Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century (44 page)

You may have noticed that a headache will go away if you masturbate and lie quietly for a few moments. You’ve breathed more deeply and opened up your blood vessels.
Oxygenated blood went to your brain. Endorphins were released. By the time you stood up, the headache wasn’t so bad or it was just plain gone. If you haven’t experienced this, try it. The same is true for menstrual cramps. Just when you think that sex is the last thing you are interested in, get out the vibrator. The sexual energy you generate opens up and relaxes the entire pelvic area. This will work almost all the time. If it doesn’t wipe out all your cramps, it will reduce them considerably.

Using Sex Magic to Relieve Colds and Sinus Pain

Sex can open up your sinus passages and make the symptoms of a cold much less severe. What’s more, sex is a lot more fun than popping mind-numbing antihistamines, which increase your blood pressure and add even more tension to an already tense you. One time as I was flying from New York to Australia, I had a bad cold. When I got off the plane, my head was pounding, my sinuses were sealed shut, and I was miserably jet-lagged. When I finally settled into my room, I lay down and turned on my vibrator. I gave myself an orgasm—not a particularly mind-blowing one, just a nice one. I meditated for about fifteen minutes, and when I got up, I could breathe clearly for the first time in sixteen hours. My headache was gone and I felt oriented enough in time and space to be able to participate in the day.

Sex brings us back to our own body rhythm. It takes us home, both physically and psychically. Using sex for self-healing does not have to include partner sex. Often, when we are not feeling well, the last thing we are interested in is sex with a partner; we just don’t have the energy to give to someone else. You can masturbate or you can simply receive from your partner. Either way, the raising and releasing of sexual energy brings you back to yourself and nurtures your body. Like magic.

Using Sex Magic to Relieve Pain and Fear

Sex releases endorphins, those friendly little feel-good brain chemicals that are powerful enough to lift us out of pain and into euphoria. Some years ago, I had a little cyst in the middle of my back. I’m very sensitive in the solar plexus/third chakra, so I’m not very open to the idea of surgery in that area. I went to a traditional medical doctor to have the cyst removed. While he was giving me a local anesthetic, he quizzed me
about my favorite movies, what I did for a living, and what I thought of the weather. He had obviously learned in medical school that you should engage the patient in conversation at moments like this to distract them from what you are doing to them. But this chit chat was making me more and more anxious. I was getting nauseous. I asked him to please stop talking. I started to do some circular breathing, some visualization, and some Kegels.

Taking slow, easy, full breaths, I began to circulate sexual energy around my body in the Microcosmic Orbit. Within a minute or two, I felt as though I had partially left my body, especially the part the doctor was operating on. I was somewhat aware of what was going on, but I had transcended the fear and nausea. In fact, I was having a pretty good time! The poor doctor. He had never seen anything like this in his office before. He was a good sport about it, though. Some doctors simply can’t cope when you mix sexual healing techniques with traditional medicine. One doctor told me that he would not treat me if I continued to do “that strange breathing” and make “those strange sounds.” I found another doctor quite easily.

Using sexual energy as a pain reliever and relaxation tool can come in quite handy at the dentist. The trick is to move sexual energy around your body in such a way as not to interrupt the dentist’s work. I usually use a slow Circular Breath and circulate energy from my pussy to my heart. I found myself a Zen Buddhist periodontist who’d also studied a lot of Kundalini yoga and some Tantra. There are quite a few Western medical practitioners who are closet Tantrikas. As this more enlightened dentist worked on my teeth, I listened to didgeridoo music, breathed, and did Kegels. This didn’t require a lot of movement. I easily kept my upper body totally still while I let my pelvis slowly rock back and forth in rhythm with the Kegels and the breath. It’s more like moving within your body rather than actually moving your body. I got through a entire mouthful of periodontal surgery feeling well and happy; and my dentist was impressed at how fast my gums healed. Experiment with this the next time you go to the dentist. Going to the dentist can bring up so much fear. The breathing will relax you; and when you concentrate on moving your sexual energy throughout your body, the combination of breath and subtle movement will take your focus off what’s happening in your mouth. Remember, sex feels good because it produces endorphins, which we want more of when something hurts or upsets us.

