We like to think that we are mature rational people, and that we let the front part of our brain make decisions for us. This is the part of the brain that thinks and cogitates. It looks after the ‘executive’ functions of the brain.

But…actually, we can slip quite easily into the ‘primitive’ part of the brain, the part that responds to threat and danger with attacking and defensive responses. These responses can be intense, with raised voices, aggression and name-calling; or they can be withdrawn, shutdown, with stonewalling, absence, silence. Neither type of response is using the ‘executive’ part of our brain, both are responses governed by the ‘primitive’ part of our brain, in response to a threat.

And there is no one more threatening than our beloved! That person who is supposed to be there for us, who understands us, looks out for us, who keeps us safe and secure in the world. If they are in some way threatening to us – and those can be very little threats, a look, a tone, a gesture – then it means a lot.

Our nervous system is ancient, and it is blind. So, when it gets triggered, it doesn’t know if the threat is a sabretooth tiger about to leap out and eat us…or our partner saying ‘we need to talk’ with that look on their face… The response is ‘yikes!’ and we can very easily slip into that primitive protective mode.

You don’t want your relationship to be ruled by the primitive part of your brain. You don’t want to be triggering each other to respond from that part of the brain. You want to keep the executive part of your brain engaged, particularly when things get wobbly.

This means that as individuals we need to do our best to soothe ourselves, to stay calm. We can do that with breath, with consciously relaxing our body, with catching thoughts and feelings that reinforce the danger and the primitive response. And choosing to respond differently. Definitely, we should learn to do that and do our best.

However, that can be challenging when something has arisen between the two of us. It is a relational issue. So, to keep the dyad calm, it helps if we are being relational. That means that we are not just seeking to manage our own response through staying calm, which is called self-regulating, we are also seeking to help the other stay calm. This is called co-regulating.

When we are co-regulating, we are simultaneously self-aware and other-aware. We are seeking to keep ourselves and our partner regulated. When we are both doing this then it is more effective than each trying to regulate themselves.

So, you are doing your best to ensure that how you are behaving will not be threatening to your partner, that you are helping them to stay calm, even if the topic is challenging. We do this through eye contact, gentle touch, proximity, even tone of voice, using terms of endearment (such as sweetheart or babe). We also make sure that we don’t say too much in a rush and that we give our partner space to think and respond.

Essentially, we are seeking to keep each other safe and keep each other connected. That ensures our nervous systems stay regulated and we operate from the executive part of the brain.

Partners who master this skill can discuss all kinds of challenging topics and do it well. It’s a great skill to learn. In fact, I think it is an essential skill in order to create a truly supportive, loving, mutual, interdependent relationship.

I find that too much of our language and concepts around sex imply that speed is good and slowness is bad. This is really not at all helpful in creating great sexual experiences. Instead of people relaxing and chilling and opening to each other, there’s pressure to get aroused quickly and have intense experiences. And if there’s one thing that gets in the way of being able to become aroused, let alone to actually enjoy sex, it’s pressure.

For example, recent additions to our sex vocabulary are sexual ‘accelerators’ and sexual ‘brakes’, with the accelerators being good and the brakes being bad. Now I know that the intention behind the language is to identify what things are helpful to you sexually and what are hindrances. But why use language that implies speed is good and slowness is bad? Why not use terms like enhancers and detractors? Or as I like to think of it, in my usual evocative style, things that make you go ‘mmm’ and things that make you go ’ngh’.

Less overtly, so often people have a speed-based concept of sex. Take the concept of libido, more often ‘high libido’ is attributed to people who get aroused quickly and  ‘low libido’ is attributed to people who become aroused slowly. And of course those with ‘low libido’ are seen as the problem. Why, because they are too slow. Which often leads to the slower one having sex before they’re ready, which,as  I’ve said before, is like eating food that’s undercooked – there’s nothing wrong with the food per se, it’s just not ready to be eaten.

