The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover (7 page)

But if my internal energy was full, then my girlfriend's moods of push and pull would not sway me. I could relax my mind and stand on one leg of love, feel through her mood into her true need, combine myself with her energies, and dissolve in the openness of our love. If my energy was circulating without ob• struction, I would have the stamina necessary to engage with her emotions as long as necessary, neither petering out nor resenting her, but embracing her in love.

I have had teachers in my life who have revealed more pro• found truths than those shown to me by the old man in the bookstore, but it is to him that I owe the capacity to combine myself with my lover in a way that magnifies rather than depletes our energy and opens us in love. It has been a long time since I first received his lessons, and I am still enjoying the ongoing pro• cess of learning. But my relationship to sexual loving has been changed irrevocably by his gifts.

Understanding your relationship to sexual energy - and especially to orgasm - is a key to cultivating your depth of en• ergy and strengthening your capacity to open in love regardless of mood or mind. Straight or gay, how can men increase their

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personal stamina and spiritual sensitivity by converting ejaculative release into multiple, whole-body orgasms? How can women fulfill their body's desire for love-bliss by opening and relaxing into full-blown clitoral, vaginal, and cervical orgasms?

First, we will look at how men can enlarge their orgasmic potential and why they might want to. Then we will look at women's potential for orgasmic delight. I have included personal accounts with some of the following descriptions in order to help illustrate the sexual experiences and practices.

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5

BYPASS EJACULATIONS FOR GREATER PLEASURE

I have been making love with my partner for quite a while, and I am on the verge of ejaculating. I feel like I will explode any moment. I want to release the pressure that is building inside me. I know it will feel so incredibly good. For a few seconds. And then I will feel depleted and empty, ready for sleep, drifting in the emptiness of post-orgasmic peace.

My urge to orgasm is climbing, climbing, nearing the crest of the mountain, just about ready to peak in intense pleasure, before I let go and roll down , down , down the other side. Then it will be over.

I want this orgasm. I want it bad. I want to spurt it out and fill my woman with my seed. I want to feel the release of this sexual pressure building inside me. I want the pleasure.

I have been here before. A quick wad-blowing seizure and consequent emptiness. Sleep. Get up in the morning. It's all quite routine.

"Wha t do I really want?" I ask deeply in my heart. Even more than this impending moment of release, what do I want, through and through? Wha t have I always wanted? What do I want from my work, from my sexing, from my friends, from my family? Wha t do I want altogether in my life, more than anything else?

An ejaculation is not it. Wha t I really want is a depth of openness far beyond the cycle of tension and release af• forded by a genital spurt. I want to love so profoundly, relax so deeply, and abide so effortlessly in the freedom of open

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consciousness that I cease being afraid, unfulfilled, or sepa• rate at heart.

My whole life revolves around this need. I am constantly seeking love, fulfillment, or freedom from stress and fear. Yet everything I do to alleviate my suffering and increase my hap• piness seems only to prolong the shallow torture. As I grow older, I find myself settling for familiar comforts. Seeking profound fulfillment seems futile.

Nothing I do, no event, ever gives me what I really want. And yet I remain riveted to the sequence of events, planned and unplanned, that unfold as my life, as if they are leading somewhere fundamentally different from this present mo• ment, something final that will end my search.

Ejaculation epitomizes this need. I am on the verge of coming, of real pleasure, and I can feel my attention being corralled by this possibility. I do not feel my partner lying vulnerably beneath me. I do not feel the dying, pain-wracked souls eking out an existence in less fortunate places on this earth, people whose suffering I can hardly imagine. Instead, I am pumping my genitals in my partner's warm wetness, focusing entirely on my imminent ejaculative release.

I especially do not feel the truth of my deep being, which is already - right now, just as it is - free, open, and unbound . My very nature is unlimited, undefined, unspeak• ably absolute. But instead of feeling free as this infinity, my attention is targeted on my impending squirt. All that came before me, and all that happens outside my bedroom, and all that is right here and now - the immense openness of this very moment, its simple suchness, the transparent efful• gence that appears right now as my experience - all of this

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is ignored so I can focus on my ejaculation. I am a slave to genital need.

