The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Highlights
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
BASIC ENERGY CIRCULATION
As energy builds in your genitals during sex, exhale and con• tract the floor of your pelvis, pulling upward slightly, as if you were trying to stop yourself from urinating. Feel or imagine your sexual energy moving up along the line of your spine into your head as you exhale. Then, as you inhale, draw the energy down the front of your body, so that your belly expands as it fills with energy and breath. Draw the energy all the way down to your genitals and pelvic floor.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Continue breathing energy in a circle this way, contracting and pulling upward at the pelvic floor while exhaling energy up your spine and then inhaling it down the front of your body to your belly and genitals.
This circle of energy, up your spine and down the front of your body, is the way energy moves in a naturally open body. By practicing this way of breathing and moving energy both throughout the sexual play and randomly throughout the day you will remove obstructions to the free flow of your energy, sexually and at other times
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Train your nervous system to sustain high levels of energy. For many people, being relaxed means being low energy. They feel at ease only when they are depleted of energy, such as after a full meal or an orgasm. They can’t handle long periods of high energy without feeling hyper, stressed, or anxious. They can’t wait to have a beer, chat with a friend, watch TV, stuff their faces, or masturbate.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
To develop this capacity for sustained high energy, prac• tice plugging your energy leaks and circulating the energy as it builds in your body. Don’t fidget. Don’t eat unnecessary snacks. Don’t ejaculate or orgasm too often. Don’t talk excessively. Don’t watch TV or read newspapers, catalogs, books, and magazines simply due to habit. Don’t grind your jaw or tap your pencil unconsciously.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
If you stop depleting your energies through these habitual means, you may first notice yourself getting anxious to some de• gree. This is because your body is being filled with more energy than it is used to handling. In the past, you might telephone a friend or masturbate in the shower to release energy and decrease your internal force. Now, since you have plugged many of these leaks, your internal pressure builds.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
You can accommodate this growing internal force by help• ing it flow throughout the natural circuitry of your body. Over time, you can cultivate a capacity to conduct a much larger flow of energy. Your internal “hoses” can unkink and widen, so your old trickle of energy becomes a full flow of force. You develop a much stronger ability to circulate great energy without dispers• ing it in TV orgasms, chatting, snacking, and fidgeting.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
MAGNIFYIN G AN D CIRCULATIN G YOU R HEALIN G ENERGY
A simple way to practice magnifying and circulating your in• ternal energy is to stand straight with your feet parallel and about shoulder width apart, toes pointing forward. Bend your knees slightly. Hold your arms out in front of you at about heart height in a rounded position, with your elbows slightly bent and your palms facing your chest, as if you were embracing a large beach ball. Allow the tip of your tongue to rest gently against the roo f of your mouth. Relax your body
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
as much as possible while still maintaining the integrity of the posture, your feet flat, your spine elongated, your half-closed eyes gazing at the horizon.
Practice breathing in the circle just as you would practice this during sex. Inhale energy down the front of your body, filling your belly with enough force and breath to feel an in• ternal pressure pushing against your genitals. Then contract upward with your genitals and entire pelvic floor while exhal• ing the energy up your spine.
To keep from becoming too rigid, smile. Smile with your face, and also feel the insides of your whole body smiling, especially your belly and chest. Continue standing with bent knees, extending your arms as if they were embracing a large ball of energy in front of your chest. Keep your lower back relaxed. You can imagine that a string from the heavens is attached to the very top of your head, pulling it up, and a thousand-pound weight is attached to the tip of your coc• cyx, or tailbone, pulling it down , elongating and relaxing your spine. You can relax the smile on your face but maintain the sense of your body smiling inside, especially when the posture begins to feel difficult to hold.
Holding this posture and breathing in this circle will in• crease your internal energy as sexual stimulation does. Some people are very sensitive to their internal energy flow and oth• ers aren’t, so don’ t worry if you don’ t feel energy moving up your spine and down the front of your body at first. With practice, as your obstructions clear and your energy flows more fully, it will be easier to feel.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
If you experience sharp pain in your joints, such as your knees, hips, or shoulders, then immediately come out of the
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posture and rest. However, trembling and rushes of heat or cold in your muscles are normal while learning to circulate your energy. If your legs begin to shake, or if your entire body shakes, that is fine and good. Stay with the exercise, hold• ing the posture, resting your tongue against the roof of your closed mouth, always breathing through the nose, breath• ing your energy up your spine and down your front, smiling with the insides of your body. Practice this exercise for a few minutes a day, gradually building up until you can hold the posture for about ten minutes.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Once you develop some proficiency at feeling the force of your internal energy flowing up your spine and dow n your front, you can visualize or imagine i t flowing to the parts of your body tha t most need it. Suppose you feel a knot in your gut from the stress of a tough day. As you inhale energy down your front , also inhale energy directly into the tension in your belly. Feel as if you are filling a balloon, expanding the knot wit h the force of your breath so it opens and loosens. Then , as you exhale, release the tension from the knot so i t circulates freely throughou t your internal circuitry. Inhale fresh energy into the knot, then exhale tension and circulate the energy. Repeat this for several minutes. If the tension fro m the knot feels like i t wants to be released ou t of your body, exhale i t ou t of your hands and feet.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
By learning to circulate magnified energy through your internal circuitry with compassion and love, you can carefully dredge through the emotional and physical obstructions formed by a wide range of past wounds and recurrent memories. Physical and emotional healing can take place exceptionally quickly and thoroughly, once your body has been opened through persistent practice and you know how to circulate your energy,
With practice, you can heal deeper and deeper levels of ten• sion-residue accumulated in your body and mind from past hurt and trauma. Meanwhile, you learn to clear daily obstructions as soon as they occur. Eventually when you have healed enough of your accumulated kinks and resistances, your practice deals more or less entirely with your degree of openness or closure in the present moment. Being love or being unlove? That is the only question.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
The primary purpose of enlightened sex is to live as love by recognizing and relaxing into the open, unlimited, aware depth of being that you are, whether you feel good or bad in the present moment.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
The way of the superior lover is about practicing being who you truly are. It is not about changing yourself. It is about recognizing who you are, deeply and really - who you already are, who you have always been, and who you will always be. It is about becoming stable in this recognition, so that all of your actions - throughout the day and even during your dreams at night - radiate sponta• neously from this relaxed and natural openness of being, rather
than from your stressful needs and fears.
