Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century (11 page)

In this chapter, we’ll look at three of the easiest and most powerful paths to pleasure: breath, meditation, and silliness. To the Western mind, these might sound like the unsexiest erotic techniques ever proposed, but trust me, the power you will find in them is unmatched by any vibrator or other sex toy or even your hottest dream-come-true lover.

The Basics of Breath

Breath is powerful. It can produce so much extraordinary pleasure that it will amaze you. Once you become familiar with moving erotic energy around on your breath, you’ll find all your erotic encounters to be much more fulfilling. Your orgasms will be longer and deeper. Eventually, you’ll find yourself using breath techniques in nonerotic situations to bring erotic energy to more and more areas of your life.

A New Way to Breathe

Let me give you an example of how changing the way you breathe can change the way you feel.

1. Sit comfortably. You’re going to yawn. A yawn is your body’s way of asking for more air. More air means more aliveness. The next time someone yawns while you’re talking, don’t be offended; thank them. It means that they’re trying to be more present and alive for what you are saying.
   
2. Yawn. Try it. Let a really big yawn happen to you. Fake it until you feel it, but do not force it. Come as close as you can to a really big yawn.
   
3. Feel how the yawn opens the back of your throat and stretches out your whole mouth and face. That’s the feeling of openness you want.
   
4. Now breathe. Let your mouth fall open slightly. Relax your jaw and face, open the back of your throat, and breathe in through your mouth, gently but fully.
   
5. Exhale. Don’t push the breath out; just let it fall out with a gentle little sigh:
   ahh
   .
   
6. Take in a much air as you can, as effortlessly as you can, and then let it go.
   
7. Keep breathing. Continue for three minutes.
   

Notice how you are feeling. Do you feel any different from when you started? Are you a little dizzy now? Lightheaded? Spacey? Relaxed? Weird? Do you feel good? Or not?

If the breath made you a little lightheaded, did that worry you? There’s no need for concern. Couldn’t you benefit from being a little lighter in the head? I know I could.

Changing the way you breathe produces a perceptible change in consciousness. It’s a physical reality. So, changing the way you breathe changes the way you feel. Sometimes it makes you feel out of control. Most of us walk around in this world trying to maintain total control over our bodies, to the extent that we have reduced our breathing to a level just deep enough to keep us going. It’s not just an individual choice—it’s cultural. Imagine this: you’re going to work one morning and just like always, you step into the crowded elevator. The door closes. But this morning, someone in the rear of the car takes a huge, deep breath and exhales with a loud a
hh!
What would you think? What might everyone else think? Would that breath seem strange and out of place? Why? In response to a sex-negative, body-shy culture, we have reduced our breathing to a survival level. We take in just enough air to stay alive. Given today’s obsession with eating and dieting, I suspect that we have replaced our need for air with a desire for food. Perhaps if we breathed more, we would eat less.

We unconsciously hold our breath many times each day. In fact, that is usually the first thing we do when we don’t want to lose control of some situation. It’s part of a reflex we all seem to have that causes us to tense up and “get through it.” Unfortunately, it’s also the technique most of us use when we “try” to have an orgasm. We bear down, hold our breath, and try to “make” ourselves come. Sure, you can have an orgasm that way. Most of us have. But deep, full, extended orgasms happen more easily and naturally as a result of the dance between tension and release, contraction and expansion.

When used consciously, both tensing up and holding your breath can lead to a mind-blowing orgasm after the body has been charged up with lots of breath. Energy pathways open, and the orgasmic energy can travel where we direct it. There’s a difference between the kind of orgasm you have after a five-minute masturbation quickie under the covers when you’re trying not to make any noise, and after a loud, passionate, energetic romp with a hot lover. In the former instance, the orgasm is primarily happening in and around your genitals. That’s as far as the orgasmic energy can travel in a short time with minimal breath. In the latter instance, the orgasm may feel like it is happening all over your body and shooting out the top of your head. That’s what happens when your energy pathways have been opened up and you have expanded to allow more energy.

The amount of breath involved is not the only reason for the difference between these two orgasms. In the second example, we also added the energy-building elements of movement, sound, and a partner. However, when we move, make sounds, and relate with another person, we also breathe more, exponentially increasing the energizing effects.