But, like food, sex is best enjoyed slowly, with presence, savouring the experience of the eating. Not scoffing it down to get to the end. Or any other activity you do for pleasure together, like going for a walk or enjoying a show – you enjoy the process of the activity, not race through to the end of it!

So, whether it’s in the getting to sex phase or the having sex phase, take your time, enjoy the process, no pressure! Remember, the point of sex is connection through pleasure, so make every part pleasurable and connecting. It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it, how you’re experiencing it.

There is already so much speed in modern life. Take the pressure off, particularly in the bedroom, and take your time, savour your lovemaking. You’ll find it so much more enjoyable, connecting and rejuvenating – all the things sex is supposed to be!

Don’t think of sex as having Key Performance Indicators. Sex isn’t about performance, it’s about pleasure! So, let’s talk about our Key Pleasure Indicators.

Good sex comes from the appreciation of the experience not the performance of ‘correct’ acts. It’s about the feeling. So, you’re not looking at quantitative KPIs – how often, how long, how many orgasms etc. You’re looking at qualitative KPIs. These might include:

Does it feel good

Does it feel mutual

Does it feel connected

Do you feel present

Do you feel embodied

Do you feel free to express yourself

Are you paying attention to each other

Are you savouring the experience

Does it make you feel better for having done it

Does it increase joy, contentment, happiness, satisfaction in life

These are quite broad and I’m sure you have a lot more specific ones that relate to your own individual sexuality. So, I invite you to think about your own KPIs, and if you have a partner to discuss them together, lightly and creatively, and get clear on your mutual Key Pleasure Indicators. Then set about achieving them!

Regular readers will know I use a lot of metaphors to describe a relationship – a tripod, a thermostat, a couple bubble, a garden. One that I particularly like is that your relationship is like a boat that carries you through life.

It’s not ‘you and me’, which can too easily turn into ‘you versus me’. It’s you, me and us. We are both IN the ‘us’, IN the relationship, we are both IN the boat. If the boat is good, we’re good.

Now when the weather is fine, and the sailing is easy - you’re drinking your champagne and sunbaking on the deck or drinking a cold beer while fishing off the side. No problems there. But it’s when the weather turns bad and the ocean is rough, that’s when the boat really matters. If you’ve got a boat that’s not shipshape, if it springs leaks and falls apart, then you’re not going to make it safely through to calm seas, and if you don’t have the technical skills and knowledge to sail your boat, then you might not make it through either. In fact, if you don’t know how to sail you might not ever leave the dock and enjoy even the fine weather.

So, to have a ‘boat’ that carries you well through life, you need two things:

1. You need your boat to be shipshape. You need to look after it, make sure it’s strong. This means cultivating a strong relationship, investing in the relationship, prioritising it, doing the things that make it strong.
2. You need to know how to sail the boat. This means you need to know how you two tick, you need to be experts on each other, you need to know how to be relational and put that knowledge into practice.

Sadly, too often people think their relationship should “just happen”, they shouldn’t need to invest in it, or learn from experts about how to make it great. You just ‘fall in love’ and live happily ever after. Nope, that is a recipe for disaster. Like anything else in life, whether it be career, health, wealth, parenting, sport, hobby, if you want it to be good you have to focus on it. It’s the same with relationships. When you look after your boat and sail it well, then you really can live happily ever after.

Can we please stop calling sex ‘dirty’!

And can we stop calling talking about sex ‘talking dirty’.

Think about the meaning of the word dirty: it means unclean, nasty, polluted, foul, sullied, squalid. Is that how you want to think about your sexuality?

Calling sex dirty buys into the old-fashioned view that sex is bad. And that leads to bringing up the shame so many people have around their sexuality. And it can keep people in a juvenile, unevolved sexuality that is crass and sleazy.

Instead of ‘dirty’, can I encourage you to talk ‘erotic’ instead?

The word ‘erotic’ is much better than ‘dirty’. It has positive connotations of sex, ones that are rich and luscious and sensual, not immature, coarse or sordid.

