I had the most unexpectedly delightful experience earlier this week, I attended a two-day Partnered Yoga training course. I’d only heard about it a couple of days before and thought “Yes, this would be so relevant to my work!” So after managing to sort out the kids (still being school holidays) I found myself on Monday morning literally entwined with the most gorgeous man, Gopala Amir Yaffa, the course leader.

 

I’ve done yoga ever since I was a kid, and I love it. It’s great for getting in tune with your body, for keep it lithe and flexible and for stilling the mind and achieving deep relaxation. Brilliant stuff. However, because it is a solitary activity I’ve always found it a little unsatisfying because there is no interaction.

 

I also trained and taught martial arts for years, particularly Aikido. That I found deeply satisfying because there is so much interaction with others. It is absolutely essential that you open yourself to feeling and receiving your partner’s energy so that you can use and move with it. It was brilliant training for applying to sexual situations, and forms the basis of my energetic abilities in all spheres of life and the work I do with people. (Although the fact that it entails hours of being slammed into a mat means it's not everyone's cup of tea...!)

 

So what a pleasant change to do yoga in such an interactive way! And to meet someone who has such a similar approach to life, sensuality and sexuality. A keen proponent of Tantra, Gopala brilliantly combines the still, spiritual aspects of yoga with playful, fun and interactive elements. (His other area of yoga expertise is kids yoga, and you can see the playful overlap!)

 

As he puts it, partnered yoga can be done in a regular class in a completely platonic way, so that class members can experience the poses differently and also get to know each other better and add more liveliness and fun to the class.

 

Partnered yoga between lovers though, can be deeply erotic. This is what interests me.

 

I’m always looking for ways to help couples connect. If you’ve done my Luscious Lovers workshops you’ll know that it’s all about connection and that by deepening connection you heighten eroticism. Which is why dance and massage are so good. Partnered yoga expands the options. It’s very much about connection, about knowing your partner, about harmonising - not to mention potentially becoming more sexually flexible and creative !

 

I’ll incorporate aspects into my work with people, but since I’m not a yoga teacher it will just be elements. So when Gopala is next in Australia in July we’ll co-run a workshop for all my contacts so everyone can experience it. Go to http://www.jacquelinehellyer.com/tantra_yoga.htm for more info and bookings.

 

And even more exciting, we’re looking at running a retreat in Bali together which will combine partnered yoga with the energetic and sensory arousing aspects of my work. Plus the fabulous international dancing star Donna Wild will teach the simple and sensuous dance style of Zouk in the evenings. It’s going to be so gorgeous. That will be in early 2011, so start saving for this luscious, empowering experience!

 

Check out Gopala’s site at: www.sunmoonpartneryoga.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A friend asked me recently what my top 10 tips for a vagina would be. Good question, I thought. So many women feel disconnected from their genitals, don’t have a good feeling about them. We don’t even have a decent word for them, often using the word “vagina’ to apply to the whole genital area. So here I use the word ‘vagina’ to apply to just the vagina, and as to the whole of the genitals..? Well, read on!

 

 

1. Honour It. The female genitals are the source of life. Other than a small input by the man at the start, the whole process of creating life takes place in the female genitals. That would have to be the most awesome thing in the entire universe!

 

2. Name It. For such an awesome part of the body, it’s incredible that we don’t have a decent name, other than ‘genitals’ which is a pretty ugly word. Even in casual talk there are not a lot of strong gorgeous names. We often refer to our ‘bits’, ‘down there’, ‘private parts’ or ‘nether regions’. It’s to relate to an area of your body that you can’t even name! So give it a name: it’s my fanny or my quim, my yoni, qualia, bajingo, honey-pot, cinnebar crevasse….Even my cunt, because originally the meaning of the word cunt was “to beguile a man with one’s feminine charms”, which is rather a wonderful concept.

