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For Franc and the mystical, healing, wondrous love we make.
And for our children Emma, Luke, Ian, and Anastasia— who have taught my heart to feel everything.
The way you make love is the way God will be with you. RUMI
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION Learning to Feel
CHAPTER 1 Freedom
Creating a path to sexual freedom ~ Taking responsibility for your sexual evolution ~ Healing our harmful behaviors ~ Claiming erotic freedom ~ Overcoming silence ~ Giving yourself permission ~ Finding forgiveness
CHAPTER 2 Pleasure
As a medium of communication ~ Restoring our humanity ~ Orgasm ~ Relaxing our judgments about sexuality ~ The many benefits of selfpleasure ~ Owning the pleasure response ~ Calling pleasure by its true name ~ Transcendent orgasms ~ Broadening our sexual vocabulary ~ Pleasure as a fountain of youth
CHAPTER 3 Finding Your Normal
The universal uncertainty ~ Bridging the erotic with the rational ~ Putting sexual health in context ~ In isolation or community ~ The Sexual Identity Grid ~ The malady of sexual dysfunction ~ Trusting our erotic nature ~ Beyond right and wrong
CHAPTER 4 Courage
The gift of choice ~ Growing up sexually ~ Living well with risks ~ Befriending our fear ~ The four attributes of courage ~ Desire as courage ~ Daily practice ~ Becoming who you really are ~ Healing erotic wounds ~ Letting our erotic self teach us
CHAPTER 5 Curiosity
Humanity’s beguiling capacity ~ Overcoming sexual boredom ~ Filling in the gaps of our sexual education ~ Exploration as the leader ~ Sensory intrigue ~ Opening as a creative act ~ Awakening to life, sexual and otherwise
CHAPTER 6 Sensation
Awakening the senses ~ Out of the head and into the body ~ Trusting erotic impulses ~ Building a vocabulary of scent and taste ~ The healing language of touch ~ Erotic connections ~ Making noise ~ Negotiating shared sensations ~ Mindfulness ~ Falling into the body
CHAPTER 7 Fantasy
Eliciting arousal through stories ~ Witnessing your fantasies ~ Fantasies as charged erotic fuel ~ The space between witnessing and enacting ~ Inner erotic landscapes ~ Uncovering the subconscious source of pleasure~ Expressing desire ~ Submission and domination
CHAPTER 8 Attention
How attention heals us ~ Listening ~ Making the time ~ A radical leap ~ Creating a love container ~ Sustaining an atmosphere conducive to intimacy ~ Showing up vs. coexisting ~ Compassion as a way to connect ~ Sourcing from our center ~ Committing to something bigger than ourselves
CHAPTER 9 Gratitude
Letting go and receiving ~ Grateful sex ~ Healing through kindness ~ Receiving abundance ~ The importance of sexual freedom, revisited ~ Gratitude makes sex work ~ A simple gratitude practice ~ You are a product of love ~ A passionate love affair with your fleeting life
APPENDIX Love Oil
Notes
Further Reading and Resources
Acknowledgments
Index About the Author
Also by Wendy Strgar
About Sounds True
Copyright
Praise for Sex That Works
INTRODUCTION LEARNING TO FEEL
Agood friend of mine recently told me that her resolution for this year was to become more human. She laughed as she shared the story of how some of her friends from Silicon Valley didn’t quite understand what she meant.
“I am serious,” she said. “I want to feel more.”
Her desire struck me because in many ways it seems to be the opposite of what we, as a culture, want. Our lives are increasingly dominated by digital gadgets that offer at best a superficial connectivity, though they allow unprecedented productivity. Thanks to technology, we get more done and faster. Feelings—who has time for those? And when our relationships begin to fail, when our sex lives disappear, we look for quick fixes—prescriptions for libido, energy enhancers, casual encounters. We search the Internet, when really it is time to begin to look within.
Maybe it’s no wonder; learning to feel isn’t easy. Feelings are like weather patterns: they are changeable and powerful, and if they reflect the nature of the moment, they can also distract and even frighten us with their intensity. Small children are frequently shaken by the power of their feelings. When was the last time you witnessed a temper tantrum in the grocery store, a giant storm raging inside a little body? What happened when your feelings were
too big to hold when you were a child? What could happen if you let yourself experience those feelings now?
Yet our ability to experience and share our feelings in meaningful ways is one of the profound marks of our humanity. Our feelings, as my friend recognized, are what make us human.