A great aid in stabilizing this recognition is opening the en• ergy channels of your body, which can be done very effectively
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Sexual wounds and desires are among the greatest sources of distraction, not just during sexual embrace but throughout the day. Much of our emotional suffering is rooted in our sexual hopes and fears.
If you don’t clear these knots, they can absorb your energy and nag at your attention, day and night. Rather than practicing meditation, you will fantasize about Mr. Right or your cowork• er’s shapely ass. Rather than practicing love, you will cram your mouth with food and slather your taste buds with drink because your partner left you for another lover. Even the most advanced spiritual practitioners are often plagued by their unfinished sexual business and emotional kinks.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
the first step for most people is to clarify their sexual desires and unkink the flow of energy trapped in their emotional wounds. But once that is done, and even while it is being done, the main point of practice is to free consciousness and live as love. The breathing exercises presented here and in Part Four can be very healing and enlivening. They bring energy and natural openness to the body and emotions. But you can also get lost in these exercises, imagining that they are ultimately liberating. They are not.
Even while practicing a breathing technique, you must feel the love that is moving the whole process.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
You can’t perfect your body, your sex, or your energy. They are all going to have their good days and bad days, until finally they dis• solve in death. But you can perfect your trust of love. You can stabilize your practice of feeling through the events and sensa• tions of every moment, so that nothing distracts you from who you really are. You simply remain as you are and always have been, conscious as your eternal and spacious nature, open as love, aware as the radiant being that you are.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
You can forget the truth of your unbounded being - and forget that you have forgotten - or you can remember and practice recog• nizing this moment’s essential openness. If you forget it and close down, then your attention begins wandering to relieve the stress of contracting your feeling. The pain of your own ongoing tension makes you look for a cure. You may begin to believe that some• thing is missing from your life. You want to earn more money, find a better lover, or make your current partner love you more. Every moment becomes a moment of stressful need, and your attention is never free enough to feel through the doings of the moment and simply open as love’s always present offering. Rather, life becomes one stress after another, and then it is time for bed. Days and nights
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
However, in any moment you feel through the doings, you are already aware of the open bliss of being which all your doings have been seeking. You still act, but you are no longer acting in order to become or to get. Instead, your doing radiates naturally from the core of your authentic being. Your doing expresses rather than seeks openness and love. Your sexing, for example, is a gift of love’s light, rather than a needy hope to be fulfilled. You and your partner engage in sex to practice magnifying love’s brightness, to celebrate love with your whole body and full range of emotions, to practice being the unbounded consciousness you are, truly and deeply.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
You can still be hurt. You can still become sick. You still have good days and bad days. But it all occurs with an open heart. You don’t add fear or stress to the world’s fear and stress. Rather, the stressful momentum of the world is absorbed in your heart. You willingly suffer the unlove of others, because to close yourself to them is no longer an option. You know the truth of love, and you live love in spite of how much you might hurt. You are simply openness itself, creatively expressing itself through every human means, including sex.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Your mouth and especially your tongue are very important parts of the natural circuit of sexual energy that flows from your geni• tals, up your spine, through your head, and back down the front of your body to your pelvic floor. As you practice moving sexual energy in this circular flow, you will notice the significant effects of tongue placement.
