In today's society where humans are disconnected to their bodies more than ever (thank you stress and our inability to sit with our own thoughts). Discover how you can tune into your body to experience more pleasure in your sexual experiences.
Humans are creatures of habit and it is a huge reflection of our current culture where so many of us are overwhelmed, riddled with stress, unable to sit with our thoughts before reaching for our phones and disconnected from our bodies. We are ‘doing’ more than we are ‘feeling’. Then we enter sexual experiences and find ourselves struggling to relax, feel pleasure or get aroused and we wonder why. In order to carve out new pathways for pleasure, we need to break our existing habits of disconnection. This means lowering the external noise like stress, screens and social media, and re-connecting to our feeling body. This is easier said than done, however it’s a practice built on consistency.
Practice tuning into your senses throughout the day. Whether it’s your drive into work or during your evening cup of tea, can you shift your awareness to a sensation that feels pleasurable and savour it? In bringing more awareness, we bring more sensitivity and pleasure becomes more readily available to us. Same rules apply during sex. When you feel your mind racing, can you hone in on one sensation that feels good? This can be your fingers running along your partner’s skin, moans while you kiss or a particular position that hits all the right spots. Shift the goal of sex from orgasm to whole-bodied pleasure, and in doing so play with different types of touch or focus on any other part of your body except for your genitals, especially the less explored erogenous zones like your ears or inner thighs. This practice of exploration and tuning into your senses doesn’t have to be perfect, it can be in little doses and then built upon. If this still feels inaccessible for you, practice bringing your focus to your breath. Feel how your body and its sensations expand and soften in line with your breath.
Ritualise setting the scene. We may need different and multiple things to help us turn our brains off and turn our bodies on. For some, it’s mood lighting and a make out session. For others, it’s turning your phone on DND and reading smut. Release the expectation that you should be raring to have sex at the flick of a switch, and savour the build-up. We experience pleasure more intensely if we’ve taken the time to warm up. Get curious and creative about what this process can look like from fantasising to eye-gazing to yoga to dancing in your kitchen. Faster and harder is not always better. When it comes to pleasure, the turtle wins the race over the hare.
I’m Selina Nguyen (she/they) and I’m a relationship and sex therapist based on Gadigal Land/Sydney, Australia. My holy mission is creating better sex and better relationships for all through education, pleasure and connection.