One thing that I have learned is that without a capacity to feel, we cannot build or sustain intimate relationships. For the past twelve years, I’ve been studying love, thinking and writing about sexual intimacy as an integral part of building lasting relationships and sustaining health. Since I study love, loveologist is the best name for my occupation. I’m also a successful entrepreneur of love products, which means on the days when I’m not flying on a plane for seven hours to go to a trade show or a sales meeting, I’m in the office wrestling with the everyday challenges of running my business. What isn’t part of my official biography is that for a woman in her fifties, I have an amazing, off-the-charts sex life. I’ve been married to the same man for over thirty years, and the depth and breadth of intimacy that I enjoy with my husband not only has been the concrete in the foundation of my marriage but also the inspiration in all my work.
Getting here was by no means easy for me. I grew up in a violent household, where my father’s experience of all emotions was limited to a single expression: anger. His rage toward women exponentially expanded after my parents’ devastating divorce, and it was confusing and frightening when this rage was directed at me.
Yet in the midst of all this unpleasantness, I was curious about feelings, as kids often are—especially the intense pleasures I was able to experience with my body. Once, after finding the word masturbation in an Ann Landers column, I asked my father what it meant. In his crass New York way, he yelled back, “It means jerking off!”
That was the extent of my sex education at home. It taught me not to ask questions. It would be a long time before I learned to stop associating pleasure with guilt and shame.
My first sexual experiences, in my late teens and early twenties, were with dangerous, destructive men—guys who were, no big
surprise, jerk-offs. Looking back, I have no doubt that I would have continued down that dark, destructive path had it not been for the help of a therapist my mother (very uncharacteristically) encouraged me to see. I expect that had I not begun, with the help of my therapist, to articulate and feel all of the sadness and anger of my childhood, I would have destroyed myself with men who cared nothing for me. Instead, I had the good fortune to begin the work that has made possible the strong relationship I have with my husband. In fact, all of the loving relationships I now have—with my family, friends, and myself — are possible only because of the work I’ve done (and am still doing) to learn to feel.
The truth is, the only way to true presence in our lives is through our bodies. This is the lesson I’ve learned. When we reach that place of true presence, everything, including sex, becomes vivid and interesting. But being truly present also means we continually risk feeling pain. This explains our rampant self-medicating—with pills, food, TV, addictive substances of all kinds; we will do anything to numb ourselves to the unpleasant feelings that are part of being human and fully living in our bodies.
But feelings don’t work that way. We can’t selectively numb ourselves only to the unpleasant ones. When we choose the route of avoidance and addiction, we end up numbing ourselves to all of our feelings, including the desirable ones. For too many people—millions, actually—a satisfying erotic experience is often inaccessible because they have abandoned their capacity to feel.
This book, Sex That Works, is about making the choice to live a feeling life, to physically experience the internal storms of living in our bodies and being together with other bodies. It is about understanding our bodies as a source of pleasure and joy. The thing is, our feelings are not just some thought in our head; they are the physical sensations of heartbreak or the churning anxiety in our belly that gets stored in the body with every emotion we refuse to feel. How you habitually relate to your feelings impacts how deeply you experience your body and your sex life. Don’t get me wrong: feeling our emotions is not easy, but the alternative is worse. Not feeling
cuts us off from the richness of our lives and makes us a stranger to our own sexuality.
The book is organized in nine themed chapters. Each chapter includes stories, skill-building activities, and kernels of wisdom I’ve gleaned as a loveologist, to help you transfigure your erotic life. Each chapter also includes a little of my own story. It isn’t always pretty, but the truth is that the more we share our personal erotic journeys, the more we help other people along their way.
The order of the chapters reflects the themes in my own journey, as well as the journeys of the couples and individuals who have come to me searching for the pleasure they know is locked somewhere in their bodies—if only they could find the key. You might encounter these themes in a different order, and no one order is better than another. You could actually pick up this book and begin with a theme that is most compelling to you.
What you won’t find in these chapters is an authoritative voice declaring, “This is how you feel.” I don’t think such an approach works. We are all different people, and we all have different work to do. However, I have found that the themes of the journey are, if not universal, widely experienced.
The journey usually begins with the freedom that comes from learning to hold ourselves, to take responsibility for our own emotional and erotic lives. Maybe the thing that pushes us toward this freedom is a wish to no longer be alone—a desire for the kind of loving connection that makes our own feelings real. But really, this first step on the journey is about giving ourselves permission to open a space where we can be who we truly are.