Feeling this, recognizing how I am contracting atten• tion and creating suffering in this otherwise open and free moment, I stop clinging. The spotlight of my attention, pre• viously narrowed on the event of my impending ejaculation, widens into a broad flood of light, shining through the entire event - my lover, the bed, the room , the world , the past, and the future. In this wideness of space, the genital urge also widens, so that my whole body is relaxed, opened out, and filled with flows of unkinked energy.

I relax my belly and chest so my breath can flow unob• structed, with full force and great ease. I relax my jaw, face, and eyes so the whole front of my body is soft, round, alive, and vibrant, not stiff or tight.

I inhale deeply down the front of my body, as if drawing energy from my head, down my face, through my throat and chest, into my belly, and down to my genitals. Then I contract the floor of my pelvis so it becomes like a trampoline. As the energy comes down my front, I bounce it off my pelvic floor with an upward intention and muscular contraction of my anus, genitals, and perineal area. Exhaling, I shoot the energy back from my genitals and upward along my spine. As the orgasm energy glides up my spine, my eyes turn up and great blisses rush in an upward direction through my body, through my head, and up, up, up, as if into a great space of light.

My breath becomes suspended in this upward realm of light. All time is made into space and even this wide realm disappears in a vastness beyond form. Our bodies hang lightly below like eaten fruit in a vanished dream.

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Wit h the returning inhale, my belly swells and sucks me back down , deep into the body. Face open, throat open, chest open, I descend into the fullness of my belly, pressed against my lover. Our hearts open so wide we are both swal• lowed in a surrender that loosens all edges into one open.

All seeking is resolved. I rest as the space that I am, as does my lover. Ou r sexual play continues, but now it echoes in a wall-less chamber of huge love. The craving that made me tense with ejaculative need dissolves spontaneously in the openness of being, wh o I am , wh o she is, rippling as this moment.

The energy that previously wanted to squirt out my penis now shoots up our spines, bathing our egglike bod • ies in luminous bliss, softening our hearts into the wide gentleness of love. Again and again, orgasmic energy shoots up our spines, throug h our brains, and then cas• cades down , floating into our bodies like so many heavy feathers of full surrender.

My chest and belly relax and fill even more as energy con• tinues pouring down . I feel pregnant with energy. Full and unobstructed, like the deep blue sea. This is who I am. This is who my lover is. Always. This full nothing, this cognizant emptiness alive as all forms. Effortless and all.

My practice is to stabilize in this recognition by noticing this openness again and again, gently, whenever my atten• tion narrows or my heart closes.

The deep peace I have always wanted is not in events. No wad of jism or cash can deliver it. No woman or absence of woman can instigate it. It
is,
exactly as I am, regardless of what comes and goes. In it,
as
it, all forms hover like waves

of heat in the desert air, like sweetness in the space of taste. Ejaculation is made trivial in this endless depth of love. All sexing shimmers in the open of wide being.

Common genital ejaculation is probably one of the most pleasur• able and addictive things a man has ever experienced - until he has experienced a whole-body orgasm, a brain orgasm, energy shooting up his spine, or total dissolution with his lover in bliss. Until he has experienced these greater pleasures, a man is un• likely to want to give up his ejaculative fix.

Bypassing the ejaculation to allow deep, multiple, whole-body orgasms requires both technical practice and spontaneous feeling-sensitivity Technical practice alone may allow you to bypass ejaculation, but your sexing will be dry and not open. Sensitivity alone may allow you to feel through the edges of the moment into innate openness, but your bodily habits will remain unchanged and so your realization of openness will remain short• lived; you will be distracted by your familiar emotional neediness and physiological obstructions.

Technical practice involves learning to circulate energy down the front of your body and upward along your spine in coordina• tion with the breath. Contracting your pelvic floor allows you to seal it against leakage as well as "bounce" energy upward. Turn• ing your eyes upward sometimes helps energy to flow up along your spine into and through your head. Pressing your tongue gently against the roof of your mouth allows energy to flow more fully down from your head through your throat and heart into your belly. Softening your belly and chest allows your front

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to conduct and hold more energy. The details of this technical practice are presented in Part Four.

