How often do you like to have sex? Are you into a daily morning quickie, or are you happy to wait for weeks until the perfect time arises, and you can have hours of quality lovemaking? Do you like to have sex at fairly regularly spaced intervals, or do you tend to have a few sessions close together and then you’re done for a while?
 
 Or don’t you know?

It does help to know what your natural rhythm is. We often talk about two people in a relationship having mismatched libidos because one wants it more than the other. That’s natural and pretty well inevitable, and the couple need to work with it. Your sexual rhythm is important too...
 
 I know that I, for example, am more of a few good sessions and then I’m done for some time kind of a person, whereas my partner is more of a regular type. I like to have a few good sessions over a few days and then I'm good for a week or more, at which point I get desirous again and want it a few more times, then a break. That’s my cycle. My partner on the other hand gets antsy if he goes more than two or three days without.
 
 So that’s something that we have to work with, as do you with your unique situation. Just to share a bit more about me as illustration, once my partner realised that it was never going to be a long-term drought, and that when it’s on it’s really really good, he could relax into the drier spells knowing that the rain was on its way! (And which stopped him being fretful about it, which had made me less desirous and so the breaks longer!)
 
 That’s me though, I’m into quality not quantity. I’m the same with food, I’d rather go hungry than eat bad food, and I won’t even consider bad sex. Personally, I can cope without sex when I’m feeling sated and there’s not the opportunity for the equivalent of a gourmet repast. But my partner’s not the same, so I’ve learned to have quality snuggles, simple sex, in-between.
 
 I’ve shared a lot of personal information here, just so you can see how one couple work with their different sexual cycles to mutual benefit.
 
 Other couples I’ve worked with have: 

• learned to have lots of sex during her horny mid-month week, and avoid sex in her monstrous pre-menstrual week; 
• learned to have more sex in the evenings when she’s in the mood so that he’s not ravenously hungry for sex every morning at 5am when she’d rather be asleep; 
• studied his or her variable work shifts to identify good opportunities for lovemaking in advance; 
• learned to have sex before dinner after they get back from the gym, when they’re both feeling aroused and before they get too tired; 
• started having sex earlier in the evening as one has to get up very early, so the night owl gets up after sex to do other things leaving their partner to sleep. 

Get in touch with your sexual cycle, and then get open and creative together, figuring out how to work with your cycles for maximum mutual pleasure. 

The number one secret to good sex is to surrender.
 
 That's all.
 
 You've got to surrender to the act. Let go of the noise in your head and get completely and utterly in your body, in the flow, surrendered to the pleasure of the experience. 

Sounds easy, but it’s hard to do. We’ve all of us, to varying degrees, gotten into a bad habit. This is the habit of thinking too much about things where thinking gets in the way of feeling. We're so caught up with thinking that we live our lives in our heads, so we're not really present in our bodies. In extreme cases, our bodies almost become an appendage to our heads. But to really feel, you must get into your body, you must really be present in your body.
 
 Paradoxically, being present in your body enables you to transcend your body. It enables the boundaries of your physical self to dissolve it and allows you to get into transcendent states where you lose touch with the physical plane and get into more spiritual, ecstatic planes.
 
 There's an exercise I do in my workshops - usually very early on because it's so instructive - where I enable people to get present in one side of their body and not the other. They're always amazed at the difference. One side feels warm and alive and tingly, the other feels empty and dead. When I point out that they mostly go through life with their bodies feeling dead like that, they realise what they're missing out on, and hopefully they then pay a lot more attention to what I'm teaching!
 
 We then do more work on breath and becoming centred and heightening sensory perception and lots of other delightful exercises that get people out of their heads and into their bodies. It might not sound all that relevant to sex, but it's fundamental. In fact, it's fundamental to living.
 
 It takes dedication and application and practice to live and make love with that level of presence and to be able to surrender so fully to the experience.
 
 Personally, I think it's worth it. 

