Taking the steps I've described in my earlier blogs to create a relationship with yourself and become more erotically embodied will increase your overall life satisfaction and your potential for intimacy and communication with friends, lovers, partners and everyone with whom you interact. For those of you who are single or starting to date someone new, I want to propose an innovative model of dating that will help you create an authentic relationship with a partner in order to share the gift of erotic connection you are developing.

There are a million different ways to meet people and I won't go into a long list here but I have noticed that finding someone through participation in one of your favorite hobbies or activities can be a way to instantly connect around topics, ideas, and shared experiences of substance. Making a list of your favorite activities and interests then finding social places where you can interact with others around those interests may help you meet someone with whom you are compatible.

From the moment of your first meeting or date, you can begin a path of self-discovery, knowing as much as you can about yourself in relationship is the surest way to create lasting, communicative and intimate relationships. Oftentimes, however, we spend our time focusing on the other person, imagining (or hoping) that they are the perfect answer to all of our fantasies.

You're Perfect, I'm Perfect

Most of us, upon meeting someone we are interested in, begin two simultaneous processes:

First, we often attempt to present our most perfect self to the other person, trying to figure out what they want us to be and hiding those qualities we think might turn them off, bore them, or even repulse them. The danger in hiding the self in order to impress another is that it may distance us from who we truly are and what we really want. If we run through this cycle over and over again or if we continue to keep up the pretenses instead of slowly allowing our humanness to show, we may become so distanced as to no longer have any idea who we are or what we want.

Second, we imagine this other person is the answer to our prayers; we expect them to make us happy, alleviate our feelings of loneliness, and share fully of themselves. If we think that they can do these things for us, we begin the process of "falling in love," which, more often than not, is more of a projection of our fantasy of perfection on to another person than an actual assessment of our mutual compatibility. Within this process of falling in love, we tend to accelerate the relationship into an imagined (and imaginary) future. On the one hand, we may picture them as our life partner or the co-parent of our child. On the other hand, we may fear that they will try to trap us into playing these roles when we are not yet ready.

Regardless of what kinds of future we project, whether it is perfection or difficulty, inevitably, at some point in the process the person sitting across from us becomes another human as opposed to our projected perfect other or our projected fear and they begin to discover that we are not perfect either.

For many, this is the point when we become disappointed that the fantasy is not panning out or we become afraid that the person we are seeing will discover what is undesirable about us so we leave and begin a new fantasy. However, this is when the opportunity arises to move from being "in love" (the temporary projected fantasy state) to loving someone not for who you think they are or should be, but for who they are now, in all their humanness.

Breaking the Cycle

If projection, disappointment and moving on or sacrificing your sense of self, have been part of your cycle, then I suggest you try the process which I call Mindful Dating. At its root, Mindful Dating is a movement of attention away from the other person, (who they are, who we want them to be in relationship), back to ourselves, (who we are, who we want to be in relationship). This witnessing of the self in relationship gives us the profoundly important ability to take a number of positive steps simultaneously.

First, when we are focused on ourselves by being present with our feelings, we are much more empowered. We need not project into a fantasized perfect (or terrible) future in an attempt to convince ourselves of something we cannot know. We no longer have to imagine that anything that our partner does or does not say or do will make or break the relationship because we no longer exist in reaction to them.

Second, in place of trying to impress the other person by hiding who we really are, we focus our attention on how we feel in the other person's presence. We begin to see what triggers our own responses, whether they are joy, insecurity, arousal, rejection, or desires to merge, to distance, or to accelerate. Interacting with someone who we are beginning to care about becomes a mirror for us to learn about ourselves.

Finally, by bringing the witness perspective to the relationship, we can watch feelings arise. We no longer need to have knee-jerk responses to interactions being fun or difficult, we can take time to gather information, to contemplate what we want, to figure out how to lovingly communicate our desires and intentions in a way that is congruent with our goals in the relationship, whether those goals are to go slowly, to deepen intimacy, or to end an interaction that is not feeling compatible.

Witnessing Self in Relationship

There are many aspects of ourselves that you can pay attention to as we practice Mindful Dating.