Changing the way you breathe will sometimes produce an extreme change of consciousness, so it pays to discover which kinds of breathing will produce which kinds of changes of consciousness. Some breath techniques will calm you down; others will energize you. For example, mouth breathing is a charging mechanism. We breathe through the mouth when we need or want more oxygen—for pleasure as well as survival. Although it is considered linked to our response to stress, breathing through our mouths involves more than the primitive human fight-or-flight response. Have you ever seen people in the throes of passion with their mouths closed, breathing through their noses? Of course not. Mouth breathing charges the body. When you breathe through your nose, air goes to the lower lobes of your lungs and stimulates the vagus nerve, part of the parasympathetic nervous system: the body’s rest-and-restore system. The parasympathetic nervous system lowers heart rate and blood pressure, and sets in motion other calming measures to allow the body to rest, recover, and gain new energy.

Four Conscious Breaths

Following are four kinds of breath that I can count on to provide delicious, body- and consciousness-altering experiences on a regular basis.

Practice each of the following breaths for five to ten minutes at a time, with the exception of the Breath of Fire, which you should practice only for a minute or two at a time. While you practice, keep in mind these general guidelines:

* Keep your eyes open and focused gently at a point across the room so that you stay focused on your breathing and don’t nod off or space out.

* Set a timer so that you don’t have to keep track of the time.

* When your time is up, take three deep breaths, and then just breathe normally.

* Notice how you feel after each of the four conscious breaths.

* Breathe through your mouth while you are learning each breath (except for the Breath of Fire, which is always done through the nose). When you become familiar with the breaths, you can experiment with nose versus mouth breathing.

The Bottom Breath

Practice for five to ten minutes
.

Bottom breathing is a gentle, easy way to calm you down and open up your senses. It’s the ideal breath to use when you want to move out of the busy or stressful state of doing into the easy, relaxed awareness of being.

1. Sit on the floor with your legs crossed (or on a hard-backed chair with your feet flat on the floor) and your spine straight. With your hands, pull the fleshy part of your buttocks aside so that you are sitting on your sit bones. (Once you learn the breath you can do it in any position.)
   
2. Place your hands on your belly. Relax your belly. Just let it go. Let it be round in your hands. (Despite the culture’s fascination with concave bellies, bellies are supposed to be at least slightly rounded.)
   
3. Begin by exhaling all the air out of your lungs.
   
4. Then, as you inhale, very gently push out on the anal sphincter. Imagine that your anus can “kiss” the floor or the seat of the chair.
   
5. On the exhale, don’t do anything. Don’t contract your anus; don’t hold it; don’t push. Do nothing. Just let go.
   
6. Repeat. On the inhale, push out with the anal sphincter; on the exhale, do nothing.
   
7. Keep going.
   

That’s all there is to it. If you find it hard to focus on your anus, try focusing on your belly button—it’s doing the same thing. As you breathe in, your belly button and your anus move outward. As you exhale, they return to their original position without any effort on your part.

This breath may take a little while to get used to, as we are not used to focusing on our anuses. Although it may seem a little odd, this is actually a very natural breath; it’s just not one you usually do when you are awake. This is how you breathe when you are sleeping deeply. If you watch someone sleeping on their side or stomach, you will see their buttocks and belly button moving outward on the inhale and relaxing on the exhale.

What can you expect to feel from this breath? Many people feel a warm flush in their face as the breath releases the tension in their bodies. Others report that it feels as though their whole body becomes a sense organ. Still others say it connects their upper and lower chakras. It produces a state of relaxed awareness quite unlike any other breath I have tried.

The Circular Breath

Practice for five to ten minutes
.

The essence of the Circular Breath is breathing in a continuous flow, with no break or pause between the inhale and the exhale. The inhale flows effortlessly into the exhale, which flows seamlessly into the next inhale. You can do this breath sitting, standing, or lying down.

1. Breathe gently through your mouth, keeping your jaw relaxed and your lips slightly parted.
   
2. Feel the back of your throat open and relax. Do not force or push the breath. The inhale will require a bit more effort than the exhale, which should just gently fall out.
   
3. Imagine your breath making a complete unbroken circle.
   

This breath is particularly useful for circulating erotic energy around your own body and between yourself and your partner(s). It builds and moves energy, and it intensifies feelings—both emotional and physical.

Some variations on the Circular Breath include breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth, and visualizing an unbroken figure eight instead of a circle.

The Breath of Fire