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 and 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 becomes alchemy, creating a life-enhancing and sustaining energy for each of you.
 
 Tenderness.
 
 Try it.

Think about how you use your senses as you make love. Do you use all your senses? Do you engage with the whole of your partner’s body, or just a few bits?
 
 As you become more sensual in your lovemaking, sex becomes less ‘sexual’, focused on ‘getting your rocks off’, and becomes more ‘sensual’, more loving. Although paradoxically, sensuality also feeds sexuality: the more in tune you are with your senses and the more you use them and enjoy the sensual nature of lovemaking, the more intensely you’ll experience sex.
 
 You need to reawaken your senses, to re-engage with life. The sensual realm is the physical realm, but it’s a lot more than just superficial appearances. Embrace the sensual and you’ll connect with your body at a deep level and increase your energy, both of which will heighten your desire for sex and your enjoyment of it.

This shift to sensuality is doubly important when you apply it to your own body image - this is a message particularly important to women. The media brainwashes us to believe that “sexy” equals the type of body that most women only have in their youth, if even then. That’s why I advocate letting go of the “sexy” stuff and embracing the sensual. “Sexy” does have this image of a perfect, young body that’s horny and lusty and ready to go. Not the way most women generally feel.
 
 Now consider the concept of “sensual”. It’s softer, rounder, gentler, full of depth and warmth – rather like the bodies of women! Sex between long-term lovers is like this too, less raunchy and a whole lot more loving and gorgeous (not to imply that it can’t be incredibly raunchy too, it just doesn’t have to conform to raunchy stereotypes). It’s the type of sex you can only have with a long-term partner, and the type of sex you can only have if you appreciate your gorgeous, sensual body.
 
 You’re not going to absorb this message from the mass media, so you’re going to have make the mind-shift yourself. Think sensual: 

• Think sensual in the shower: rub soap over yourself and love the softness and the roundness; 
• Think sensual as you move through the day: feel your hips swaying, your breasts moving (picture how full-figured African or Latin American women move, it’s poetry); 
• Think sensual as your partner caresses your curves; 
• Think sensual as you caress your own curves when you make love. 

 Loving your body is a challenge for most people, men as well as women, and the challenge is harder as we age and become less like the media-generated idealised image of sexy. But if you can let go of that unrealistic ideal and embrace your body for what it is in all its sensuous gorgeousness, you will in fact feel sexy, naturally sexy, just as you are. 

Sex is the one thing in life we seem to think should just happen “naturally” without any focused attention and study. This is completely absurd, and one of the reasons why people don’t have good sex lives! 

The only “natural” part of sex is the basic putting-penis-into-vagina, which anyone can manage with a modicum of bumbling and fumbling around. To do any more than that requires application and research.
 
 Yes, research - trying things out, exploring, making mistakes, being creative, and discussing what you’re discovering.
 
 I take my research seriously. As my partner said to me with a mock pout not long after we got together: “I’m just a guinea-pig to you, aren’t I?” I had to agree it was true to an extent. I want to know what he’s doing when it feels good to me, what I’m doing when it feels good to him, how it feels with subtle changes and different approaches. This is how we get to know each other’s bodies, arousal, and eroticism. Without that we’d just be thrashing around in the dark.
 
 I tell my clients and workshop participants, get down and have a good look at your genitals and your partner’s genitals. Go for an exploration, with sensual touch of course, and get to know your genitals thoroughly. Get to know what feels good, where, and how. Get to know how the feeling changes with different states of arousal. Explore different feelings and sensations. Find different ways to get to orgasm and experience different types of orgasm.
 
 Ideally your early sexual experiences would have had a strong element of natural curiosity (fortunately mine did, I was blessed with a wonderful young lover). You would have been two young people exploring and discovering with gentleness and opening to the full potential of their sexuality. Then you would have carried this sense of curiosity throughout your lives, constantly seeking to explore and discover your partner and find ever more wonderful ways of connecting.
 
