Archive for October, 2014
Posted by Nicole on October 13, 2014
Great sex – great physical love – makes us feel alive. It is our soul’s current dwelling in a body that, in fact, makes us ALIVE. Really see your Beloved tonight. See them and remember how precious these days are together. Breathing. Touching. Moving.
Don’t waste it. See your Beloved with fresh eyes of hungry, vibrant gratitude.
-N
Posted in Love and Making It | Tagged: poem, sex, Tyler Knott | 1 Comment »
Posted by Nicole on October 12, 2014
I was asleep but my heart was awake.
A voice! My beloved was knocking:
‘Open to me, my love, my darling,
My dove, my perfect one!
For my head is drenched with dew,
My locks with the damp of the night.’
“I have taken off my dress,
How can I put it on again?
I have washed my feet,
How can I dirty them again?
“My beloved extended his hand through the opening,
And my feelings were aroused for him.
“I arose to open to my beloved;
And my hands dripped with myrrh,
And my fingers with liquid myrrh,
On the handles of the bolt.
“I opened to my beloved,
But my beloved had turned away and had gone!
-Song of Songs, Chapter 5 verses 2-6
*****
I was sleepwalking through my days and nights, but somewhere buried inside … my heart was awake. I wanted to feel alive, but mostly I just felt tired. My heart was beating inside my chest, but my limbs and eyes could barely feel it. Life is just draining, isn’t it?
I got all ready for bed. The kids’ teeth were brushed, pajamas on, homework checked, clothes set out for tomorrow, lunches planned, and after 3 trips back into their room with forgotten stuffed animals, glasses of water, and extra hugs, I finally started winding my own self down for the night. I took a quick shower and put on my toner, serum, eye-cream and nighttime moisturizer. I plucked a few stray hairs from some, places…There’s coconut oil on my feet inside cotton socks. My hair is braided in the hopes that the Pin I saw about beachy waves is true. Finally, I lay down with a book to relax – just for a few minutes before my eyes cross and I do that thing where I read the same paragraph 3 times without knowing what I read.
Then, my husband comes in with that look in his eye.
He bumps me, unnecessarily, and asks,
“How Are you?”
He, too, wants to relax. His version of relaxing is sometimes different than mine.
I hesitate. How am I?
Me: “I’m fine. How are you?”
Him: “Good. I’m good”
{He stays very still, keeping eye contact}
Him: …. “Are you tired?”
{I reply, honestly, but also knowing what he’s getting at and not sure I’m up to it}
Me: “Well, yes.”
Him: “oh, ok.”
{He leaves the room, slowly}
I sit, thinking. I love him. I wish I felt more awake… more alive. I wish I felt passion or desire or any kind of freakin energy so I could go and love him… actively. Instead I sit and feel the push and pull of wanting and not wanting to have sex tonight. I know it’s a good idea. I know he loves me and wants me to open up to him. I’m just so… tired. And ready for bed. I am ready for bed. Do I really need to get all messed up and start over. That’s a lot of special nighttime product I already put on.
Finally, I decide to go out and see him. I stand next to him as he sits on the computer. I lean against him, my stomach and chest pressing into him. He doesn’t look up.
We share a few words but they don’t connect. We lost each other, for tonight.
*****
So many men and women will live this story tonight? Will I choose it again? Or will tonight be the night that when he knocks, I open the door? Will tonight be the night that I am already covered in “myrrh” and ready to be open to him in body and spirit – when he first reaches for me rather than as a afterthought when the rejection has already taken hold of his heart and he is gone?
What will you do?
Posted in Love and Making It, Uncategorized | Tagged: missed opportunities, sex, Sex. Love, song of solomon | 6 Comments »
Posted by Nicole on October 10, 2014
Designed by Sir Christopher Wren and built near 1700, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London is a glorious piece of history and architecture. Even more than that, it has a famous architectural anomaly halfway up the majestic dome.
Have you ever heard of a whispering gallery?
The first one ever discovered is still in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
If you climb the 257 stairs from the cathedral floor to the whispering gallery, you are met with a surprising intimacy even Sir Christopher Wren did not foresee.