• Your Inner Voice. Pay attention to what kinds of messages are you giving yourself about this relationship? Are they similar or different then the messages you have given yourself in other relationships?

• Your Internal and External Reactions. How do you react to what the other person says and does? What are they doing or saying that makes you feel attracted or drawn in? What about them makes you feel repelled or driven away? How do you respond when you have these feelings? What kinds of things to you say or do to convey your responses?
  
  
• Your Center. Track your center and see what kinds of interactions with others pull you out of your center (i.e. make you feel imbalanced, confused, needy, over-emotional, angry or crazy). What do you want to do when you have these feelings? How might you deal with them differently than you have in past interactions? What brings you back to your center?

Generating Joy

Once we stop living in the future, cease trying to be perfect and expecting perfection, and witness the moment to moment fluctuations of our emotions and actions in relation to others, we can begin the process of generating joy. As we learn about what we like and don't like, who we are in relationship and who we want to be, we can begin the slow, gentle process of creating those mutual experiences and interactions with others that give us the most pleasure, satisfaction and inspiration. By focusing on ourselves, we no longer have to try to be what we think others want us to be or struggle to make others into our fantasy; instead we can become the most magnetic, exciting, fun, beautiful manifestation of ourselves. Soon enough we will be surrounded with friends, lovers, companions, and life partners who support and cherish our most desirable qualities, while at the same time accepting that each of us has moments of difficulty and need.

Now that you've had a chance to breathe yourself into your body, it is time to embark on the awe-inspiring journey of physically exploring your body. This is an opportunity to create amazing, sensual, romantic, loving and intimate dates with yourself in order to learn about what electrifies you emotionally and physically. I call this next step on the road to erotic embodiment Conscious Self-Exploration.

I choose not to call this piece conscious masturbation because most people have a very strong association in their mind between the idea of masturbation and genital orgasm. While the release that comes from genital orgasm can be one possible and lovely outcome of self-exploration, it is not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to initiate and deepen your relationship with your own body: to understand what kinds of stimulation arouse your desire and what sensory experiences give you the most pleasure and enjoyment.

Many of us began our sexual self-explorations early in life and learned from many sources that it was something that we were not supposed to do or something that should be kept hidden so that, in addition to providing pleasure or release, self-pleasuring was also an anxious experience. One consequence of feeling anxious about pleasure is that we try to get it over with as fast as possible instead of allowing our excitement to build to its greatest heights or savoring the warm depths of our enjoyment. Unfortunately, this anxious masturbation was where we set the patterns for our adult sexual interactions.

In the face of all of this anxiety and haste, it is no wonder that so many men have problems with timing ejaculation and so many women complain of desire and arousal disorders. If we never took the time to fully enjoy and arouse our bodies, then, as our bodies get older or our relationships move out of the honeymoon phase, we lack the knowledge we need to spark desire, maintain arousal or continue to experience heightened pleasure. Lack of desire, arousal or control can lead to frustration with ourselves and our bodies. In the face of this frustration, we sometimes give up on our bodies in subtle and overt ways or even set our sexual selves completely aside.

Conscious self-exploration is about creating new patterns for ourselves and learning new ways to love and enjoy our bodies, it is a commitment to yourself to never give up on pleasure. Most of us masturbate the same way every time we touch ourselves so conscious self-exploration is a promise we make to ourselves to take the time do something different in order to gather more information about our desire, arousal and pleasure.

This information not only helps you develop a deeper sense of connection with your own body, it can also be very useful when you are communicating with a partner about ways that he or she might arouse and satisfy you. Going deeper with yourself in and of itself is an amazing journey and it also lays the groundwork for erotic depth and longevity with a partner.

Step 1 - Making a Commitment to Yourself

What does it mean to make a commitment to yourself and why is it important? Just as we make commitments to our partner, which, when kept, deepen their trust in us and their ability to open up and connect, making and keeping a commitment to ourselves teaches us to trust in ourselves, our bodies and our feelings. Commitments to yourself are often the easiest to break, but you will find that making and keeping commitments to yourself can also strengthen your relationship with yourself. A strong, deep relationship to yourself is the foundation from which you can act in empowered ways in the world. When we don't keep our commitments to ourselves, we lose our sense of trust and clarity about who we are and what we want.

