Yesterday I had a wonderful meeting with a wise person. It was one of those meetings where two hours pass in a flash of enthralled conversation. I was sharing my views on sex and life, and he listened in rapt attention, so pleased to have found someone who ‘gets it’. As a spiritual seeker himself, he said that he had looked for someone who understood what sex was really about, to no avail.

There are your sexpots, promoting a raunchy and generally superficial approach to sex; there are your spiritual hippie types who might get it but seemed removed from modern reality; and there are your clinicians with their ‘jolly good, sex is a healthy activity’ approach, which is all a bit dry and unsexy. These are all useful approaches in themselves, but not any of them are holistic.

So, to find someone who combined the scientific and the spiritual and had a definite sexual edge, well, bring it on!

As he put it so well: Sex is the Base. It’s where life comes from; it’s where everything comes from. All these seekers of meaning and purpose and growth and development won’t get where they’re going unless they address sex. All aspects of sex: the dark and the light, the yin and the yang, the sensual and the sordid, the serious and the play.

Sex is a microcosm of our lives. To put it to one side and get on with ‘the rest of life’ is simply not possible. Not if you want to be complete.

Physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, energetically – sex is there in all of it. It’s in the poetry and the beauty, the destruction and the chaos. It’s all life. It all stems from sex.

Sexual energy permeates our lives; it’s what makes us feel alive and vital.

I think that’s one of the reasons why seeing a sex therapist can be so effective in enabling change in people’s lives. Until that’s unblocked, there can’t be real change in people’s lives. The energy needs to flow through your body and out into your life. It has to be unblocked at the base to flow freely, for you to be free.

Would you like your vagina to be exquisitely sensitive, alive to nuance and sensation and responsive to ecstatic subtleties? Then you need to wake her up!

Unfortunately our focus in this society on the harder side of sex, the “peaks” rather than the “valleys” of sex, means that many women have “hardened" their vaginas. The focus on the “bigger, harder, faster”, rather than the “slower, softer, subtler”, means that many women have lost the ability to sense subtlety and softness through the walls of their vaginas. If your vagina can’t feel, then you either need increasingly more intense stimulation, or you forget about the vagina and focus on the clitoris as your primary sexual organ, or you give up on intercourse altogether because it just doesn’t feel like much. When your vagina is awake though, it becomes so sensitive in the most delightful of ways! It becomes highly receptive and attuned to subtle energies and exquisite variations of sensation.

This is very different to the intense thrusting most of us view as good sex (although as I always stress, I’ve got nothing against a good shag, just that it’s only one aspect of good sex!).

To wake your vagina up, you need to spend time being purely receptive. The easiest way to do this is to have some lovely non-genital foreplay (especially kissing) with your partner so you’re feeling connected and yummy together. Then you lie back and relax and allow him to touch your body and your genitals, gently, tenderly and softly. Then when you really want to invite him inside you, only then you allow his penis in.

Have a sense of “enveloping” his penis, feeling that you are embracing it with your vagina. Although you are receptive, you are not passive; energetically your vagina is awake and attuned.

With his penis fully inside you, really feel it. Let him hold it still for a while, even for some minutes, then move very slowly and gently. If he’s having trouble being so slow himself, practice with you on top first, barely moving, then moving in slow little circles around and around. Relax and breathe to your belly. Feel what it’s like with and without eye contact. Try some gentle contractions with your vagina, giving his penis a gentle massage with the walls of your vagina. Notice how different parts of your vagina feel.

Then slowly build up to stronger thrusts, all the while being aware of how your vagina is feeling and responding.

For those of us more used to a “unisex" approach to sex, where you’re both “giving” to each other, rather than allowing one or the other to purely “receive”, then this approach might seem one-sided. Once you get used to it and have woken up your vagina, then you’ll understand why you need to approach it this way. The amazing sensations, and the orgasmic spaces you can go to with an awakened vagina engaging in “valley-style” sex, are just wonderful!

And guys, the sensation for your penis inside an awakened vagina is equally awesome.

To find out more about awakening your vagina, enrol in my online women's course!

Or if you live in Australia, come along to my gorgeous women's weekend workshops!