Once we have opened this space of freedom, we begin to experience the pleasure that we desire and that it is our innate ability to feel. Pleasure becomes our guide. Yet in order to experience deep, lasting pleasure, we have to be able to feel everything that comes our way. We cannot selectively numb ourselves to only the unpleasant feelings and sensations. If we want to be able to feel the pleasure of being embodied, we also have to be willing to feel the pain. Moreover, we need to educate ourselves and learn to talk about what gives us pleasure, in order to both
communicate with our partners and help us explore and shape our own experiences.
As we follow our pleasure and develop our erotic selves, our feelings may be accompanied by doubts, the most vocal of which is often, “Am I normal?” We wonder if we are normal to be feeling what we are feeling, desiring what we are desiring. With these doubts comes fear. Feelings are, for many people, sealed within a locked box, and to begin to open that box can be frightening. Certainly this was the case for me. In a variety of circumstances and for a variety of reasons, we are taught to suppress feelings that aren’t “normal,” and we learn to silence them so well that the messages they send us through our bodies are not even discernible. This stage of our journey is about observing—observing our own ideas of what is normal, observing the people around us and what’s normal for them, and starting to open our eyes to the true range of feelings that we are capable of.
Those suppressed feelings are not as invisible as we might think. They take on a life in our dreams and eventually become diseases in our bodies. Our inability to express them not only cuts us off from our own experience but also limits the connection we feel with the people we love most. If we are to become mature in our sexuality, we need to do more than observe; we need to work through and go beyond our fears. We need to have courage. Having the courage to feel and then articulate the full range of emotions that comes with intimate connections is, in fact, the do-or-die work of relationships. It is the fuel for the fire of passion, the air that keeps a relationship breathing, the ground for transformation and growing up. Just as our weaknesses and frailties are intimately connected to our virtues and strengths, the ability to express and feel uncomfortable emotions creates the possibility of discovering the love and passion we want most.
With courage comes the ability to explore our curiosity. Earlier in our journey, we learned to follow our pleasure; now we begin to look outside the boundaries we thought we had, to seek out and experiment with new pleasures, to question, to wonder. And we may find that we begin to wake up in more ways than just sexually. The
world we live in, our loved ones, our own emotions—everything becomes more interesting when we have the true curiosity and courage to explore it.
With our curiosity awakened, we begin to explore a new awareness of the full, powerful range of sensation our bodies are capable of. We stop being dominated by our thoughts, which so often keep us rooted in old habits and stale ways of seeing ourselves and our lives, and we start tuning in to all we are capable of perceiving through our senses when our minds are calm and quiet. When we can actually feel what’s happening to us — all the myriad sensations the body is capable of having the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and we can experience bliss.
At this point in our journey, we are likely feeling more comfortable with our bodies and with ourselves as erotic beings. We can use that comfort, that intimacy and trust we’ve built within ourselves, to start exploring our interior lives through fantasy. Our fantasies guide us along the tantalizing and often blurry boundary between pleasure and pain. Following them, we begin to open our bodies to the wild creations of our minds. And because we have learned to be courageous, we might even begin to share our fantasies with a partner, creating the intense intimacy a passionate sex life needs.
Finally, we begin to witness the power of attention. If we let our minds run the litany of habitual thoughts, as they so often do, we will not be able to feel our bodies because we will be distracted by our minds. By mastering our attention, we foster and create the experiences that give us pleasure.
And as we live more fully in our bodies, a deep, visceral feeling of gratitude naturally arises. This gratitude is the culmination of each of the other stages, and it renews and replenishes us, so that we can stay present with our feelings through all of our life’s joys and challenges.
Learning to feel begins with a choice. When we realize that authentic living demands the maturity to open up to our full experience, as messy as it might be, we choose to learn to do so. Once we can, we have the maturity to be grateful for the life and
embodiment that make these pleasures possible. We understand how fleeting all our sensations really are, how brief the time is in which we can experience them, and we start to live the brave, authentic life that is centered on what matters, not what merely distracts.
There are plenty of books out there offering tips or techniques for improving sexual performance. Those books have their place, but it’s also important to recognize that although sex is something we do with our bodies, it is not something we do with just our bodies. Having good sex, sex that works, depends on learning to feel.
