Heart of Tantric Sex (11 page)

When I am innocent and able to share what I am truly feeling, my entire body and breath come alive. My body responds to my courage and the truth, it vibrates, it pulsates, it trembles. This makes me experience my aliveness, and realize that I am not really being vulnerable to another but rather to myself. Each time I have had the guts to expose my obscure hidden feelings, I was the one that flowered and sparkled afterward, not my lover. He was certainly touched, and it helped him to be more vulnerable too, but I was the one who benefited. Each exposure was like removing a layer revealing myself to me. I finally came to understand that my lover is not responsible for my expansion, my inner growth, my love. Rather, I am responsible for myself, and it is all dependent on me. My own vulnerability and attitude gives me life and sensitivity; it is not the work of my lover that does it. I learned that in order to get closer to my lover I had to get closer to myself first. In this way we can see how much love we are willing to allow into our lives. The more the mask of the personality is challenged and dissolved, the deeper the experience of Tantric union.

The sounds and silence of your body

There may be moments when you are so immersed in the silence and brilliance of the present moment, the intensity of sensitivity within, that it seems virtually impossible to pull yourself up and out from these blissful depths to speak. If this happens to you there is no need to force yourself to find words. Keep relaxing into the serenity and stillness. However, words are not the only way we can use our voices. Sounds in sex are great, and you can use them too, to convey your pleasure. Be alert to avoid sounds that come from the mind and not from the body. This easily happens in sex when we make sounds to please the other, sounds to make it seem like we're having a good time. These are not true sexual sounds. A deeply sexual sound will have a ringing authenticity to it that engages you, and a mind sound is more likely to have a tinny, superficial hollowness. Allow sounds to emerge from your body to express your inner bodily feelings, the ecstasy and joy. Make an attempt to link the sound with the actual feeling inside of you, get the sound to vibrate from within it. It is as if the feeling itself is emitting the sound vibrating and amplifying through you, so deep is your throat in your body. Sound and sex are one.

 H 
AVING CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE GENITALS means to enter the living part of yourself from within. In normal sex, we focus our attention outward on the genitals while we make love, holding it there with intensity in order to experience sexual pleasure. But in truth we tend to be unaware of what is really happening to us, usually caught up in an idea of what we think we want, and using the penis and vagina to get it.

In Tantra, we don't exactly concentrate on the genitals, we relax into them. Remember, it is an easy approach and not a forced or tense one. Instead we bring our awareness
into
them, and begin to get an inner sense and impression of them. This internal focus brings awareness into the sexual act and gradually builds consciousness into the penis or vagina. Imagining a fire or liquid warmth that fills the pelvic area, melting and softening the genitals, can be a helpful image. Our orientation is inward, and by holding the genitals in awareness, almost listening to them as we make love, we start to see and experience them, not ourselves, as the makers of love.

Slowing it all down nicely

Slowing down all the movements during sex will naturally bring genital consciousness as it enables you to feel the genital interaction. At first, this may seem contradictory as you wonder how your penis or vagina can perceive anything without the friction to which we are so accustomed. To slow down or stop moving may seem a bit daunting, or confusing. But as you slow down, you will soon find more genital consciousness and a tremendously deep level of pleasure as the sensitivity is increased. With a great deal of movement there is too much happening to feel the finer genital function.

The first penetration creates the world in which you will make love together,
so penetrate as slowly as you can, taking several long moments to feel the yielding softness, the opening and the giving way of the vagina. Feel the whole glorious phenomenon, penetration and being penetrated. There is nothing like it! And then gradually dive into the welcoming depths. This could take several minutes. Once you get to the end, be still and wait. After a while you may want to move out slowly and come in again slowly, or simply remain for a while without moving. Immerse yourself in the sensation of being embraced by the vagina. Visualize your penis as a generator of love energy and channel this into your partner. From this type of relaxed, slow, conscious initial greeting by the genitals, fluidity and sensitivity grows and the sexual act has an effortless quality. With no goals each sexual moment becomes a world of love unto itself.

The more a woman moves her pelvis back and forth, the less sensitive the vagina, and the greater the defense that is automatically set up within the vaginal walls. As a woman approaches orgasm, particularly clitoral orgasm, she will usually begin to move more rapidly, increasing the friction, and it is here that she begins to separate her consciousness from her vagina. If she is observant she can notice that the entire musculature of the vagina is contracted and tense as she thrusts and moves her pelvis to create pleasure. Stated simply, the more contracted the environment, the less sensitive and receptive the vagina. At this moment, when the sensitivity of the vagina should be at its utmost, the complementary female genitals are unable to truly absorb energy from the penis.

Staying sensitive

When women stop the pelvic motion, we can sink inward and retrain the muscles and membranes of the vagina, and thereby the penis, to become more soft and sensitive. Through this we are able to establish genital consciousness. When first experimenting with this, my lover and I would ask ourselves, "How slow is slow?" With me relaxing and he moving one millimeter at a time, I was re-orienting my vagina to feel the event of penetration, the opening, the surrender, the receptivity. It was glorious! He was learning to feel the penetration, the divine warm welcoming sensation. For the man, it can be a bit of a Catch-22 at first. Moving is a hard-earned habit, one that he has always considered responsible for sexual satisfaction, his partner's and his own. For some men this is an easy habit to change while for others, it isn't. It takes practice. But when a man can slow down for a while, if he can simply be in the vagina and relax into the gap of no-feeling, it will be well worth it. Lost sensitivity will be slowly and surely regained. As he switches his focus to other perceptions besides that of friction, he will eventually feel like he is entering an electrical socket, or a highly magnetized environment. It is riveting!