It’s much easier to drop into and let yourself go to the erotic than to the dirty. I mean, who wants to let go to something foul and squalid. We want to move away such things, not open up and embrace them.

Language is so important. And maybe the word ‘erotic’ isn’t the right one for you. Maybe the word for you is:

Amorous

Seductive

Sensual

Steamy

Lascivious

Titillating

Spicy

Arousing

Romantic

Tantilizing

Salacious

Sexy…

And look, possibly the word ‘dirty’ does work for you in a positive way. Which is fine, as long as it has positive connotations for you.

Whatever word is right for you, it’s one that makes you feel empowered and engaged.

So, get out the thesaurus and find the language that is right for you!…

The best sex is rarely spontaneous. Or if it is, it’s because the conditions were right for it be ‘spontaneous’.

People often complain to me that their sex isn’t spontaneous. As though that’s a bad thing. They often reminisce about the early days when sex was so easy and apparently ‘spontaneous’. But, I challenge them, was it really spontaneous? I point out that back then sex was anything but spontaneous: there were days of anticipation, thinking about your new love interest, you’d spend time preparing to meet, looking good. Then when you met, you’d be doing interesting things, you were fascinated in each other, you’d spend hours talking or dancing or having fun. So, by the time you got home you couldn’t wait to rip your clothes off….

That wasn’t spontaneous. There were days and hours of looking forward to, thinking about, engaging with, before you got sexual.

Then time passes and people move in together, and all of life comes into the relationship: work, logistics, kids, finances, etc., etc. They work all day, deal with life matters, maybe sit in front of a screen for an hour or more… then collapse into bed exhausted, totally spent… and think they should suddenly turn into some ravenous sex fiend and have spontaneous sex!

No. It wasn’t spontaneous at the beginning. It was good because the conditions were right. Like anything else good in life. Think about it – how often has an experience been spontaneously good? Occasionally perhaps, but not regularly. You want to catch up with friends, go to a show, play some sport, have a holiday, cook a good meal – it all takes planning, making space in your life, making sure you have in place the elements that make it good. If you want a good meal you have to make sure your kitchen is stocked with the right ingredients, you need the time and energy to cook, and have the knowledge and skills to cook well. If you have all of those, then yes, you can spontaneously cook a good meal.

So, if you want to ‘spontaneously’ have good sex, you can if you’ve set up your life to enable sex to happen easily. That means you need to:

• create the time and space in your life
• not be too tired
• not be too distracted
• be feeling connected with your partner
• be in a relaxed, appealing environment
• pace the approach and interaction so that you both become aroused, don’t rush it
• know what each other likes and needs in general
• be able to communicate what you want and need in the moment
• not have expectations that cause pressure and anxiety
•  enjoy the pleasure of connection and co-create a lovely experience moment by moment

Have all that happening, and you’ll live in what I call the ‘simmer zone’, where you’re feeling loved-up, connected, relaxed and alive. From that space sex can be spontaneous, because you’ve made your life and relationship sex-friendly.

Some days into my last couples retreat in Bali we were in a group discussion when one of the participants said that what he and his partner were experiencing, based on what I was sharing and teaching, felt like a ‘practice’. Just as they had regular meditation practices, this approach to sexual intimacy had the same qualities. I think that is an excellent way of conceptualising the approach to sex that I encourage.

So, what do we mean by a ‘practice’? Well, spiritual traditions have various spiritual practices or disciplines to enable personal growth and spiritual development. Prayer and meditation are obvious ones, but it can expand to include some of the martial arts and other physical activities such as dance and yoga, volunteering, creative arts, being in nature. But it’s less about the activity itself that makes it a practice, and more about the way in which it’s engaged. Which is why sexual intimacy can also be a spiritual practice.

