Heart of Tantric Sex (20 page)

Many men are sensitive in their nipples too, and enjoy being touched here. When you do so, include the entire chest and heart area in your caress, stroking the chest, feeling its furry or silky muscular textures. Include touching an important pressure point in the center of the chest, sometimes called the Love Spot, lying on the breast bone directly in line with the nipples. Massaging this point firmly in a circular motion stimulates the thymus gland and the immune system while it warms and opens the heart. When the chest area of a man is activated through loving touch or his own awareness, it helps him to be more considerate and conscious as he makes love, his heart too, feels acknowledged. When chest and breasts meet, a man can imagine himself receiving energy of woman through his heart, and can allow his heart to be penetrated with love.

Breathing and kissing

If you breathe consciously slowly and deeply as you approach your lover during foreplay it makes for tremendous sensuality. Breathing in and out of your mouth can bring you in tune with your body and in harmony with your partner. As you touch or are being touched, breathe deeply into the hands, feel the breath wrapping and penetrating the cells with consciousness. Be adventurous with your breathing, it activates the life energy and encourages you to be fully present in your body.

Kissing is a truly wonderful and sensual art, and it can become a language in itself, an important aspect of foreplay and lovemaking. It evokes the sexual response at a deep level. Kissing, being joined at the mouth, is the ultimate intimacy of face-to-face and eye-to-eye. It is an extremely intimate gesture and often a person will think once about making love with someone, but think twice about kissing them. It is as if we consider kissing to be more sacred than sex. If we are in love, as we make love, then there is usually the overwhelming wish to kiss each other. It is a profound sharing of energy, a drinking through the sensuality of the mouth, and through this the bodies connect in intimate circular fullness.

However, in kissing as in lovemaking, once again we do too much. Relaxation is the biggest aid to kissing. Relax the mouth and jaw and especially relax the lips, allowing them to be soft and receptive. Usually in kissing we purse the lips into a tight rosebud and then we kiss the other person on their tightened lips very quickly. This is not really a genuine kiss, one where there is a sharing of energy through the mouth because the lips are too tense. Lips need to be relaxed and pliable, yielding and responsive. In kissing, bring the lips together very very slowly; let them join softly, be elastic, melt into each other. Maintain this juicy contact allowing them to answer each other in a succulent dance.

Today much emphasis is given to tongue kissing, the famous French kiss. However, in Tantra this is maintained for special occasions when the sex energy is flowing deeply. At the onset of kissing, a tongue thrust in the mouth of a woman can easily have an off-putting effect. It is too much too soon, she needs a slower approach. Kissing with the tongue can also trigger excitement very quickly, especially in the case of a man. So during foreplay and lovemaking this is something to watch for if you wish to keep the sexual temperature cool. The thrusting tongue is often used by men as a substitute for the penis, especially when it is not possible to penetrate the woman, and also where he feels his penis to be inadequate.

At first, when leaving the tongue out of kissing, it can seem a little strange or incomplete, but soon you are able to feel the thrill and sensuality of the succulent lips themselves. Penetrate your lips with your presence and awareness, and you will be amazed at the effects in your own body and in your partner's response. In approaching love, enjoy a sense of humor, be childlike and innocent, unknowing and fresh. Lie together, cuddle and kiss and even rub noses!

Separating in consciousness

It is good to realize that separating slowly and respectfully is as important and significant as coming together slowly and respectfully. Foreplay and afterplay are one and the same thing. Conscious lovemaking creates a very powerful energy field around a couple, and if suddenly disrupted it can be extremely disturbing, producing quite the opposite effect. The intimate exchange creates a deep bonding, nurturing and healing. It can be a physical and psychological shock when, for example, the man suddenly and unexpectedly withdraws his penis from the vagina leaving the woman with the feeling of being unplugged or suddenly abandoned by her lover, and the benefits experienced from the lovemaking can easily be destroyed. The energy fields are one, so avoid sudden separation. Tell your partner when you wish to separate your bodies, and do it slowly and consciously.

After making love it is really worthwhile to lie down side by side in consciousness, and relax together in silence after sexual union. Keep your attention inward before scattering the energy with talking or laughing, focusing on the streaming sensations in the body. This strongly reinforces your sensitivity and consciousness and has transforming effects.

 W 
E ALL WONDER IF WE ARE GOOD LOVERS. "Do I please my partner?" we ask ourselves. "And am I good enough or am I too much?" We want to be valued and enjoyed which puts pressure on us in bed. We want to do it right, make it work. But because the emphasis has been placed on the outcome, the end result, it has also led to performing and pleasing. When we have an idea of what should happen and we do our best to engineer that event, we are not in contact with our core, the source of the sex energy. The energy, instead of heating up and expanding inside each of us, gets directed or leaked outward in pleasing and performance.

Due to our physical differences, the brunt of performance pressure falls on the man. Since he has to maintain a full erection every time for intercourse to take place, he has an enormous burden to carry. When men share their feelings about desperate nights where every attempt for erection failed, you can feel their tremendous pain. It is not surprising that men suffer anxiety, because without this miraculous phenomenon we are not able to penetrate and make love, which further creates the concept of performance.