Make love for yourself

The essential step in rooting your consciousness in the genitals is to invert your focus. Place your attention on yourself first and foremost. This means that instead of projecting outward, making love for your lover, you pull in, making love for yourself. As we impress the energy rather than ex-pressing it, it slides down and back into the base of the body. It is useful to imagine your energy falling back, tracking down vertebra by vertebra into the pelvis. Suddenly we can see and feel the spine as a highway that connects with the genitals, flowing upward.

When we bring consciousness to the vagina, most women will find they unconsciously hold their vaginas tightened and flexed while making love. Many women also consciously squeeze and tighten the vagina believing this will create more pleasure for the man. Today there are even exercises for the vagina which women practice to increase agility and strength of the musculature. This comes from a common fear that the vagina may be too loose, even big, perhaps having been stretched in childbirth, and therefore less interesting. Both the fear and the belief are misconceptions that have arisen out of the use of friction to create sexual pleasure.

If, however, couples choose to experiment with Tantra, perceptive and conscious genitals are essential. It will take some time to regain the sensitivity of the vagina and penis at this deeper level, but if the woman constantly keeps her awareness in the vagina, and remains relaxed, receptivity is increased and a greater energy exchange occurs. The sense of welcoming that is imparted to the vagina through consciousness increases trust and creates the basis for true ecstasy in sex. A serene and conscious vaginal environment also naturally prolongs the sex act. In the same way for the man, it is important that he brings awareness to the buttocks and relaxes his anus, noticing perhaps his tendency to squeeze it tightly.

Tension in the anus is associated with insecurity, and men's fear of not getting or maintaining an erection. Tightening the anus will not allay the fear. It will distort a man's energy as he pushes his genitals and pelvic structure forward, so compressing his sexual experience by confining his genital consciousness. By relaxing the anus the whole floor of the pelvis will soften, the sexual energy can fall down and backward into the body so to speak, and he will feel more rooted in the base of the penis. I have heard this feeling described by men as making love from "behind" the penis, and many have found this to be a most significant Love Key, as it helped to increase sensitivity in the penis and prolong intercourse.

Be aware of your pelvic floor

Most people are completely unaware of the pelvic floor, where it is and what it does. One man in my couples workshop commented that until three days earlier, he didn't even know he had a pelvic floor. Now, he couldn't stop feeling how tense it was. The truth is that we rarely feel all the way down into the tissue of our genitals, not really. Only when we are actually engaged in sex or masturbation do we allow ourselves to feel "down there," and even then only a little. Unknown to us, we are in the chronic habit of holding ourselves
away
from the genitals. We are always unconsciously holding our sex centers very tight. We are tightening the musculature of the pelvic floor, thereby holding the genitals in ongoing corkscrew tension as described in chapter 2 on Sexual Conditioning. This tension also inhibits the pulsing effect of the breath into the pelvic floor.

This web of muscle spreads across the base of the pelvis, attaches to the sitz (buttock) bones, pubic bone, and coccyx and forms the delightful base of the torso. It is these interlacing muscles into which the genitals are enmeshed and out of which they are created. There are muscles that can be used to consciously squeeze the anus tight, and another group of muscles that can interrupt the flow of urine and contract the vagina or make flicking movements of the penis. The pelvic floor also has a central point called the perineum, lying in front of the anus, behind the vagina or root of the penis. The musculature pulls up parachute-like, into a central knotty tendon, which you can feel with your hand when you tighten up. A lump will become palpable under your touch. It is here in particular that our tensions accumulate, spreading down and affecting the energy and structure of the legs and feet. We are continually pulling the floor of the abdomen up. Any time you put your awareness in your pelvic floor you will discover you can relax it and in releasing it, the musculature may drop down two to three centimeters!

The prime characteristic of the pelvic floor is that we are always holding it tight, pulled up and contracted. And we are absolutely unconscious of this central tension. Since I discovered my pelvic floor at least fifteen years ago, it has been a constant reference point. I started taking my awareness to my pelvic floor and
every
time I would find I was holding it tense. I would consciously release it, my body would take a huge sigh of relief, and I would feel more at ease, with my legs and feet having more contact to the earth. Moments or minutes later I would travel there again to find that it was tight! Regardless of how many times I consciously let go, the second my awareness was absent, my unconsciousness, my fear and tension around sex would pull upward to create a tightening. I remember it exasperating me particularly at one time, so I asked a close friend of mine if she felt any tension in her pelvic floor "No," she said "Never!" This was a shock for me! Was I really so tense? More than most? It was some years later we met again, and almost the first thing she said was: "I haven't stopped feeling my pelvic floor since I last saw you! I did not realize that I had never been conscious of it."