Exposed

Ok, we know, we are skipping ahead, but we’ll get back to integrity and openness soon! Right now, all we can think about it something meaty to bite into. Hmmmmmm, maybe we’re ovulating! When we say that a love sandwich needs something meaty to bite into we mean this both concretely and metaphorically. To stay romantic and passionate, love requires a sexual connection full of flesh and fantasy, seduction and sensuality, teasing and temptation! If not all the time, at least regularly, we want to feel like our partner wants to eat us alive, ravish every part of us, or tantalize us into a state of orgasmic bliss. Metaphorically, love also requires that we  be there fully with each other with both our bodies and our minds. It means not only being present, but being fully willing to share our desires even if they are different from our partners. We have to feel our partner’s meatiness, to push up against one another, and to be willing to engage in conflict, which is always a part of being close and a pathway to deeper intimacy. So feel your meatiness right now, feel yourself as made of flesh and blood and desire and imagine savoring a big, delicious bite of love.

Love requires celebration! Celebration can only happen when you slow down and take time out of your busy schedule to delight in your connection with yourself and your partner. We live in a world that rewards endless striving and encourages personal disastisfaction and judgment of yourself and others. This continual and endless grind towards improvement sets us up for stress and disappointment and does not foster loving acceptance. Celebration is about recognizing this moment and looking at everything that is wonderful and great and amazing about yourself, your partner and your connection right now. It means taking a breather and acknowledging how far you have come, and, if you REALLY take it seriously, it means  living your life in the joy of celebration instead of the grind. In short, every day can be a celebration of love and life. If our saying that caused a spike of fear in your body and questions like, “If I take time and celebrate, will I ever be successful?” Our response to that is, “Will you ever feel a moment of success if you don’t take time and celebrate?” We invite you to think about it, create time to practice it, give us a call to talk about it and to create YOUR OWN PRIORITIES for you life and your love. Love requires celebration!

I (Celeste) walked into Madame S innocently enough; I was coming to replace a set of leather cuffs and anklets I had given to some friends for their wedding present. The saleswoman, let’s call her Sherie, was extremely helpful and I walked out with a bag of tricks that would rival any suicide girl’s wardrobe. It started with an inquiry about fur-lined cuffs and what might be the best toys to get for our upcoming couple’s workshop. Sherie was so helpful, I thought to myself, “maybe I should see what it’s like to try on some latex”. After she helped me adjust my latex, which I had to use body lube to slide into, I realized that I had to have some shoes to go with it. She was such a good bottom she generously kneeled down at my feet and helped me put them on, looking up at me and directly into my eyes the entire time. I started to think she was having as much fun (or maybe more!) putting my shoes on for me as I was receiving her help. I knew I would have fun with my new outfit and toys once I got them home, but I never realized how much fun it would be to buy them!

Common wisdom tells us that relationships require compromise. For the most part we disagree. We see most of the compromises people make in relationship as more of a slippery slope to losing who you really are then the necessary step to a lasting relationship.

It is one thing to learn to put the toilet seat down because it bothers your sweetie or to wash all the dishes instead of leaving the last two so you don’t drive your partner crazy and an entirely different thing to decide that you or your partner have to put an essential part of yourselves away in order to maintain a relationship. And, the craziest thing about these decisions is that people often make them based upon assumptions they make about their partner without ever verifying whether they are true or not.

This happens all the time around sex. For example, you say to yourself “I’m sure my partner would never want to do …. sexually and, for me to even bring it up would be so upsetting to them that our relationship probably would not survive it so I’ll just try to make myself not want that.” The problem is, when it comes to our deepest desires, it is impossible to make ourselves not want them so, we begin blaming the other person for keeping us from what we want the most. Sometimes people find those things elsewhere secretly, other times they shut down out of resentment or lose track of their own path.

What does not happen from these kinds of compromises, sexual and other, are happy, connected relationships. These kinds of compromises get in the way of true love. Instead of compromise, we invite the idea of Acceptance. To share with, listen to and accept the multiplicity of desires and parts of your yourself AND your partner and to really want them to be happy and to fulfill these desires is true love. Unlike compromise, Acceptance requires honest communication and internal work to go through all of the feelings that come up when your partner wants something that feels threatening or uncomfortable. The payoff for this communication and work is immense because it can lead to truly, deeply and uncompromisingly, satisfying love.