If you keep the tip of your tongue gently pressed against the roof of your mouth, your internal energy can flow through its complete circuit. Your tongue should remain in contact with the roof of your mouth through most of the sexual occasion and through most of the day. Then, your internal energy can flow from your head back down through the front of your body and through the entire circuit.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
If your mouth remains open or your tongue remains apart from the roof of your mouth, your internal circuit of energy is broken. Your energy gets stopped in your head and cannot flow down your front, so you cannot relax in the fullness of your personal power and easeful sexual vitality. Unable to continue flowing, the stopped-up energy will tend to fill your head with thoughts, fears, tensions, and fantasies.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
When your sexual energy cannot circulate fully, it will build up at different places in your body. Although your spine and vari• ous organs may suffer due to blocked and stagnant energy, most of the energy usually gets stuck in your head and/or genitals. If this happens, you will feel a chronic need to discharge tension through conventional genital orgasm and/or constant thinking
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Without proper tongue placement and circulation of energy, you can become chained to an addictive build-up-and-release cycle of excessive thinking and orgasm. Because your natural internal circuitry is disrupted, your energy is unable to flow freely through your whole body. You become unable to relax your thoughts and sexual urges. They build up. You become obsessed by head and tail. Therefore, be very conscious of your tongue placement.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
its tip across your lover’s skin, noticing how it affects the energy in his or her body. After using your tongue gently in this way, begin to press your tongue more forcefully into your lover’s neck, as if you were trying to reach into your lover’s heart with your tongue.
Gauge the depth, pressure, and style of tongue stroke by your lover’s moment-to-moment response. Don’t just listen to your lover’s moans and look at how his or her body is moving, but actually learn to feel the flow of your lover’s internal energy. Al• though it might seem nebulous at first, with practice you will be able to feel, in great detail, the energy flows within your lover’s body as you open your own body and learn to merge your heart and breath with your lover’s.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Don’t focus your vision as if you were looking at the backs of your eyelids. Instead, while your eyes are closed, focus your gaze at infinity. That is, while closed, your eyes should be looking far away, as if gazing deeply into a black night sky. A deep gaze will open your attention through the sensations of the moment, relax the tension of your mind, and foster a deep and free flow of energy through your body.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
As sexual stimulation becomes intense, you may find yourself squinting or otherwise adding ten• sion to your eyes. Practice keeping your eyes relaxed, even during the height of sexual stimulation
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
If your stare is stuck on one part of your partner’s body, then your energy will also become stuck. There is nothing wrong with looking at your partner’s sexual organs. In fact, beholding each other’s sexual form is an important part of making love. But if you become fixated, obsessively staring at one part of your part• ner’s body for too long, then your energy will become fixated. Rather, drink deeply of your partner’s beauty, allowing your gaze to travel all over his or her body, freely, relaxedly with great ap• preciation but no rigid fixation.
Relaxed eyes help your energy to be relaxed. If your eyes are moving erratically all over, your thoughts will also move erratically all over. Your eye movements should be like silk across your lover’s skin: smooth, loving, and gentle.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Just as you should keep the tongue relaxedly pressed against the roof of your mouth unless you are consciously choosing to do otherwise, your eyes should remain open and relaxed unless you are consciously choosing to use your eyes in some other specific fashion.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
A primary way to use your eyes while making love is to gaze deeply into your partner’s eyes. Feel the love within your partner through his or her eyes.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Even if your partner seems emotionally closed, do your best to feel the openness and love behind your partner’s fear or tension. By seeing through your partner’s layers of resistance, you can consciously connect to the love deep in your partner’s heart and bring it more and more to the fore.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
There is no difference, just one love, expressed through two bodies. This is enlightened sex.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Orgasms had always felt good to me. Really good. They relieved me of sexual tension and left me feeling relaxed. But now I realized that this relaxation was actually depletion. I felt less stressed because I had less energy flowing through me. I got out of bed and tried to do some of the exercises the old man in the book• store had taught us, but my energy was too low. A baby would have been able to push me over. I got back in bed and went to sleep.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
My girlfriends
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had always been sensitive to the internal flow of energy, to the bodily flow of love. Energetically, it was as if they could see and I was blind.
Their shifting moods - upset, anger, lust, lack of inter• est - had, in effect, been a kind of test: Would I continue to be an energetically disadvantaged nerd, trying to reduce everything to words and mentalized communication, giving up when their emotional flows didn’t fit into my mental boxes? Or would I feel their deep flows of energy - which spoke the heart’s true desire - and dance with the push and pull of their moods so we could both relax in love?
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Now everything was falling into place. The old man in the bookstore had taught me that true power is not muscular but energetic: my friend could easily bend my arm when I used only my muscles to resist, but when I felt the energy flowing through my arm like an infinite rod of light, he could not move it. I real• ized that I had been using my mental muscles to try to figure out and change my girlfriends’ moods. But their emotional flows of energy were much more powerful than my seemingly more “muscular” mind.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
I could see with my internal eye and feel with my body how pumping my penis increased the flow of this river of energy. Furthermore, I could see and feel how sitting all day at school, slumped with a sunken chest, had blocked the flow of energy around my heart and solar plexus
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
What she wanted - what she
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needed in terms of energy - changed moment by moment. Sometimes she might need a delicate kiss on her neck to help her open. In the very next moment, she might need a ravishing thrust to deepen her surrender
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Now that I was no longer driving toward an ejaculation, lost in my own sensations, I was able to breathe and move with my girlfriend. Our energy combined in trustful harmony. She could feel my presence pervading every inch of her body. She could feel my loving intention, my constancy and fullness. So, she let her heart open ever wider, teaching me love beyond what I had ever allowed myself. Her surrendered body became an inviting exten• sion of her open heart. I was awed. And humbled
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
the next day, she might sur• prise me with a sudden change of mood. If I had ejaculated too
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frequently, or if my own internal energy was low for other rea• sons, then the weight of her mood would bend me. I would attempt to figure out what was happening and right myself through mentally muscular means: argument, analysis, and insis• tence. But her energy was usually stronger than my mind; even if she agreed with me, in the end I would be worn down. Too weakened to stand unmovable in love and humor, I might walk away from her moods, seeking solitude or refuge with my less energetically weighty male buddies - who were all too ready to smile, shake their heads, and commiserate with me.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Nothing I do, no event, ever gives me what I really want. And yet I remain riveted to the sequence of events, planned and unplanned, that unfold as my life, as if they are leading somewhere fundamentally different from this present mo• ment, something final that will end my search.