 For great sex you’ve got to get out of your head. Or at least, out of the left side of your head.

The left side of your brain is the logical, analytical side. It’s useful in much of life but it tends to get in the way when you’re having sex.

When you “lose yourself” in sex though, you move out of left-brain activity and into a right-brain, creative, flowing, blissful sense of oneness. The sex could be simple or it could be wild and exciting, or any other possibility. You know it’s right brain though because you’re not thinking; you’re just going along with the flow.

You can practice getting into the right side of your brain by meditating. You sink in to yourself, feel the calm descend and still the distracted monkey chatter of the left-brain.

It’s not so hard to do by yourself, with practice. Doing it when you’re making love with another person is pretty challenging though - especially if your mind is full of the nonsense most of us carry around about sex!

All those constant thoughts of: “Am I doing it right?” “Is s/he enjoying it?” “Will I come?” etc, keep you in the left side of your brain - as of course does thinking about the shopping list or the important meeting you’ve got on tomorrow…

To reach your sexual potential you have to learn to move into the right side of your brain. You have to:

• Ditch the myths that undoubtedly plague you 

• Stay present in your body 

• Feel safe and connected with your partner

• Surrender to the experience without worry or fear

Opening up to another and allowing yourself to become lost in the act of lovemaking is very powerful. When that is done with beauty and poetry and profound feeling, the outcome is the type of ecstasy we yearn for, but that so many rarely find without chemical assistance.

Bonking on the right side of the brain is better bonking, beautiful bonking, and blissful bonking.

…through each other’s bodies.

Sexual union with another - where you dive deep into each other - where you let go into the giving and receiving - relaxing into the expanding potency as the borders blur and you are consumed by ecstasy - is the experience of the divine manifesting in the physical.

It’s a space uncontaminated by sordidness or shame, the two big challenges to finding the purity of sexual connection in this modern era.

It’s quite simple once you let go. It’s the letting go that’s hard: letting go of the all the stuff attached to sex: the fears, the fantasies, the judgements.

Once you do, and you find the essential beauty of the experience, the purity (and avoid judgement of the word ‘pure’), there you’ll find the transcendence, the experience of divinity.

Practice alone - masturbate as meditation and invite in the divine, whether as a general concept or a particular deity; or meet your beloved (whether you’ve yet met them or not) on the astral plane and make love.

Practice together - start slow, relax, connect through your eyes, your hearts, your sexual centres (well before they actually touch).

Then… enter deep into each other, allowing yourself to be consumed by the other, by the act.

Open up and move past the physical, past the smallness and the limitations. Open your heart and your body, allow the force of love the force of sex to move through your genitals and your bodies and way beyond, burring the edges.

Until you are less an individual ‘having’ sex and more a ‘being’ of sex, of bliss.

And there you find yourself in union with god.

And it is magnificent.

**************************

I’d love to hear your thoughts on having sex with God - have you experienced it? Does my limited ability to express through the written word convey what you’ve felt? Please let me know!

So many people live lives that are boxes within boxes, constraints within constraints, limitations within limitations. The number of “should”s and “must”s and “ought”s and “can’t”s and “mustn’t”s are never-ending.

We love our boxes. We have them around our work, our gender, our ethnic grouping, our age, our relationship status, our parental status, our place of abode, our religious beliefs, our health, our appearance, our sports and our hobbies.

Then we love to categorise our personalities, whether it’s the multitude of psychological tests or astrological classifications - it’s all about putting ourselves into still more boxes.

How often do we say “I am a [insert classification]”, or limit ourselves by stating: “I’m [insert adjective] because I’m a [insert classification]”, or “I can/can’t/should/shouldn’t/must/mustn’t [insert verb] because I’m a [insert classification]”.

It’s all so limiting.

And it’s all based on fear.

And it comes through more powerfully, and more with more limits, in our sexuality than anywhere else.

I’m [insert gender] so I’m……
I’m [insert age] so I…..
I'm spiritual/an atheist/a [insert religion] so I….
I’m married/single/divorced/in a relationship so I…
I’m fat/old/ugly so I…

Now of course we can be classified, of course we have an age, an appearance, a profession, and so forth, there’s no issue with that. It’s all the crap that’s attached to the classification that’s the problem.

