Masturbation as Self Love

February 5, 2013 by

How do you touch yourself?

Do you treat yourself the way you treat your lover?

Do you bring the same kind of enthusiasm and exploration to your self-touch as you do to touching your partner?

Most of us do not. Masturbation is often a utilitarian act, a release valve for excess sexual pressure. Most of us masturbate in the same way every time, repeating the same strokes and playing out the same fantasies that bring us to climax quickly and reliably. This can be useful – again, knowing how to get off is not a bad thing – but masturbation can also serve as a powerful laboratory to try new things and learn more about your body, arousal patterns and erotic potential. As you learn what kinds of touch your body responds to, or what fantasies really turn you on, you can bring this knowledge to your partnered sex life and have more variety to play with, more self-knowledge to guide your partner.

Most of us love a confident, self-aware lover who can give us guidance towards pleasuring and satisfying them. So why not also cultivate this self-awareness in ourselves, so we can be the kind of lover we want to have?

Filed Under: Erotic Embodiment, Relationships

Focusing Your Erotic Attention

January 28, 2013 by

“And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.”

― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

One of the greatest sexual skills is also one of the most subtle. To fully enjoy all of the sensations of erotic stimulation, you must learn how to focus your erotic attention. I consider this a form of erotic mindfulness. Just as you can learn how to focus and center your attention during meditation, you can learn how to focus your attention on sexual pleasure. Many of us get distracted during sex – either thinking about mundane daily things (“Did I pay the electric bill yet?”) or worrying about our lover’s experience (“are they having fun?” “do I look sexy enough?”) To the extent you are not focusing on sensation, you are missing out on pleasure.

I love this quote from Jeanette Winterson because it calls to our attention one strategy for developing erotic mindfulness. “Separating pleasures” is a good way to learn how to slow down, focusing on one sexual sensation at a time and letting the erotic hunger build.

I think the tendency to rush through sex is a symptom of living in a culture that focuses on sexual scarcity. As long as we believe there is a lack of sex available to us, that our partner may not be willing next time, that we are lucky to be scoring, we will have a tendency to rush and consume as much as possible. If we believe in the abundance of sexuality, we can slow down and savor each moment. And when you learn to slow down and focus your erotic attention, you may be shocked to discover how much pleasure is available to you in every moment.

Filed Under: Erotic Embodiment, Personal

Weight Loss Through Erotic Embodiment

January 14, 2013 by

This morning, I walked to the bottom of the big hill near our home, and did my best to run all the way up. My pace broke a few times into a slow shuffle, but I made it up. I found myself heaving, in pain, triumphant at the top of the hill.

I am in the middle of what will surely be a lifelong journey: chasing health and fitness. This morning, I did my first run since high school, in an attempt to amp up my fitness plan to the next level.

Growing up, I was always the fat girl. As a budding feminist, I proudly rejected diet plans and body image issues, choosing instead to rely on my fierce brain to succeed. It never mattered to me that I was overweight. Of course it hurt when I was bullied in the halls of my high school, but I never put too much stock into the opinions of others. I wore my curves like armor, flaunting my big breasts in a leopard push-up bra worn under a slightly see through men’s button down. I have a big frame, lots of muscle and a pretty enough face. I knew I could never compete with my slender friends in their strapless dresses, so I opted out.

When I came out as queer in college, my weight became even less of an issue. In the queer community there is a lot more tolerance and love for bodies of all sizes, and I was too busy hooking up with gorgeous people to worry about my waist line. None of my lovers – male or female or other – seemed to mind my big belly. I felt hot and sexy, and had a great sex life. I laughed at all the hype about diets and thinness – I felt myself to be way above all that.

It wasn’t until I hit 30 that I realized that my weight might mean something more than simply being fat. It could mean diabetes, heart disease, years of my life lost. I nursed my mother through a double knee replacement, spending weeks in the amputee ward where I saw dozens of people losing their legs to diabetes. This disease was rampant in my family, and it became clear to me that diabetes would be my destiny if I didn’t whip my ass into shape.

So I began a journey of weight loss and building fitness, discovering what my body might be capable of. I began my journey at 249.5 – the scale hovering close to the 250 mark for months. For the first few years, I lost a bit of weight here and there but most of my energy went towards confronting all the deep emotional shit that surfaced as soon as my heart rate escalated. I shed tons of emotional baggage, and only then started to shed pounds. Today I weigh in at 215, and am pushing forward towards the goal of being a lean mean muscle strapped love machine. My goal is not to be skinny, but to be athletic. To have bulging muscles and be free of the baggage of excess body weight. To have balanced blood sugar and fuel my body with the food it needs to thrive.

I’ve come to name my body a path of “weight loss through erotic embodiment,” understanding the journey to be one of setting the stage to feel more pleasure, be a better lover and enjoy my body as an erotic engine. Nothing motivates me more than the question “How much more pleasure can I feel?” and sure enough, as the excess weight comes off, all new levels of physical and emotional pleasure are becoming available to me.

I’ll share more about this process and the techniques I have used in future blog posts. For today, I am celebrating making it to the top of the hill. My lungs were burning with the ice cold morning air, my thighs felt ready to collapse, but I had run up the hill. In a few days, I’ll go back and do it again. Right now, I am soaking in the delicious soreness that comes after a good workout, and the emotional triumph of conquering my little mountain. I feel just a bit stronger, just a bit more bad ass than I did when I awoke. There is so much more work to do, but for today, I am victorious.

Filed Under: Erotic Embodiment, Personal, Weight Loss