Ejaculation epitomizes this need. I am on the verge of coming, of real pleasure, and I can feel my attention being corralled by this possibility
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
I especially do not feel the truth of my deep being, which is already - right now, just as it is - free, open, and unbound . My very nature is unlimited, undefined, unspeak• ably absolute. But instead of feeling free as this infinity, my attention is targeted on my impending squirt. All that came before me, and all that happens outside my bedroom, and all that is right here and now - the immense openness of this very moment, its simple suchness, the transparent efful• gence that appears right now as my experience - all of this
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is ignored so I can focus on my ejaculation. I am a slave to genital need.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
The spotlight of my attention, pre• viously narrowed on the event of my impending ejaculation, widens into a broad flood of light, shining through the entire event - my lover, the bed, the room , the world , the past, and the future. In this wideness of space, the genital urge also widens, so that my whole body is relaxed, opened out, and filled with flows of unkinked energy.
I relax my belly and chest so my breath can flow unob• structed, with full force and great ease. I relax my jaw, face, and eyes so the whole front of my body is soft, round, alive, and vibrant, not stiff or tight.
I inhale deeply down the front of my body, as if drawing energy from my head, down my face, through my throat and chest, into my belly, and down to my genitals. Then I contract the floor of my pelvis so it becomes like a trampoline. As the energy comes down my front, I bounce it off my pelvic floor with an upward intention and muscular contraction of my anus, genitals, and perineal area. Exhaling, I shoot the energy back from my genitals and upward along my spine. As the orgasm energy glides up my spine, my eyes turn up and great blisses rush in an upward direction through my body, through my head, and up, up, up, as if into a great space of light.
My breath becomes suspended in this upward realm of light. All time is made into space and even this wide realm disappears in a vastness beyond form. Our bodies hang lightly below like eaten fruit in a vanished dream.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
The energy that previously wanted to squirt out my penis now shoots up our spines, bathing our egglike bod • ies in luminous bliss, softening our hearts into the wide gentleness of love. Again and again, orgasmic energy shoots up our spines, throug h our brains, and then cas• cades down , floating into our bodies like so many heavy feathers of full surrender.
My chest and belly relax and fill even more as energy con• tinues pouring down . I feel pregnant with energy. Full and unobstructed, like the deep blue sea. This is who I am. This is who my lover is. Always. This full nothing, this cognizant emptiness alive as all forms. Effortless and all.
My practice is to stabilize in this recognition by noticing this openness again and again, gently, whenever my atten• tion narrows or my heart closes.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Common genital ejaculation is probably one of the most pleasur• able and addictive things a man has ever experienced - until he has experienced a whole-body orgasm, a brain orgasm, energy shooting up his spine, or total dissolution with his lover in bliss. Until he has experienced these greater pleasures, a man is un• likely to want to give up his ejaculative fix.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Bypassing the ejaculation to allow deep, multiple, whole-body orgasms requires both technical practice and spontaneous feeling-sensitivity Technical practice alone may allow you to bypass ejaculation, but your sexing will be dry and not open. Sensitivity alone may allow you to feel through the edges of the moment into innate openness, but your bodily habits will remain unchanged and so your realization of openness will remain short• lived; you will be distracted by your familiar emotional neediness and physiological obstructions.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Technical practice involves learning to circulate energy down the front of your body and upward along your spine in coordina• tion with the breath. Contracting your pelvic floor allows you to seal it against leakage as well as “bounce” energy upward. Turn• ing your eyes upward sometimes helps energy to flow up along your spine into and through your head. Pressing your tongue gently against the roof of your mouth allows energy to flow more fully down from your head through your throat and heart into your belly. Softening your belly and chest allows your front
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to conduct and hold more energy. The details of this technical practice are presented in Part Four.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
All day, whenever you can remember to do so, it is helpful to practice receiving energy fully while inhaling deep into your belly, as well as releasing energy fully while exhaling upward along the spine. You can also practice contracting your pelvic floor periodi• cally throughout the day. Then, when you are in the midst of sex, the basic circulation of breath and energy will already be in place. But none of this will fulfill you profoundly unless you are also practicing love. Love itself is a practice. It is something you can do over and over, improving your capacity to love more freely with fewer bounds, even through difficult moments. Unless you deepen your capacity to love, the technical sexual practices will only make you
into a non-ejaculatory robot of mechanical thrust and breath.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Practicing love often means feeling through fear: intention• ally opening yourself when you would rather close down, giving yourself when you would rather hide. Love means recogniz• ing yourself as the open fullness of this moment regardless of its contents - trenchant thoughts, enchanting pleasures, heavy emotions, or gnawing pains - and surrendering all hold on the familiar act you call “me.”