Consider: “I’m fat and ugly and I don’t give damn, I’m having great sex!” versus “Well, we’ve been together a long time and we’re not as trim as we used to be and the kids are always around, so of course we can’t have sex, or good sex.”

When it comes to sex, I see the limitations everywhere, even in the supposedly free-spirited types: the swingers who think monogamy is boring; the kinksters who think vanilla sex is dull; the Tantric types who think it’s got to be oh so terribly slow and spiritual; the free love exponents who think we’ve got to let it all hang out.

And there’s all the black and white thinking. You’ve got to be one gender or the other, into women or into men, monogamous or deceitful, sexually active or celibate.

How about we all embrace the possibility, for those for whom it feels real, to whatever extent feels right, of gender-bending, bisexuality, ethical non-monogamy, celibacy as sexual expression?

How about we see that all types of kinks and fetishes are fun to play with, that enlightened BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, Sado-Masochism) can be as empowering and connecting as deep spiritual sex?

How about feeling that missionary with the lights out can be as fulfilling an experience as swinging from the chandeliers?

How about we let ourselves be ourselves?

And maybe, ultimately, how about we let the judgemental be judgemental too, if that’s what makes them happy, and focus on our own business?

Avoid judging others and don’t judge yourself. Give yourself the freedom to explore and play and find out who you are in all aspects of your life.

Get out of the boxes!

It’s so hard when your partner has been unfaithful.

“How could this person I love, and who I thought loved me, do this to me? How can I possibly get over it? Should I even try…?”

These are the thoughts that plague you.

The first thing in moving forward is to realise they probably haven’t done it to you. Affairs are rarely initiated with malicious intent to deliberately hurt the partner, although hurt is inevitably the result. (If it was done purely with intent to hurt you, then you really do have a problem and shouldn’t be with that person.) It’s important that you accept that as hurtful as it is, the affair was not about you and not done with the intention to hurt you.

So, can you get over it? Possibly.

Should you try? Most definitely.

To deal with the affair and at least try to move forward is far braver and harder than just giving up and leaving.

There is always a reason why someone has an affair, and it’s generally because they are not happy, and the affair makes them feel better. So, to be able to move forward you have to understand what led your partner to have the affair in the first place. Once you’ve done that, you need to fix what caused it so there is no need for an affair, or any other ‘solution’ such as excessive drinking, drugs, overwork, or other unhealthy distractions from the misery of life.

I’ve spoken with countless people who have had affairs, as many women as men, and some of the reasons include:

• Feeling disconnected from their partner, not valued
• Too much pressure from their partner, feeling overwhelmed or criticized
• Living parallel lives and no longer feeling like partners, so feeling lonely
• Not being able to tell their partner how they are feeling, yet feeling they can share with their lover who understands them
• Bored with life and their relationship
• Not feeling desired sexually by their partner.

Affairs are intoxicating, as is any new relationship, so people tend to get drawn into them and find it hard to leave, even when the buzz wears off and the affair is no longer satisfying them. It is a kind of addiction as the chemicals in the brain function as with addiction: the ‘reward’ circuitry goes into overdrive with a dopamine high associated with the excitement and clandestine nature of the affair; but over time that is no longer satisfying, what gave you the high no longer works, yet you are still drawn to it craving the same reward.

If you understand the physiology and the psychology of affairs in general, and can establish what led to the affair, then it is easier to accept it and easier to move on.

It will still hurt though, and an important thing to understand is that your partner can’t actually heal the hurt, that’s something you need to do for yourself. That takes time.

There are different requirements for all three of the entities involved, that is: your partner, you and you as a couple:

- Your partner needs to be truly remorseful;
- You need to forgive your partner;
- You as a couple need to work on your relationship to ensure the conditions that led to the affair are fixed.

This is not easy, and parts of the process can be quite lonely. You have seen a side of your partner that you didn’t know about, a darker side, the scales have fallen off your eyes. You have to ask yourself the challenging question of: Can you still accept him or her even with these imperfections? And the even more challenging one, given the hurt and shame you’re feeling: What might have been your role in contributing to the affair?