 Unfortunately, most people’s early sexual experiences were nowhere near as tender and beautiful as this. More likely they had the opposite effect, shutting people down early on and making them reluctant to expand.
 
 Even if it did start well, you can easily fall into the know-each-other-too-well syndrome, where you get locked into views of each other and feel there’s nothing more to explore. You accept that you’re just the way you are and sex is going to be just the way it is (which usually means it gets gradually worse over time).
 
 Worse still, and so common, is that people lose their sense of self in the relationship and can no longer
 push their boundaries for fear of the other’s reaction. This more than anything keeps people locked into routine sex: “I’m not going to say or do anything for fear of how my partner might respond!”
 
 But you have to do your research, and you have to discuss what you find with each other - unless you’re single and doing solo sex research, which is also very important. That means talking about it, as you do it and after you do it.
 
 Considering your sexual experimentation as “research” can make it easier to do and easier to discuss. If you know you’re experimenting, then it matters less if you “fail”, in fact, finding what doesn’t work or feel good is just as important as finding out what does.
 
 It’s a collaborative project, team-work, you’re both on the same side seeking the same outcomes. With this approach, you can’t get it wrong.
 
 And you know what? It’s fun! 

There's a beautiful quote from Anais Nin:
 
"There came a day when the flower realized that the pain of remaining tight in a bud was greater than the risk of opening up and blossoming. “
 
 That's how people often feel about their sexuality before they come to see me. It's what I love in this work, whether it's with private clients or in the group workshops, people start to tap into their true selves and to allow themselves to be who they really are and express themselves honestly and openly. 

Our sexuality is one area where many people aren’t open and honest and true to themselves. No matter how much personal development work they’ve done, if they’ve missed out this crucial part of themselves, then they’re never going to be whole and real.
 
 You see, true sexual expression comes from a very deep part of ourselves, it’s probably the part of ourselves that is truer than any other part. Many people think our sexuality is part of our lower, animal side. I beg to disagree. I believe our sexuality is part of our higher human side, along with creativity and art and music and all those attributes of being human that come from higher evolution and bigger brain and more complex and meaningful existence. And just as to tap into and express ourselves in those other areas of humanity, so it’s important that we tap into the authenticity of our sexual selves.
 
 And this authenticity is tricky in a society that’s so juvenile in its approach to sex – more giggle and snicker than expression and growth.
 
 So, if you’re on this journey, you’ve got to get past all the myths and crap in society around sex. Get over the limiting beliefs and lack of permissions, toss out the “should”s and “shouldn’t”s. Get informed, get creative, and get transformed!
 
 Again, this is tricky in a society that has so little real sex education and inspiring sexual information. So, in my own little way I try to start the ripples that will turn into waves that will help turn our society into one where sex has its rightful place and people feel and express the love. Getting back to my opening line, I see in the workshops people opening to possibility and realness. It’s so good. I love my work. I’m a small drop calling for sexual expression and sexual authenticity in an ocean of sexual repression and sexual distortion, but every little bit counts. And what counts is you.
 
 The change starts with you.
 
 Ponder deeply on that, then start to express yourself freely. Feel the love; feel the pleasure; live the ecstasy. 

We tend to get into habits with sex, and one habit that is so widespread is having sex last thing at night.
 
 Why is that? It’s the time when most people are the most tired and the least likely to want or to enjoy sex! 

One thing I encourage people to do is to think outside the square in all aspects of sex, and one of those is in the timing.
 
 Sex doesn’t have to be the last thing you do at night; it doesn’t even have to be in the evening. Having sex before dinner can be great! Think of it as entrée, rather than the traditional dessert.
 
 Of course, that doesn’t suit everyone’s routines, but you might be surprised at how flexible your timing can be. I remember when my third child was a baby and for a while there I was just waaaaaaaaaay too tired to manage sex in the evenings. I’ve never been a morning person anyway, unless it’s a long lazy Sunday lie-in. So, my then husband and I decided that the only way we were going to have sex was if he came home for “lunch” on Tuesdays. That worked really well and got us through a pretty exhausting phase of our lives.
 