A practice is engaged in with intention to engage in a certain way and with attention during the experience. It’s mindful, both in the sense of bringing mindfulness to the experience and also for the experience itself to be a mindfulness practice. In the case of sex, regular readers will remember that the academic research I did a few years ago explored how sex itself becomes a mindfulness practice, heightening both the lovers’ experience in the moment, and taking from that experience an ongoing sense of presence and engagement in the rest of life.

It’s also about bringing a sense of the sacred into the experience, to create a sacred space of time and place. In the case of sexual intimacy, the lovers enter into it consciously, with the intention of creating a beautiful experience of pleasure and connection together. Then as the experience unfolds, each pays attention to what they are feeling and wanting to express in the moment, while also paying attention to what the partner is feeling and wanting to express in the moment - and through that they co-create positive meaningful experiences, whatever the activity and however long they stay engaged.

The lovers don’t rush in. There’s what I call a ‘chilled build’ - they take their time first to connect and then to become aroused. There are no expectations of outcome, other than pleasure and connection. There is no need for it to follow the standard linear approach, and even if it does, that happens through focused co-creation, not expectation. Then the experience comes to a close when the lovers feel it’s right.

This approach to sexual engagement can potentially last for hours, but what really matters is that it heightens any kind of sexual encounter, so a sweet and simple cuddly encounter under the covers can be enriched when considered a “practice” and not just a quickie and definitely not as a duty or obligation.

It’s simple really, just as a meditation practice is simple. But it’s not necessarily easy – you have to practise at making sex a practice! You need to change your mind set about what drives a sexual encounter, how it is initiated, how it is engaged with and how it’s concluded.

But once you do, the depth of feeling, both physical and emotional, that you can attain is so beautiful. It can feel not just mindful, but also bodyful and soulful. Then you really are making love.

Client after client sits on the couch in my consulting room wishing they didn’t have their sexual difficulties and were ‘normal’. After hearing their stories, I give them both the bad news and the good news – they are ‘normal’. In our society sexual struggles, difficulties are confusions are the norm. It’s a rare person who is totally comfortable in their sexuality.

Which isn’t surprising as we get no sex education. If we’re lucky we get a bit of reproduction education, which let’s face it, isn’t that complicated. And that’s not why humans have sex – we predominantly have sex to connect through pleasure. But we’re not taught anything about connection nor about pleasure. We’re not taught about how to be in tune with our needs and desires. We’re not taught how to communicate those needs and desires. We’re not taught how to listen to our partner’s and co-create experiences based on both parties needs and desires. We’re not taught how sex changes with different stages of life and how to enjoy all the different phases, nor how it can evolve for the better over a long relationship. We’re not even taught what quality sex is. And we don’t talk about it.

Imagine if we did that with food! Imagine if you couldn’t tell your partner you didn’t like eggplant even though they served it up frequently. Imagine if you weren’t sure if it was ok to have afternoon tea. Imagine if you couldn’t obtain any information about broccoli and how to cook it. How many people would have good food-lives?

It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous. But that’s how we are with sex. We don’t know, we don’t talk about it and it’s very hard to get good information. Yet we are surrounded by “sex-positive” messaging that says we should be having good sex, we should be enthusiastically and frequently engaging in that good sex, and there’s a problem if we’re not.

Well, I certainly agree that we should be engaging enthusiastically and frequently in good sex! But I also know that we need to develop the sexual knowledge, self-awareness, and relational skills to be able to create that good sex.

Which is where I come in! Having devoted my life to understanding the art and science of sex, I know that with quality information and loving support it’s generally not that difficult to ditch the myths, shift the negative blocks, get in tune with yourself and learn to communicate positively about sex with your partner. It’s what keeps me going in this work.

I do get despondent seeing the anguish and the aloneness people feel in their ‘problems’, but I also love seeing the shifts as people free themselves to enjoy this gorgeous part of life. Whether it’s through private sessions, or attending retreats, or even just from reading this blog (I love the feedback!), I love to help people discover just how wonderful their sexuality can be and to become what should be ‘normal’ in what is still an abnormal society.