 

3. Understand It.I think one of the reasons women don’t feel so good about their quim/farfalla/bajingo is because they don’t know how incredible it is. Women are built for extreme sexual pleasure! The anatomy, the physiology, the energetics. Once you understand that, and realise what you’re sexual potential is, then wow, you’re going to love it. Do you know how big your clitoris is? Most of it is on the inside! Do you know how much engorging material there is down there? How orgasms work? How you can go beyond normal orgasm to an orgasmic state? All thanks to your amazing bajingo.

 

4. Incorporate It. It’s part of your body, so feel it as part of your body. Close your eyes and and go over every part of it in your mind, both the inside and the otuside. Explore it with your hands and fingers. Take a good look at it in the mirror. When you can recline in front of a mirror with legs wide apart and look and say to yourself “Mmm, that is gorgeous!”, then you’ll know it’s part of you.

 

5. Pamper It.Our bodies love and deserve to be pampered. It’s so good for the soul. Your honey-pot is part of your body and deserves that pampering too. So if you’re in a hot bath, part your legs and allow the warmth to wash over it. If you’re in the ocean, part your legs and allow the salty sting of the water to caress it. When you apply creams to you body, slather yourself all over (no creams or oils on the inside though). When making love with your partner, request/invite/allow it to be touched/massaged/embraced.

 

6. Pleasure It. Our genitals are made for pleasure. The clitoris has no purpose at all, other than to provide exquisite pleasure. The mass of nerves, engorging material, lubricating and wetting functions, all conspire to show that our fannys and meant to be used for pleasure. So do so. With another or on your own. Particularly on your own. The womanly art of self-pleasuring is so important to self-loving and self-honouring. See my video on self pleasuring if you need advice on how to do this.

 

7. Listen to It.This is particularly in relation to having sex. One of the biggest problems I’ve noticed with people’s sex lives is that they move too fast. You have to listen to your body and in particular to your quim to know when you’re ready to move on. So you don’t start to kiss until your mouth is drawn to your partner’s. You don’t allow your breasts to be touched until you feel them lifting and moving towards your partner, wanting to be touched. You don’t allow your qualia to be touched until you feel your hips raising and your legs opening. And you don’t allow your partner to enter you until you feel your cinnebar crevasse yearning for his jade stalk, your yoni invites in his lingam, your cunt is dripping with desire for his cock… If you’re not really feeling it, don’t go there.

 

Now some tips on keeping it in good shape:

 

8. Squeeze It.There’s a band of muscle that goes from your pubic bone to your tail bone. It’s important to keep it toned as it does some very important things. Firstly, it holds all your internal organs in place. If you don’t keep those muscles toned, your vagina might fall out when you get old. I kid you not, vaginal prolapse can happen to older women.Secondly, the contraction of these muscles is an important part of orgasm. The more toned the muscles, the better the orgasm. So ladies – squeeze! And squeeze some more! Imagine you’re stopping urine from flowing, those are the muscles to use. Squeeze rhythmically, then squeeze and hold a few seconds, then squeeze progressively tighter, keeping your abdominal muscles relaxed.

 

 

9. Rest It.Rest is such an important part of health and wellbeing. It applies to your vagina too. It’s good to give it a rest. Particularly during your period. In many traditional cultures women would take time out during their period to relax and rest, often with other women. This is not as many anthropologists have interpreted it because the women were considered ‘unclean’ at that time, but because it was a sacred time for a woman to go within. We modern women would benefit from doing the same. Take it easy during your period, especially the heavier days. Avoid exerting yourself, be peaceful, and avoid genital stimulation, especially intercourse. Get into the rhythm of your cycle, be aware of the ebbs and flows of your energy and work with those flows, rather than ignoring them or fighting them.

 

 

10. Let it flow.And finally, on the topic of menstruration, let it flow. I do believe modern women try to hide to ignore and hide their cycles excessively. Tampons have their place, but if you let the blood flow, you’ll get more in touch with your body. So rest and let the blood flow during your period, and you’ll find more energy and more intuitive flow in the rest of your life.

I'm on a writing retreat working on my next book to do with female sexuality (stay tuned - the muse is flowing!), and have been looking over my past writings for inspiration. I came across this one on sex and spirituality, which is so good that I've decided to reprint it here.