This concept dictates that the man has to perform well, do a good show, give her a good ride, an attitude that suggests that in order to be a good lover, a man must be a good machine. This results in the man directing himself to "doing," making something happen, and this has made him mechanical. He believes he must get as hard as possible as soon as possible, and so he directs his energy outward in his desire for the outward projection of his penis. This takes him away from his bodily consciousness, from his ability to relax and trust in his body. The belief is that a man
has
to act in some way for love to happen. But in order to embrace a new style of lovemaking, we must make a fundamental shift by pulling the attention back to ourselves. The emphasis on the penis being hard for love is one of the most basic misunderstandings between lovers. The truth is, when the penis finds itself in loving, relaxed sexual surroundings, he will grow erect easily or, at least, hard enough for penetration. And remember the delightful possibility of soft penetration where no erection is needed. A man in one of my groups once said, "When my penis is soft, I don't even consider it to be a penis." This is not so. Hard or soft, the penis is always infused with energy.

Forget the performance, be in the awareness

For a man sex has become so much an aspect of the mind, and he has been so busy monitoring his performance or been in fantasy to stimulate performance, he has rarely had the chance to really feel down into his penis. He's been around it and using it, but not truly in it. Now with this new orientation, where performance is no longer required, he can re-direct his energy into feeling the marvel that he has between his legs. He can start to feel that he is his penis inside the vagina, in fact and not fantasy. When he merges his consciousness with his penis, it becomes incredibly sensitive and perceptive, and this has nothing to do with performance and nothing to do with size. When the genitals are viewed as a single unit and experienced as generative organs, sensitivity is an asset, not size. Men have reported that many of the usual feelings of competition between men, the parading of physical prowess, fell away once they embraced a new way of making love.

The woman, because she does not need an erection, is not challenged to perform in the same way as a man. She knows she must get wet, but dryness is easily overcome. Lubricant or saliva will do, so the performance pressure on woman is far less. In knowing that without an erection she cannot have her man, however, she will begin to perform to please him. She is notorious for faking her orgasms. She may pretend too, through sounds and movements, that she is enjoying the way her man is touching her or thrusting inside her even when she is not, simply because she hopes she is turning him on, and hoping he will stay harder for a longer time. Most women have done this, and some have even suffered physical pain during intercourse, but they ignore it. Instead they stay focused on pleasing the man to support his performance instead of being aware of what is happening in their own body. Is my vagina relaxed? What if I stopped moving backward and forward? How about letting him in deeper? Changing the angle of my pelvis? A woman will notice as she brings consciousness to herself during sex, that many of her movements are oriented toward the man and pleasing his penis, rather than toward herself, and her receptivity in her vagina. Tantra informs us that when a woman's vagina is relaxed, the penis will grow erect naturally. Where the environment is yielding and porous, there is more likelihood of attraction and response.

When a woman's energy is swinging away from herself in pleasing, and a man's energy is projected outward in performance, there can be no genuine exchange of sexual energy between opposite poles. Rather, both are off center and away from home and more likely to have an explosive quick bang than the long, slow, sensual burn envisaged by Tantra.

We all know that if a fire has too much air and wood, it burns too quickly. We also know if it has no air or wood, it won't burn at all. A fire needs exactly the right amount of wood and air to keep it glowing into the early hours. If we compare this to lovemaking, we can realize how much love and understanding is needed to keep a continual awareness on the wood and flow of air.

Excitement is what we have been taught to use to get us where we want to go. This "heat" stokes us up prior to penetration. Once the penis is inside, we need even more heat to maintain the erection. In creating a quick fire, stoking it up as much as possible, we make it burn all the more fiercely. But more important, when we create the heat in another person's body before creating it in ourselves, we are making a false fire.

Experience your body from within

When you slowly withdraw projection, forgetting about the other person and coming back to yourself, the relationship to your own body will become extremely significant. You can concentrate on relaxing, breathing, and experiencing your body from within. When you stop thinking about the other person, over whom you have no real influence anyway, and bring your attention back home, you are stoking your own fire.

You must look after yourself first before tending to the fire that belongs to someone else. Then you will be in for a big surprise! When your fire is alight, reach out to your lover. Keep lighting your fire as you come closer, and if they have lit theirs, there is the potential for glowing golden embers. Keep asking yourself, "Am I doing this for me, or some idea I have about me?" and this will provide invaluable answers. The moment you find yourself projecting outward, pleasing or performing, drop back into your own center, and usually you will both experience a wave of sexual energy coursing through your bodies.

The time for penetration is always a delicate moment and the pressures of pleasing and performing can easily manifest here. Often when the bodies and energies are prepared for penetration, the minds are preoccupied with concerns
about
penetration. Is it too soon? Is it going to happen? Will it work? Will she let me in? Frequently a man will penetrate his partner before she is physically or psychologically prepared which can lead to the woman feeling forced and therefore resistant to making love. To reduce these pressures and to increase consciousness it is important that a woman is willing to be penetrated. I suggest to couples that as soon as the woman is ready she invites her partner to enter her. If the man is erect, well and good, if he is not, more time is needed and the woman can wait. Or you may agree to try soft penetration. The man with his active positive pole of love is naturally more likely to be ready while the woman is sexually more passive and usually needs more time than her man. When the woman invites penetration she enters as a willing and responsive partner. It must be added, however, that the woman must not withhold penetration from her man as part of a push-and-pull power game. This will bring in the element of the mind and its desire to control the other, and this attitude has no place in the Tantric approach to love. Partners attempting to create a new basis for their love should enter into lovemaking with sincerity and honesty.