The gallery is a complete circle with an intricate handrail and simple wall.
If you place your cheek near the surface of the wall and speak {even in a whisper}, your companions can hear you, clear and crisp – even clearer than if you were standing right next to each other – no matter how far away they are down the wall. You can stand on opposite sides of the gallery, place your ears to the wall and whisper back and forth as if you were in bed together {but keep it clean, because there are usually lots of people around when you actually visit}.
…Which is why we are talking about whispering galleries today in our conversations about LOVE AND MAKING IT. What if we made our bedrooms into metaphorical whispering galleries? Then you could whisper anything you wanted and your lover would hear you.
In the whispering gallery it does not matter how far apart you are, if you both agree to place your cheeks against the wall and face toward the path of the sound waves {letting the waves connect you} you WILL hear each other clearly even if you only speak in whispers.
If we set aside our bedrooms as whispering galleries, maybe the space and separateness that can creep in between two people who love each other can be made inconsequential. Maybe, if we agree to turn towards each other, just in this special space, we will be able to hear each other’s love and desire – clear and crisp.
Perhaps the bedroom is too big a space. What if we narrow it down to just your bed?
Your bed is your whispering gallery and it works best if you are naked.
Even when bills, schedules, forgotten lunches, dirty socks, cereal chewing noises, Netflix addictions, wet towels, 3am feedings, bad days, ill-timed jokes, and wrong turns all try to get between you… In your whispering gallery, you can still hear LOVE and INTIMACY even if you have to whisper to get it out.
How do we do this? How do I make a naked whispering gallery?! I can hear the questions. I feel them in myself sometimes too. How? The noise and space seem too immense to cross some nights. I’m too frustrated. Too tired. Too uncomfortable in my own skin.
Even Sir Christopher Wren didn’t KNOW he was building a Whispering Gallery. How do we do this on purpose?
*****
1. Start to see sex as more than just intercourse. Let your mind wander, meander, create, and want more than a few minutes of predictable movements. What if we thought of sex as full of possibilities – 1,000 ways to connect. Like a great football game or dance class, the details and surprises are the most fun parts. {It’s not JUST the touchdowns that make a good football game.}
2. Start to see sex as more than just a healthy habit. Sex is way more useful than brushing your teeth or doing squats. Sex is as good for your health as those two things are, but it is also a spiritual practice that forces us to face down our issues. Sex is more like prayer – connection, honesty, growth, beauty, life. These are the things we can start to see in our sex lives, with some practice. Sex matters because once we are married, it becomes an important part of our wholeness.
3. Start to see your bedroom as set-apart for a purpose. Just like anything: a writing space, a workout space, a space for quiet-time. Your bed needs to become off-limits to all those problems that sneak into your relationship. In bed, there are no bills, no laundry to do, no unforgiveness. Your bedroom is for “whispering” love & for learning to YADA each other better.
4. Start with an agreement to make your bedroom the place for connection. Remember, In the whispering gallery it does not matter how far apart you are, if you both agree to place your cheeks against the wall and face toward each other, you WILL hear each other clearly even if you only speak in whispers.
*****
There’s so much more but we will have time. Everyday in October we will continue to talk about LOVE and MAKING IT… and I have some good things planned for our time together after that. Thanks for sticking with this – it’s a fun but hard topic. Talking about it helps me too, you know. We are in this together… this hope that we can be made whole and that sex is a big part of our wholeness once we fall in love.
Posted in Love and Making It, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Posted by Nicole on October 9, 2014
If you love your husband but just can’t find the motivation or desire to have sex or initiate sex, this is the most practical help I can give:
Just Do It
I know it’s not romantic. I know it’s not ideal.
We want passion and an irresistible magnetic pull towards the love of our lives, but we do not live in Outlander or Twilight or 50 Shades. No one is writing our romance for us – in OUR lives. We have to do the work of making time to love our spouse with not just our minds but our bodies too.
Many of us spend all day basically in our heads. Our bodies serve to carry our brains around and not much else (except to eat Chipotle! Thank you, mouth!). I mean, we work hard but we do not move our bodies for pleasure or mastery of movement.