I’m often asked about spiritual sex, and terms like ‘Tantric sex’ are the most commonly googled requests that link to my website. I believe that to reach your sexual potential you’ve got to be open to the spiritual elements. So let’s talk sex and spirituality.

 

‘Bliss’,  ‘ecstasy’,  ‘connection’, ‘union’, ‘transcendence’, ‘losing self’, ‘merging with the universe’…

 

What do you suppose I’m describing here?

a)    A spiritual experience

b)    A sexual experience

c)    Both

 

The answer is (c). Not all sexual experiences are spiritual and not all spiritual experiences are sexual, but there is a strong connection, and when the too merge the sex is truly awesome.

 

For many of us in western culture this seems at odds, because we’re often brought up to believe that sexuality and spirituality are opposites, that one is base and ‘bad’ and the other is lofty and ‘good’, that to get to the spiritual we have to overcome the sexual.

 

So instead of embracing our sexuality, which is an intrinsic part of being human, we at best trivialise it and at worse deny it. Which means that instead of a whole healthy society we have one that is obsessed with superficial sexuality and full of people with dysfunctional attitudes and behaviours around sex.

 

Sex is not meant to be like this. Sexual energy is our basic life energy. We all come from orgasm. Denying or corrupting it damages our selves. It’s far better to embrace our sexuality and experience life-affirming and life-enhancing sex.

 

You see, sex has three purposes. The first is reproduction. That’s a wonderful thing, but it’s not the essence of human sex, all animals have sex to reproduce. The second is pleasure. Our bodies are sexual pleasure machines, we are designed to experience exquisitely delicious sex. The third is personal transformation. By deepening the intimacy and heightening the erotic, we are capable of having sex that is far more than a physical joining of the genitals. We can have sex that takes us far above the physical rutting of animals, way up into the realm of the angels.

 

This type of sex can be called ‘high sex’, I think of it as ‘deep sex’, it’s definitely spiritual sex. Whatever you call it, you have to realise that it doesn’t just ‘happen’ (although plenty of people have experienced a glimpse of this possibility), just as blissful transcendent spiritual experiences rarely occur spontaneously. You have to cultivate deep sex.

 

For a start, you have to be truly present in the experience. For a society that increasingly views sex as a performance activity, this can be hard to achieve, because to be present you have to be out of your head and into your body, you have to turn off the incessant monkey chatter. Spiritual sex does not happen if you’re constantly thinking about whether you’re doing it ‘right’ or if you’re worried about your bits jiggling or whether you ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be doing a particular act.

 

By being present you become more intuitively attuned to your partner, so the sex flows. You also become more sensually aware, so the sensual aspects of sex are heightened. You’re also more likely to take it slow, delighting in every exquisite morsel of the experience. Our society tends to focus on the peaks of sex, the harder-faster-louder side of sex, which of course is good, but it’s only half the story. The valleys of sex, the slow, sensual, deep aspects are at least as glorious and often more ecstatic, and the sensations linger longer….

 

When you practice sex like this, it can go on for hours, and the sensations go beyond our normal concept of orgasmic. Too many of us see orgasm as the point of sex, believing that all the preliminaries just lead up to the grand finale of the big O. In spiritual sex orgasm is an outcome of sex (often many times over) not the point, and certainly not necessarily the end. The heightened states of arousal reached can transcend the usual experience of orgasm, so the feeling extends way past the genitals into the body and beyond, and potentially for a very long time. In fact, experiencing sex like this means you carry the bliss into the rest of your life, so that the whole of life becomes an extended experience of sexual and orgasmic energy.

 

I’m not advocating some hippie herbal version of sex here where it’s all about worshipping the god/dess in each other and dancing around in sarongs to Indian sacred chants (although that can be good too). This sex can occur anywhere - in a bondage parlour, for instance, or in a back alley up against a wall, or even a simple late-night cuddle under the sheets - if it’s part of a life lived in a heightened state of spiritual and sexual awareness.