Making a commitment to fall in love with yourself and give yourself pleasure can also set the groundwork for keeping your commitment to live authentically in all areas of your life. When making a commitment to yourself about creating a deep, loving relationship with your body, make sure you only bite off as much as you can chew. If you usually spend 3-5 minutes masturbating, promise yourself two self-loving sessions a week that take 15 minutes each. If you usually spend 15 minutes, take a half an hour for yourself. Only make a commitment you can keep so that you learn to trust yourself again. Put this time in your schedule and treat it just as you would an important meeting you cannot miss (believe me, it is a meeting you won't want to miss!).

              

Step 2 - Warming Up

Start you session with a few minutes of Eros Breathplay (see blog: A First Step on Your Journey: Erotic Breathplay) to fully enter into and relax your body.  During your self-exploration, you can try varying the breath in any number of ways including how quickly you breathe, how deeply you breathe, whether you breathe through your mouth or your nose to see if these breaths increase your sensitivity to stimulation or help you with relaxation and sensation. As you start on your body exploration, keep breathing. Your breath will keep sensual energy circulating throughout your body as you practice touching yourself in new ways.

Step 3 - Approaching Yourself with Childlike Curiosity

When we are first learning about our bodies, we touched ourselves all over, we stared at our hands for hours, we sucked on our fingers and our toes. For those of you still lucky enough to be able to suck your toes, I'd suggest giving it another try J but, more importantly, my point is that we have an entire body with which to play and touch and stimulate and we might find that we have some amazingly sensitive, totally ignored places on our bodies or that different kinds of breathing awaking different parts of our body to their full pleasure potential.

While fantasy, erotic movies, or erotic fiction can be wonderful ways to arouse ourselves towards orgasm, for this session set aside these external brain stimulators because these self-pleasuring sessions are about deepening on your connection between your brain and your body through various forms of stimulation.

One way to approach yourself with childlike curiosity is to do your self-pleasuring in front of a mirror. You can start by standing up and looking at your body, if you have some sensual music playing, you can move your body in ways that feel arousing or arouse you visually. You can try on different kinds of clothes that make you feel sexy or sensual. You can switch to a make-up or shaving mirror when you are lying down in order to take a look at the parts of your body that you don't always get a chance to see, your vulva or your anus. Tell yourself how beautiful and sexy you are, how wonderful it is to have a body and how much pleasure you want to give yourself.

Step 4 - Exploring Your Body in a Sensual, Sexy Space.

In later blogs, I will talk about eating, sleeping and exercising erotically in order to bring eroticism into every part of our everyday lives. For now, I will simply say that one place that you can start to make erotic is your self-pleasuring space. Some people like to pleasure themselves in the bathtub, others their bed, some may do it front of the computer. For this exercise, I urge you to make whatever space in which you pleasure yourself a beautiful, sexy place to be. The best way to think about his is to pay attention to each of your senses and figure out what arouses them.

SIGHT: In thinking about arousing your visual sense, you may want to start by adding some sensual colors to your space, such as reds and oranges. Make sure the lighting in your space is warm and inviting. Dim the lights, light candles, or allow the light from a streetlamp outside your window to pour across your bed or to make your bath sparkle.

Suggestions:

1. You may also want to try sight deprivation by putting blindfold on or closing your eyes and visualizing the colors of your arousal.

2. Look at the flame of a candle while you touch yourself and imagine the energy from the flame entering your body.

SMELL: Scented candles or fragrant flowers such as gardenias or stargazer lilies can fill the room with delicious fragrance. Or, you may want to use scented massage oil on your body.

Suggestions:

1. The smell of scented massage oil, mixed with your own bodily scents and juices can be very arousing.

2. Rub flower petals across your body to scent your skin, lay a flower on your pillow or put petals in a bath.

SOUND: What kinds of sounds give you the most arousal and pleasure and keep you inside your body. You may want your favorite music or chanting or it may leave the room quiet so you can listen to your own, erotic voice.

