The Multi-Orgasmic Couple: Sexual Secrets Every Couple Should Know (7 page)

PRIORITIZING PLEASURE

While we all have the potential for enormous desire and great passion, we face obstacles that make it difficult to experience them. The demands of work, friends, and family keep most of us busier than we’d like to be. Lovemaking often gets put off until bedtime, when we must choose between intimacy or much-needed sleep. In a recent in-depth study of more than 12,000 couples, the authors concluded that fatigue was the greatest obstacle to satisfying sex.
1
For our sexual life to flourish, we need to make our pleasure a priority.

There is a widely held assumption among women that our sexuality and desire are not nearly as important as the other priorities in our life: our part-

ner, our children, our work, our home. It is difficult for us to make our personal well-being a priority in any sphere of our life and particularly when it is something as self-focused as our own pleasure. But just as the other spheres of our life affect our sexuality, our sexuality can positively affect every other aspect of our life. A sexually satisfied woman is much happier and more optimistic, not to mention a better partner, mother, or worker.

Like anything truly worthwhile, sexuality requires that we prioritize it and make time for it. Just as we need to dedicate time for our family and our job, we need to dedicate time each week away from phones, children, or other demands in order to nurture our sexual self. We would never expect our body to be in shape without exercising regularly. The same is true with our sexuality. To have a healthy sex life, we need to exercise our passion regularly.

THE BEAUTY IDEAL

Another common obstacle to desire for many women is the feeling that we are not attractive enough to be desirable or even to experience our own desire. Our society often conveys that there is only one kind of beautiful female body: an unrealistically thin one with large breasts. How unfortunate that the barrage of media images of airbrushed women’s bodies has made us lose sight of the fact that every body is unique and beautiful. And even more to the point, every body, no matter what size and shape, is capable of giving and receiving pleasure.

We are enormously influenced by the body images we see on
TV
shows and posters and in magazines and cosmetics advertisements. Medically speaking, most models are far below their optimum body weight. It is also important to remember that these “ideal” images are relative within time and culture. Female movie stars and models fifty years ago in the United States weighed on average 20 percent more than they do now and were much closer to their optimum body weight.

Within other cultures many different body types (large breasts or small breasts, large lips or small lips, large hips or small hips) are revered. It is our curves that make us womanly, and most men (and women) prefer a lot more flesh on their partners than the media portray. Later in this chapter, we will get to know and love our body as an integral part of increasing our desire and our pleasure.

Just as the other spheres of our life affect our sexuality, our sexuality can positively affect every other aspect of our life. A sexually satis
fi
ed woman is much happier and more optimistic, not to mention a better partner, mother, or worker.

Every body, no matter what size and shape, is capable of giving and receiving pleasure.

Building Desire: Exploring Your Erotic Potential

The first step toward multiple orgasms and a more satisfying sexual life lies in increasing our powers of desire. In the following exercises, you will explore your erotic potential. This exercise is useful no matter how much desire you currently experience.

For those of you who worry that you have “too much” desire, you should know that the Taoists considered having strong desire to be a great blessing and a wellspring of energy for cultivating our physical, emotional, and spiritual life. While sexual desire can be distracting (and even annoying) when it is unsatisfied or unable to be expressed, learning to mobilize this energy for your benefit will transform your life. Increased sexual energy, or
ching,
can be transformed into physical energy, or
chi,
for improving our body’s health and well-being. The more desire and energy we have, the more vitality we can experience. The Healing Love practice will give you access to your sex-ual energy when and where you want and will allow you to channel any remaining sexual energy into your creative, emotional, and spiritual life. We will demonstrate how to transform our sexual energy in chapter 3.

If you find that you consistently have more desire than your partner, you will want to encourage him to read this book and
The Multi-Orgasmic Man.
When men learn to become multi-orgasmic (without ejaculating), they find that they have a great deal more sexual desire and are much more able to satisfy their partners. Men are also often distracted by work and other pressures, so it is important for both of you to take time to focus on your sexual life away from these other demands.

Most of us are strongly influenced by the attitudes about sexuality we encountered as children. The comfort or discomfort with bodily pleasure of the adults around us sent strong messages about the value of desire and sexuality. What kind of model did your parents or other adults in your life provide of a committed, sexual relationship?

In addition to providing models of a sexual relationship, parents have varying attitudes toward the sensual and sexual potential of their growing children. Consider the role of touch in your family. Was there lots of jovial hugging or very little physical contact? Did you experience touch as welcome affection or was it sometimes uncomfortable?

In addition to our family, the wider cultural attitudes regarding sexuality also have a lasting influence on our sexuality. Whether we accept these attitudes or rebel against them, they still shape our sexual selves.

Our sexuality grows out of our unique sexual history, the situations and

Exer cise 4

YOUR EROTIC FINGERPRINT

Answer each of these questions for yourself as a means to understanding your unique sexuality. You may wish to write down the answers to these questions, or you may wish to simply answer them in your head. It might be helpful to start a journal to explore your sexual self through the exercises presented in this book. This journal need not be shared with anyone, not even your partner, unless you wish to do so.

As a child:

1. What were the attitudes about sexuality and about bodies in your fam-ily as you were growing up?
   

2. What was your
   fi
   rst sexual experience like? Was it alone or with another person?
   

3. How have these experiences in
   fl
   uenced your current views of your body and your sexual life?
   

As an adult:

1. At what moments in your life do you recall feeling the most desire or pleasure?
   

2. What places, times of day, or partners have aroused you the most?
   

3. In what speci
   fi
   c ways were these moments different from and similar to those in your life now?
   

And now:

1. In your current life, what things increase or decrease your desire?
   

2. If you could create the perfect erotic situation for yourself, what would it look like? (Do not limit your imagination here. Your fantasy life does not need to have any relationship to your present life. There is no greater generator of desire than an active imagination.)
   

experiences that we found sexy as we were growing up. Exploring your sexual history will help you discover your individual erotic fingerprint.

What have you rediscovered about yourself? Can you harness the desires of your past to fuel your present life and relationships? Once you have “found” your desire, whether you felt it in the past or in a real or imagined present, the desire is yours. You can bring that desire into your current life through the power of your imagination. While doing the exercises in this chapter, recreate for

Exploring your sexual history will help you discover your individual erotic
fi
ngerprint.

yourself those specific situations (whether historical fact or future fantasy) that get you hot. You may actually be able to do this in the privacy of your home, but more likely you will need to use your memory and imagination.

By exploring your erotic fingerprint you’re opening up your intimate past. Our sexual history can be a great erotic resource, but most of us have difficult and even painful memories of our sexual past that can interfere with our satisfaction in the present. Exploring and understanding our past takes the power from these negative memories and reclaims it for our present. We strongly encourage you to explore and share these experiences with a trusted partner, friend, or therapist. If this does not seem possible, try drawing, painting, or writing about these experiences. The more you are able to shed the light of your current mature understanding on the shadows of the past, the less hold these experiences will have on you and the more you can revel in the sexuality of the present.