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
The natural momentum of your deep being is more and more to live as love. Yet it is all too easy to collapse from love and limit your• self to familiar cycles of mind, desire, emotion, and fear. It is easy to narrow the naturally compassionate wideness of this moment.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
If you are like most people, most of the time, you are proba• bly reducing love, over and over, in similar ways: Your genitals are about to burst from pleasure, so this moment of love becomes reduced to attention on a few square inches of pressure and juice. Your partner criticizes you and so love collapses into hurt,
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closure, and anger. You try oh-so-hard to bypass ejaculation and end up diligently narrowing love into mechanical effort, forget• ting to feel your partner, the room, and the entire world.
Love is recognizing, now, that without changing anything whatsoever, the openness of this moment is who you are. Love is practiced by noticing the transparent feel-through of this mo• ment, by relaxing as the cognizant openness that you are, not by trying to force yourself to be more loving.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Open love is your natural state, unless fear intervenes and stress follows. No amount of technical sexual practice will re• lieve you of this stress; only the practice of love will cut the roots of fear and undermine your addiction to de-stressing through ejaculation.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
The superior lover is one who practices authentic loving in the form of his or her chosen lifestyle, rather than stopping short and building a comfortable cage of familiar habits inside the confines of fear
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Enlightened sex involves technical exercises to retrain the body’s energy, but primarily it is a matter of practicing love, feeling through the limits on love, and unguardedly being the vulnerable openness that is your true nature, over and over and over - during sex, with family, and at work - so the reflex of separation ceases to bind the heart to the familiar sense of stress that we call “me.” Only the unguarded heart, relaxed as the whole of this moment, is willing to feel as the openness that consumes birth and death.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Some days, you feel like you must ejaculate. You’ve eaten too much salt or too much protein, and your body needs to release the diet-induced pressure. Your breathing is shallow and tense, and stress builds up in your body, needing to be discharged.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Your habits of diet, breath, posture, and mind create an in• ternal turbulence that seeks to be relieved. Your addiction to ejaculation is fueled throughout the day by these stress-creating habits. You are lying in bed, unable to sleep, a bit agitated, and you know the peace that lies on the other side of shooting your wad, relieving yourself of desire, tensions, and thought.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Sex can be a time of total dissolution in love. Sex can bathe every cell in your body with light, bliss, and life force. Sex can be an ecstatic practice of open-hearted communion and surrender to infinity. Or, sex can be ten or twenty minutes of genital stimu• lation ending in a spasm of biological relief.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Ejaculation is addictive. Once you start having ejaculations with some habitual frequency, it’s hard to stop. You will tend to ejaculate more or less on schedule, even if you don’t want to. Even if you have practiced all the proper exercises for opening your internal energy channels and circulating your sexual energy, you can still become addicted to spilling your semen through sex or masturbation. You will come right to the point of ejaculation, and instead of bypassing it in a deeper realization of sexual en• ergy, you will think, “Well, I might as well come this time.”
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
On the other hand, once you stop ejaculating for a while, it is much easier to bypass ejaculation by choice. If you have had non-ejaculatory sex for several weeks, it is much easier to choose not to ejaculate. Then, you can use your abundant energy to consis• tently deepen and strengthen your sexual power of love as well as your ability to be fully conscious, moment by moment, and true
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to your deepest purpose, spiritually, professionally, with friends, and with family.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Fidgets are mini-ejaculations. Bypassing ejaculation won’t be worth it unless you learn to conduct energy throughout your body with your breath. If you don’t practice circulating your en• ergy fully, then the built-up sexual pressure will just accumulate in various parts of your body, causing fidget, twitch, and fret. You will feel tense. Perhaps you will tap your fingers, bite your nails, or grind your jaw. Your increasing sexual energy will inevitably be expelled in restless movement as well as in random thinking.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Practice relaxing the body consciously, especially when the symptoms of fidget and fuss begin to unconsciously pup• peteer your extremities. Consciously breathe deeply and fully, allowing your belly and chest to be relaxed and open, your energy circulating in a deep current of ease rather than in swirling culs-de-sac of choppy thoughts and jagged fray.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Fidgets, both mental and physical, are the body’s way of dis• pelling energy it can’t circulate, exactly as ejaculations are.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
As a superior lover, practice redirecting the energy behind fidgets and ejaculations as we have outlined earlier - through your breath, contraction of the pelvic floor, bodily relaxation, and deep feeling - if you want to live as mighty, wide, and pro• found as you truly are.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
In general, the amount of semen you release corresponds to the amount of energy you release. By regulating the size of your ejaculation, you can better balance yourself, releasing only the amount of energy you need to release in order to attain in• ternal equilibrium.
