Sensation

by Isabel Losada

  ‘Well, and the partners of the other two, surely as well? What about a man who is emotionally abusive? And the men too – as I said earlier. It’s hard to love a woman who may, for example, have compulsively lied to you. Or who mocks you – or who sometimes just isn’t kind.’

  ‘That’s why the concept of sacred space exists. When you go into the sacred sexual space it’s all about the energy field in that moment. All the other stuff has to be left outside.’

  ‘I’m pleased that I know someone like you exists.’

  ‘Thank you. Where did that come from?’

  ‘I’m so pleased that someone uses words like those or understands these things. I remember feeling, in several relationships where the sex wasn’t like this, that a man must exist who would be interested in kissing me and be glad to do so. Not because I’m special but because everyone is special. To be with any other human being is an honour, as you say. I remember thinking to myself that love is about energy because a man lay beside me once and shook, but there is so much that tells us that sex is – well, what do you call it?’

  ‘Friction and novelty techniques.’

  ‘You are funny.’

  ‘I’ve not heard anyone put this into words. It’s consoling listening to you. Even the concept of the sacred space, of making love with someone in this way is beautiful.’

  ‘You’ve read about it though?’

  ‘I’ve read the poetry of Rumi. But when most people talk about “creating a sacred space” they are usually talking about putting down some red cushions and lighting candles.’

  ‘That makes me laugh.’

  ‘But to be fair you mean that too. Create a beautiful environment and then make love but you don’t really even need a beautiful environment, you can make love beautifully even in a messy room.’

  ‘So everything else has to be left outside.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t miss the miracle of being alive and having a body and senses. You can give someone happiness and joy just by touching them.’

  ‘Yes. No matter how good the “pleasure” factor, if you feel miserable the following day, it’s not good sex. And if it gives you lasting happiness and joy that IS good sex. That’s just my stance.’

  I love these words. They make sense to me.

  Winter by the Fire

  Take a Deep Breath

  So the last of the leaves are falling from the trees outside today. Instead of sitting at my desk I’m sitting on the sofa with a hot water bottle and a blanket.

  I know that there are several pieces missing on my quest. The most important, I feel instinctively, is the breath. The whole subject of breathing and the breath is key to vitality and to sexuality. I don’t know this because I’ve experienced it fully. I know it because, well, I feel it. I’m convinced that the fact that we hold our breath and don’t breathe correctly is one of the key causes for much of our ‘dis-ease’.

  It’s not just during sex – most of us don’t breathe correctly all the time. I remember years ago I was reading my old friend do-you-want-to-murder-him-Anthony-Robbins on the subject of excellence. He claims, quite logically, that before we can be excellent at anything we need energy, and in order to have energy he doesn’t suggest buying a product or taking one of his seminars. He talks about breathing. He writes about the lymph system and its importance to the body. Then he points out that although the blood has a heart to pump it around the body, lymphatic fluid (which is vital for the immune system) does not. What is vital in moving the lymph around the body? Deep breathing. What oxygenates the blood and keeps us healthy? Deep breathing. What gives life and vitality to every cell in the body? Oxygen through … deep breathing. He says, ‘Look carefully at any “health programme” that doesn’t first and foremost teach you how to fully cleanse your body through effective breathing.’ He writes that if you get nothing else from his writing apart from an understanding of the importance of correct breathing, you could dramatically increase the level of your body’s health. And this is what he recommends in his book, Unlimited Power. He asks that, three times a day, you breathe in to a count of one then hold for a count of four and breathe out to a count of two. Build up your breathing daily at that ratio until you can, comfortably and without straining, lead up to breathing in for a count of seven, holding your breath for a count of 28 and breathing out for a count of 14. He says that this creates a vacuum that sucks lymph through the bloodstream and multiplies the pace at which the body eliminates toxins. Now, is that true? I have no idea. But I do know how it makes me feel when I do this kind of breathing, which is energized.

  And what has this got to do with sex, you ask? Bear with me. I’m just talking about breathing a bit.

  There was an experience I had with ‘re-birthing’. This is the discipline which, according to The British Rebirth Society, ‘brings into awareness not only our unconsciously held beliefs and emotions’ but also the relationships we have with ‘our bodies, ourselves and our world’. When we breathe with this awareness, they say we make it possible to ‘resolve, integrate and heal previously unresolved issues within ourselves’. And how do they do this? In the presence of an experienced breath worker, you breathe a full and relaxed breath with no pause between the in-breath and out-breath. When you do this for between 30 and 50 minutes (don’t try it at home alone) you take in more oxygen than you usually would, which increases the levels of CO2 in the brain. This leads you into a semi-trance-like state in which all kinds of weird things happen. Both mental and even physical memories emerge. For example, you may feel a pain from an injury that you believe was healed long ago. Or you may find yourself sobbing about some loss that you thought forgotten. It’s weird. And my point is? The breath is powerful and changes our state.

  If you just imagine, vividly, right this minute that someone is about to give you an injection in your arm. Put your right arm out and look the other way. If you have imagined it well you may find that you are holding your breath. We do this if some part of us doesn’t want to feel a sensation. And we get into bad habits.