These are hard questions. They are also questions that can lead to personal and relationship growth. If you and your partner can dig deep into yourselves and open yourselves up to each other with such honesty and realness that you can share and heal, then you will move forward together.

It’s also possible that the process means you decide that you can’t move forward together, but the process will enable you to move forward separately without bitterness and resentment, even with love.

One thing to be cautious about is that you don’t ‘resolve’ the issue by turning it into a power play where you as the betrayed partner take a holier-than-thou attitude, lording it over your partner who is constantly reminded of what a terrible person they are and therefore how inferior they are. This is not addressing the underlying causes and will not lead to an improved relationship.

It is essential that the underlying causes be addressed. Otherwise, your partner will have another affair, or reach for some other solution such as becoming an alcoholic. Or they will simply leave you.

Sometimes relationships do need to end, and an affair is a valid reason to end one. But it’s not inevitable.

Do the work and you may be pleasantly surprised at the outcome: a relationship with greater understanding, more depth and closeness, and more resilience.

Why are humans so sexual?

Because our babies are born too early.

Yes, you read that correctly, humans have evolved to be highly sexual because our babies are born too early.

The reason our babies are born too early is because our brains are so big that babies have to be born before their heads grow too large to be able to get out of the birth canal. Which means they are born utterly useless.

Unlike other mammals, whose young can generally stand and move around and get to teats to feed themselves, human newborns are incapable of even holding up their heads. And they stay highly dependent on adults until they are at least seven years old (and in the modern era it’s more like 17 years, sometimes 27 years or more!)



Other mammalian mothers can look after one or even a whole litter of infants on her own, because her young are sufficiently able to cope while she’s off hunting, or can follow her around reasonably well. Human young can’t. A human mother cannot look after an infant without support (at least, not in prehistoric days before we had single mother pensions). As humans evolved, both parents, and quite possibly the whole tribe, were needed to raise infants to an age of survival and usefulness. Sex evolved in humans to keep people bonded while they raised their slow-maturing children. 



This fact also puts paid to the myth that men naturally want to ‘sow their seed’ widely. That is not a human reproductive strategy. Humans would never have evolved to the level we have if the men were off wandering around ‘sowing their seed’ and leaving the mothers to raise the kids alone.

Other mammals (with the exception of most other primates) only have sex to reproduce. They only have sex when the female is fertile, there’s no great pleasure involved, there is no purpose for it other than to reproduce.

Humans, however, can have sex at any time, and it is highly pleasurable (or should be!) We can also continue to have great sex long after our reproductive years are over, probably because happy grandparents were needed to look after the children while the more physically able parents were busy doing other things like skinning hides, bringing in the harvest, and so forth.

Sex in humans has a social function, a bonding function.

Sex is so much more than just conceiving children; sex enables a couple to feel good about each other while raising those children. Possibly in prehistoric days people didn’t know about fathers, so everyone felt responsible for helping the women raise their children - and quite possibly they all had sex together (read ‘Sex At Dawn’, for a fascinating discussion on this possibility.)

So, our big brains have forced us to evolve to have good sex.

Fortunately this big brain of ours has a dual function - not only has it necessitated us to have good sex, it has also equipped us to have good sex. Our enormous brain capacity allows us to think and plan and fantasize and be creative - all required for good sex!

I had the most unexpectedly delightful experience earlier this week, I attended a two-day Partnered Yoga training course. I’d only heard about it a couple of days before and thought “Yes, this would be so relevant to my work!” So after managing to sort out the kids (still being school holidays) I found myself on Monday morning literally entwined with the course participants on the yoga floor.

I’ve done yoga ever since I was a kid, and I love it. It’s great for getting in tune with your body, for keeping it lithe and flexible and for stilling the mind and achieving deep relaxation. Brilliant stuff. However, because it is a solitary activity I’ve always found it a little unsatisfying because there is no interaction.

