Exposed

We have invited Jamie Platt, a sex toy expert from TheAdultToyShoppe.com, to give us some of fabulous ideas about vibrators. Here’s the news!

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Ask many women and they will all agree that good sex becomes great sex when you have a little helper at hand. The use of sex toys is becoming more and more popular as couples experience how incredible it feels to share this naughty pleasure.

Before you take the plunge, it’s important to know what you want to bring into the bedroom. If you look at vibrators for example, there are at least a dozen different styles. Read an adult pleasure product guide from TheAdultToyShop.com to educate yourself on the different styles of sex toys to determine which will best be incorporated into your routine. There are a hundred different styles for a hundred different personality types and if you’re matched with the correct item, sex will never be the same ever again!

They call them “toys” for a reason, it’s for playing with, experimenting and being kinky. Make sure to have a sense of humor and approach it with an open mind because trying new things is a sure fire way to enhance the spark in your relationship and to make sex very memorable.

We love involving more and more of the whole body in a sexual experience, as this article suggests, and when you engage your senses everywhere you go, like can be one big sexy adventure. Embodiment through sensual engagement is not just a foundation for the work that we do in sessions, but ultimately for everything we do out in the world. Eating ice cream or watching leaves ripple on a tree on a windy day can be extremely arousing and sexy, especially when you allow all of your senses to feed into and connect with your sexual desire.

Reading this Nerve.com article on the Five Reasons We’re Having Better Sex Than Our Parents we got to thinking about this generation’s sex life compared to ours, our parents’ or even grandparents’.  We are hoping twenty-somethings haven’t faced the same kind of sexual double standards (which harm both men’s and women’s sexual self-expression) that most of us faced growing up and that they have a chance to explore more openly with less guilt and shame. To these five reasons, we would add that there is infinitely more information available out there online and in the book stores to help people learn more about who they are sexually. We also believe that people are now taking account of the importance of sexual communication and compatibility when making choices about who to date and marry. What would you add to the list?

Women (and men too) – your body is beautiful, right now, just as it is. So many women spend so much of their lives hating their body, struggling against it and punishing it for having curves or wrinkles or spots. Women feel like they don’t deserve to have sexual pleasure until their bodies are perfect (and there is no such thing as a perfect body, even the magazines airbrush supermodels). The media, the dieting industry, the fashion industry and so many of our cultural outlets tell women that they have to change themselves to be beautiful. In this way, they can keep making money off of women’s insecurities. And, women’s insecurities about their bodies are yet another cause of low libido.

When women diet in unhealthy ways, starve themselves or overexercise, their sex drive goes down – if you think about it in biological terms, it doesn’t make sense to make a baby if you won’t be able to feed it or yourself. Also, many women feel ashamed about being naked in front of their partners and, instead of feeling the pleasure of sexual arousal, experience sex as though they are outside of themselves watching to make sure their stomach or thighs aren’t too fat. If there is one thing that we know about body image, it is that body image DOES NOT CHANGE from changing your body, it changes when you start loving your body just the way it is and stop monitoring every bit you eat or every pound you have and then beating yourself up about it.

Sometimes just the act of loving your body in this way inspires you to take good care of yourself, eat healthy and exercise. When you look at your body with love and picture others doing the same, you begin to walk in the world in a way that is more open and alive, you believe that you deserve pleasure and people begin to respond to this aliveness and this belief. The freedom from diet-brain and self-hatred is a personal freedom, it is about claiming your own right to pleasure and self-love. To improve your body image towards better libido follow the three steps in our previous post on loving yourself in 3 steps.

Also, an this might sound surprising, libido is also about having power out in the world, about claiming your voice, connecting with other women and changing the world in positive ways so that women’s sexuality is celebrated and cherished instead of denigrated and denied. One example of this might be attending a Slut Walk, a walk organized to respond to a comment by Toronto police offer who said that to remain safe, “women should avoid dressing like sluts.” At events like this, women speak out about ways that they have triumphed in the face of adversity and about issues that still need to be addressed around women and women’s sexual freedom. Another option would be starting a women’s group, or a mother/daughter group, with your friends or acquaintances and educating yourselves and each other about women’s issues and women’s sexuality (or girls’ sexual development). We love to come in and speak to women’s groups, so please invite us if you do! When you begin to see how all women have been denied the full expression of their sexual desire, you will become motivated and inspired to change the world and when you make positive changes in the world, you feel more alive and sexual as well!

We would love to have your comments and experiences, so please write them below.

It’s vacation time again and you may be feeling the desire for a vacation or a staycation, where you can relax and enjoy your home and let the vacation come to you. Either way, we would like to offer you a couple’s retreat full of playfulness, passion and connection. Many couples take vacations hoping to spice up their sex life, and they often end up having a week or so of heightened connection or more frequent sex and then return home and go right back to business as usual (which often means sex and intimacy go back to the bottom of a long to-do list). Lasting relationship transformation requires that you learn and experience something new on your couple’s retreat so that sensuality and seduction become part of your everyday life!

