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Sex is a word that catches our attention. We overuse it, abuse it, misunderstand it, manipulate it, and try to dominate it for personal gratification - and when we do any of these things, it invariably means we will end up not only harming others, but ourselves, too.
Sex used positively, however, can bring about change that boosts every aspect of our lives. On the evidence of the research out there, a convincing case can be made that both men and women are happier and perform better outside of the bedroom when they have an active, healthy love life within the framework of a trusting relationship. A trusting relationship seems key here. It's believed to act as a divining rod, capturing our sexual energies to ignite our mind, body and soul into life.
This is not new age nonsense. For centuries, various cultures have talked about purposely transforming our sexual drive, effectively harnessing its creative and productive energy to drive people to create, invent, build, or manifest greater mental and physical abilities usually in favour of progress and enhancing enlightenment. The discipline of tantra is founded on such principles, and a prime example of using sex for good.
Psychologists have described this transformation or deflection of sexual energy into productive energy as sublimation. Sigmund Freud believed that sublimation was a sign of maturity (indeed, of civilisation), allowing people to function normally in culturally acceptable ways.
Sex is a great motivator, but it's not only about a fuelling drive for life. It's also connected to our health and well-being. Like eating and exercise, good sex is also important for our well-being. It can impact on our physical health - sex can help you lose weight for example - and the health of our relationships. In turn, the foods we eat and how physically active we are can impact on our libido. We mustn't underestimate the importance of our diet, as the foods we eat can help us find the necessary balance for optimum emotional health.
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Whether or not you are even interested in sex can tell you a lot about your health. If you've lost interest in sex, it could be a reflection of poor hormonal health, or a relationship out of balance. If your hormones are out of balance, your performance and enjoyment outside the bedroom will suffer, too. For example, orgasms are said to be better for the brain to boost its productivity more than any mental exercise might do. Orgasms for both men and women are proven at being better than crosswords to keep the mind young; sex, in short, makes us feel good.
When we look at these benefits, as evolution's tool for survival, sex seems to be more than just about procreation, and these "by-products" are becoming increasingly important in their own right as major influences on our emotional, physical and mental performances outside of the bedroom.
It has been said that nobody ever died of an erection, but for men and especially women attempting to address the reasons for their difficulties reaching orgasm, it can impact greatly on their lives outside of the bedroom. We often view orgasm as "the holy grail" of sexual pleasure, some nirvana that can only be obtained by the initiate, and thereby tend to ignore to our detriment the gradients of sexual pleasure and presence of physical being that can also be achieved with a trusting, loving partner. It can turn into a sexual gulf that grows between couples who are close in every other way.
Read how to forge stronger tantric connections.
Often when we think of tantric sexual philosophy we mistakenly think of it as simply being techniques to help maximise (or slow down) a male's climb to climax to ensure the women he is coupled with comes to orgasm and is thereby "fulfilled". What tantra does, however, is to break down physical barriers, and aid effectively communication between loving partners, to come to the point where sex is not just about the act at all. Sex becomes just a means to an end, which is to communicate with your partner spiritually. Sexual pleasure and lengthy, drawn-out orgasms become just a (very welcome) by-product of that.
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It is when we come to this epiphany of understanding about how we need to experience more potency, pleasure and passion in our life, that the body works its magic. Your body will end up sweating more steadily, your heart beat becomes stronger, you'll feel certain sexual positions are more easy in the heat of passion, bringing with it a host of other amazing physiological changes that pretty much mean your body is healthier and firing on all cylinders. Plus, as already mentioned our sexual well-being and experience of orgasms are said to benefit our physiology in many ways to keep us healthy. Harnessing our sexual energies correctly is said to help us keep young, fit and mentally active - but its prime objective should be as a tool of communication between respected and trusting partners.
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I often say that when learning tantra, we can practice it without over philosophising (you don't need to learn the how to feel the pow, so to speak), because simply by practising tantra, we are actually obtaining knowledge, about ourselves and our loved ones. But delving deeper into why sex matters in long term relationships (or more importantly HOW it should matter) will inevitably add more power to that "pow". You'll come to realise sex is not simply about family planning, or quick pleasure, but about something much more fundamental than a physical dance of the sexes.
Like healing, sex is also very individual. When combined with tantra, it can be a path for us to find a connection to something - to find some meaning, some sense of purpose, some deeper expression of the love we are twinned with. Tantra, as the practice of this form of kundalini awakening is about a weaving and reweaving - an integrated process of awakening our dormant potential and feminine energies. It's believed that the fabric of life is made of such currents and cross-currents of energy that are woven together in a structured manner. As human beings, our energy structure gives us the broadest range of powers and privileges, and we therefore have a great responsibility to use them wisely.
Discussed in detail in the ancient tantric way of thinking for instance, man and woman are seen as two different poles of energy. Some say that a woman should keep her separateness, protect all her feminine qualities and purify them and in this way go according to her true nature towards enlightenment, while others believe these energies can exist in both genders, in complimentary amounts. A man might want to experiment with his feminine side (awakening his feminine energies) during sex with a prostate massage for example. It's all about making quality time to find out.
However, these days we generally like our philosophy plain - be it tantra or other forms of yoga or spiritual thought - without too many intangibles or hefty concepts such as soul or faith to weigh it down. We are too busy, caught in the middle of modern demands and wanting a more spiritual outlook on life. Who can find time between balancing a career, parenting (a maybe a few keep fit dance classes in between) to give over adequate time for an extended sex life?
This push and pull goes on constantly. At this moment you will find yourself caught between good and bad, pain and pleasure, success and failure, and it seems that one is more desirable than the other. When you try to understand if this is really true, you will come to see that these two seemingly opposing forces have a common goal: fulfilment and freedom. It's in this necessary push and pull of life, that we find meaning and purpose. They say that the loneliest people are the kindest, that the saddest people smile brightest and the most damaged people are the wisest. Similarly, it's the stresses of daily life that provide the very reason we should make time for the healing arms of sex with a loving partner.