 

You see, high sex incorporates the intimate and erotic, in fact you can’t really have erotic without the intimate. True intimacy is about showing your real self and surrendering to the experience. If you’re playing a role, or if you hold yourself back out of fear of your partner’s reaction, or a belief that certain acts are ‘bad’ (some are, I’m assuming consenting acts between living adult humans here), then you won’t be able to open yourself, to surrender yourself, to experience the sublime.

 

Spiritual growth involves an ever deeper knowing of oneself. A centre, a presence, a union with wholeness of the universe, an experience of self as selfless, of loss of self. There are many paths to this awareness, sex is one of the most accessible and beautiful paths to spiritual awareness and growth.

 

I encourage you to start the journey…

 

 

I'm on holidays at beautiful Whale Beach, feeling quite mellow and life is slow and gentle. I've been musing on how rare that experience is in life in general, and on how sex is one of the few areas in life where we can be slow and gentle, mellow and yummy. Unfortunately too many people think that sex is supposed to be intense to be good. It can be, but it doesn't have to be.

So I thought I'd write my next blog post on the topic of Slow Sex. But being on holidays I'm feeling a little lazy, and thought that I'd use something I wrote earlier that is very relevant. Its theme is less about slow sex and more about removing the performance approach to sex, with the focus on giving each other orgasms, to getting into a state of flow that paradoxically can lead to more orgasms and/or to more ecstatic states of pleasure.

I call it 'beyond orgasm'. Orgasms are great, but there's better than that. To discover it you have to let go.

Here's what I wrote:

I’m often asked what I think the biggest problem people have with sex these days. I’d have to say it’s the performance model of sex, that it’s all about giving each other orgasms.

 

It’s not surprising so many people think sex is a performance activity, given how driven we are in this society, all driving harder, harder, faster, faster to achieve more and get more. It’s so exhausting! And leads to a number of problems in relation to sex:

 

First, if people think sex has to achieve something, but they’re not really feeling up to it, they might not bother.

 

Second, people get performance anxiety. This reduces their confidence and enthusiasm, which tends to result in less satisfactory sex (if any at all) and sets up a negative feedback loop of low sexual confidence.

 

Third, and most importantly, if you’re focused on the endpoint of sex you miss all the good points in between!

 

The point of sex is not orgasm. The point of sex is a complete luscious experience. Orgasm is a delicious outcome of sex, not the point of it.

 

Sex is a journey, not a destination.

 

Otherwise you might as well just masturbate. That’s the difference between solo sex and partnered sex – solo sex is generally just about orgasm, partnered sex has so many more aspects to it.

 

Great sex has peaks and troughs, softness and intensity. It’s all good. You have to get into the pleasure of the valley as much as the pleasure of the heights. The feelings are different, but the valleys can be just as orgasmic, in a gentler, exceptionally exquisite, blissful way.

 

Paradoxically, by savouring all the different aspects of sex, rather than just going for the one big O, you can experience more orgasms and more varied orgasms in the one sex session.

 

Men can too! One of the important steps for men in becoming multi-orgasmic is to fully experience both the valleys and the highs of sexual sensation and learn to appreciate sexual sensation in a whole body way, rather than being genitally focused (I’ll write more on that another time).

 

One other paradox, if you move away from this performance-oriented it’s-all-about-the orgasm style approach to sex, you’ll experience a wider range of sexual sensations – even without orgasm. For instance, the style of sex I call “Cup of Tea Sex” can be absolutely gorgeous, just gently lying together without much activity at all, just feeling close and bonded. Have you ever tried having sex without any intention to orgasm? Try it, in fact try it several nights in a row – just lie together, him inside her (spoon position is good, on your sides, her back to his front), and do nothing. You can both squeeze your pelvic floor muscles now and again to keep the erection, but move as little as possible. Align your breathing as you do it, and you’ll find it even more interesting. Do that for 15 minutes or so, see how it feels. This will get you learning to appreciate the quiet, soft, troughs. This is so different to what we usually think of as good sex that it might seem really odd at first, but do it every night for a week and I think you’ll find it’ll change the way you make love ever after. 