Using Sex Magic to Facilitate Childbirth

In her book
Woman’s Experience of Sex
, Sheila Kitzinger observes that birth today is treated as though it is a medical/surgical crisis. The mother feels imprisoned in a situation outside her control. Childbirth classes, including Lamaze, teach a breath that encourages a “hold it … push … shoot” style of giving birth that is more like the way men ejaculate than the way women orgasm. A woman is supposed to carry on holding, pushing, and shooting as long as she can, and then fall back exhausted.

The energy flowing through the body in childbirth—the pressure of contracting muscles, the downward movement of the baby, and the opening of soft tissues—can be powerfully erotic when a woman does what comes naturally. When a woman does what comes naturally, she will breathe in a pattern that corresponds almost exactly with that of sexual excitement and orgasm. Her breath will quicken as she builds up to an orgasm, or contraction. Her breath then slows down after an orgasm or contraction. Then the quickening of breath picks up again in preparation for the next orgasm or contraction, and so on.

Women who are about to give birth would be wise to take stock of what their bodies are doing when they have their best orgasms. Use that as the model on which to base the breathing, the movement, the peaking, and the resting of labor. If you are multiorgasmic, take note of the period of time between one orgasm and the next. Learn to fully appreciate the valleys between the orgasms. How do you build up the energy again for another orgasm? Apply the same consciousness to childbirth as you learned in sex. If you are not yet multiorgasmic, it might help to learn how to be before you give birth.

Women who have given birth before and after participating in my Erotic Awakening workshops have reported that their postworkshop labors were much easier. The breathing they had learned in order to move sexual energy was exactly the breathing they needed to use in labor.

Using Sex Magic to Alleviate Back Pain

Our spine is literally our support system, so it follows that back pain has a lot to do with support and survival. Caroline Myss, author of
Anatomy of the Spirit
, maintains that lower back pain is always related to finances or financial relationships, whether those relationships are of an intimate or business nature. And remember your chakras. The lower back is also part of the sexual energy center of the body. The fears that manifest
as pain in this area can range from “Can I earn a living?” to “Can I find a partner?” and “Can I take care of myself?” Essentially, the issues of support and survival here boil down to trusting and receiving—the same issues that arise around sexuality.

Many of us have grown up with a belief that we need to struggle in order to survive, or that pleasure is something that we have to earn—we have to do something (usually something difficult) in order to have the right to enjoy ourselves. Learning to receive sexual pleasure can help us break out of this puritanical equation. When you both ask for pleasure and really receive it, you begin to reprogram your body and your mind, and you open yourself up to greater trust and the enjoyment of abundance, as well as a greater spirit of guilt-free generosity.

The next time you experience lower back pain, use sex as a physical affirmation. Visualize your sexual energy flowing up from your root chakra. Feel it opening up all your energy channels. Feel it expanding your energy field so that you can reach out and accept abundance and prosperity. You can say an affirmation such as, “I am open to receive all good” as you orgasm. The expansion and the power that results from this will center you and restore your trust in the natural flow of universal abundance. As a side benefit, your back will begin to feel a whole lot better.

Using Sex Magic to Heal Sexual Wounds

One of the most challenging issues we face when we talk about sexual healing lies in the area of sexual abuse. Sexual abuse wounds the body, the mind, and the emotions. Abuse most often occurs at times in our lives when we are particularly vulnerable. The wounds of sexual abuse are so deep and so profound, it’s easy to feel that the spirit itself is wounded. Higher self/spirit cannot be wounded. The spirit is always intact. It’s always whole and strong and particularly available to help us in a method of healing, which for lack of any other name, I call homeopathic sexuality.

