Introduction:
Keeping Our Sex Life Alive
For many years, we have been leading workshops in which we teach people how to love – themselves and another. One of the topics that very often arises, particularly for couples that have been together for sometime, is how to keep their sexuality alive. Couples notice that often the longer they are together; the more difficult it is to maintain the same interest in making love. Life’s stresses, familiarity and lack of communication may wear away at their desire to make love. Perhaps they long for those early days when they couldn’t wait to jump into bed and have hot, passionate sex. Or maybe they long for a deeper way to connect through lovemaking but it doesn’t happen.
Sex changes as intimacy deepens. But unless you appreciate and learn how to adjust to the change, you may not know how to deal with it. Sex is a significant aspect of togetherness; if it fades, it can threaten the relationship. And if it fades, you may easily get restless or resentful. You may begin having affairs or become resigned, bitter and/or depressed. Or you may find yourself drawn to other things like the computer, television, work, sports or other hobbies and not take the time to connect with your partner.
When you come closer to someone, you become more vulnerable. That vulnerability usually also means greater fears and insecurities. Sex can bring up feelings of vulnerability more strongly than just about any experience in your life. Most of can remember painful and humiliating or even frightening moments related to our sexuality. And sometimes, we may not know that we are traumatized sexually but our body is showing fear without your even knowing it. It is frozen fear, what we call “shock” that can cause sexual dysfunction. If you have not explored, understood or accepted your fears and insecurities, particular in connection to your sexuality, you may not know what to do or even what they are when they arise. You may feel that something is wrong with you or with the relationship. You may try to compensate for the fears by pushing yourself in sex in a way that doesn’t feel right.
When we are feeling frightened or insecure while making love, it drastically affects how we respond and also the way we want to make love. In lovemaking, especially as we come closer to another person, it becomes more and more crucial to feel safe.
It is natural and even healthy that the kind of excitement that was present in the honeymoon period of the relationship may fade. Excitement may happen easily when you are making love to someone you have just met. But if it diminishes with time, you may try to keep the excitement going one way or another. These methods become increasingly artificial and contrived. The solution to this problem is to discover something deeper and more sustaining that eventually replaces your need for perpetual excitement.
Excitement cannot be the sustaining force in the sexuality of a long-term relationship.
As we sat down to write this book, we had been together for fourteen years. We met originally in India where we were both practicing meditation and living in a spiritual commune. One of the aspects of the commune was an active program of growth workshops. When we first got together as a couple, we decided to take a two-week tantra (sexuality) workshop. The course was teaching a way of integrating meditation and sexuality in a specific approach and technique of lovemaking that attracted us. (We will be describing this approach in some detail in a later chapter.)
At the time we took this workshop, I (Krish) was also seeking for a change in the way I had been making love. One reason was that I was seeking deeper, more loving and more meditative connecting in sex. But there was another reason. In my lovemaking, I was afraid of coming too fast when I or my partner got excited. I felt intense shame when it happened and I couldn’t really relax because of this fear. The method we learned stressed connection rather than performance and taught lovemaking in such a relaxed, non-doing way that something inside of me deeply relaxed. I noticed that when I took the time to relax and became more focused on the connection rather than on the excitement of lovemaking, something changed for me. The absence of pressure and expectations has helped me to recover from my insecurity and dysfunction. In fact, we have found that this absence of pressure and demands in sex is one of the most important ingredients that allow couples to keep their love and sex life alive.
It was also very nourishing for me (Amana) to discover that lovemaking can be so relaxing and deeply satisfying without doing anything. I found that just by connecting and allowing the bodies and the energies to melt, something much deeper happens than can happen with a lot of doing. In fact this workshop prepared our relationship for a different way of being together, where lovemaking is not about excitement or sexual satisfaction but rather about connecting.
In our own sexual relationship, we continue to face challenges of encountering fears and insecurities and working through them. What’s more, in just about any deep relationship, each person’s wounds have a way of triggering the wounds of the other. And each person has to confront deeply unconscious and automatic ways that he or she pushes the other person away and hides. And then retreats from making love. In our own case, Krish’s fears of being overwhelmed by a powerful woman and then going into shock (originating from a strong and overpowering mother) can run a collision course with Amana’s experience of her man’s not being present (originating from an alcoholic father who escaped into addiction and eventually killed himself.) With love and awareness, we have managed to deal with this dynamic in a creative way.
As we go deeper into intimacy, we need to understand how fear, shame, shock and self-doubt affects our sexuality. We need to learn how to communicate our experience in sex, particularly our vulnerabilities. And most likely, our sexuality may need to adjust and incorporate our increased vulnerability.
But there is more to a healthy sexual relationship for a long-term couple than learning to make sensitive love. You also have to keep your emotional house clean and work toward deepening the love between you. There were twelve couples that took the workshop together with us. But as far as we know, of the twelve, we are the only couple that survived. And the reason these relationships ended, for the most part, was because unresolved emotional conflicts tore apart the fiber of their love.
We have been able to keep our love and our sexuality very much alive partly because we have made it a priority from the beginning to deal with anything that creates distance and hurt between us. Our intimacy is such that we can feel it whenever something disturbs our closeness. We have learned, from working with ourselves, that when we feel triggered, reactive or distant from each other, it is mostly because some early wound has been opened which we are still sensitive about. Or, it can be because we are feeling stressed and we take out that stress on the other person.
Sex can be the first causality of unresolved conflicts and undealt with stress. You may have no idea that you are heading into an emotional minefield when you come close to someone. You just want things to flow harmoniously and conflict-free as they may have done in the early days of your togetherness. Love is not like that. Love brings up your unresolved wounds, your fears of invasion and abandonment, your dependency, your fears of losing yourself in the other person, your expectations and your buried resentments toward the opposite sex.
We all need tools and understanding to navigate through all the emotional issues that come up. We need to know what is being triggered, how to deal with it inside and above all, how to communicate. Most of us didn’t have much experience with learning these lessons before we found ourselves in a relationship. We didn’t go to “intimacy school” before falling in love.
What’s more, most of the time, your reactions and disturbances may have little or nothing to do with the other person. They have to do with a lack of inner space in the moment and feeling overwhelmed by life. When you get provoked or stressed, often all you want to do is blame someone or something or find someone or something to make you feel better. And when you lack inner space, the smallest thing that the other person does or any kind of life stressor, disappointment or frustration can easily provoke your agitation and fears and cause you to react. When you are reacting on each other, sex suffers.
Behind our conflicts, resentments and hurt is fear and pain. It is a big part of the inner world of our vulnerability.. Yet vulnerability is also the doorway to the most profound and precious parts of ourselves, to the treasures of our soul and to the heart of intimacy.
This book is not a tantra book. It does not deal with teaching new and different ways of making love in order to improve orgasm or using sex to attain to ecstatic states. That is not our expertise and there are many excellent books that deal with these topics. In this book, we provide a roadmap for bringing sex and vulnerability together so that it can become a way of deepening and enriching intimacy. Too often, relationships and sex falter because of lack of understanding of our underlying sensitivities and lack of tools to communicate and resolve hurts and resentments. It is our sincere hope that we can provide concrete ways to deal with these issues in these pages. In the course of the book, we give examples from our own life and also from those of people we have worked with. Naturally, to protect the confidentiality of those we discuss, we either omit to mention names or we have changed the names of those we discuss.
******
Comments