The Secret to Freeing Yourself From Limiting Habits – In Bed

Dear Reader,

This weekend I was at a bridal shower where I’d been asked to speak about the sexual side of tantra. Of course, the ladies were a lot of fun, and as always, they had some really good questions. I’ll share an answer to one here today.

As I’ve explained in past issues of Tantra Tips, and as I explained at the bridal shower, if your breath and energy (“chi” or “prana”) cannot freely circulate in your body as you make love, the pleasure you can feel is limited. You’re cheating yourself of better sex! Your breath, energy, and mind are all linked, so your capacity for spiritual bliss is also limited (your ability to experience samadhi through complete absorption in the love and/or sensuality of lovemaking, or in anything else for that matter).

So here’s the question: How can you learn begin to relax, deepen the breath, and maintain relaxed awareness while making love if your body is in the habit of tensing up and panting?

And here’s the answer: You don’t. Not at first. Just trying to remember to do all those things while “getting it on” will only make you more stressed and tense, and make you stay in your head and worry self-consciously instead of enjoying yourself, right? No fun. And if you start to get carried away by the moment, your breathing will get away from you again.

So then, the *easy* way to change your limiting sexual habits is to start changing your habits and your awareness when you’re *not* making love, just a little bit each day, and making the whole process relaxing and fun….

If you want to experience orgasm throughout your body, or to experience the bliss of samadhi (dissolving completely into the object of your awareness – pleasure, orgasm, love, your lover, or whatever your awareness is focused on), you have to become more consciously aware of breathing fully, deeply, slowly, and relaxing all the emotional tensions within your body – in the pelvic floor, the solar plexus, the throat, and the mind.

The easiest way to begin is to wake up in the morning, hit the snooze bar on your alarm, lie on your back, arms and legs relaxed open, with left hand on your belly, right hand on the center of your chest, and breathe slooowly and deeply with just your abdomen rising and falling for 5 minutes. Then breathe with your abdomen and your chest for another five minutes. The hand on your belly should move more than the hand on your chest.

Try to count to 6 as you inhale, hold for 2 or 3, exhale for 6, and hold for two or three and repeat until the alarm goes off again. Then gently massage your face, scalp, arms legs and torso, and start your day. Don’t start worrying about your morning until you’ve finished your ten minutes of breathing. You’ll be more relaxed, more energized, more efficient, and you’ll find your whole day flows better, too…

Then do the same thing before you go to sleep, this time relaxing your body more by lengthening the breath out, inhaling for 8 to 10, holding 3, exhaling 8 to 10, and holding three, focusing on the counting and on your belly and chest rising and falling, relaxing your body deeper into
the mattress each time you exhale. You’ll sleep much better for it, and your body will release some of it’s stress.

You’ll start to find that you breath more deeply and are more relaxed throughout the day, and more relevant to Tantra Tips, when you’re making love, too.

Once you’ve relaxed with your morning and night breathing for a week or two, try touching yourself and giving yourself as much pleasure as you can handle while doing your breathing and relaxing. Keep doing this each day until you can relax, and breathe (preferably nose-breathe!)
while experiencing incredible pleasure that would have incapacitated you before!

The pleasure turns the exercise into play, makes it much more fun, and starts to integrate healthy breathing naturally into your sexual behavior. Then, if you have a willing lover, tell them that breathing this way will amplify your pleasure, and ask her / him to touch you for
ten minutes while you breathe and relax… It’ll be fun for both of you to see how long you can enjoy without losing the smooth, long flow of your breathing… turn it into a cooperative game with no losers, just orgasms… Sound like fun?

Even if s(he) wasn’t open to tantra or yoga before, after watching you open up and enjoy those ten minutes, your lover just might want to start freeing up his/ her breathing too… Which is a lot easier way to get you both having more fun than by saying, “Babe, lets do these
exercises to improve our lovelife” – which would kill just about anybody’s passion… by turning sex into work.

So — keep it playful, and lead your partner by exhibiting your own enjoyment, not by nagging or turning sex into a project!

For more tips on releasing sexual and emotional tension, and opening up both sexual bliss (orgasm) and spiritual bliss (samadhi), subscribe at the upper left hand side of this page, under our logo…

Smile, breathe right, and keep your tongue up!
Tao Semko