I’ve arranged Sex That Works to highlight the themes of the journey while still allowing you the space to make your own observations and discoveries. In each chapter, I’ve also included some exercises related to the theme, to help you in this work of observing and discovering. I invite you to return to these exercises as often as you like. As you navigate your own journey, think of this book as a network of signposts along the way, pointing you toward yourself: a humanly embodied, sexual being.
You will probably find, as I have, that this journey isn’t a linear process. For instance, it wasn’t until I was in my forties that I started to let myself explore the erotic fantasies my mind wanted to have when I was aroused. Doing this brought up all sorts of new questions about my normality, and I needed a good deal more courage before I was comfortable giving my curiosity free reign and my body space in which to feel the pleasurable sensations of these fantasies. So, rather than a line, think of this journey as a spiral: from time to time you’ll pass signposts you’ve seen before. Luckily, they’re still there to guide you. Since you also have the benefit of accruing practice and experience, the challenges start to seem familiar and less daunting.
Learning to feel is a practice, no different than learning a musical instrument. Some days you hit the right notes; other days there is no melody at all. But just by agreeing to the practice, you open yourself up to an intimacy that deepens your connection with yourself, your partner, and your life. It is an intimate journey that makes sex work.
1 FREEDOM
The beginning of any journey is imbued with an urgency for more freedom the freedom to know and understand more of who we are. When it comes to creating a sexual life that works, we must begin by understanding and defining our own sexual freedom. We cannot have sex that works until we create a space for our own sexual freedom. But that doesn’t mean sexual exploits, and it doesn’t mean drowning our need for real human connection in a sea of casual hookups.
Sexual freedom is really about responsibility. Yet how many of us truly realize this, even as adults? In my experience, not many.
In this chapter, we’ll explore some of the ways we misunderstand what it means to be sexually free and sacrifice our tender, emerging erotic selves for what turn out to be sexual exploits instead of the true freedom we innately crave. I’ll also present a few avenues that lead toward healing as well as helpful reminders as you set off on your own journey toward reclaiming your sexual freedom.
A lot of us are still working with a misunderstood notion of sexual freedom. While we understand that “being adult” is synonymous
with “being responsible,” when it comes to sex, we often lose sight of this vital connection. Especially as young adults, we think being sexually free means acting on impulse, without reflecting on how our actions will impact ourselves and others. How did we get this notion? The confusion starts early. For many of us, it begins during our adolescence, when our emerging erotic identity and newfound sexual desires create deep conflicts with the family and culture we grow up in.
The ideal of sexual freedom is enticing, especially in the years of our earliest sexual development. During adolescence, as many girls contemplate the big moment of losing their virginity, the questions of when and with whom dominate their thinking. For teen boys, the “first time” is a marker on the road to manhood and is fundamental to how they come to grips with what it means to be male. As this adolescent erotic consciousness emerges, though, it collides with a culture that has segregated sexuality from real human relationships and made it something to objectify, fetishize, and shame. As a consequence, many of us end up misunderstanding sexual freedom as license to do whatever comes into our heads, whatever we think might give us a little power over this sexuality that we don’t understand and aren’t allowed to talk about. The ideal of freedom flips on its head, and we find ourselves falling down the slippery slope of sexual irresponsibility.
This transition was no different for me. I was elated to finally have a boyfriend I wanted to “do it” with, but my first time, in the back of a car, was both brief and painful, leaving me wondering what everyone was making such a big deal about. His breaking up with me a few weeks later added a dose of humiliation, which his crazy ex-girlfriend magnified by spray-painting my white car with profanities.
It isn’t surprising that I followed this pitiful first time with increasingly desperate grabs at sexual “freedom.” I would meet guys in bars, using a fake ID to get in. The sex was painful, and the interactions with guys who couldn’t care less about me made me feel increasingly damaged—distanced from myself and afraid to look at how I actually felt. Yet the worse I thought of myself, the more
desperate I became to find the loving, intimate connection that I thought sex was supposed to be about. As a child I was easily orgasmic, but this capacity left me entirely during this time. In the name of sexual freedom, I was eroding my ability to trust myself erotically — which, ironically, made me less and less free.
I hit rock bottom during my second year of college after a “relationship” with the social director of my campus’s “animal house” fraternity. By the time it ended, I was a wreck physically, mentally, and emotionally. I couldn’t even go back to school.
