It's vital for mindful acts of emotional and spiritual intimacy to steadily develop as a daily practice for healthy sex. To that end, Center for Healthy Sex has created daily meditations to help you reach your sexual and relational potential. (You can subscribe for free here.)
Even momentarily concentrating on healthy solutions rewires psychological patterns to receive and share healthy sexual love in the present. Here are three meditations with the themes of healthy sex, neglect, and self-empowerment for you to ponder and practice this week.
Meditation 1: Healthy Sex
"(E)very gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it." -- Hermann Hesse
There are many debates about what constitutes healthy sex, and no one person has the final definition -- except you. You have to decide what is and isn't healthy for you depending on your past, what you know about yourself today, and what safely brings you pleasure. A general guideline of aspects for you to check is S.A.F.E.: Is it Secretive or Shaming? Is it Abusive to you or your partner, whether verbally, emotionally, physically, or sexually? Is it used to escape Feelings? Does it require an Emotional connection with another?
As you continue to define healthy sex and to develop your own safe scripts, consider that deepening your sense of self and embracing your own erotic, animal nature is a benefit of the sexual freedom you seek. Create a climate with your partner of mutual respect and honor and notice how you feel after a sexual encounter. An embodied sense of self that feels congruent, whole, and good likely means you're on the right track. As you hone your erotic lovemap, you may dare to demand the experience of staying in the present moment and staying relational with your partner. Seek surrender and vulnerability and take risks you may have avoided in the past. Challenge yourself to feel deeply and to love with your entire body, mind, and soul.
Daily healthy sex acts
- Take time to envision your most erotic self. What's missing from your experience today, and what do you need to do to take a step toward your vision? Share this with your partner.
- Talk to your partner about trying something new the next time you have sex. Will this be making eye contact during the moment of orgasm, sharing a sexual fantasy that includes the two of you, or using massage oils? Bring to life one aspect of your vision of your most erotic self.
Meditation 2: Neglect
"It's not love's going hurts my days
But that it went in little ways." -- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Neglect is more harmful than once thought, especially for young children. It comes in the form of disregarding or ignoring a child's needs, whether emotional, physical, or psychological. Being neglected can wreak terrible damage on children's sense of themselves, and therefore on their self-worth and esteem. These under-valued children may carry the baton of neglect into the rest of their lives. Many of us struggled from the supposedly "benign" neglect by our caregivers, which left us feeling shameful about our appearance, bodies, morals, or intelligence. We may heal ourselves from these wounds. But making such a fundamental change in the way we see -- or don't see -- our true beings requires stopping and taking an inventory of the self-disregard we still tolerate in our lives.
Survey your life: Take a look at your home, car, work environment, wardrobe, relationships, and spiritual state, and see what parts of yourself you may be neglecting to care for. What has become shabby in your surroundings? In your appearance? In your work? Do you settle for neglectful, cavalier relationships with friends or your partner? If you show indifference to yourself, you can expect nothing more from potential lovers, friends, or bosses.
If you're neglecting your primary relationship, then that "garden" won't flourish and grow either. So often we assume that once we're in a relationship it will sail on automatic pilot seamlessly into the future. Since no one ever put attention or care into them, persons neglected as children may have particular difficulty grasping that living relationships, like living beings, require tending, hard work, and love. Promise yourself to care for your relationship, and for yourself, and put those vows into practice.
Daily healthy sex acts
- Take a moment to look at your life and consider your most deeply desired vision for the coming year.
- Do the persons and things in your life reflect that vision or are you tolerating scraps?
- Remove all tattered or shabby things in your life, and stop neglecting yourself.
Meditation 3: Self-Empowerment
"I had to give up the fantasy, the enormous life consuming fantasy, that someone or something was going to do this for me -- the fantasy that someone was coming to lead my life, to choose direction, to give me orgasms." -- Eve Ensler
Waiting for Prince Charming to swoop in and elevate our dreary lives is a dis-empowering, grandiose and childish fantasy that only serves to leave us weak and victim-like. Yet many fairy tales conjure images of knights in shining armor and Cinderella-like endings that will rescue us from the hardships of life. Like all fairy tales, these stories are filled with metaphors for life but don't bear any factual resemblance to adult reality. So they can cripple us in immaturity if we stay attached to them.
Life is filled with challenges and strife, which we can use in service of shaping our character, rounding out our rough edges, and forcing us to grow. Taking the "bull by the horns" in life means we set ourselves a course of possibility and vision, and to do so we must step out of our comfort zone. It can also mean that we aren't relying on a lover or partner to make us happy or to bring us sexual blossoming.
Living a life of self-empowerment means that we willingly live in discomfort, anxiety, and sometimes even in fear because we recognize those feelings as a personal crucible for growth. Such growth is essential to realizing -- that is, to making real -- our own dreams and visions. Independent people know that challenge is a genuine part of reality, and that only by managing it ourselves will we manifest our true selves. Holding the paradox of fear and faith simultaneously is the task of the visionary; create your own fairy tale today and empower yourself to live the life you imagine!
Daily healthy sex acts
- What fantasies are you harboring -- perhaps about being saved from your lot in life -- that need to be dashed?
- Are you sexually disempowered? If so, how? What small step can you take today to get into reality and empower yourself? Try talking to a friend, your partner, a health or mental health professional. Take your sexuality into your own hands.
- Do you discount your current relationship and live in fantasy about a perfect one? How might living in fantasy keep you from appreciating the relationship you already have?
For more by Alexandra Katehakis, M.F.T., click here.
For more on conscious relationships, click here.