We can help! Whether you are looking to create more intimacy and intensity in your relationship, experience new and expanded sensual and sexual experiences, learn more loving forms of communication or change relationship patterns to make way for stronger connections, a Passionate Vacation or Staycation will create lasting transformation your sex life and your relationship and you can have tons of fun on the journey. Over the course of a week or weekend – a minimum of 3 days is preferable – one of us will spend ten hours with you and your partner – we will start by talking about who you are and about your desires together and then we will embark on a special, experiential couple’s vacation created just for the two of you. You can come stay in the beautiful and romantic city of San Francisco with its stunning architecture, booming night life and tantalizing world cuisine, or invite one of us to join you in some other part of the country or the world.

Finally, if you want to stay in and create something on your own, you can bring the feeling of a vacation at home and create a “stay”cation. Here are some ideas to try, and we hope you’ll put your own unique twist on them based on what you and your partner love to do.

• Spa Vacation – Draw a bubble bath and set a glass of some exotic fruit drink with a lemon on the rim beside it. Lay towels down on one side of the bed (if you don’t have a massage table) and get some lavender massage oil. Take turns giving each other sensual massage.
• Camping Trip – If you have a backyard, pitch a tent in it, just make sure you have a nice, thick foam mattress to put on ground if you want anything really hot to happen. Or make a good, old-fashioned fort in your living room and have a sexy movie night.
• Paris, Goa or Puerto Vallarta – Get take-out from one of your favorite foreign restaurants and set the table and the mood accordingly with local music (try Pandora), some slow, sexy dancing. Feed each other while you whisper sexy words to your partner (je t’aime, hum tumhe pyar karte hae, te quiero). For a complete list of how to say I love you in different languages, click here.

So tell us, how do you take the time to create sex retreats and intimate vacations for yourself throughout the year? What was your sexiest vacation or staycation? Let us know in the comments below. You never know, you might just inspire someone to have the hottest sex ever!!

In addition to performance anxiety, we find that those who suffer from Erectile Dysfunction also have anxiety that comes from a fear of and a pulling back from their own natural impulses towards sexual interaction and escalation. In others words, many men who suffer from ED suffer from an impulse control problem – not too little control, but TOO MUCH. While sexual desire is one of the most natural functions on the planet, what many men learn is that sexual desire is wrong, bad, and harmful to women. Unfortunately, these kinds of messages about sex, and especially the message that women don’t actually want sex, leave the “good guys” of the world, who want to please and don’t want to harm women, in a state of frozen impulses. There is little that is more anxiety-provoking than stopping your natural desires over and over and over again, especially in the face of a competing internal pressure to perform and please. In our work with men, we help them to unfreeze these impulses, and practice following their body’s own desires in a way that is also very pleasurable for their partners and connected with their partner’s bodies and desires. As the impulses begin to free up and men stop hesitating at every turn, their erections become more reliable and lasting. We hope, if you are dealing with ED that comes from too much impulse control, that you take some time to try fix Erectile Dysfunction the natural way first!

Step 1: Pay attention to your own sexual desires and impulses. Without any judgment as to what those desires are, notice the natural impulses that your body wants to follow in the face of those to whom you are attracted. Take some time to enjoy the aliveness in your body that comes from having those natural desires and impulses.

Step 2: Listen for the automatic messages. Notice what kinds of messages you say to yourself when you are having sexual impulses. Do you immediately question whether or not your partner wants your advances? Do you fear rejection or hurting someone by trying something new or different? Do you feel like you wait for permission for every escalation?

Step 3: Create conscious messages. Try out your own version of the following messages: “It is perfectly normal to have sexual desires.” “If my partner has chosen to be in a sexual relationship with me, it is very likely that she wants to feel my desire coming towards here” (research has shown that being desired is the top of the list in terms of what turns women on). “Just because my partner doesn’t want something I want, or doesn’t want sex right now, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t want me or never wants sex.”

Step 4: Honor and follow your impulses. When you feel sexual desire or arousal, see if you can shorten the time between feeling the impulse and following it. Let your body do the thinking for you (yes, we are telling you to listen to your little brain – more on this in the next installment as well!), and seduce your partner instead of asking for permission. Follow her cues and stay at the edge of her boundaries without backing off at every slight sign of rejection, she may just be checking in with herself to see if she is feeling aroused as well. If she really isn’t interested, let her tell you directly.

When you follow your body’s natural impulses, your arousal will lead to its normal and natural outcome, a firm and lasting erection. You will feel the flow of your own desire in concert with your partner’s and share a circuit of pleasure that can build to the heights of intensity and satisfaction. Enjoy!