 

So, what makes for better sex? Relax, switch off your brain and get into the groove of sex, enjoying every exquisite moment – the highs, the lows and every point in between.

 

Enjoy!

This is an adaption of a post I made last new year when I was writing for Mindfood magazine. It's so relevant I thought it useful to reprint it here...


Happy new year readers! I hope you’ve had a wonderful festive season and have taken the time to look over your life and acknowledge where life is going well and identify those areas which could do with improving.

 

Hopefully you’ve gone so far as to make some new years resolutions. These are probably to do with health issues such as getting fit or drinking less, or to do with finance issues such as saving money or getting a raise. These are all very worthy resolutions and good on you for making them.

 

Here’s another one for you:

 

“I resolve to have better sex in 2009.”

 

Say it out loud. Go on, this is a practical exercise.

 

How did it feel? If it felt good and powerful and real, excellent, skip over to the check-list below. If it felt awkward or a bit silly or even embarrassing, then let’s take a moment to consider why you would feel that way.

 

Sex is a fundamental part of being human, and a good sex life has enormous benefits in terms of improved health and well-being, greater self-esteem, better relationships (and because of that a happier, healthier and saner society) – so why would it seem odd to resolve to improve your sex life? It’s simply a reflection of our sex-negative society. Because sex hasn’t been acknowledged as the important thing it is, in the same way as for instance good nutrition and a healthy bank balance have been, we tend not to focus on it with the same level of intent as other parts of life.

 

No-one would think you odd if you declared your resolve this year was to get fit or get a promotion. Yet if you declared your resolve is to have better sex…

 

So, ok, you don’t have to publicly declare this intention. It’s sad that this is the case, but never mind. If you have a partner, I strongly encourage you to make this declaration together, but you can do it alone if need be. Find a place where no-one can hear you, then state out loud:

“I/We resolve to have better sex in 2009.”

Excellent! That is a brilliant start to the year!

 

I can always tell which of my clients are going to make good progress, it's all to do with their attitude. The ones that come to me stating that they are taking the sex coaching on as a ‘project’ are the ones that do well. They know that they have to have a positive intention, take concrete action, and realise they are on a journey.

 

So, to get you started, here are some important points that are relevant to everyone in improving their sex life:

• -  Is your bedroom a boudoir, a sanctuary from real life? When you go to your bedroom do you feel you can relax? Is it attractive, comfortable, sensual? Does it have soft lighting, music?-  Do you set aside time in your week to make love? Do you allow yourselves time to unwind and relax so that you can get in the mood before making love?-  Do you wear clothes that make you feel attractive and sexy? Especially underwear and night wear?-  Do you self-pleasure regularly? Both in terms of pampering yourself and masturbating?-  Do you read books or watch movies that inspire your erotic fantasies? Do you allow yourself to enjoy your private fantasies?-  Do you read books, attend workshops or watch videos for educational purposes, to improve your knowledge and skills?-  Do you and your partner talk about your love life, about what you do and don’t like, what you’d like to try, how you’d like to make it better and better?

 

Take some time to think about what you personally can do to improve your sex life. Based on the list above this could include some shopping, redecorating, time allocating and activities for yourself – quite pleasurable on the whole!

 

If you have a partner, talk to him or her about this. Many couples do find it difficult to talk about their sex life, so start simply, perhaps with a discussion on redecorating the bedroom. Keep it light! Heavy discussions around sex are rarely conducive to improving the situation. Book in for a session with me if you're finding this challenging.

 

I also strongly encourage you to attend my workshops to improve your sexual confidence and knowledge: Luscious Lovers will be run on Valentine's Day, Sunday 14 February, and Saturday 17 April. Luscious Woman over the weekend of 27-28 March.

 

Together we can make 2010 your year for better sex (leading on to better and better sex in the years to come…)

 

It all starts with your resolve.