With practice, you will discover that you can explode huge gobs of semen and expend huge energy in doing so. Or you can seep a small sample, a quarter of a teaspoon or less, and not even
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lose your erection.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Learn to. become sensitive to the signs of energy in your body and mind. Unless you are ill, of advanced age, or coping with intense stress, you should generally feel replete with energy and yet relaxed. Your breath should be full and deep. Your entire body should feel filled with vital force and ease, especially the major en• ergy centers of your genitals, belly, chest, and head. Impotence, frigidity, promiscuity, lack of motivation, workaholism, ulcers, heartburn, heart disturbances, shallow breath, and headaches can all be signs of blocked energy in these major energy centers.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
A man who ejaculates too frequently often finds himself addicted to stimulants such as cof• fee, cigarettes, or pornography. Even the stress of his career or profession may function something like a stimulant, compensat• ing for his spent internal energy.
A too-frequent ejaculator may find himself unable to muster the energy to meet creative challenges and cut through the ob• structions that arise in a creative life, so he may settle for a rote job, something he can do without really living fully. His financial, cre• ative, and spiritual endeavors may be decent, but they will evidence far less expansiveness than he is truly capable of. If he has depleted his natural energy through excess ejaculation, he may find that all he can do at the end of a day is sit in front of a TV and zone out.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Alternatively, a man who doesn’t ejaculate frequently enough may become overly picky, angry, and obsessed. He may suppress his natural flow of energy in other ways, too, becoming prone to fanaticism or zealotry, righteously devoting himself to a spe• cial diet, religious belief, or social cause. If he builds up internal energy but isn’t sensitive enough to know when he needs to ejac• ulate, then he may also be too insensitive to properly circulate his building energy, resulting in “blue balls” or genital discomfort, as well as headaches, backaches, or emotional rigidity.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
When you are ejaculating at your proper frequency, your en• ergy is full yet smooth. Your mind is rested and calm, yet alert and responsive. Your creativity flows freely and you are able to meet difficult situations with fresh perspectives and great persistence. Your humor is quick and flexible, neither uptight nor excessively sarcastic. Your body flows with its full natural energy, and thus you tend toward optimum health for your age, constitution, and genetic characteristics.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Most important, you have the energy to grow in awareness. Spiritual growth - the deepening capacity to love through all situations and feel the infinite here and now - depends on hav• ing enough free energy to apply to the spiritual process. If you are squirting out too much energy in ejaculations, you just won’t have enough vigor to witness the expanse of the moment; rather, you will get caught in its maze of transient forms. Hours will go by and suddenly you will realize you have been totally lost in a sequence of one detail after another, without even a moment of true humor or profound love to awaken your heart to deep sur• render and clear recognition of natural and open being.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
And yet, life consists of actions taken in this present moment: earn a living, take out the garbage, diaper your baby, read a book. Spiritual growth involves being able to take these actions - im• peccably - while at the same time feeling through them as they arise in the midst of infinity. Then, you can have humor about your situation. You can live as love. As good or bad as this moment is, you can feel its transience, as well as the depth of primordial awareness in which this moment always abides. This recognition isn’t a trick of thought or a philosophy to believe in. It is realized, or not, with your whole being, in the smack of this moment. Ei• ther you are living as love or you are lost in the drama of your own story
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Sexual misuse of energy is just one important factor that contributes to spiritual dullness.
If you are an excessive ejaculator, you will rarely have the en• ergy it takes to sustain the awareness you need in order to feel into the depth of this present moment and live as love, giving your deepest gifts
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
In the way of the superior lover, you have sex as often as you like, but you circulate your energy rather than needlessly spend• ing it in excessive ejaculation. You allow your increased energy to loosen your internal blocks by practicing full breathing, loving, and feeling, during sex and throughout the day.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Meld through any stress or sense of separation with a heart of trust, moment by moment by moment, so that relaxed and easeful oneness is your constant practice and natural home.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Then, when your body needs to, when you can feel that it would be healthy for you - and not simply a spasm of addicted need - then and only then ejaculate, with as much love and open giving as you will allow yourself. In this manner, find the best frequency for your ejaculations, whether once a day or once a year.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
To determine how frequently you should ejaculate, you’ll first need to erase the old habit patterns of your body so you can feel its authentic and natural rhythms of energy flow. In other words, you’ll need to break your addiction to frequent ejacula• tions before you can trust your body’s messages.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
To break your addiction to ejaculation, you’ll first need to practice the techniques of conducting energy through your body up your spine and down your front, as we have discussed. You’ll need to practice breathing, relaxing, and loving fully during sex and throughout the day. Otherwise, the tension you develop from a day of partial breathing and constrained lov• ing will want to be released in an ejaculative spasm.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Diet and exercise often affect your circulation of internal en• ergy and therefore influence your need to ejaculate. Excess sugar in your diet may make it more difficult to smoothly circulate your internal energy. Excess consumption of salt, eggs, and meat may increase your urge for ejaculation.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