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If you missed the previous posts in this series on treating Psychological Erectile Dysfunction, you can find them here:

- Post 1: 3 Causes of Psychological Erectile Dysfunction (ED) – and How To Heal Them Without Drugs

- Post 2: Fix Erectile Dysfunction (ED) By Overcoming Performance Anxiety

While we can all agree with the idea that one “should” feel comfortable in their own skin and embrace their vagina (and every other part of their body) just as it is, the question we always want to ask is how”? It is one thing to say I want to love my body, and feel comfortable in my skin; it’s another thing entirely to actually put that plan to execution. We want you to have the tools in your tool-belt to actually go about making this change and improve your body image. For real-life change to happen, people actually have to have the EXPERIENCE of feeling differently, not just the thought that they should. “Should” after all is something that mostly makes us feel bad about what is. As a wise client of ours once said, “I’m going to stop should-ing all over myself”. Through the Somatica Method, our trademarked brand of sex therapy, we teach people to fall in love with their body all over again (remember, we had only positive feelings towards our body until society taught us that there was something wrong with it).
Here are three ways you can practice loving your body. After all, our body image doesn’t change when we change our body, our body image changes when we take the time to practice falling in love with it. We hope you and your body enjoy every minute of it!!!

1) Touch – Find a part of your body that you usually treat poorly or talk harshly to and take some time to massage it, tease it and stroke it. Start to notice the potential for pleasure located in this previously-hated part. Notice the softness of the skin or flesh in your hands; notice the subtleties of the texture. Feel how the body part receives pleasure and how that pleasure can begin to spread to other parts of your body as well.

2) Arousal – There is nothing like a good dose of arousal to help us see things in a better light. Try this exercise: look in the mirror in your regular state and notice what you focus on and what kinds of things you say to yourself. Next, take some time to heighten your arousal through self-pleasuring. Do some Kegels (squeezing the muscles in your vagina like you are stopping yourself from peeing) and give your whole body and pussy some arousing touch. Once you get to a heightened state of arousal, or in between 2 orgasms, look in the mirror again and bring your aroused gaze to your face, your whole body and make sure you also take a look at your pussy. Notice the lusciousness and fullness of yourself when looked at through aroused eyes. If you start to lose this perspective, go back to arousing yourself and take another look.

3) Voice – Give the parts of your body to which you have been unkind a voice. Imagine that they can speak for themselves and can tell you how tired they are of being treated poorly, of being told that they are “too this” or “not enough that”. Put your hands on each part of your body that you have been mean to and let them tell you how they’d actually like to be looked at and treated

We just answered a message we found on a Men’s Health blog and wanted to share it with you.

Q: My wife and I want to spice things up, but she says she doesn’t have any fantasies she wants to fulfill. Is that possible?

A: We have found that women often freeze up in response to questions about fantasies. In answer to your question about how to spice up your sex life and find out more about women’s fantasies we’d like to offer you an excerpt from our upcoming book – Cockfidence – “Each woman has her own ideal seduction ‘movie’ – an assortment of thoughts about the kind of seduction that she wants to experience with her partner. Many women have daydreams about how they want their relationships with men to look, and what kinds of looks, words, acts, and gestures would fill their hearts and wet their pussies, but they often don’t identify these thoughts as fantasies because they are not overtly sexual. This is especially true for women whose ideal seduction fantasy is Romantic.”

Women’s fantasies of seduction generally fall into one or a combination of 3 categories – Romantic, Passionate, and Dominant – which we cover in depth in the upcoming book. To get a better answer to your question about your partner’s fantasy, try asking a woman what her perfect date would look like from beginning to end – this should give you plenty of hints into her ideal seduction.

In honor of the Giants winning the World Series (yay Giants!), we figured we’d offer a few brief words about sex and baseball. Baseball, like every other sport or physical activity, takes a certain kind of body-based learning. Do you think that the first time Renteria picked up a bat, he hit a home run? No way. And, as with baseball and any type of embodied learning, being a great lover takes more than just practice, it also takes a great coach! ;-) Let’s stay with the home run metaphor for a minute. Technique is very important, but there’s so much more – just having a great swing still won’t get you a home run. There’s having the desire, the confidence and the passion to do it, there’s knowing and playing by the rules, picking up on the pitcher’s pitches, and feeling into your own body and knowing what you are capable of. Much of the information out there on being a great lover is so limited to technique, however, that you might learn the perfect swing but will never get yourself a big-league at-bat to show it off. If you really want your lover to have unforgettable experiences with you over and over, you gotta bring all of yourself – desire in your eyes, confidence in your hands, connection with your passion and intention in your kiss. You have to read your lover’s cues, and be connected with them. Don’t just settle for a great swing – be the best player.  We’re here if you need us, we want to be your Bruce Bochy of Sex.