The Energies of Love

by Donna Eden

  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):

  Lying down, place your palms on your back at your waist with your fingertips touching.

  Lightly move your fingertips down to the bottom of your sacrum.

  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.

  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.

  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 c
olleagues 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.”