These experiments in sexual freedom were a far cry from the romantic stories that filled my adolescence. Growing up in a desolate landscape where nobody really showed up for me, at home or anywhere else, I would listen over and over to Barry Manilow’s “Ready to Take a Chance Again,” longing profoundly for a loving relationship that would hold me and nourish me. It was only years later, after I had crashed and burned in college and had to figure out how to put my emotional life back together, that I learned that being sexually free meant, first and foremost, being able to hold myself. Seeking solace from strangers in bars was a dead end. The only person who could give me the freedom I craved was myself.
Even though some things have changed dramatically since then, I don’t believe that the experience of a young woman using a hookup app today is much different from my own. I projected my longing for the intimacy and connection of a sexual encounter onto a Barry Manilow song; a young woman today might project the same longing into the vast outlets of social networking. The damage we inflict on our fragile erotic selves is the same, and it is real.
Hitting bottom during college was an important turning point for me. Finally, I started to have an inkling of how I might have misperceived this notion of freedom. I started to see that my actions had real consequences and that what I was doing in the name of sexual
freedom didn’t feel like freedom at all — instead, what I was doing was another way I betrayed and hurt myself. I wasn’t looking out for myself, and the guys I was with certainly weren’t looking out for me. Now I think of the end of my freshman year as the beginning of what has become my life’s journey of rehabilitating my fragile erotic self and my misconstrued ideals about freedom, especially about sex.
The most important realization I’ve had is that sexual freedom is intimately, integrally connected to responsibility; there really can’t be one without the other.
True sexual freedom does not come from acting out; it is not about sexual license. Authentic sexual freedom means taking responsibility for our own sexual needs. It means moving beyond sexual anxiety and damage through education, gaining not only the courage to take ownership of our erotic preferences but also the skills to engage in sexual behavior that is consistently pleasurable. It means growing up sexually and becoming adults. While we understand that “being adult” is synonymous with “being responsible,” when it comes to sex, we often lose sight of this vital connection.
Adults are not waiting for someone else to make them feel sexy or give them permission to explore the range of their sexual function; they are comfortable in themselves, comfortable making their own decisions, and comfortable being who they really are. That’s true freedom. This kind of freedom, incidentally, also allows them to be truly responsive to the sexual needs of others, which makes them attractive partners—who tend to stay partnered. Without understanding the vital connection between sexual freedom and personal responsibility, we can never reach the level of sexual maturity where we connect authentically and intimately with others. And without ever having these intimate connections, we cannot experience the full range of our feelings, including the amazing pleasure sensations our bodies are capable of having.
Taking responsibility for ourselves is the piece that most of us completely miss in our youth and often don’t discover until we have done significant damage to our erotic souls. It is such an elusive lesson in part because of the cultural silence and shame surrounding the way we think about sex. For many, the sexual education we receive at school and home is as good as a locked box; it gives us few resources and none of the understanding we seek. During our early sexual years, we move through the shadows, trying to make sense of what we are feeling before, during, and after our sexual encounters. Once we’re older, we bristle at the idea of honest conversations about sex even between partners, let alone with our children.
Instead, we replace the education and witnessing that we really need to grow into our freedom with our mistaken notion that being free means baring all. We tweet and post about our exploits as a means of feeling them, letting an imagined audience’s reaction to us be a proxy for our own sense of self-worth and covering up the devastating impacts of giving our sexual selves away for nothing.
Although I like to think that when it comes to sex education my four kids have had it better than many — their mom, after all, works as a sex educator—I know that each has struggled in their own way to map for themselves the terrain of their sexual freedom. Adding to their difficulties is the Internet culture they’ve grown up in, with its myriad channels for broadcasting far and wide each and every life event, amplifying the peer pressure to speak, dress, and behave in certain ways. Feeling this pressure, one of my sons had his first sexual encounter in high school with a girl he barely knew, whom he didn’t care for, and who didn’t care for him, just so he could say he “did it” and escape the stigma of being a virgin.
People have long been obsessed with virginity whether it should or shouldn’t be “lost” and when and how to lose it. Much of our obsession has to do with the shame that always seems to be cloaking sex and sexuality, and so part of waking up to our sexual freedom is removing this cloak. In doing so, we help to create more openness around sex in a world where even the adults don’t know how to have mature conversations about their feelings or their
bodies. Sexuality is absolutely fundamental to who we are as human beings, yet so many of us don’t even know how to begin to talk about it—and if we do try, we end up feeling embarrassed. As a result, the places where our sexuality is damaged, as individuals and as a society, are never brought to light, which only makes the damage more destructive.