Just by reading this you are part of the shift in society to understanding quality, life-enhancing sex and relating. Go you! Be the ripple that spreads a truly positive sexuality until everyone is loved-up and feeling the joy of an authentic expressive sexuality. What a great world that would be! Let’s all do our bit to saving the world – one love life at a time…

We tend to think that the definition of ‘libido’ is sex drive, how much you want sex, or how often you get horny. But the original meaning of the word libido is life force energy. I think that is a much better way to conceptualise libido.

In the oriental traditions they say that the sexual energy is transformed into the life energy, the chi or ki. That’s what I notice clinically too. When people are flat, exhausted, stressed, depressed, their life force is low and they tend not to want sex. When people are engaged and joyful and connected, then they tend to be open to sex. Interestingly, I do see people with low life force who want sex, but it’s usually to relieve stress or because they’re bored and want a ‘hit’; and I see people with high life force who say they don’t want sex, but that’s usually because their concept of sex isn’t appealing or their experience of it hasn’t been great.

So, anything you do that enhances your life force will enhance your libido.

Being is nature is a great way to do this. Nature is full of life force – it’s where life comes from! Bathing in nature’s life force is so enhancing of our own.

I just spent two weeks camping in central Australia. It was a total experience of this libidinal life force! There was the vast open desert, incredible rock formations, hidden gorges, oases, towering river red gums, multitudes of wildflowers, wallabies, emu, and so many different birds… Waking up to the dawn chorus of birdsong, walking all day and sitting around an open fire as the sun set, were such connected, spiritual experiences.

It's bathing in nature. It’s cleansing the spirit and the soul with nature. It’s allowing freshness and goodness and joy to permeate and fill your being. It’s libido, being in tune with life and nature, untarnished with the stress and negative energies of modern living.

The more you can bring this into your life the better. With plants, art, good food, beautiful relaxing spaces, music. And making love in the way I advocate! Not some sordid pornfest but connected, slow, intimate (which can also be playful and wild and wicked, the two aren’t mutually exclusive) – real, authentic, deep and light, blissful and transcendent.

Sex like this is also life force-enhancing, libido-enhancing, so it becomes a positive feedback loop, enhancing all of life and love!

It's why my clinic is full of plants and has beautiful views of trees, why my own home blurs the boundaries of garden and house, and why I hold my retreats in beautiful locations surrounded by nature. I encourage you to create this in your own life too!

When you know it’s time to welcome your lover into your depths, when you’re yearning to be filled, then, and only then do you invite your lover in…and as he enters you envelop his penis with your vagina, holding it warm and soft and wet…

Now that ain’t ‘penetration’!

Regular readers will know how I loathe the word penetration being used for sex. It literally means ‘breaking through resistance’. It’s appropriate if you think sex is something a man does to an unwilling woman – force himself into a resistant vagina and essentially masturbate there. Ugh. Not the approach to sex that I advocate!

 So let’s go back to my opening paragraph. Notice the language. Nothing aggressive there. It is soft and inviting. And it’s not one-sided, it’s not something a man does to a woman. It’s totally mutual. There is equal agency. He enters and she envelops. And that entering and enveloping is done when both partners are ready. She knows when she is ready and invites him in, then he accepts, or they wait if he’s not yet ready.

No expectation, no obligation, no going faster than either of you need. Just an awareness of self, an attention to other, a communication and a coming together with pleasure. In this way you are co-creating psychological safety, which allows for relaxation, vulnerability and openness. These are the conditions from which the greatest intimacy and pleasure comes.

This doesn’t just apply to heterosexual intercourse, it applies whenever anyone of any gender enters into the other’s personal space. The more personal that space, and particularly when you are entering another person’s body, the more essential it is that you wait for the invitation and then allow yourself to be welcomed in.

Notice in your own life if there is this mutuality. Is there invitation? Is there welcoming? Is there envelopment? 

 If there is – excellent! If there isn’t, then start to shift the way you engage. If you need help along the way, come to me for private sessions, online courses and retreats.