Thinking about the ingredients of a love sandwich…acceptance, celebration, integrity, openness and something meaty to bite into. More on that tomorrow…

Just for a moment, close your eyes and imagine a world where the erotic is celebrated, a world in which everyone is taught that self-pleasuring is our birthright and those of us who started young or enjoy it frequently are called “erotically gifted”. Imagine a world where consensual sexuality is free from the confines of guilt or shame and let yourself feel, at least for a moment, what it would be like to grow up and live in a world of erotic revelry.

Celebrate Your Erotic Gifts…

Sit down right now and grab a pen and a piece of paper. Draw a line down the middle making two columns. Good. In one column write down  “My Erotic Gifts” and in the other write down “My Partner’s Erotic Gifts”. If you are single, the second list will be a list of the erotic gifts you desire in a partner. Here are some examples of gifts you might have in your list:

My Erotic Gifts: enjoy touching myself, adventuresome, interested in learning about sex, able to talk to my partner about what I want, in touch with all my senses.

My Partner’s Erotic Gifts: enjoys their body, touches me the way I loved being touched, suggests new sexual experiences, kisses me with passion, dances from their heart.

When you write these lists, feel free to dream! What other erotic gifts would you like to explore? What new erotic experiences would you like to have? If you want, you can do this exercise with your partner, making sure you acknowledge them for all of the erotic gifts they bring to the relationship. Remember, in this world, all of your desires are beautiful!

Sometimes the erotic gifts and desires of one partner can bring up feelings and responses in the other. We offer individual and couple’s coaching if you would like a place to share, explore and expand!

In this consumer society, dating has turned into a science of the mind, a calculated process in which you are supposed to identify your Key Requirements and Dealbreakers and go directly to the “job interview”. This is when you sit across from each other on a first date over coffee, drinks or food and ask each other horrible questions like, “What was your last relationship like” and “do you want kids” and “are you interested in marriage?” while you stutter and try to be impressive and look for red flags and mostly don’t feel anything at all. It is no wonder that most people look at dating as a terrible chore, a necessary evil that they must endure in order to experience sex, intimacy and relationships. Not surprising considering that so many people out there are approaching dating, checklist in hand, ready to cross people off at the slightest provocation, or, perhaps worse, trying to create a relationship with someone who they feel absolutely nothing for but who fits all of their pre-conceived pre-requisites. Women say things like, “He seems so great on paper, I’m just not attracted to him at all. Do you think there is something wrong with me?” The answer is YES, what is wrong is that you are CHECKLIST DATING. Dating in San Francisco, I (Celeste) actually had men ask me, “don’t you have any questions for me?” They seemed astonished that I wanted to spend the first date just getting a feel for the person and, most importantly, how I felt when I was with them. The biggest problem with checklist dating is that it assumes humans actually know what they want all the time and that their desires never change, yet any marketing researcher can tell you that people make decisions based on emotion as much as they’d like to think they are making decisions that are reasonable or logical. We can’t tell you how many times we have worked with men and women who have said that they weren’t ready for a relationship and, within a month, had met a person they were really interested in and chose to start a relationship or swore they would never move out of San Francisco and then got married to someone and off they went. In the face of this, we propose a different kind of dating, what we call EMBODIED DATING, a process during which you could actually enjoy yourself and the experience for exactly what it is, AN EXPERIENCE, a time to see how you feel with another person and who you are when you are relating, a time to play with someone and see if you play well together, a time to see if you feel happy, excited and TURNED ON by the other person and to see and feel into what is possible for the two of you. Next time you go on a date, we suggest you leave your checklist at home, just this once, and share an actual experience with someone. For more on embodied dating click here.

Sure, our pussies change over our lifetime, but we certainly weren’t expecting these changes to feel soooooooooooo good! When we first became business partners neither one of us were G-spot girls; we had spent our childhood masturbatory explorations and our adult sexual experiences completely clit-focused. And then we discovered perhaps one of the best-kept secrets of female sexuality. Namely, the sensitivity of the G-spot and a woman’s potential for mind-blowing G-spot orgasm develops over time. Don’t get us wrong, clitoral orgasms are GREAT and we would never want to promote a hierarchy of orgasm, but we do want women to know that their orgasms can be both multi AND multi-dimensional. Over the past 3 years of G-spot exploration, both of our G-spots have grown larger and developed extraordinary sensitivity. And we’ve both learned to ejaculate, sometimes with and sometimes without orgasm. The clit at times can feel like a fuse, you might need it to light up, but eventually you get to the BOMB – explosive internal orgasms that shoot through your body and make you scream. And, you can add another dimension by accessing the G-spot anally, or by giving the cervix stimulation as well. The more dimensions, the more intensity and the more you will want. We don’t want any woman to miss out on her potential to be as big sexually and emotionally as she can be!