So much of my work revolves around enabling people to come together with real intimacy. I’m blessed to be able to see this in private sessions in the workshops and retreats that I run. Seeing couples sharing their love and intimacy so beautifully is an awe-inspiring experience, but it’s also sadly rare in our society.

It’s not that smooth and easy for all couples though. For very many people intimacy is bewildering and perplexing, and it’s very often extraordinarily confronting to ‘meet’ each other in this way. The barriers have to come down. You have to meet each other with deep, calm, slow tenderness. There needs to be a slow dissolving of the edges. The woman needs to get a place where she can welcome her man into her, invite him to enter. That entering is a place of beauty and relaxation and letting go for the man. She needs to be able to allow that. He needs to be able to hold her so well that she can get to that place, so that he can enter her and the entering becomes a coming together, a merging into unity.

When a couple come together in this way, they are exploring the exquisiteness of the “valleys” of sex - a place where altered consciousness is possible, where you can enter orgasmic states. This is a very different experience to the “peaks” of sex, which is about intense genital stimulation leading to genital orgasm.

I believe that many people lose interest in sex, or become obsessed with sex, because focusing on the “peaks” of sex is not sustainable in the way that a “valley” approach to sex is. Sex that is predominantly genital and orgasm-focused gets empty over time. The women feel like receptacles and the men have performance problems due to the over-focus on the penis. Without the emotional and energetic connection sex becomes just an empty physical act that doesn’t really satisfy either person.

The starting point for real sex, true lovemaking, is tenderness. Tenderness is coming together with softness and strength. Tenderness is deep, calm and beautiful. This is how your love-making needs to be to get to that place of true connection, true yielding and opening to each other. This is where your love-making turns alchemical, creating a life-enhancing and sustaining energy for each of you.

Tenderness.

Try it.