This causes a disconnect between our minds and our bodies in that we are not accustomed to a life that requires a conscious, practiced connection between body, mind, and soul. We move minimally or with rough, uninspired, exhausted actions throughout long days.
Then, we come home and our husbands (usually, but sometimes it’s the other way around) want to make sweet love… and we are so disconnected from our body that it feels foreign, awkward, and… well, like a lot of work, to get up the energy to have sex.
BUT if they hang in there with us and push through the initial rejection (miracle!) then we kiss and kissing turns to sex… and most of the time, we are really, really glad we did have that sex. We really love our spouse and making love to them is a good thing.
It’s a lot like going to the gym.
Sometimes you just have to do it. Get started. Put on your shoes.
You may not really feel like it, but you know it’s good for you and you’ll be happy you did it. So you start, and about 15 minutes in you find yourself enjoying it. You feel strong and alive. Your muscles and your mind are working in unison. Then, after you are done, you are proud and you are glowing.
It’s okay to feel the same way about sex.
Sometimes you just have to do it. Get started. Put on your shoes {but this time it’s lingerie}.
You may not really feel like it, but you know it’s good for you and you’ll be happy you did it. So you start, and about 15 minutes in you find yourself enjoying it. You feel strong and alive. Your muscles and your mind are working in unison. Then, after you are done, you are proud and you are glowing.
(I did not make this pic, I just like it.)
Posted in Love and Making It | Tagged: help, initiate, Love, love and making it, sex | 3 Comments »
Posted by Nicole on October 8, 2014
What lights a relationship on fire? What keeps it going after fifteen years?
What sets butterflies to flight in your stomach when your eyes make contact?
What keeps your bodies magnetized so that the pull towards each other never weakens?
The obvious answer is mutual attraction, but what is that exactly? How do we stay mutually attracted? What’s the answer to “How to keep a marriage magnetized?”
People are not permanent magnets. We do not just naturally hold onto our charge in a relationship. We must keep electricity running through us so we can keep our magnetism pulling us together.
At first it seems like our relationship is more like permanent magnets than electromagnets. We are pulled together without even trying. The attraction just seems to happen and we accept it as fact, but there is a vital element available in a new attraction that wears off over time without an intentional electric current shooting through your coils.
If you want your coils to stay attracted to his or her coils for years to come, the essential electric thought you must keep flowing through your mind so that your bodies will attract is this:
I’M SO LUCKY TO HAVE YOU & YOU ARE SO LUCKY TO HAVE ME.
The more time you spend counting the ways your spouse is awesome and how lucky you are to have them, the more humbly grateful you will feel for your relationship. Equally important is the time you spend realizing how awesome you are and how lucky they are to have you, because this gives you confidence.
HUMILITY + CONFIDENCE = CHEMISTRY
We are attracted to people that we admire, who surprise us, but we also need confidence to receive that awesome person’s love in return.
There is nothing like thinking your spouse is spectacular and YOU get to be married to them… and then having them think that about you.
Believing yourselves to be lucky to have each other builds in just enough “seize the moment” motivation to keep the attraction alive. Luck brings gratitude in it’s back pocket.
This keeps that little flicker of tension and wonder between you.
Do not let jealousy, or the attentions of someone else, be the electricity that remagnetizes you. It’s easy to let passion fade and take our partners for granted… until someone else notices how great they are and we are suddenly lit up with jealousy.
*****
Imagine that your spouse is your high school crush… the overwhelming joy that came when their arm touched your arm, when they asked what the homework was in Trig and you couldn’t believe your luck, when they smiled at you across a room and you’d never felt more alive…
Sown into those moments was gratitude and massive admiration of that Crush… plus a focus on every single minute detail of your interactions. You wanted more.
Why do we take for granted that the person we crushed on at some point in our lives, now wakes up beside us?
*****
See that person you married, sitting at their computer scrolling through Facebook? Imagine that you’ve had a crush on them for months and suddenly they are in your house… but this time, you are not some shy, scared high schooler… sure, you are scared because we are always a little frightened to go after what we really want… but now, you know you are crush-worthy too and kissing you is hot. After you read this sentence, you walk over and put your hand on their neck like you can’t believe you GET to. You look them in the eyes like an 80’s hearthrob just long enough to let them know you want them… and then you lean over and kiss, full on the mouth. And this kiss is pure, unbelievable luck: two awesome people finding each other and never letting go… every single day.
