Feeling your unique energy-body
This meditation helps you sense and connect with the vitality of your inner body of energy.
Close your eyes to focus on sensing your body from within. Let your body revel in its vitality. Focus your awareness on your pelvis, feeling it radiating energy. Let the energy spread from your pelvis into your chest and heart area. Feel the energy in your head, arms and hands. Let the energy spread from your hips and buttocks down into your legs and feet.
Relax into your body more deeply. Sense how this energy pervades your heart, your lungs, your muscles and every tissue of your body. Focus on the sensation inside your body.
Feel that every cell of your body is full of vitality, vibrating with energy. Focus all your attention on this.
Let go of the form of your body. Pay attention to the feel of this energy, visualizing the finely vibrating atoms and molecules. Feel how your body is made up of energy; you are just a small part of a vast energy field.
Sense how the subtle energy field that makes up the universe permeates you. Let it course throughout your whole body.
Awaken your inner fire
This meditation helps you to connect with your natural erotic energy.
Lie down comfortably, allowing your whole body to relax. Focus on your gentle breathing.
Feel your sexual energy emanating from your pelvis. Sense it penetrating your whole body. Revel in the sensuality of your body.
Imagine an intense, inner heat at the core of your being. Visualize this as red fire permeating your body. Let your sexual energy enliven you – don’t think, feel it: feel your sexual being. Embrace that sexual power.
As you go about your daily life, allow this sexual energy to be in your awareness. Don’t cut off from it, judging it inappropriate, embarrassing or distracting. Sexuality is your true nature.
Allow it to colour your interactions with warmth, passion and sexual presence.
The chakra energy map
The energy-body has been documented over thousands of years. The body’s energy system is considered to be a microcosm of the universe. In this model, there is usually a central conduit of energy from the base of the spine to the crown of the head, fed by two main channels on either side and a network of subsidiary arteries. Along the main channels are areas where the energy gathers and seems particularly intense. These are described as chakras, or wheels of energy. There are seven principle chakras, and myriad minor chakra points.
At the crown of the head is the seventh chakra, where mind and body, heart and soul are unified. Tantric practitioners describe this unification symbolically as the lovemaking of the divine goddess and her consort, whose sexual satisfaction creates a cosmic state of bliss and connectedness.
Give yourself pleasure
Sensual pleasure is vital for your wellbeing. It nurtures your body and opens you to sexual experience, enhancing your life. You need pleasure as an affirmation of your right to happiness and joy. Touch and nurturing are healing. The need for touch is crucial for survival and development – so touch yourself.
You need pleasure in your life, so learn to prioritize pleasure. Think about what gives you pleasure; you might want to write down all the things you enjoy doing, and then think about how much (or how little) time you actually spend doing those things.
It’s important to make more time for yourself. You can nourish yourself and your loved ones with touch, with food, with sleep, with sex. By focusing more on the sensual pleasure provided through sensory contact, you will get more from it. Demonstrating your love and affection creates an atmosphere of love, which nourishes you too. Being demonstrative affirms your own positive feelings.
Sensuous touch
Touch is a vital means of opening to pleasure. Through touch, you can reacquaint your body with subtle sensation. Slow and gentle touch allows you to relax into the sensation more fully. Touch each other gracefully, with gentleness. Have a session in which you spend time exploring the surfaces of each other’s body, enjoying the shapes, textures and smells of your partner’s flesh.
When you touch your lover, keep your touch light. Imagine that you are tracing exquisite designs on your lover’s skin.
Think of softer, slower ways of touching your partner; this way sensuality arises naturally and won’t feel contrived.
Try using your fingertips, your fingernails or a feather to touch. Touch through silk, or massage with textured food like avocado puree or natural yoghurt.
Massage
Massage is about feeling good in your body, releasing tension, relaxing, receiving and surrendering to love. You can practise self-massage, or enjoy giving and receiving massage with your partner. It’s a good way to nurture each other, to feel cared for and looked after. Knotted muscles can be kneaded out, aches and stiffness released, worries stroked away and skin stimulated. By relaxing your partner through massage, you prepare him or her to receive your love and absorb your tenderness.
If your partner is going through a phase of not feeling sexually alive or responsive, massage maintains the physical contact that you associate with lovemaking. When you are having a difficult time sexually, massage helps you keep touching in a safe, non-pressurized way. All sex therapists suggest opting for non-genital touch and massage whenever your lovemaking is not working for one or both of you, and you need to work towards a new style of lovemaking. Your partner will relax more if massage is not set up as a prelude to sex, but something to enjoy for its own sake. Massage is about giving, without expectation of receiving – and receiving without feeling that you have to reciprocate. Sex, however, assumes that you will be responsive, and if your partner is not in the mood they will experience your desire as a pressure to satisfy your needs.
Sensual massage technique
There are a few golden rules for massage:
1 Keep the room warm. You may like to cover the parts of the body that you are not massaging with a warm towel.
2 Place a few drops of massage oil in your palms and rub them together to warm the oil before you apply it.
3 Keep one hand on your partner at all times; it’s distracting if your partner doesn’t feel your touch and then you suddenly place your hands on their body.
Start with your partner lying on their front and work on the area just above the buttocks. Use long strokes, sweeping from the base of the spine (on either side of the vertebrae rather than directly on the bones) up to the shoulders – use one hand on each side of the spine.
Knead the buttocks and work up along the spine.