On the other hand, some of these same foods can also help re• vitalize you if you find yourself depleted from excess ejaculation. The foods that work best to revitalize you depend on your body type, metabolism, constitution, and everyday diet.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
For many people, eggs are a powerful revitalizer after excess ejac• ulation. In fact, eggs are often considered a normal breakfast food among many people who are addicted to frequent ejaculations.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Depending on your regular diet, there are other foods that are effective for rebalancing your system after a period of excess ejaculation. If you eat a vegetarian diet without any meat, eggs, or milk products, then almonds are an excellent post-ejaculative replenisher. If, however, you eat a heavier diet, already rich in eggs and other proteins, then you may need something like a steak to replenish your depleted system.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Regular physical exercise - especially gentle and conscious exercise like yoga, tai chi, and walking - often helps you to con• duct the energy circulating through your body, making your sexual practices much easier.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
When you are feeling tired or weakened, it is far better to have sex and circulate your energy without ejaculating in order to magnify your internal en• ergy and strength.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Weather plays an important role in determining how often you should ejaculate. In cold weather, your body needs to use more of its internal energy to produce heat, so you should ejac• ulate less frequently in order to conserve and build up internal energy. In hot weather - for instance, when you are on vaca• tion in the tropics - your body doesn’t need to use extra energy to heat itself, so your internal energy builds up more readily than in cold climates, and ejaculations will have a less deleteri• ous effect.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Your body is something like a battery. Its store of energy is drained by too-frequent ejaculation, along with cold weather, ex• cessively strenuous or unenjoyable work, disease, poor diet, and chronic tension. It is recharged with energy through non-ejacula- tive, energy-circulating sex, deep loving, appropriate diet, exercise, engaging in work you enjoy, and full and relaxed breathing.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Whereas most men lose energy when they ejaculate, many women find that when they have orgasms their energy actu• ally increases and flows more freely helping their hearts to open more widely. However, just as men can learn to convert ejaculatory orgasms into internal rejuvenating orgasms, women can learn to bloom their orgasms into deeper and deeper openings of rejuvenating bliss.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
To cultivate enlightened sex, it is helpful to know of at least three types of women’s orgasms: clitoral, vaginal, and cervical.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
She may feel his care and affection. But her depth awaits the bloom of fullness.
In her unfulfilled longing, a woman may darkly dream of deep penetration by other men, bikers and pirates, horses and fantastic creatures, or perhaps an indefinable force that “fucks” her like no man ever has. And all of this because she has not been
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able to receive her partner’s deepest penetration of ravishing love - whether lesbian or heterosexual - in her body and heart with full trust.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
No matter how many clitoral orgasms she has, as her lover drifts off to sleep she is left deeply untouched. Knowing there is more to sex than this. Yet not knowing how or what to do to get it.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Sometimes it is solely a depth of heart that is missing. But sometimes the body yearns, too, and clitoral orgasms often won’t do it. For many women, vaginal and cervical orgasms are the necessary physical door to a more complete emotional and
spiritual reception of love.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Clitoral orgasms are the easiest of orgasms. They occur for many women after only ten or fifteen minutes of manual, oral, or penile stimulation, near, around, or directly over the clitoral area - as long as sufficient attention is given to the rest of her body, too.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Some women have a well-defined area - the “G-spot” - a few inches inside the vagina on the front or anterior wall. This area is sexually respon• sive in a unique way. The spongy tissue under this vaginal surface may become full with fluid as orgasm approaches. Some women feel like they have to urinate as the G-spot is stimulated. Some women actually ejaculate fluid from this area during the contrac• tions of an orgasm.
Other women do not have a well-defined G-spot, but still en• joy deep vaginal orgasms
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
If you are receiving the massage, you may be surprised by the amount of emotional residue stored in your vaginal tissue. During G-spot massage, you may find yourself suddenly angry, frightened, or grieving for no apparent reason. If these emotions become too intense for you to continue, stop the massage and simply be present with your lover, sharing what you feel while you relax and breathe together, perhaps while you are held and given refuge in your lover’s arms.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Eventually, however, your vagina will open to this kind of touch. Your G-spot will relax. The emotional scars from past experiences - every• thing from memories of childhood sexual abuse to the residue of insensitive ex-lovers - will gradually dissolve. Just remember to continue breathing, feeling, and relaxing during the G-spot mas-
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sage as emotions and memories arise, move through your body and heart, and disappear, bit by bit.