Our aberrant denial of what it means to be human and sexual creates strange and harmful behaviors. It was only about a hundred years ago that boys — these would have been our grandfathers and great-grandfathers—could be forced to wear a ring with sharp metal prongs around their penis, which would gouge the penis when it became engorged as a result of a boy’s “impure” thoughts or even dreams. We might like to think we’ve become more accepting since then, but have we? There are plenty of examples of how convoluted our relationship to sex still is. Consider this: we now live in a world where millions of girls have had their clitoris brutally removed.1 Often they are made to undergo this torture by their own mothers, who had to undergo it themselves. It seems unimaginable, yet we pass on our own sexual damage to our children—and as a result, we all suffer.
Closer to home for many of us is the epidemic of rape and sexual assault on U.S. college campuses.2 This is another example of how a damaged relationship to sex is afflicting us all, but especially young people, who are grappling with impaired notions of freedom they’ve inherited from a culture with a twisted relationship to sex. For many of today’s young adults, the current practice of casual hookups through online dating sites is accepted as a normal, even inevitable, part of dating. I have met many beautiful, intelligent young women who routinely have casual sex with strangers they’ve barely met — and I stress to them that “meeting someone” is not the same as perusing their online profile. Sadly, they believe this is the only way to find someone to be intimate with. Many of these girls, too, have misperceived — as I did — what it means to be sexually free. Not only does this casual sex rarely end in orgasmic pleasure, but also early and persistent damage to our erotic consciousness often leaves
us unable to feel at all. I have wondered whether there is a direct connection between the rising number of young people who engage in self-harm and those who have hookup sex.3
There is also the recent trend of successful young women being publicly shamed when naked photos of them are posted on the Internet. When actor Jennifer Lawrence’s phone was hacked and photos she’d sent to her boyfriend appeared online, she said of the people who had done it, “I just can’t imagine being that detached from humanity. I can’t imagine being that thoughtless and careless and so empty inside.”4
A number of other female celebrities also received threats, saying they would be next, from the same people. We can all see the double standard here: these are women who might be expected to pose nude onscreen, where their naked sexuality can be accepted because it is distanced from reality by the trappings of Hollywood, but when they appear naked outside that context, it’s assumed they will be shamed and their reputations ruined.
Genital mutilation, college rapes and sexual assault, hookup culture, photo scandals these are all symptoms of the same disease: fear and denial of what it means to be human and sexual.
The problem is made even more convoluted, especially in the United States, by the prevalence of sexual dysfunction. It impacts nearly half of all women at some point in their lives and typically begins with vaginal dryness, pain with penetration, and an inability to orgasm. Almost as many men deal with premature ejaculation or an inability to have or maintain an erection, as well as generalized anxiety around being sexual. Although our bodies are just as capable of experiencing intense pleasure as they are of experiencing discomfort, for many of us, our early experiences with sex lead us not to pleasure and developing a growing confidence with our sexual maturity, but to suffering and stalled sexual development.
My point in telling you all this bad news is not to be grim but to illustrate that this work of rehabilitating our understanding of sexual freedom is hard and has high stakes. Yet it is the work that will cure the disease of denial and shame around sex.
Waking up sexually starts with breaking the societal barriers that silence our questions and desires. Especially with the people we trust most deeply, we deserve to dare ourselves to wake up to the sexual beings we are.
Our journey of erotic awakening begins with responsibility, and a key part of taking responsibility for your erotic self is recognizing that no one else but you can heal it or make it work. For each of us, the process will look different, because we have each been damaged in different ways. Yet we are all similar in an important way: we all live in a human body capable of feeling a wide range of painful and pleasant sensations. Sensation—this common, shared space of embodiment is where we can begin our healing.
For myself, working with sensation—touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing—has been the key to unlocking my sexuality and all its pleasures. I’ll say more about sensation and pleasure in later chapters, but I mention these topics here to show you something bigger than my own story: the process of creating a space of erotic freedom involves practicing, learning, exploring.
To begin our journey toward becoming mature sexual beings, we need to educate ourselves about our bodies and our sexuality, and we need to build a vocabulary with which to talk about sex. Education is essential because, just as in other areas of cognition, what we don’t know about our sexuality or don’t have language to describe disappears from our conscious experience, where we can engage with it rationally. Instead, this ignorance slips into our subconscious, where it impacts our thoughts and bodies even more deeply, but where we have much less access to it and therefore less ability to transform it.
