortably, close your eyes, and consciously inhale by first expanding your stomach to fill your lower lungs and then expanding your chest to fill your upper lungs. Slowly exhale in the same order, first using your stomach to expel air from your lower lungs, then allowing your chest to expel air from your upper lungs. You can enhance this technique by visualizing that you’re inhaling life-giving, clear white light, and exhaling gray smoke containing any negative thoughts lingering in your body.

—Keeping a journal. Expressing your thoughts in writing is another powerful way of heightening your awareness and focusing your mind and spirit on any changes you want to create for your health and sexuality. The act of physically spelling out your intentions on paper, with its unique reliance on your mind-hand connection, can effectively reroute neural circuits in your brain, redirect your consciousness, and supersede old thoughts. If you keep a journal, it’s a good idea to make entries on a regular basis. As with affirmations, you may find that writing first thing in the morning is especially rewarding.

Your self-esteem is of paramount importance in creating a strong intimate relationship and a healthy sex life. Your ability to love yourself is a prerequisite to loving another, and self-esteem affects every aspect of your life. Let’s look at how you can gauge your self-esteem status, particularly with issues relating to sexuality, and whether you need to improve it.

You may have low self-esteem if you frequently feel sexually inhibited, insecure about your appearance, or ashamed of sexual activity you engage in. Other common indicators include difficulty achieving orgasm (either alone or with a partner), having sex with partners you don’t love, or believing that there’s something “wrong” with you sexually.

The way you choose your sexual partner can also reveal something about your level of self-esteem. If you have high self-esteem, you’re likely to feel attracted to a potential partner who has it as well, and you’re also more apt to use the power of your mind to assist you in making a healthy choice. If your self-esteem is low, you may feel drawn to a partner with similar low self-regard, which can be compounded by believing that you don’t deserve a better choice. You may also be more prone to “impulse buy” when choosing a partner, with potentially disastrous results; the person you find attractive on the spur of the moment isn’t always a wise choice.

Another way to assess the level of your self-esteem is by looking at your behavior patterns once you’re in a relationship. The ways in which you interact with your partner can tell you a lot about how you think and feel about yourself. The following is a summary of what your relationship can reveal about your self-esteem quotient. No one factor definitively means you have either high or low self-esteem. These indicators are simply to give you an overall sense of where you stand in your own estimation.

If you have healthy self-esteem, you communicate honestly with your partner, you openly express your feelings when you need to, and your relationship supports your inner emotional self. You feel a clear sense of your own identity, you have the courage to be yourself, and you’re comfortable saying no if you don’t want to go along with something your partner wants to do, sexually or otherwise. You bring all aspects of your personality to the relationship and live fully and authentically in the present, as opposed to putting up a facade of who you are.

Another sign of your high self-esteem is that your partner displays all of these same qualities. You love, support, nurture, and respect him just as much as he does you. Your relationship is reciprocal, and you evolve together. It gives both of you a solid base and a constant source of strength from which you can thrive as whole people, pursue your dreams, and maximize your potential as a couple and as individuals. And as two self-esteeming people, you’re more likely to experience a healthy sex life.

If you have low self-esteem, you may exhibit one of two characteristic behavior patterns in a relationship:

1. In one scenario, you present yourself as a victimized “wounded woman,” and give off signals that you need help. You tend to attract men who feel compelled to save you from your predicament—whether that be poor health, personal problems, eating disorders or other addictive behaviors, or professional failings. Although your partner may make valiant efforts to help, you’re likely to give him mixed signals and sabotage the relationship with destructive impulses or behaviors, because you’re unable to change as long as your self-esteem remains low.

2. The second, more common scenario is almost the opposite. You tend to “lose yourself” in a relationship, sacrificing your needs, emotional security, or even physical safety in an effort to please your partner, conform to his ideas of who you should be, or “rescue” him from difficulties in his life. You may hide parts of yourself that don’t support your partner’s needs, let go of your dreams, suppress your creativity, or “self-collapse” (disappear emotionally) when conflict arises. You’re liable to experience lots of drama in the relationship, with poor communication leading to emotionally volatile outbursts of arguing, stress, and unhappiness, which can be all-consuming and further prevent you from pursuing your goals. You tend to stay in the relationship, even if your partner is verbally or physically abusive, because you’re afraid to be alone or believe he couldn’t live without you.

In this second scenario, the effects of low self-esteem can be of particular consequence for the quality of your sexual relationship. You may be so focused on your partner’s pleasure that it interferes with or negates your own ability to experience pleasure, or be so afraid of disappointing him or being rejected by him that you avoid sex altogether. At times, you may go through the motions of having sex, even though you don’t want to, because you believe it will make the relationship work. One way or another, your sexual needs aren’t met. Many women in this category exhibit the “chameleon syndrome”: they conform to whatever sexual tone is set by their partner. As one 60-year-old told me, “I’ve had many relationships, but always acquiesced to the sexual needs of the man I was with. I still don’t know what my own sexual needs would be if it were up to me.” She’d lived through the sexual revolution, yet never allowed herself to experience her own natural sexuality.

In either of the preceding scenarios, your relationship tends to be nonreciprocal; you’re not true partners, and the relationship doesn’t ultimately help either of you achieve your potential, as your low self-esteem prevents you from being loved for who you are or otherwise gets in the way. And because you don’t have high self-esteem, your partner may not esteem you either, which can further exacerbate the problem and prevent you from experiencing a healthy sex life.

What to Do If You Need to Build Your Self-Esteem

If you have low self-esteem, the good news is that there are effective ways you can address the condition, rebuild your self-confidence, get past unhealthy sexual patterns, and tap into your highest potential. An in-depth exploration of solutions for low self-esteem is beyond the scope of this book, but the following suggestions can help you to start moving in the right direction:

—Seek out a therapist. This may be the single most important step you can take to improve your self-esteem. A good therapist is a catalyst you can use to get where you want to go much more quickly. Therapy can help you identify patterns in your behavior, sexuality, and communication that may undermine your efforts to become a more whole, self-esteeming person. By examining your early relationships with your parents or primary caregivers, you may discover where feelings of low self-worth began. Becoming conscious of your patterns, strengths, and weaknesses allows you to shift your perspective and ultimately change your behavior and your choices.

—Affirm your worth. To access your natural ability to be a healthy, vibrant, sexual woman, you first have to realize that you have that potential. True health and beauty come from the inside out; as the saying goes, you’re as beautiful as you feel. When you get in touch with your self-esteeming, gorgeous self, you take better care of yourself and you emanate energy that attracts other self-esteeming people. As explained earlier in this chapter, you can change your brain, and your actions, through the potent influence of your thoughts. You can use affirmations to connect with the intuitive, nonlinear power of your right brain, change your beliefs about yourself, and elevate your self-esteem. Examples of affirmations for boosting self-esteem include: I honor and value myself, I have unlimited worth and potential, I’m beautiful and attractive, and I’m worthy of the highest love.

In this chapter we’ve considered a diversity of approaches for using your mind and spirit to nourish your natural potential for sexual fulfillment. We’ve touched on your brain health and how it can affect your sexual energy and the emotions you experience when you’re in love. We’ve also looked at ways you can use your mind to support a relationship, supplant limiting habits of thought, empower your sexuality, and more.

As you move forward with the rest of this book, remember that with your mind—the miraculous entity that gives you the power of choice—you can achieve practically anything. Continually engaging the strength of your mind to keep making healthy choices will inestimably boost your ability to reap the benefits of the many sex-enhancing tips and secrets you’ll discover in subsequent chapters. Remaining mindful that mindfulness itself can multiply the potential of every page will transform your life and lead you to vastly greater sexual health.