As with anything we do in life, we need to put our whole heart faithfully into the practice of sex. We need to put our faith into sex. This is a more essential notion of faith rather than a religious or secular one. It's a faithfulness to put or place or to direct your mind towards your own spiritual truth. Acts of the heart take us beyond (or beneath) everyday thoughts and feelings. They ground us in the fundamentals of life - supplying us with direction, hope, and resilience. The way each of us lives out our lives reflects the nature of our faith.
Assemble these meanings and they tell you that faith blooms when the mind directs itself toward a deep-seated truth - a truth arising in your heart. Simply put, whatever we do in life, whether we sing, dance, love or make love, it should be done from the heart to engage the mind. It should be done with passion, towards the purposeful truth of connecting with who we really are and those we truly love.
Therefore, in this ground-breaking mini-series I'm going to share with you 15 ways we can master our sexual energies, by focusing on our emotions, our mind and of course our bodies under the guidance of centuries old tantric philosophy and recent scientific study. They will show us how to combine these synergies as a divining rod to help explore our own souls and act as a bridge to discover the soul we are twinned with, towards gaining mastery with tantra.
At this point it's wise to make a clarification that in using the word "master" I mean to understand, not to control or dominate, because that is open to abuse. We use tantra to foster greater mastery in mutual understanding, not to dominate or control another human being. The first two interconnected steps shared below and in part two are a good example of this: in that we need to employ the heart to engage the mind when coupling with our long term partner - because what arguably turns having sex into making love is the feeling of love itself.
1. The relationship between love and sex
When we talk about love and making love, it's true that the question of sex gets more intricate (and complex) as our emotions deepen, but we cannot harness any of the benefits of its energies without it. The point of tantra is that it kind of doesn't work with strangers.
Sure, you can wow them with your prowess in positions, body massage and extended ejaculations, but the deep sense of connection, awakening and weaving of energies between two entities bridged from the physical to the spiritual doesn't happen in one night - whichever way you stand, sit or lie down. Moreover, too many bad one night stands (however much we laud our sexual freedoms) can often end up with us becoming a tragic figure of our own making.
Yes, we are free to have no strings fun when we want instant gratification, and yes, we can procreate via the cold and clinical act of sex (we can even do this in a lab without needing the act itself) but harnessing our sexual energy for a greater awakening requires more than just the physical act itself. When it comes to great sex, therefore, love matters. Love is the most nourishing of all energies, because it has the ability to balance all the other energies through all its different expressions.
But does love, in fact, exist? Greater minds than mine have pontificated about the infinite nature of genuine love. It has formed the basis of many existential questions, such as what it means to be a human being, in a way that we can connect with. Some have likened love to a disease (as Plato has been attributed as saying), while 17th Century German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher regarded magnetism and love as branches of the same topic - attraction.
Yet, all come to the consensus that the more they know about it, the less they understand about love's true value. Whatever we think of love, whether it exists or not, will be codified by our social biases and experiences - but there is one thing that seems to hold true, without the concept of romantic love, sex can leave many of us cold. Love is a true balancer and harmoniser, and for us to harness the healing and performance boosting properties of our sexual energies, we need to turn sex into something deeper.
Men can orgasm without the need for this dimension to the act of lovemaking, but those orgasms, rather than being beneficial, are thought to be life-sapping rather than life enhancing, and the real benefit of orgasms come when women have many, and men have fewer but longer lasting forms of spiritual payback to the physical connections they make with their loved one and their own bodies.
But great sex is more than just about orgasms, and it is also more about the physical benefits we may construe from the positive act of lovemaking. It is more than just an evolutionary aid to the survival for our species, too. We have the science that says the workings of lust and attraction (and the hormones and chemical responses that fire off in the body and brain) are nature's way to make us available to the opposite sex for the driving evolutionary force that pushes the will of life to procreate, but what are the reasons we find love so addictive (over sex), to the point we can become blind with infatuation?
One research team, who measured and analysed love to evidence it as real thing, concluded that romantic love is in essence a goal-oriented motivation state rather than a specific emotion. In other words, individuals who are "in love" feel strongly motivated to be with their beloved because being with that person causes a high level of emotional (i.e., a neurobiological) reward.
It's no surprise to learn we want to be with the person we love because it feels good, but another study took things a step further, linking sexual desire to romantic love. This research examined brain activity while subjects were engaged in tasks like viewing pornographic photos, photos of their significant others, and non-pornographic photos of familiar but not beloved people and/or strangers. After pooling this data, the authors of the study were able to "map" exactly where and how both sexual desire and romantic love stimulate the brain.
As it turns out, sexual desire and romantic love both activate the striatum (the brain's pleasure centre), yet only romantic love (and not porn use) also activates the insula (the part of the brain that organises and makes sense of our emotions and social connections). Thus, the striatum is responsible for sexual desire and initial attraction, and the insula is responsible for transforming (giving value) to that desire, and turning it (potentially) into love. In other words, love is co-created by and "lives within" the striatum and the insula - inside our heads.
But whether sex and love resides in the head or the heart, the backers to such findings say they know for certain that love exists, not simply as a product of evolutionary glue, but as something that goes deeper to our very purpose of being.
And if love goes to giving us value or a purpose of being, how does having good sex enhance that? And what effect does it have on our brains, and our relationships? Are there secrets we can master to enhance our relationships? We shall look at these issues in the second part of this series, as we try to understand the importance of one of our most deepest of connections.
End of Part 1 | Read more in this series: (Coming in 2014)
Yours in (sexy) love,
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