Suggestions:

1. Say arousing things to yourself that you'd want a lover to say to you.

2. Make noises when you breathe such as sighs or moans.

TASTE: You can also arouse your sense of taste while giving yourself pleasure. You can keep delicious foods or drinks nearby and taste them as part of your self-pleasuring. 

Suggestions:

1. Dip your fingers in melted chocolate and suck on them.

2. Remember what you favorite childhood food was and treat yourself to it before, during, or after your self-exploration.

TOUCH: Make sure that wherever you are, you can feel silkiness or softness against your skin. In a bed, this might mean investing in some soft, silky sheets, in the bath, it would mean adding some oils or bubbles. Keep some massage oil near your space to add silkiness to your own touch as well as lubrication. (Safety note: Always remember when playing with a partner that oil based lubricants such as massage oil can break down condoms). There are many other delicious tools to arouse your sense of touch such as clothes with different textures, feathers, ice, hot water, toys to stimulate your penis, or the inside of your vagina or your anus. Wearing gloves sometimes may allow you to feel as though someone else is touching you.

Suggestions:

1. Approach your body by touching all of the extremities first - stroke your hair and run your fingers through it, rub your feet, tickle them with a feather, tickle the palm of one hand with your finger tips, touch your cheeks, your face, and your neck.

2. Try using feathers or different textures on the back of your neck and your back.

3. Use your fingernails or a back scratcher on your arms and the backs of your legs.

4. Tease the inside of your thighs with a silky cloth.

5. Rub an ice cube down your stomach and across your nipples or let icy water drip off of the ice cube onto your vulva or penis.

6. Stimulate the inside or outside of your anus with a toy or your fingers (Safety tip for women: make sure that nothing that goes on or in your anus, goes on or in your vagina afterwards).

7. Kiss your hands or arms.

8. Pull the hair on your head or on your genitals.

9. Try different kinds of touch including tickling, tapping, stroking, pinching, massaging, slapping and squeezing.

I have offered a number of suggestions and even adding just one of them will begin you on your journey to deeper self-love and pleasure. I also strongly encourage you to come up with your own creative ideas (and, if something works really well, I'd love to hear about it!). Remember that this is an exploration without an end result in mind except to learn more secrets about your own beautiful body and commune with yourself. It is also an opportunity to laugh with yourself, dance with yourself, cry with yourself, and learning to love yourself in new ways. Some of the new touches, smells, or breathplay won't be arousing at all. However, making a commitment to yourself, approaching yourself with childlike curiosity, and taking the risk of trying new ways of interacting with yourself may be the pathway to pleasures that you never even knew were possible.

Just as your journey into this world in your body begins with a breath, so too, does the journey back to erotic embodiment. Breathing is central in building an inner relationship with your erotic self and feeling good in your body. Ultimately, taking steps towards feeling good in your body is one of the most important acts of self-love that you can do and feeling comfortable in your body will positively affect every other aspect of your life.

I call breathing exercises breathplay, not breathwork, because this journey is an opportunity to regain the natural curiosity about yourself and your body that you had as a child. I will talk more about reconnecting with childlike curiosity in later blogs, but for now, it is important to remember that the path to erotic embodiment need not feel like a chore. Bringing your creativity, your passion for life, and your love for yourself to breathplay can make erotic breathing fun, delicious, exciting and relaxing. Reward yourself with lusciousness every time you take time out to play with your body and breath. Try having some chocolate covered strawberries nearby or make yourself a soft, warm nest in which to play.

While every step of the journey is about joy, it is important to note that delving into your erotic self and remembering your curious child may bring up trauma, past abuse or negative feelings about the self. Thus, it is important to be gentle with yourself and to remember that moving through these feelings can be done with a sense of power and accomplishment. With this in mind, I will start by joyfully stating that there is no right way to breathe. Simply remember that different breath increases different kinds of responses, perceptions, experiences, and/or sensations in your body and mind. The good news is that if you do nothing more than play with different kinds of breathing throughout your day, you will experience a greater sense of erotic embodiment!