Once the G-spot area is freed of chronic tension, the whole vagina will respond differently to internal stimulation. If the man is able to stay erect for thirty to forty minutes, and if the penis and vagina are both positioned so the appropriate contact is made, intercourse can regularly involve deep and emotional G-spot or• gasms for most women.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
For a really deep orgasm, a woman must trust her own sexual process - including bodily and vocal expressions of tremendous pleasure and the dark chaos of uncovered emotions - as well as her partner’s integrity and his ability to embrace her pleasure and emotions. It is usually this fear of opening, rather than any purely physiological closure, that most limits a woman’s profundity of orgasmic experience. Growing from clitoral to G-spot or vaginal orgasms is an important step for most women as they practice enlightened sex.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Eventually, the lust for great orgasms begins to shift. Once you have willful access to any particular experience - whether cosmic orgasms, ice cream, or divine visions - you become less needy. You become less obsessed with obtaining the experience. You may still enjoy it, or you may be bored with it, but either way, it’s just an experience. It may be a beautiful experience, but it doesn’t change your life in any fundamental way.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
The revelation of a cervical orgasm tends to recontextualize the entire sexual act. Sex is no longer about genital pleasure or even emotional connection with your partner. Enlightened sex is about profound surrender and dissolution in bright oneness. The sexual occasion shifts away from the pointed pursuit of pleasure or even intimacy toward the relaxed practice of bliss• ful openness - ultimately, to the degree of effortless, effulgent, and unbounded love, a love that transfigures the entire body and heart
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Cervical orgasms often require forty-five minutes or even an hour of sexual stimulation. Clitoral orgasms and G-spot stimu• lation may be used as a warm-up, but most of the stimulation should occur deep inside the vagina, near the cervix. Some
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women find this area of the vagina either without feeling or painful to the touch. In many cases, this cervical numbness or pain is due to emotional tension, sexual trauma, or years of poor lovemaking technique.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Your breath may change frequently sometimes being slow and deep, and other times more quick and shallow. But, in general,
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keep your breath full and relaxed, not tense. Allow your belly to rise and fall with your breath. Allow your jaw to be relaxed. Notice if you lock yourself into a repetitive breathing pattern; instead, keep the breath fresh and responsive to your feelings in every moment.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
In this way, cervical orgasms are baptisms of true surrender. They are bodily reminders of the profundity of your natural openness, if only you would choose to remember love, widen your awareness, relax your body, give yourself completely, and receive the available force of life deeply, down to your toes, with every breath.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
With practice, a woman can learn to distinguish, at the onset, orgasms that are going to magnify her energy and open her heart from those that are going to deplete and close her. When she feels an energy-depleting orgasm on the horizon, she can breathe her about-to-orgasm energy throughout her internal circuitry, up her spine and down her front in blessed fullness, bypassing the kind of orgasm that might weaken her.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Fear of loss of control, fear of openness, fear of masculine penetration, fear of feminine immensity - all these forms of fear and more can prevent the fullness of your orgasmic response to love. Therefore, to really relax into your native orgasmic po• tential, practice clearing the possible obstructions in your body, breath, and emotions so you are able to fully surrender as your natural flow of energy and openness.
The way of the superior lover is to love. Actively. Enlightened sex uses creative and skillful means of breath, surrender, and
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energy to dissolve obstructions to your loving. Then you can re• lax more and more as natural openness and love. Eventually, or in any moment of full practice, you spontaneously live open as love, breathe as love, and move as love itself. In the face of this natural enormity of love, whether you orgasm or not hardly matters.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Pay particular attention to the ears, lips, neck, nipples, belly, anus, perineum, hands, feet, and spine. Use rough and gentle touch, sharp and soft pinches, wet and dry friction, tickles, scratches, steady pressure, and sudden blows to awaken and circulate your lover’s energy. Through creative and skillful means, coax your lov• er’s energy to flow so fully that his or her heart opens as spacious surrender, offering love, shining without boundaries. This is en• lightened sex. Genital contact may get the sexual energy moving,
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but unless you are also skillful at helping it circulate throughout the whole body, the energy will just build up and deplete itself in localized blips of ratchety release.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
you may want to emphasize the upward flow of energy along your spine, perhaps when you have accumulated too much energy in your genitals or when you want to experi• ence a whole-body or brain orgasm rather than a genital orgasm. We have already described how to do this by using your breath, intention, visualization, and upward tension in your pelvic floor.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Enlightened sex means unlimited feeling. If we collapse our feeling onto ourselves, limiting our feeling to our own body, mind, and emotions, then we are not practicing enlightened sex.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
All these exercises are best learned by making them quite muscular at first. While doing the throat lock, for instance, re• ally push the broad part of the back of your tongue up toward the back of your throat. While doing the abdominal lock, really pull the belly and solar plexus inward and upward with signifi• cant force and strength
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Actually feel your lover, then feel the space around your lover, and feel outward to the furthest reaches of feeling. This is how to train in enlightened sex. Over and over, notice you are refusing to love fully, then consent to love.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Be willing to suffer your partner’s and everybody’s closure without closing yourself. And if you do close, remember to open again.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
This choice to open and feel is our fundamental moment-by- moment practice in enlightened sex. Instead of focusing merely on our own pleasure, or reacting to our partner’s coming and going, we train to feel through and beyond every experience.
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
during sex it is important to keep the tip of your tongue gently pressed against the roof of your mouth in order to complete your internal circuit so energy can flow from your head down through the front of your body. In addition, the tongue can also be used to regulate a “diaphragm” located near the back of the throat. With some strength, push the thick back part of your tongue up into the soft palate toward the rear of the roof of your mouth while you contract your upper throat. If you do this exercise correctly, you will feel a pressure in your head
The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover
Eventually, you may find that an occasional and lovingly ad• ministered gentle slap to the face - not to mention the ass or thigh - can surprisingly open the sexing to a new level of aban• don and passion