There’s a wise old saying about spiritual and personal growth:

First there is the mountain

Then there is no mountain

Then there is the mountain again.

What this means is that you have normality, then that disappears while you grow and experience its opposite, and then a new normality comes back again as you integrate the experiences of personal growth.

This ’new’ reality is never the same reality as the one you had before - it might look the same to a casual observer but your experience of it is quite different.

If we’re talking about sex and intimacy, and human sexual potential, then the process is the same as for spiritual growth.

Think about electrical sockets. You have a masculine socket and a feminine socket. Bringing them together enables the energy to flow.

Spiritual sex is playful sex.

Because spirituality is about lightness, joy, relishing the spice of life. Our spirits love to play.

You can tell a truly spiritual person because they are light, they smile, they feel the lightness of being, the joy of existence.

The Hindu term ‘leela’ reflects this concept, that life is play. Without attachment and heaviness we can be playful.

It’s not just eastern traditions that recognise it, many of our great Western thinkers discovered the same thing:

"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."

         George Bernard Shaw

"The true object of all human life is play."

           G. K. Chesterton

“The most evident token and apparent sign of true wisdom is a constant and unrestrained rejoicing.”  Montaigne

And to quote me: “Sex is playtime for grown-ups!”

We’ve been blessed with bodies that experience pleasure, minds that are creative and spirits that love to play. Life is meant to be the combination of all three, and sex, the source of life, the base of life, is most definitely all three.

When a woman gets to a level of arousal where she’s in a different ‘zone’ - love-drunk, in a heightened state, an altered state of consciousness - the sex changes.

There’s a different energy in that state, strange things happen. You can become aware of different sensations in your body: feelings of ecstasy and rapture, of transport and transcendence.

The description of this state sounds almost religious.

The pleasure is there, yet it’s not just genital, it suffuses the body and the mind.

Sex in this state can be wild and crazy or it can be completely serene, and it can go from one to the other and everywhere in-between.

She can spend time in what appears to be suspended animation, barely breathing, hovering in an ecstatic state.

She can feel animal energies move through her - such as big cats and snakes - and she will roar and writhe in tune with these energies.

She can feel goddess energies - energies of compassion, of destruction, of power, of lust.

She can sense the presence of beings and entities, gods and goddesses.
... read more

Intense sex can be wonderful, transporting you on a wave of fervour, even ferocity. You’ll find the pleasure of passion there, but if you want ecstasy, rapture, you have to look elsewhere…

Because the ecstasy is found in the spaces in-between…

Imagine…just the barest of touches…not quite a touch at all…just the knowledge of the presence of the other…

I had an interesting few days recently, running a workshop for women, followed two days later with a seminar for men. 

For me it was truly wonderful to work with a group of 16 women over two days and feel and see them come more fully into the strength and softness of their femininity, and become more sexually confident and expressive. Such gorgeous strong feminine women! 

And then two days later to work with a group of 15 men for an evening of coming into the strength and softness of their masculinity, becoming more sexually confident and (according to feedback from participants and/or their partners) more sexually expressive. Such gorgeous strong masculine men!

What is Tantra?

Essentially, it’s mindful sex. Or to be a little broader: mindful loving. Loving with presence and focus, fully engaged physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

Mindful sex means that:

• your monkey chatter mind is stilled, so your brain can focus creatively and connectedly;
• your body has heightened awareness, fully using each of its five senses, so there is great feeling throughout the whole body;
• you’re focused on the whole body, and even beyond the body, not just the genitals;
• there is a palpable energetic flow within you and between you, you feel connected;
• your sexual play flows in peaks and valleys, from intensity to subtlety and everywhere in between;
• you communicate verbally and physically with ease and understanding;
• you feel both deep and light: deep in feeling and light in freedom;
• orgasms may or may not happen, it’s the pleasure of the process not specific outcomes that matter;
• the encounter leaves you feeling recharged and reinvigorated;
• you find that the whole of life improves, you are healthier, more vital and feel a positive joyful outlook on life.

Would you like your vagina to be exquisitely sensitive, alive to nuance and sensation and responsive to ecstatic subtleties? Then you need to wake her up!

Unfortunately our focus in this society on the harder side of sex, the “peaks” rather than the “valleys” of sex, means that many women have “hardened" their vaginas. The focus on the “bigger, harder, faster”, rather than the “slower, softer, subtler”, means that many women have lost the ability to sense subtlety and softness through the walls of their vaginas. If your vagina can’t feel, then you either need increasingly more intense stimulation, or you forget about the vagina and focus on the clitoris as your primary sexual organ, or you give up on intercourse altogether because it just doesn’t feel like much. 

When your vagina is awake though, it becomes so sensitive in the most delightful of ways! It becomes highly receptive and attuned to subtle energies and exquisite variations of sensation.

This is very different to the intense thrusting most of us view as good sex (although as I always stress, I’ve got nothing against a good shag, just that it’s only one aspect of good sex!).

To wake your vagina up, you need to spend time being purely receptive. The... read more

…through each other’s bodies.

Sexual union with another - where you dive deep into each other - where you let go into the giving and receiving - relaxing into the expanding potency as the borders blur and you are consumed by ecstasy - is the experience of the divine manifesting in the physical.

It’s a space uncontaminated by sordidness or shame, the two big challenges to finding the purity of sexual connection in this modern era.

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 course participants on the yoga floor.

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 keeping 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... read more