Learning to be Mindful and Present During Sex Will Improve Your Sex Life
The following is adapted from Beyond Satisfied.
It’s easier to touch someone physically than it is to get close psychologically. The “hard skills” of sex, like specific fingering or oral techniques, are straightforward enough to learn. But how do you learn to connect with your partner’s mental and emotional state during sex?
The quality of our attention is contagious. When you’re at dinner with a group of friends and someone pulls out their phone, everyone else is more likely to check their phones. It’s embarrassing — lonely, even — to be the person left sitting at the table looking at everyone. The same goes for staying present with your partner.
If she’s ready to give you her attention, but you’re not in the moment with her, she might feel like she’s out on a limb. Be willing to be the one on the edge of vulnerability. Be present even if your partner is checked out. Your presence can invite your partner to be in the moment with you.
Learn to Feel it All
Checking our phones during dinner or an awkward social interaction serves an important function: to distract and dissociate. There are a lot of reasons people dissociate during sex, particularly if they’ve had trauma associated with sexual experiences or if they experience negative emotions with sex.
The problem with dissociation, however, is that blocking ourselves from fully feeling a sexual experience means we block feelings of pleasure, too. Have you ever wondered why when some people orgasm it’s like they’ve seen God, but other people never seem to have that reaction? While there are many factors to the intensity of an orgasm, including genetic components, some of it has to do with our access to feeling. To learn to feel more, we have to learn to feel it all: sensations and emotions.
All Emotions are Welcome
Sex is more than a physical experience; it’s an emotional one — which is why it’s not uncommon for people to cry after an orgasm. Make it clear to your partner that all of her emotions are welcome. Hold space for whatever might come up for your partner. If your partner is experiencing deep emotions, take note of what comes up in your own body. Are you feeling anxious or fearful, or tense? See if you can relax those emotions in yourself.
Don’t try to fix or change the emotions that are coming up for you or your partner. Observe the emotions that are coming up with as little judgment as possible, like watching a cloud pass across the sky.
When we allow ourselves to fully feel emotions that come up, without trying to shove them down, our systems are able to naturally move through those emotions and relax. This is where mind-blowing connection begins: with your ability to be with your partner whether she’s feeling sadness or ecstasy.
Often when we’ve done deep emotional processing, like from a good cry, we don’t have a lot of cognitive energy left. Keep things simple for your partner. Ask if she’d like to cuddle or have a glass of water or a snack. When you offer a few simple options, you give her easy choices to say yes or no, and she doesn’t have to think too hard about a decision. A good cry releases cortisol (the stress hormone) and endorphins, and can create almost as much relaxation and bliss as a good orgasm. Let your partner take time to enjoy the feeling of release (even better, skip to Chapter Fifteen on aftercare for tips on how to continue treating your lover).
Be Mindful of Yourself
It’s not always so simple to flip from distraction to mindfulness in a single moment. It can take time to unwire rumination habits or establish enough intimacy to be vulnerable about one’s fears. It’s possible your partner may even have physical or emotional trauma that keeps them from being fully in the moment during sex. Or, your partner may experience inhibition simply from being in “performance mode.”
These larger factors can’t be reversed in an instant. If you notice your partner is having trouble paying attention to her own pleasure, it’s important to take a step back to help her pay attention to herself, rather than to focus on the sex techniques you’re trying to use. The better you get at being mindful of yourself, the more you’ll be able to help your partner attend to her own pleasure.
For more advice on how to stay in moment during sex, you can find Beyond Satisfied on Amazon.
Kenneth Play is an international sex expert and sex educator. Named the world’s greatest sex hacker by GQ, he has been featured by more than one hundred media outlets, including The New York Times, Men’s Health, Cosmopolitan, Huffington Post, and Nightline. Kenneth has been a guest lecturer on female sexual pleasure at New York University and San Jose State University. His work has helped millions of men gain lasting confidence and competence. AskMen described Kenneth’s most recent course as having “at least one nugget of sexual learning you’ve almost certainly never encountered before, if not several.”