 Quite a number of my clients find that changing the time they have sex makes a big difference. For those without kids in the house, the sex before dinner concept is very possible and very desirable. For those who can’t manage it that early, at least doing it as early as possible, generally in place of the TV veg-out session. Think about what you’re doing! Watching three hours of gruesome cop shows is generally not a good warm-up for sex! You can always get up and do other things after you make love. You don’t have to go to sleep after sex. You certainly don’t both have to go to sleep after sex, the tired one can drift off and the other can get up and do stuff.
 
 There are no set rules around sex, particularly the timing. Have a good talk with your partner and figure out when the best times are for both of you.
 
 Sex doesn’t have to be the after dinner “dessert”. Too often it’s so late and so unappealing it becomes a habitual late-night snack that doesn’t satisfy anyone particularly, if you can even be bothered. So, try it for entrée. Try it for lunch. Try it for a morning pick-me-up. Try it for a lazy Sunday breakfast in bed while the kids are conveniently watching cartoons!
 
 There are no rules! 

I was giving a talk to a large group of women at a Melbourne Cup lunch this week (wearing a fabulous hat of course). Since they were pretty much all married with kids, the discussion was primarily around how to keep up a good sex life in a long-term relationship, particularly when you’ve got babies and children. 

Next week I’m giving a similar talk in Newcastle on how to have a good sex life once kids come along.

One of the key messages is that you need to prioritize sex. You need to accept it as an important part of your relationship and then work on it. It’s like anything in life: it doesn’t just happen.

If you want to be healthy you have to focus on your health and work on it.

If you want to be wealthy you have to focus on wealth and work on it.

And if you want a good loving, healthy and rewarding sexual relationship you have to focus on it and work on it too.

Too often couples come to see me too late. “If only we’d come to see you a year ago!” they bemoan. An all-too-common question is: “Can you revive a flagging sex life?” Well, if there was once the flame of passion and the embers are still burning, however faintly, then yes, it’s possible.

So how do you fan the embers so that they burst into flame again? Private sessions with a good sex therapist can help. Workshops – the right workshops - can help too.

But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cures, as they say, so it’s better to keep fanning the fire before it burns so low that it’s almost out.

Just like a great building can be made of countless tiny, small bricks, a great sex life is made up of countless tiny, small moments – things that you might not even think of as being sexual. A small touch, a smile, a tender gaze, a small service, a small gift a tiny word of kindness …

The list goes on and on …

There is a school of thought that says women should ‘just do it’. The implication being that sex really isn’t that important, it’s easy to lie there and get it over with - I guess the idea is that you can just plan the shopping list or something while he gets his necessary sexual release (as if he doesn’t have two hands available).

I find that approach abhorrent on so many levels. Most obviously, men don’t actually want obligation sex. Radical concept to some perhaps, but men actually want their partners to enjoy sex too. (Hmm, maybe men aren’t just animalist creatures wanting to get their end in?)

Less obviously, but more importantly: sex is not just sex. The vagina is exquisitely linked to a woman’s brain, her self-worth, her creativity, her joie de vivre. For her to feel good about herself and about life she needs to treat her vagina well.

A vagina that engages in gorgeous, desirable, satisfying love-making will make her owner feel wonderful. A vagina that engages in unwanted, unprepared sex (slapping on some lube is not preparation) will not make her owner feel good. The vagina is being subjected to low-level trauma and so the woman is being subjected to low-level trauma. She will feel resentful, irritated, frustrated, used (sound familiar?). When a woman feels like this it goes inward, so she feels bad about herself and life in general; all because she’s ‘just doing it’ and putting out because for some reason she thinks she ‘should’.

Say ‘no’ to obligation sex and say ‘yes’ to desired sex, sex that is good for your vagina and good for you!

Download Audio: Obligation Sex is Self-imposed Low Level Sexual Trauma