The Steps to Eros Breath

To awaken the center of your eroticism, you must breathe deep into the parts of your body from which your most erotic energy is generated. There are many kinds of erotic breathing (some of which I'm sure you have already practiced!). The first breath that I will teach you is a relaxing breath, because, to attain the greatest heights of arousal, you must first find comfort and relaxation in your body. We hold many memories in our bodies, of pleasure and trauma, stress and relaxation. You can breathe into all of these feelings and the breath will heal trauma and relax the stress, allowing you to feel more comfortable in your body and to begin to produce an erotic glow that others will sense. You can do erotic breathing in any position. When first beginning to explore erotic breathing, I find it easiest to feel the deep movement of the breath lying on your back, however you can experiment with different positions (many people really love to do this breathplay in child's pose).

1) For now, lie on your back with you knees bent, feet planted on the floor and simply bring consciousness to your breath, notice how deeply you breathe, what parts of your body move when you breathe, whether you hold your breath after the inhale or after the exhale. Moving the breath into different parts of your body, your chest, your stomach or your sides, for example, has the benefit of awakening that part of the body, massaging nearby organs, activating digestion and blood flow and creating connections between your body's energy centers.

2) Place your hand in the center of you chest and take 10 slow, deep breaths directed into your chest. Do not force your breath but allow it to gently flow towards your hand. Feel the breath rise and fall in your upper body and visualize yourself opening to love. Open to the love you have for yourself, the love you have for others and the loving being that you are. I like to say, either aloud or to myself "I love, I am loved, I am love" to remind me both that love flows between myself and others and that I embody love.

3) Place your hand on your solar plexus, the upper part of your stomach right below your ribcage. Take 10 slow, deep breaths into your stomach, again being gentle with your body. Feel your body open to power. Connecting with your own sense of personal power (as opposed to power over others), your free will and your desires will have profound effects on your ability to be comfortable in your body. I like to say, „\"I am, I desire, I create, I fulfill" to remind myself that I am the source of both my desire and my fulfillment and that the dance of desire and fulfillment is in large part what ignites my creative energy.

Eros Breath

The final breath, the one that is rarely taught in other embodiment practices, but which is the basis of erotic embodiment, is what I call the Eros Breath (what my amazing teacher Chester Mainard calls the anal breath and which some teachers of woman's sexual empowerment call the yoni or cunt breath). Breath that moves through your chest and stomach into your erotic center connects your inner senses of love, power, eroticism and security. The idea is to recreate a free-flowing energy between these centers. Connecting these centers, which have often been painfully disconnected through the process of socialization, trauma, and difficult relationships, is the first step towards erotic embodiment. For example, when your erotic center is connected to feelings of love, you will better know your desires. When it is connected to your sense of security, you will better know your boundaries. And, when your erotic center is connected with your sense of power you will feel empowered to ask for what you want and to communicate about what you don't want. This is why erotic breathing is part of every body-based session I do in my work and why both I and my students engage in conscious breathing throughout the session.

If Eros Breath seems difficult at first, it is because you are likely very used to breathing into your chest or stomach, and you do not realize how deeply you can move your breath. However, if you watch a new born baby sleep, you will see their pelvic floor moving with the breath, with some practice, you can regain this depth of connection. Most importantly, be gentle and do not judge yourself, the healing effects will come in time. Remember you deserve pleasure, playfulness, joy, and love in your life and breathplay is one way to give yourself these gifts.

1) Place your hand on your genitals so that your middle finger is touching your perineum (the place on the pelvic floor between your genitals and anus) and gently bring the breath all the way down to the pelvic floor (the tip of your middle finger). Notice what reflex, if any, happens around your pelvic floor when you breathe deeply directing your breath towards your perineum (where you have placed your middle finger).