This is magnetic.
Posted in Love and Making It, Uncategorized | Tagged: hope, Love, sex | 5 Comments »
Posted by Nicole on October 7, 2014
I closed my eyes and spoke to you in 100 silent ways. – Rumi
Using sex as a way to temporarily satiate a craving is like gulping a fine wine or perfectly-aged scotch to quench your thirst, and then wondering why you are still thirsty and your throat has started burning.
When we are quiet and settled, we notice the profound stirrings simple physical touches wake in us: fingers intertwined, lips kissing the inside of a wrist, the bump of a fist, a hug.
When we move too quickly and desperately, we grab and suck whatever we can to calm our nerves and queasy stomachs.
We were made for more and we know it.
You were made to worship and be worshipped because of the infinite beauty and glory in you. The fast, shallow or chaotic moments most of us experience are not the way we were designed to know each other.
The original Old English marriage vows in the Common Book of Prayer…
“With this ring, I thee wed, with my body, I thee worship…”
Old English Definition of Worship: Giving honor and admiration; acknowledging worth… worth-ship.
This is not sacrilege, this is sacred. Sex is sacred – spending time on the utter appreciation of one child of God
*****
In making love to your spouse, are you communicating their worth, to you and to God? Are you taking in each inch of them the way you would your absolute favorite “thing” in the world? After sex with you, does your spouse feel more connected to God and more themselves in their perfectly created “naked” and “shameless” form?
*****
I love Degas paintings. I could pour over one; seeing the brush strokes and colors… think about what it must have been like in the room as each swash of pain hit the canvas and the images emerged.
I love great music. I could listen to a song over and over, hearing different notes and inflections of sound.
I love swimming and watching great swimmers compete. I watch the water move over their strong shoulders and the small but powerful waves forming behind each kick.
I love my husband. I could pour over every inch of him.
I love my husband. I could listen to him talk or whisper or laugh over and over again.
I love my husband. I watch him move and savor the waves his actions send around me.
When you come together with your spouse, do you use your body to its fullest capacity to speak worth and love to them? What could you start doing today to express how much worth you see in them?
*****
Whether you are married or not, your body is worthy of love and detailed enjoyment. We run, work, chomp some food, clean the bathroom, lug groceries, and 1,000 other things each day … but we hardly ever stop to notice our bodies unless it is to criticize them for something. We do a terrible job of loving our bodies.
For a marriage, it is vitally important for both partners to worship themselves and each other… to see worth in the beautiful creation God made them to be. We do not worship any created thing more than God. We do not give more “worth” to any created thing than the worth due the Creator… but we know that God makes good things. You are good. Every wrinkle. Every freckle. The way you smile when surprised. The way you look when you hear your favorite song… do you not think God is giddy over every single thing you do?
When we are not married…even when we are married and our spouses just don’t SEE us, we can see ourselves. We can marvel at the wiggle of our toes or the way the lines curve around hips and thighs. We can appreciate what we have been given.
Beautiful. All Beautiful.
*****
Poem by Tyler Knott Gregson
Posted in Love and Making It | Tagged: common prayer, love and making it, Rumi, sex, worship | 2 Comments »
Posted by Nicole on October 6, 2014
As far as I know, you are not having sex so other people can watch.
You do not sell tickets to the sex show in your home.
You are not trying for any awards.
The camera is not panning across your taught abdomen as your spouse’s equally taught abs slowly lower onto you, the light languid but grateful in its luck at caressing your skin.
When you have sex, it is not for an audience.
So, why do we care so much what we look like while having it? Why do we care what other people think? And, are we so wrapped up in doing everything “for show” online that we have forgotten how to let sex be a sacred and intimate place worthwhile even in its secrecy?
Let’s discuss…
*****
First of all:
We are so accustomed to watching other people kiss and make love on screens that our own experiences are often “watched” inside our own mind’s eye rather than experienced with our whole selves…with all of our senses. We are outside the actual experience.