  Here is another way to experiment with how breath influences you. A breath-work teacher and Kundalini practitioner, Susan P. Boles in Canada, studied breath-work after a severe spinal injury. She writes of a method where she was taught by breathing in to four slow counts. She says, ‘Feel the breath expand your ribcage ... you are aiming to fill your whole chest cavity with air. At the end of the fourth, when you think you can’t take any more air in, take a sip more.’ Then you hold for a count of four before exhaling over a count of four. She says that when you think all the air is gone then breathe out some more, assuring us that there is more that can be breathed out even when we think our lungs are empty.

  She writes, ‘You may experience burning in your lungs doing this. But soon, your breathing comes deep and sure. The count of four expands to a count of five or six.’ Then she invites us to concentrate on the emptiness between breathing in and breathing out ... that period of stillness.

  Then she talks about the practice of ‘breathing in from different parts of the body’ that I hear about from many sources. Then I read the instruction to breathe through my genitals. I sigh. What? ‘Breathe in through my genitals?’ I ask with my literal brain being a little dominant. ‘Er?’ But Susan writes that she discovered various weird and woo woo things were possible just practising breathing. She says, ‘Once my lungs were used to doing this, I started to visualize breathing in from different parts of my body. No one taught me this, it just started to happen when I meditated.’

  She would imagine opening up the top of her head or her ‘crown chakra’ and breathing in through there on the inbreath, on the pause she would imagine the energy flowing around her heart chakra and then on the out-breath push the breath through the rest of her body and out through her feet. No one suggests that this is possible literally but there is something about imagining breathing into those places that seems to energize them in a way that we don’t fully understand.

>   Continuing her experiments, she imagines breathing in through her feet, holding it around her heart and breathing out ‘through her head’.

  She says, ‘It was dizzying at first but energy fills me when I do this; that’s incredible.’

  Then there is the famous ‘Breath of Fire’ technique. Kundalini yoga teacher Anne Novak claims that just practising this technique for five minutes a day ‘will strengthen your heart, your lungs and your nervous system’. She says that purifying and oxygenating your blood in this way will give you tremendous energy and even says that if you do this practice it will deepen the way you breathe for the rest of the day which will give you a steady energy not dependent on ‘pick-me-ups’ like tea and coffee and that you’d ‘be able to face life’s challenges with grace and joy’.28

  This is a pretty strong claim for a five-minute breathing technique. So here it is. Sit with a straight spine and place your hand on your diaphragm. Take a deep breath and then using your diaphragm and tummy muscles (very technical here) push all the breath out, with a sound. Then let the air enter in naturally. Then push it out again. Repeat this, initially at one breath a second and then raise it to two breaths a second. Your hand isn’t resting there to do the pushing; it’s just there so that you can feel your diaphragm going in. It’s not so much breath – rather like a whoosh out and a gentle draw in. There is a very good demo of this on YouTube. You’ll find it at ‘Breath of Fire: Kundalini Yoga basics.’

  Then there is ‘alternative nostril breathing’ where you breathe in through one nostril then block it and breathe out through the other; then in again through the one you’ve breathed out of. Then you block that and breathe out through the first. And so on. This one is a slower breath and is simply used to calm you down. It does calm you down.

  Then there is the ‘Ujjayi breath’ in Hatha yoga (again you can look all these different breathing practices up on YouTube). This breathing practice actually means ‘to be victorious’. Such are the claims made on your behalf if you are prepared to become a master of your breath.

  And all this is possible even if you don’t do yoga or don’t want to do yoga. Even if you are bedridden. If you are alive, you can explore the breath.

  Then, outside the field of yoga there is an amazing and comparatively little-known Russian breathing technique called ‘The Buteyko Method’.29 This completely natural breathing teaching reverses asthma and helps even children gain control over and eventually free themselves from their inhalers. They use fun breathing games that include holding your breath and learning how to redress the symptoms that lead to asthma attacks. The Buteyko Method is also used to treat high blood pressure and irritable bowel syndrome. You don’t even have to own a yoga mat to learn about this.

  The reason I’m telling you all this is that I want to consider the importance of the breath to sensation. I don’t think any of us have any clue how important it is to breathe well unless we are breath-workers. I don’t think we realize how much we hold our breath or the effect of shallow breathing on our health. I don’t think we realize the spiritual significance of breathing. I have certainly never heard a sermon on it in any church.

  The Holy Spirit is mostly linked to the notion of breath and life. A priest friend reminds me that the word ‘spirit’ etymologically means ‘breath’. This is how we get the word ‘respiration’. Then, in ancient Greek you have ‘pneuma’ meaning both ‘life force’ (which has given us ‘pneumonia’, a disease of the lungs) and ‘pneumatic’ meaning containing and operated by air. That’s us of course – we are beings containing and operated by air. And in ancient Hebrew and Semitic languages, ‘Ruach’ means ’wind’ or ‘life-giving breath’ – but not just any old ‘life’. It means what we would call ‘spiritual life’. So there is a very close connection between what we call the breath and what we might call ‘Life’, ‘The Source’, ‘The Holy Spirit’ or, even, ‘God’.

