How To Have Better Sex and Intimacy

Think of it this way: you just made love to that raisin. When you bring that same mindful attention to your sexuality, a whole range of experience opens up. The human body, your partner's body, different positions, everything from eye contact that practically crackles, to a single touch on the hand that sends a shiver through you, to kissing. I wish more people would simply go home and try this today.

Kiss the way you kissed as a teenager, back when nothing happened below the neck. No roaming hands, no touchy-feely, just all that intense adolescent sexual energy packed into lips and tongue and teeth. I spent hours on the couch in my parents' rec room with my boyfriend, kissing. I didn't even know it had a name, necking. We would go at it for an hour or two and our whole bodies would be humming with pre-orgasmic energy. That is the eroticism of the raisin meditation carried into a kiss.

If the first step in mindful sexuality is showing up with real intimacy, the second is exploring the full range of the senses. I won't ask you to answer this out loud, Erik, private stays private, but ask yourself, and everyone listening or watching can ask too: when did you last kiss the back of your lover's knees? When did you last actually play and roam across the whole range of what's possible?

Most of the time the bandwidth is narrow. Unless you're in a brand new relationship, sex settles into something predictable. I don't mean this disrespectfully, but the typical North American sex life runs something like nipple, nipple, crotch, good night. There's a routine. You do your part, I do my part, there's the one swirl thing, and done. That isn't exploring anything. That's hanging around in the blues and greens and never touching the rest of the spectrum.

Picture walking into the biggest paint store in the country, thousands of colors and shades stacked on the walls. That is closer to the real possibility of sensual experience, and even that undersells it.

Here is a statistic that saddens me a little. The average sexual encounter lasts seven minutes. I don't mean seven minutes of intercourse, I mean seven minutes from "hey honey, do you want to" all the way through. Seven minutes, start to finish. Don't misread me, I'm a fan of the quickie. When time is short, a quickie is wonderful. But we get lazy. We stop bringing any mindfulness or delight or playfulness to the whole thing.

So the two main things to carry home about mindful sexuality: connect through intimacy, and explore the entire range of experience, get creative again. Notice that the word foreplay has play sitting right inside it. Play, in its simplest sense, is imaginative and a little silly. You use toys, you goof around, you're not scared to fail or laugh or try something that might not work. That belongs in the range of the senses too.