For example, consider the largely unknown anatomical structure of the internal clitoral erectile network. Contrary to popular belief, the clitoris is not just a small button that sits on top of the vagina;
the external glans, containing over 8,000 nerve endings and connected to 15,000 more throughout the pelvis, is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. In fact, the clitoral organ structure closely resembles the male sexual structure, but with long legs that reach deep into the vagina.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that research was done which elevated the clitoris to a full organ system that is part of a complex internal erectile network, and not until 2011 did we have an accurate sonographic image. Yet even today, most women have yet to fully understand how to access this complex and profound organ system they are carrying around. One of the researchers, Dr. Pierre Foldès, noted that this internal organ system only functions at its full potential for women who know it is there and are working at cultivating their sensitivity. Knowing about this important network of erectile nerves makes it more possible to experience all of its sensations — thus the long-standing arguments about the existence of the G-spot.5
Our lack of knowledge about our sexual selves and the complexity of our sexual functioning is not limited to our anatomy. While pain with sex is almost more common than not, we often know little about its potential causes. And it is the utter silence and discomfort about breaking our silence—that keeps us locked away from the healing sexual capacity that lives in each of us. The solution to almost all sexual dysfunction begins with open dialogue, not suppression, and to start and maintain this dialogue, we need to educate ourselves.
As your first step toward sexual freedom, build a curriculum for yourself and the people you love that allows you to expand your ideas about sexuality and to experience pleasure without shame. This may well mean providing yourself with the sex education you really should have
been offered when you were first emerging as an erotic being. A good place to begin is by asking questions and finding the resources and people to help you answer them. You could start with this book’s “Further Reading and Resources” section, where I’ve included some of the resources I’ve found most helpful.
One thing you can try right now: Make a list of three or four questions you have always had about your own sexual response but never had the nerve to ask anyone. Allow yourself the freedom to ask anything. Don’t be surprised if your questions are linked to your deepest fears about your ability to perform or respond sexually. Your questions are the keys to learning that you have needed.
Once you have your questions down, commit to getting real answers. You could do this anonymously by posting on question-and-answer sites such as Kinsey Confidential, by reading books that will give you insight, or by committing to seeing a sexual health counselor (see “Further Reading and Resources” for where to find one).
You can’t find answers to questions you won’t ask. Start here and now by asking.
The next step in becoming truly sexually free is to give yourself permission permission to be curious about your erotic capacity, to explore your body, to experience the mental abandon that is necessary for passionate sex.
So much about our sexual experience is connected to our ability to give ourselves permission to explore the far reaches of arousal. The permission that I am referring to is not deliberative “thinking through the consequences.” It is more a visceral form of openness that allows all of the mysterious and hard-to-articulate intensity of
sexuality to move through you. We are inherently sexual beings, and this instinctive procreative urge has the power to transform all aspects of our health. By giving ourselves permission to engage fully with all our senses, we call our minds back into our bodies from wherever they may have wandered to during our day’s work, and we begin to feel what’s happening right here, where we really live — in bodies that are highly sensitive, in living organisms filled with feelings and desires.
No one is exempt from nagging shame and insecurity when they dive deep into their sexuality. But the transcendent emerges from the physical; passion has to replace our more organized, linear thought process in order for our capacity for pleasure to lead us into incredible experiences, the sort we can’t believe we’ve had even moments after having them.
What keeps people from this pleasure delirium is an inability to open up while relinquishing control. Pleasure and passion can seem frightening and unpredictable, especially if you prefer a more controlled and predictable life. For example, think of the leap that has to occur for the couple that thinks sharing a toothbrush is gross to be able to fall headfirst into passionate oral sex. For many people, giving their partner oral sex is simply providing a service. They can’t find the pleasure in it, partly because they are not able to give themselves permission to experience the many unpredictable feelings that may arise when you open up to feeling pleasure while giving oral sex.
When I was in the midst of offering myself this permission, I realized that allowing this opening was a close relation to sexual forgiveness. Giving yourself permission to experience pleasure unexpectedly is a way of forgiving yourself. And there is a lot of forgiving that needs to happen around sexuality for most people. Whether from unhelpful cultural messages about what our sexuality means about us or the bad choices most of us made on the way to figuring out our sexuality, we live within a wounded culture of sex that swings wildly between the prudish “just say no” and the casual hookup.