What if we focused our attention back to the present moment? How does this feel, smell, taste? What is each part of my body experiencing right now? What am I loving? How would I describe this sensation or moment?
It absolutely DOES NOT matter what anyone {no audience, ex, or imaginary judge} would think of how you look or perform during sex.
The only thing that matters is the connection between you and your partner.
What would change if we believed that?
*****
Second of all:
We are so accustomed to watching other people kiss and make love that our own bodies are measured against templates they were not meant to be measured by.
Learn to enjoy yourself and your spouse – as you are. People like to say things like “we are held to an impossible beauty ideal.” It’s an impossible ideal NOT BECAUSE IT IS BETTER THAN YOU but because it does not apply to you. Ideals of taste are entirely subjective and arbitrary. Make your OWN ideals based on your own life.
The most beautiful and ripe pineapple would appear to be a terribly strange apple – if it was trying to be an apple. Be the ripe, glorious, juicy version of YOURSELF. Your body is unique and worthy of honor {as it is} … not just honor, but hot, passionate, confident sex too.
By the time you were 12, you surely had plenty of movies and TV {and misguided friends} teach you that only SOME people deserve to have great sex or be proud enough of their bodies {and their existence} to kiss and be happy and naked. We learn this quickly as we notice how “fat” or “ugly” people are ridiculed for doing things they enjoy, let alone kissing anyone. We would rather die than feel the shame of being ridiculed like that.
Pay attention to when you are believing lies about your own worth. Pay attention to when you have slid into believing yourself too “fat” or “ugly” to enjoy your own body. It is a lie.
It does not matter what the world would say about how you and your spouse look while having sex. The only thing that matters is the connection between you.
*****
Third of all:
We are so accustomed to taking other people’s advice about sex that we have lost contact with our own intuition and personal pleasures. Block out your friends, your church, whatever porn you’ve seen… and really be with only your partner.
One of the biggest poisons to great sex is unmet expectations of what sex is “supposed” to be like. What if you both started with a clean slate and enjoyed designing new versions of GREAT sex for YOU?
*****
Finally:
So, what can we do now?
Stop allowing any kind of audience into your head.
Be alone with your spouse – in body and in mind.
Create an island in your home where the two of you are the epitome of sexy. Maybe it’s just your bedroom. There, you two are naked and you have no shame. You move and breathe for each other alone. You make the rules.
It sounds silly, I know. But perhaps it’s worth feeling a bit silly at first to have years of fantastic, confident, creative, passionate sex. I’m just sayin…
Stop selling tickets to the sex show.
Allow as much PRIVACY in your head and heart as you do in the actual room.
Posted in Love and Making It, Uncategorized | Tagged: love and making it, privacy, sex | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Nicole on October 4, 2014
Has anyone ever accidentally grabbed or brushed against your breasts?
(That is, if you have breasts… if you don’t, have you ever accidentally grabbed or fondled or brushed against someone else’s breasts?)
It’s happened to most everyone at some point or another. You are in some close space and people are moving around. Breasts stick out and hands or arms often accidentally brush against those soft bumpers. The second after it happens, when it registers in everyone’s minds that breasts have been touched, eyes dart up in shock and embarrassment before blinking hard to break the stare. But do not fear, this is not necessarily a moment of awkward embarrassment for both of you.
See: The intimacy of the moment is the direct inverse to the push-up-ness of the bra on said breasts.
Wearing ^^ THIS ^^ is like wearing boob armor. Bump against them all you want, it’s not really ME. The real me is hiding behind inches of padding and water or gel or air.
(That picture is so airbrushed, the bottoms of her pretend breasts are pinched up in the bra. It kind of hurts me.)
That’s the kind of bra to wear to a mosh pit or first date. If someone gets too handsy, you’ll hardly notice.
If the woman is wearing an unlined bra where her breasts actually reach the edges of the cloth and her skin feels the movement of cotton or hands, then it is entirely different. The level of vulnerability goes way up.
More padding = Less vulnerable | Less padding = More vulnerable
How much armor are you wearing?