I also trained and taught martial arts for years, particularly Aikido. That I found deeply satisfying because there is so much interaction with others. It is absolutely essential that you open yourself to feeling and receiving your partner’s energy so that you can use and move with it. It was brilliant training for applying to sexual situations, and forms the basis of my energetic abilities in all spheres of life and the work I do with people. (Although the fact that it entails hours of being slammed into a mat means it's not everyone's cup of tea...!)

So what a pleasant change to do yoga in such an interactive way! And to meet someone who has such a similar approach to life, sensuality and sexuality. A keen proponent of Tantra, the course leader brilliantly combined the still, spiritual aspects of yoga with playful, fun and interactive elements.

As he puts it, partnered yoga can be done in a regular class in a completely platonic way, so that class members can experience the poses differently and also get to know each other better and add more liveliness and fun to the class.

Partnered yoga between lovers though, can be deeply erotic. This is what interests me.

I’m always looking for ways to help couples connect. If you’ve done my Luscious Lovers workshops you’ll know that it’s all about connection and that by deepening connection you heighten eroticism. Which is why dance and massage are so good. Partnered yoga expands the options. It’s very much about connection, about knowing your partner, about harmonising - not to mention potentially becoming more sexually flexible and creative!

I was watching a video of 2Cellos playing recently. So erotic! So voyeuristic - like watching them have sex with their instruments.

I remember when my eldest son came home from school one day when he was five, giggling and snickering and asking us if we had (giggle giggle, cover mouth, snicker): “S…!?” He was absolutely stunned when we replied: “Yes, that’s Mummy and Daddy’s Cuddle Time.”

You see, we’d brought him up to know that Mummy and Daddy have Cuddle Time, and when we have Cuddle Time, we make lots of love for each other and for the whole family. He loved cuddles, so that made sense, and he was quite happy to watch Thomas the Tank Engine or build really big space stations out of Lego on a Sunday morning while Mummy and Daddy had cuddle time. So, you can image how much trouble he had reconciling the good, positive Cuddle Time he knew about, with the tawdry, naughty “S” his classmates were snickering about.

I was so pleased that his first understanding of sex was the positive Cuddle Time, and not the negative “S”.

My younger two children have been brought up the same way, and they all have healthy approaches to sex, seeing it as something normal and positive - and something you do when you’re ready. In fact, just the other day one school mum said about my 11-year-old: “Thank god for your son, he’s setting all our boys straight!"

I bring this up because I got some flack on the net for comments I made during an interview with a journalist from a teenage girls’ magazine. In the published article I talked about orgasms, and also said that when sex is good it’s very, very good and when it’s bad it’s horrid. Apparently, I wasn’t supposed to imply that sex is supposed to be good in case it encourages teenagers to have sex.

Of course, they know it’s supposed to be good! They’re not that naive, especially not these days...

In the old days, pre-internet, we didn’t get a lot of information, maybe a bit of reproduction education at school, perhaps some birds and bees from our parents, so on the whole we had to figure it out for ourselves (some more successfully than others).

These days, it’s a different story.

Young people are naturally curious about sex, so how do they satisfy their curiosity?

If their choices are sterile information about reproduction and disease they get from educators, awkward limited information from their parents, or (in their eyes) the far more interesting and accessible information they get online from porn, well, a lot of them are going for the latter.

So porn becomes the model for sex - after all, everyone seems to be having a good time, aren’t they?

Unfortunately though, no-one is explaining to them that porn is a medium that’s designed to be visually titillating - it’s all about what looks good, not what feels good.

If you want your kids to think that porn is good enough sex education, there’s no need to read on.

But if you want your kids to have a positive attitude to sex, to feel good about their bodies, and understand that their bodies and sexuality can bring great pleasure and enhance their health and well-being; if you want your kids to be able to make correct decisions for themselves about when they start to be sexually active, why they choose to be sexually active, and with whom... Then you need to talk to them.

That’s not always easy, given that we adults aren’t always that comfortable with our own sexuality. So you need to sort yourself out: examine and understand your own sexuality, till you feel comfortable enough to speak freely with your kids, providing accurate, positive helpful information.

Even more than that, you need to model a positive sexuality.

That’s the most important element of all.