Forgiving ourselves for these choices and loving the wounded places within us is perhaps the most essential commitment we can make when we are permitting ourselves sexual freedom. The more forgiving and accepting we are about our own sexual wounds, the more we can allow our own pleasure, and even more deeply, we can give our partner that same freedom.
And, finally, know this: you are what you love, not what loves you back. This is a profoundly freeing recognition that allows us to experience the depth and breadth of our capacity for love. It is a revolution for the heart to open up to love, the most instructive emotional experience we are capable of having, without hesitation and without worrying about whether our love will be reciprocated. Love teaches without the need for reciprocity, and an understanding of our true selves and our innate freedom develops in us alongside our capacity to give and receive love. No one can take this capacity from us.
Practice forgiving yourself. Throughout the day, when you find yourself blaming yourself or being judgmental about who you are, just notice the harsh tone of your inner voice. Listening to how we talk to ourselves is a way to both befriend our fears and the judgments we hold about ourselves and to interrupt the process so we can replace that negative self-talk with something more helpful.
Just by beginning to notice the moments of negative self-talk, you will be creating more space for a new and forgiving response to emerge. By listening and paying attention to the way you talk to yourself, you increase the chances of speaking to yourself with kindness and acceptance. This takes practice but gets easier the more you do it.
My own route to sexual freedom has taken me a long way from my early days, when I understood sex only in terms of license, exploits, and pain. Now I can say, unabashedly and without hesitation, that I love sex, and it continues to be the most healing and profound area of growth in my life. Establishing authentic sexual freedom in your life makes you more of yourself. Taking responsibility is where we begin to feel we have real control over our sexual evolution. And truly there is nothing else in life that eclipses the culmination of release, joy, and satisfaction I experience each and every time I make love.
I will go further and say that my sex life saves me, restores me to my better self, each and every time I open to it. This is not a minor statement for a woman in her fifties who has been making love to the same man for over thirty years. In fact, it flies in the face of a good deal of current literature on the topic of sexual satisfaction and long-term relationships. Yet here I am, living proof that sex with the same partner over decades can get better and better if it is based on a relationship of true erotic freedom. This truth of this is both one of my best qualifications for my chosen profession and my driving force in trying to spread the word about love. I know from firsthand experience—every week, and if I am lucky, twice a week— that amazing sexual connection is most valuable when it comes to almost any measure of life satisfaction.
You can spot from miles away the couples who have given up on their sex lives. Many of my closest friends’ marriages are sexually lonely ones. There is a hardness between the partners, a disappointment that is palpable, even if no one will talk about it out loud. There might not be a lonelier feeling than that of being sexually disconnected from our partner. The truth is I don’t know many couples who stay together after they’ve given up on their sex lives. A dead sex life is the number one reason cited for the dissolution of a relationship.
There is a bonding that happens in physical union. What keeps this bond strong is our experience of erotic freedom within a maturing relationship. And the extravagance of the acts that come out of this erotic freedom is as profound as the tenacity of the bond
itself. At the remarkable place where we fully come to our senses and completely forget our egoic self, our erotic capacity is unleashed. It is where we are most animal and also so completely human. The idea that we must lose this space of intellectual abandon and emotional freedom to the familiar confines of longterm relationships is a tragic and, I believe, false conclusion—but one that we keep clinging to. I often hear comments like, “How could I do that with him, when I sit at the table with him every night?” and “How could I do that to her, when she is the mother of my children?”
We have little experience and even less cultural education to help us reconcile the wild in us with our accustomed roles. Yet when we lose our erotic nerve with the people who most intimately inhabit our lives, we are left with little choice but to solicit illicit relationships to discover and reveal our erotic selves. Then, instead of our intimate relationships reveling in the amazing elasticity and strength that provocative eroticism and wild sex contribute to our lives together, we are stuck with the shame of betrayals and a longing for sexual recognition that is always just out of reach.
It isn’t like this dichotomy between my sex-crazed self and the woman cooking dinner is lost on me. Coming up for air after the increasingly risqué and surprising sexual acrobatics that my sex life with my husband of thirty years involves often has me at a loss. We lie entwined in the dim candlelight, without words to process what we just did together. And then, after a time, one of us gets up, and quietly we slip back into the middle-aged, long-married parents of four, weighing our options of salad and sardines or going out for take-out.
