Sensuality feeds Sexuality

Article originally posted on The Love Life Blog

You might have become one of those people who have closed off from their senses, experiencing the world primarily through the mind. It’s common enough. I don’t want to downplay the importance of cerebral activity, the mental sphere is vital to engaging in life and is important in love-making too. But making love when you’re all in your head is just not on a par with making love with full sensual awareness.

Think about how you use your senses as you make love. Do you use all your senses? Do you engage with the whole of your partner’s body, or just a few bits? As you become more sensual in your love-making, sex becomes less ‘sexual’, focused on ‘getting your rocks off’, and becomes more ‘sensual’, more loving. Although paradoxically, sensuality also feeds sexuality: the more in tune you are with your senses and the more you use them and enjoy the sensual nature of love-making, the more intensely you’ll experience sex.

You need to reawaken your senses, to re-engage with life. The sensual realm is the physical realm, but it’s a lot more than just superficial appearances. Embrace the sensual and you’ll connect with your body at a deep level and increase your energy, both of which will heighten your desire for sex and your enjoyment of it.

This shift to sensuality is doubly important when you apply it to your own body image - this is a message particularly important to women. The media brainwashes us to believe that “sexy” equals the type of body that most women only have in their youth, if even then. That’s why I advocate letting go of the “sexy” stuff and embracing the sensual. “Sexy” does have this image of a perfect, young body that’s horny and lusty and ready to go. Not the way most woman generally feels.

Now consider the concept of “sensual”. It’s softer, rounder, gentler, full of depth and warmth – rather like the bodies of women! Sex between long-term lovers is like this too, less raunchy and a whole lot more loving and gorgeous (not to imply that it can’t be incredibly raunchy too, it just doesn’t have to confirm to raunchy stereotypes). It’s the type of sex you can only have with a long-term partner, and the type of sex you can only have if you appreciate your gorgeous, sensual body.

You’re not going to absorb this message from the mass media, so you’re going to have make the mind-shift yourself. Think sensual:

• think sensual in the shower: rub soap over yourself and love the softness and the roundness;
• think sensual as you move through the day: feel your hips swaying, your breasts moving (picture how full-figured African or Latin American women move, it’s poetry);
• think sensual as your partner caresses your curves;
• think sensual as you caress your own curves when you make love.

Loving your body is a challenge for most people, men as well as women, and the challenge is harder as we age and become less like the media-generated idealised image of sexy. But if you can let go of that unrealistic ideal and embrace your body for what it is in all it’s sensuous gorgeousness, you will in fact feel sexy, naturally sexy, just as you are.

No comments yet

Have your say! Login to comment.