How to Improve your Sex Life using Mindfulness
What I’m about to tell you is no secret. Improving your sex life is as easy as being more present with each other, which can be achieved through mindfulness.
More and more people are practicing mindfulness to alleviate stress, manage anxiety and depression, sleep better, and view their lives and surroundings through a different perspective. These are a few of the benefits of mindfulness, which helps you be fully conscious of the here and now. It takes you out of your normal thread of thought to enjoy the people and sensations that occupy the present moment.
Being fully conscious essentially means being present in both your inner and outer world. You can practice mindfulness in many more situations than just meditation. This is why so many therapists recommend it as a way to improve your personal life, relationships, and even sex life.
Mindfulness can improve your relationship
Our day-to-day lives easily distract us. Negative thoughts, stress, uncertainty, and other problems prevent us from enjoying moments of relaxation and time with others. We forget to feel. As a result, many relationships go downhill because people are with their partners without really being there. This affects all aspects of the relationship, including sex.
Sex is an important part of romantic relationships, but the magic is often broken when partners engage in this intimate act without paying enough attention to actually enjoy it. When your mind wanders, you can’t really enjoy the moment, and it can make your partner think you’re not paying attention, aren’t committed enough, and/or are losing interest in them (not just sexually).
Practicing mindfulness will teach you to be conscious and present, but also to notice and enjoy absolutely everything that’s happening around you. This will broaden the shared experience and elevate the bodily and emotional experience to a spiritual level.
Being fully present during sex will show your partner that you’re listening to them, that you’re focused on them, that there’s nothing else but you and them in that moment. Not only will this make the experience much more satisfying, but it will also help you build trust and improve intimacy in the long-term.
In addition, mindfulness can help people who are struggling with sexual problems. These include problems related to performance anxiety, when the person becomes a prisoner of their own fears, making it impossible to concentrate on feeling, on what they’re doing right now.
Conscious sex, conscious love
We’re too used to being less conscious during sex, which we too often associate with alcohol, avoidance, and fantasy. We overemphasize individual pleasure and forget that satisfying our partners can help us achieve our own satisfaction.
Conscious sex encourages you to stop and explore the moment as a profound exchange of emotions and senses. Paying deep attention to the heart and body of both yourself and your partner will allow you to discover that arousal is just the beginning. Meditation can turn sex into a transcendent and intensely pleasurable experience.
“Holding the hand of your woman or man, why not sit silently? Why not close your eyes and feel? Feel the presence of the other, enter into the presence of the other, let the other’s presence enter into you; vibrate together, sway together; if suddenly a great energy possesses you, dance together – and you will reach to such orgasmic peaks of joy as you have never known before. Those orgasmic peaks have nothing to do with sex, in fact they have much to do with silence.
And if you can also manage to become meditative in your sex life, if you can be silent while making love, in a kind of dance, you will be surprised. You have a built-in process to take you to the farthest shore.
-Osho-
Improving your sex life with mindfulness
Practicing mindfulness in your personal life will help you improve your sex life, especially if your partner does it too. But regardless of whether you practice mindfulness or not, here are some key takeaways that you can incorporate into your daily life with your partner:
Kiss consciously
Do you remember your first kiss? Do you remember the first time you kissed your current partner? How many times have you dreamed that the magic of the first time would return? Well, it can if you focus all of your energy on every kiss.
Focus on the here and now with your partner
It doesn’t matter what happened before or what’s to come. Focus all of your attention on the present moment, on you and your partner. There is not, never was, and never will be anyone or anything else. There’s no rush. Explore every moment, every sensation fully.
Be conscious of one another
Look each other in the eyes and see each other deeply so that you may enter into a spiritual sexual union.
Feel each other’s energy
During climax, visualize a ball of light emanating from you, starting at the bottom of your spine and growing outward. Then imagine both of you melting into the ball of light through your heart and mind. Let your thoughts dissolve into the beam of light and allow the shared pleasure to make the two of you become one.
“Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.”
-Dalai Lama-
Reduce your stress level
Reducing your stress level is the key to improving your sex life because it will allow you to be more present. Practicing mindfulness will give you a new perspective on how your thoughts pass through your mind. That way, if you find yourself distracted, you’ll be more likely to recognize and counteract it.
Regular meditation can reduce levels of cortisol, or the stress hormone, in the brain. In evolutionary terms, cortisol is released as a part of the “fight or flight” response. It directs blood to areas of the body that would be useful for fight or flight, such as the muscles, and takes it away from other organs, such as the genitals. In that way, cortisol reduces libido. Therefore, if you reduce cortisol levels, you can increase your libido.
These are just a few reasons why mindfulness can play an important role in improving your sex life. And if it improves your sex life, it will likely improve your relationship in general.