Can you be touched? We are not just talking about bras, now. How far away is your inner self from the surface of your skin? I call that space between YOU (the part that feels love) and your skin = you Armor.
When you come to bed, how much armor are you wearing? When your Lover’s hands run across your stomach to your chest, how much armor are you wearing? When you kiss goodnight, how much armor are you wearing? When he makes a move and subtly tries to see if his passionate feelings are reciprocated, how much armor are you wearing?
Can you feel it? Can you feel when his words reach out to touch you? Can you feel it when his hands want to caress and affect you?
I do not mean, how padded is your bra? I mean, how padded is the passionate center of your heart?
Are you doing things to make yourself “look better” that are actually separating you from really feeling when your Love touches you?
It could be anything:
It could be an actual push-up bra when you should be naked.
It could be holding your stomach in so much you can’t remember to orgasm.
It could be disconnecting from your skin because your skin isn’t the size you ordered.
It could be layering frustrations and disappointments between you both to punish your spouse for them.
It could be pretending you are fine when you desperately need something.
*****
We like to throw the word “Embodied” around lately in conversations about health and beauty. People talk about it in all kinds of complicated ways, but it is simple and it is vitally important to great sex.
Get in your body. Be in it.
Let your Lover locate your soul in every inch of your skin. Do not pull back to hide in some dark, safe recess of your inner self. Spread out and fill your skin to the brim so that when you are caressed … YOU are caressed.
Start by noticing the places your soul already feels safe to be. What parts of your body connect with your soul?
Is it your lips? When you are kissed well, does your gut feel loved?
Is it that space near your collarbone where your neck curves up? When lips touch that spot, can your heart feel it?
What parts of your skin are you already in?
Start there.
Then, invite your soul into the other beautiful places and spaces on your body as well.
(Pro tip: All the places and spaces of your body are beautiful.)
This is the best gift you can give yourself and your current or future spouse:
become at home in your body.
Push up bras can be fun & utilitarian, and it makes sense why someone would wear one, but a hand on 2 inches of padding is not the same as a hand on warm, naked skin.
Learn to be at home in your body so you can be intimately loved in it.
Posted in Love and Making It | Tagged: appearances, bras, love and making it, sex | 2 Comments »
Posted by Nicole on October 3, 2014
Yada. Yada. Yada.
I’ve got a little sexy etymology for you. Ready?
And Adam knew [yada] Eve, his wife; and she conceived.
Genesis 4:1
Yada is not just a fill-in word like blah-blah-blah. It’s the original nudge-nudge, wink-wink. I “know” him.
Ever see that Seinfeld episode where they start using “yada, yada, yada” to fill in the details in a story instead of saying what really happened? George asks if you can “yada, yada, yada” sex… OF COURSE you can “yada, yada, yada” sex.
“What’d you do last night?” “Oh, you know, we had dinner and watched New Girl and yada, yada, yada.”
Actually, “yada, yada, yada” is not really an innuendo or replacement phrase at all. In the old days, this was no polite way to cover details.
This was the actual King James version of: Fornicate, Have Sex, Copulate, Do it, Business Time, Yada.
*****
Have you ever heard someone use the phrase “I know her in the Biblical sense”?
Did you ever wonder where that came from?
I did. Today. Because I told people to think about sex and now I am thinking about sex and following rabbit trails so we can have good conversations that make all of our lives better… and I thought, “Where does that phrase about ‘knowing someone in the biblical sense’ come from?”
*****
To know someone “in the Biblical sense” is to have sex with them.
To have sex with someone in the biblical sense is to KNOW them… To YADA them.
Do you see how we have mixed this up a bit in our lives? We’ve taken the “knowing” out of sex. Some of the original language surrounding sex {Hebrew, specifically, here} involved not just bodies bouncing together, but actually knowing another human intimately. Usually, knowing {yada} meant a deep connection tied to an agreement of faithfulness to a promise.
There’s two things I am taking away from this lesson today:
I make a promise every time I have sex. When you yada someone, you make a promise. It is an important statement of faith and love that I make with my whole self.
which brings me to the other takeaway…
Am I bringing my whole self to sex? Is my whole self there to be known? As we started mentioning yesterday, there are a lot of things that make it easy to have sex with just the surface of ourselves and not our deeper, whole selves.