2) Take a few deep breaths and notice. The basis of the Eros Breath is an active relaxation in the inhale and a passive relaxation on the exhale. Sometimes, simply directing our gentle attention on this part of our body will encourage a relaxation in the pelvic floor when we breathe in. It is possible to deepen this relaxation by VERY GENTLY bearing down during an in-breath in order to train you body to open and relax on the inhale. Eventually, you will not have to push at all. On the exhale the idea is to DO NOTHING, simply allowing your body to fully release the breath. This is much easier than it sounds for most people who often equate conscious breathing and sexuality in general with feelings of control. By letting go of this control, you can feel your body open to eroticism.

3) Allow your consciousness to move deeply into your pelvis and genitals. Imagine the base of your body from your pubic bone to your buttocks is getting warm and soft, imagine it beginning to glow with your energy and passion. I like to say "I give and receive pleasure, I am sensual, (or I am erotic), I am fulfilled." As you engage fully in this breath, you may start to feel some tingling or awakening. Give yourself permission to enjoy this experience. You might actively tell yourself, "I deserve pleasure." After 5 minutes (or more) of Eros Breathing, allow your breath to return to normal and check in with your body.

Check-In

Do you feel a difference anywhere in your body? Are you more warm and open? Is there a greater sense of relaxation and aliveness? Are you aware of tension you didn't know you had? Did any resistance come up? If you keep a journal, try writing about feelings or sensations that came up during this breathplay. Or simply walk through the world with the greater sense of erotic centering you feel, you might be surprised at the magnetism that this breathplay generates.

Every child is born with orgasmic intelligence. Their experiences of their body are not kept at a safe distance and intellectualized, their actions, such as sleeping, eating, crying, and touching are in direct connection to their bodily desires. They fully experience their sensual selves as they commune with their outer world. Slowly, over time, and through feedback from parents, friends, and the larger society, children learn that there are certain socially acceptable ways that they must behave in order to get their physical and emotional needs met. Throughout this learning process they come to understand that some of the physical and emotional needs are approved of and some are frowned upon, and that there are certain times that they can get those needs met and other times that they cannot. People are told that sensual pleasure and satisfaction are unnecessary, excessive, and even dangerous. They learn to defer certain desires and, sometimes, to completely ignore or deny others. This process of distancing from, controlling, denying and intellectualizing our desires, is a process of losing our orgasmic intelligence.

The problem with losing our orgasmic intelligence, our connection with our desire, pleasure, sensuality and eroticism, is that these erotic feelings have the potential to be highly motivating in our lives and they are also the basis for other's attraction to us. Aside from the fact that many of us spend vast amounts of time and energy looking for relationships and sexual partners to share our eroticism with, eroticism can also unleash our creativity, fill us with energy, increase our sense of love and respect for the planet we live on and deepen our relationship to the people and creatures who share the planet with us.

When I told a good friend, and excellent critical thinker, about the idea of orgasmic intelligence, she said, "but doesn't that focus too much importance on orgasms?" She had a point if what I meant by orgasm was simply the muscle contractions that one gets by certain kinds of stimulation to the genitals, however, this is not what I mean by orgasmic intelligence. Orgasmic intelligence is the ability that every body has inside of it at birth to experience sensual pleasure, and a deep sense of desire, arousal, satisfaction and joy. Sometimes, after a night out dancing, I feel more erotically radiant than if I had spent hours being made love to. Other times, after giving pleasure to a partner, and watching them experience the depth and breadth of their erotic potential I feel as beautifully fulfilled as if I‘d had ten orgasms. Once, during my training as a Sexological Bodyworker, I had an orgasm that originated in my heart instead of my genitals, spreading warmth and love throughout my entire body. I called it a heart-gasm.

If the process of being socialized is often marked by a loss of our orgasmic intelligence, how can we regain this intelligence and reintegrate our eroticism into our daily lives and interactions so that we can experience erotic embodiment and all of the personal, interpersonal, social, and sensual benefits that come with it? This will be the focus of my blogs to come, which will include both the philosophy of orgasmic intelligence and daily practices and practical tips to help us become radiant, magnetic, fulfilled beings who attract magnificent friends and incredible lovers.