All day, whenever you can remember to do so, it is helpful to practice receiving energy fully while inhaling deep into your belly, as well as releasing energy fully while exhaling upward along the spine. You can also practice contracting your pelvic floor periodi• cally throughout the day. Then, when you are in the midst of sex, the basic circulation of breath and energy will already be in place. But none of this will fulfill you profoundly unless you are also practicing love. Love itself is a practice. It is something you can do over and over, improving your capacity to love more freely with fewer bounds, even through difficult moments.
Unless you deepen your capacity to love, the technical sexual practices will only make you

into a non-ejaculatory robot of mechanical thrust and breath.

Practicing love often means feeling through fear: intention• ally opening yourself when you would rather close down, giving yourself when you would rather hide. Love means recogniz• ing yourself as the open fullness of this moment regardless of its contents - trenchant thoughts, enchanting pleasures, heavy emotions, or gnawing pains - and surrendering all hold on the familiar act you call "me."

The natural momentum of your deep being is more and more to live as love. Yet it is all too easy to collapse from love and limit your• self to familiar cycles of mind, desire, emotion, and fear. It is easy to narrow the naturally compassionate wideness of this moment.

If you are like most people, most of the time, you are proba• bly reducing love, over and over, in similar ways: Your genitals are about to burst from pleasure, so this moment of love becomes reduced to attention on a few square inches of pressure and juice. Your partner criticizes you and so love collapses into hurt,

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closure, and anger. You try oh-so-hard to bypass ejaculation and end up diligently narrowing love into mechanical effort, forget• ting to feel your partner, the room, and the entire world.

Love is recognizing, now, that without changing anything whatsoever, the openness of this moment is who you are. Love is practiced by noticing the transparent feel-through of this mo• ment, by relaxing as the cognizant openness that you are, not by trying to force yourself to be more loving.

Open love is your natural state, unless fear intervenes and stress follows. No amount of technical sexual practice will re• lieve you of this stress; only the practice of love will cut the roots of fear and undermine your addiction to de-stressing through ejaculation.

The superior lover is one who practices authentic loving in the form of his or her chosen lifestyle, rather than stopping short and building a comfortable cage of familiar habits inside the confines of fear. Enlightened sex involves technical exercises to retrain the body's energy, but primarily it is a matter of practicing love, feeling through the limits on love, and unguardedly being the vulnerable openness that is your true nature, over and over and over - during sex, with family, and at work - so the reflex of separation ceases to bind the heart to the familiar sense of stress that we call "me." Only the unguarded heart, relaxed as the whole of this moment, is willing to feel as the openness that consumes birth and death.

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6

RETRAIN THE ADDICTION TO EJACULATION

Most men have become addicted to ejaculatory orgasms through at least three routes.

1. Evolution.
   

   If a man didn't ejaculate, then he didn't make babies. You can be pretty sure that your father ejaculated. Likewise, your father's father ejaculated. And so on, all the way back. We are the result of tens of thousands of years of human thrust and spew, not to mention the furry ejaculations of our primate forefathers. Evolu-tionarily, all men, straight and gay, have inherited their ancestors' predisposition toward ejaculatory orgasms.
   

   And quick ones at that. Imagine that ten thousand years ago you are a man having sex with a woman in the wilderness. Or, perhaps yesterday, you are a man in bed with your woman hoping to make her pregnant while your three children are in the other room playing with a video game. In terms of being a successful impregnator, would it be better to be able to ejaculate in a few minutes, before tigers or toddlers pounce on you and your lover? Or would it be better, in terms of making babies, if it took you an hour or so to ejaculate?
   

   Obviously, the former. It may not be romantic, it may not be the deepest way to have sex, but in terms of reproduction, a man who ejaculates quickly - and frequently - will be most suc• cessful. Over evolutionary time, men who were fast and frequent ejaculators probably had more babies on the average, and thus propagated their genes more, than men who were slow and infre-
   

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   quent ejaculators.
   

   So, today, you see the descendants of these successful re• producers: modern men who ejaculate relatively quickly and frequently, men addicted to ejaculation.