Are you bringing as much attention and feeling and honesty to sex as you do to coffee with a friend or a yoga class or even drinks after work? Sometimes, people have sex just to get it over with or do it out of obligation or because it’s an itch they want to scratch… instead of treating the time like the best possible way to get to know their spouse better. What other activity has space for your entire personality and body to participate?
I’m not saying it’s easy. Not many important things are easy.
I’m saying there’s an infinite space to play and know each other… really know each other.
Every physical activity, especially sex, has the ability to involve our soul or not. Sex is meant to involve your soul too. Maybe soul is too mystic a word. When I say soul, I mean the things that matter to you… your hopes, fears, desire, longings, the things that make you laugh, the things that hurt… YOU. Involve YOU in sex so you can be known.
So, tonight, don’t just have sex with your spouse… really, yada them!
Posted in Love and Making It, Uncategorized | 9 Comments »
Posted by Nicole on October 2, 2014
Day 1: How to have good sex? = Think about sex.
I don’t mean just “think about sex” like a soda erupting; shaking it up and then shooting sticky thoughts all over the place. (Those cans are small but they manage to cover everything when they explode. The same goes for sexual thoughts.) No, no. I mean, think about sex in very specific ways: disciplined, new, brave ways.
First of all:
Who do you want to want to have sex with? (this is not a typo)
Who do you want to want to have sex with? You may not want to have sex at all, especially if you do not like your own self (more on that soon). You may not want to have sex if you are angry with the person you’ve agreed to have sex with otherwise OR You may want to have sex with an inappropriate person.
Who do you need to start focusing your passionate + positive mental attention on?
*****
Try This:
Name them. Write their name down in your own handwriting. Take time to form each letter. Imagine each letter as a part of them {their person + body} that you notice and trace.
Take the name of your spouse or beloved or even yourself and write it down.
This will move the image of them in your mind… the thought of their existence, their soul, your history together… from your mind to your hand. Write their name in the physical world.
Notice how the thoughts in your head can connect to the actions of your body. Notice how the movements can change and go fast or slow, hard or soft. How did you write it? How could you write it differently a second time? What if you wrote their name on your skin or asked them to write a meaningful word on you?
*****
There are so many things stuck to our skin {especially women}: thoughts and expectations and hurts… really, anything negative seems to stick like superglue and the positive things in life just slide right off. Women walk around the world with so many words on their skin, and usually those words are full of disappointment.
She comes to a moment in the night {or day} when all the stars have aligned and sex is about to happen … most likely… and as he reaches his hands to touch her skin, it’s not really her skin he makes contact with. I mean, it’s her skin – but not the layer of her that connects to her soul.
There’s this tough, invisible layer of self-hatred and frustrations about life that covers almost every inch of our skin. This layer is impenetrable some days. On those days, you may still have sex, but you don’t have sex that makes loving connections because you can’t touch each others’ vulnerable layers.
*****
So, where do we even start? What do we do?
When your body feels like a disappointment and just a hand on your stomach or breast makes you flinch away?
When every dish you wash or sock you pick up is like angry armor you put on your skin that keeps you away from the person you want to love?
When your body has never had healthy pleasure just for pleasure’s sake and you have no idea where to start?
When you love your spouse, but you just do not like having sex?
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We will get to all of that hard stuff, but I know it helps me to start back at the beginning. When it all feels overwhelming or confusing or frustrating, I sit down and start over. I let my brain and the rest of my body reconnect in a simple way. Try this exercise:
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Start here.
Make time to think about the one you love… in detail. Write their name. Write it a few times; write it like you are 14-years-old and falling in love. Feel each movement without judgment of “how” you are writing it (you perfectionist!). Notice pressure and speed. Pray love into each specific part of their body as you write each specific letter of their name. Be present to how love can move from your brain to your fingers.
This is just the beginning.
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Photos by Jennifer Upton www.byjenniferupton.com
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Posted in Love and Making It, Uncategorized | Tagged: love and making it, self care, sex | 8 Comments »
(I did not make this pic, I just like it.)