Homeopathy is the branch of healing that uses “the hair of the dog” to cure the dog bite. No, we are absolutely not going to subject someone with a history of sexual abuse to even the smallest bit of more abuse. But we can use just the right amount and kind of sexual energy. Homeopathic sexuality is based on the understanding that our higher power can and will guide us to ways to work with our own sexual energy in order to heal past sexual traumas.

Forms of sexual abuse range from years of intense physical and emotional trauma to the less obvious varieties that nearly everyone has experienced: being humiliated for masturbating or for not fitting into the right gender mold, being coerced into having
sex when you didn’t want it, or being told you look like a whore when you’re sixteen and have just spent two hours making yourself look beautiful for a date. The wounds may not be physical, but in this puritanical culture we are constantly wounded or abused emotionally as we grow up learning to be sexual. Whatever the physical or emotional circumstances, sexual abuse is abuse of power. Period.

Psychotherapist Dean Allen works extensively with energy medicine and the physical disorders created in the body by emotional traumas. He defines power as “the ability to meet pressure with pressure in such a way as to hold the outside force at bay, confront the issue with courage, and resolve the issue with pride.” In cases of sexual abuse, the abused is in a situation where they are not able—or feel they are not able—to hold the abuser at bay. Once the abuse starts, they are not able to confront the issue, and they are certainly not able to resolve the issue with any pride. The abuser may be a parent or someone in authority; they may be larger and stronger.

The abuser’s misuse of power is rooted in insecurity. Abusers have a win/lose mentality. According to Dean Allen, abusers believe that the source of their power is winning and that winning means overpowering someone else. Once begun, patterns of abuse often carry on for years and years, not to mention from generation to generation. The experience creates a debilitating drag on the energy of the sexual power center. Once in place, this drag will remain on the sexual energy center until the true power inherent in that center is restored through healing.

Healing sexual abuse through sexuality begins by peeling away the layers of armor we have built up to protect ourselves from further abuse. What does some of this armoring look like? It often manifests as hatred of the body and an extremely negative body image. That can range from putting on lots of weight (representing layers of protection) to anorexia and bulimia, which are attempts to make the body invisible. Armor may be in the form of sexual shutdown—loss of feeling in the sex organs and the inability to receive pleasure from sex. Armor can manifest as lack of boundaries or compulsive sex—the inability to say no to sex or the desire to seek it out in excess even though the person receives little or no pleasure from it. It’s also very common for survivors of sexual abuse to experience real pleasure only when they are giving or receiving pain. (This is certainly not to say that everyone who loves BDSM is a survivor of sexual abuse.)

When the power in the sexual energy center has been drained, blocked, or dragged down, we seek to replace that power by attaching ourselves to situations or people that seem more powerful than we are. Later in life, we often look to exactly the same type of person as the first abuser.

Homeopathic sexuality is a gentle process that seeks to stimulate the body’s natural healing response. In the case of sexual abuse, it means gently introducing the recovering person to the beauty and power of his or her own sexuality. Homeopathic sexuality is the step-by-step process of relearning pleasure. We move from sex as survival to sex as pleasure.

At first, any sort of invocation of sexual healing energy might be uncomfortable. As the sexual energy begins to peel away the armor, the layers of feeling underneath are very sensitive, very tender. As we gently move out beyond the protection of these layers, we find safety and empowerment. This can come in the form of being given a safe space and the permission to say no, thereby reestablishing more naturally healthy boundaries. Participating in a sexual healing workshop, where you are given the opportunity to say, “No, I really don’t want to be touched right now,” and have that wish honored and supported, can be worth a year in therapy. The discovery or rediscovery of what actually feels good, what feels bad, and what has no feeling at all—that’s what I mean by a relearning.

I am not advocating any one path of sexual healing for sexual abuse. I am advocating some form of sexual healing. I have known people who have been in therapy for years and are still victims of their childhood sexual abuse; I have known others who are long-term survivors. The choice is up to each individual. Tantra can give you the time and space to experience your sexuality as a gift rather than as a wound. With its emphasis on consciousness and its support for a wide range of emotional and sexual expressions, Tantra can help heal past traumas and open up new avenues of trust and pleasure.