  And of course our breath is our surest friend. There are few things of which we can be sure. One is that we will die and another is that until that time we have breath and that this breath gives us not only our life, but the quality of our life depending on the quality of the breath.

  I’ve a friend who is an engineer and for his PhD he designed breathing machines for those whose lungs have been ruined by emphysema. I was reading his dissertation, understanding nothing of the engineering but there was something about the dry language that made it all the more horrific. He described the simple fact that patients who depend on machines for breath would rather be dead but they don’t have the courage to switch off the machines and suffocate. These patients can’t inhale any more. So the machines have to force the air in, which makes them want to gag at every in-breath. Then the out-breath comes naturally as the machine pauses and the lungs simply release. But then the machine forces air in again. And so on. I read my way through descriptions of why each of the current machines is ghastly and that there is really no less agonizing solution. My job, in theory, was simply to copyedit. But sadly my imagination meant that I visualized the patients.

  ‘Did you meet these people?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t pretty.’

  The clergyman who answered my questions about the breath sits regularly and holds people’s hands as they die ‘drowning in the tar inside their own lungs’. I will not write my feelings about the tobacco industry.

  But for the rest of us, who can still breathe without the help of a machine, have you ever explored the breath? How it relates to energy and sex?

  I have a feeling that my lack of understanding about the breath has influenced my sexual experience all my life. And T’s too for that matter. T’s 25-day challenge proved to be a perfect time to explore the influence of the breath on the body. I remember hearing a story once about a sex and relationship coach who had more clients than he had time for. He would meet each of them once and tell them, before they made love, to experiment with breathing together for 30 minutes. Apparently very few of them ever returned. Why? Well, possibly because they found this advice annoying or possibly because they tried it.

  The reason it works is that if you and your partner are on what some people might call different frequencies then it helps you to tune in with each other. This beautiful exercise needs to be done facing each other.

  Traditionally the woman leads the rhythm of the breathing and the man follows her. It’s difficult at first and you feel as if you are going to hyperventilate, you’ve forgotten how to breathe, you’re too hot or your hands go buzzy or all kinds of weird things happen. But just keep breathing. Eventually you’ll calm down and feel as if a gentle stream of energy is running between you. It is.

  This is the energy that Alexey speaks about and of which we may not always be aware. Anyone who has studied physics will tell us that we are made up of a mixture of space, water and energy. If you study Vipassana or any form of yoga you may even have experienced a sensation as if you are a being made purely of energy, and that the muscles and bones don’t seem to belong to that which is you. It may seem a weird way to begin to come together with someone in an act that is of the body, but I’m not suggesting that you do this every night. You need to experience yourselves as energetic bodies and have even a glimpse of how your energies come together, meld and influence each other. This is why you need half an hour.

  It’s a little bit special. I don’t want to tell you too much about my experience this time. I want you to go away and experience it for yourself.

  And to explore energetic exchange and the breath you don’t even need a sexual partner. The monks and nuns of Thích Nhat Hanh’s community in southwest France have a very special way of hugging, they call it ‘hugging meditation’. In the description on their website they write that,

  ‘When we hug our hearts connect and we know that we are not separate beings.’

  But to be reminded of this they have a very special way of hugging that involves a lot of deep breathing. They meet and then, instead of doing a quic
k polite hug with no body contact, they first pause. Then they stand and take three deep breaths to make sure that they are fully present. Then they open their arms and give ‘full body’ hugs, which they maintain for a further three deep breaths. During the first inhalation and exhalation they focus on being grateful for being present in that very moment and being happy to be there. (We can assume you wouldn’t be hugging if you weren’t happy to do so.) On the second inhalation and exhalation they become fully aware of the presence of the other and are happy that the other is there. On the third breath in and out they focus on gratitude for being together in the present moment, on this earth. They focus on deep gratitude and happiness for this togetherness. Then they bow to each other. They say, ‘We hug in such a way that the other person becomes real and alive to us.’ These people are celibate monks and nuns.

  It’s a pretty good example for those of us that are about to have sex, wouldn’t you say? Surely we could, sometimes, potentially at least, be honouring each other at least as much as if we are going to get naked with and touch our bits together? Or if we are in a couple where we’re considering making love in order to create new life, could this be something sacred? Be ‘dirty’ some nights – whatever that means to you, if you like it like that, and ‘sacred’ on others? Sometimes? Maybe? Just saying.

  But back to breathing before sex. So, following deeper breathing, everything slows down naturally. T and I moved to making love and T slowed down his breathing. That was it. Result? A totally different form of sexual experience. Now if you’ve already been having the kind of sex where you both breathe very slowly and the man doesn’t ejaculate, this may not be news to you. But for us it was just one more area that we hadn’t explored before. The other piece of information that I had to play with, which I learnt at Hilly Spenceley’s workshops, is that the man is supposed to follow the breathing of the woman. His physical movements coincide with my breath so when we arrive (finally) at penetration I can have him move just as slowly or as quickly as I like. I have to slow him down at times and become good at that. Or keep completely still if I like.