Great Sex, Naturally (5 page)

Not only does abundant mental and physical health increase your capacity to enjoy sex, but sex, in turn, gives you many health benefits. In fact, a climax a day keeps the doctor away: sex reduces stress, burns calories, increases your circulation (bringing nutrients and fresh oxygen to your tissues), and releases “feel-good” oxytocin and endorphins, as well as prolactin (which promotes calmness and reduced blood pressure). And sex has many other potential benefits as well: it may help strengthen your immunity; aid in pain relief (including that of menstrual cramps and migraines); lower the risk of heart attacks, endometriosis, and preterm deliveries in pregnant women; promote consistent menstrual cycles; stimulate your vagina’s natural lubrication; and prevent urinary incontinence. Some research also suggests a link between frequency of sex and longevity.

Health and sex are, in a sense, mutually reinforcing: the greater your health, the greater your capacity to enjoy sex; and the more you enjoy sex, the greater your health. Health makes you sexy, and sex makes you healthy!

In Part I of this book, you’ll explore the four cornerstones essential for nurturing your potential to have great sex: your mind and spirit, diet, exercise habits, and ability to detoxify. We begin with your mind and spirit because they’re uniquely pivotal; all of the choices that influence your sexual destiny emerge from your mind, after all. Through the power of choice making, your mind will be the crucial determining factor for every one of the tools you’ll discover in this book for building your health and libido. Many of the benefits you stand to gain will be for naught if your mind and spirit aren’t healthy.

Your state of mind is also connected to your capacity for sexual pleasure in innumerable other ways. Not only does your ability to fully enjoy sex require a healthy mind and spirit, the clarity of consciousness to pursue your passions, and freedom from unhealthy emotions, but every state of mind you experience can have profound effects on your physiology and resistance to disease, as well as your potential for great sex. Your capacity for sexual pleasure is inseparable from your mind—in a sense, pleasure is nothing more than the
awareness
of pleasure—which may make your mind the ultimate measure of pleasure.

In this chapter you’ll explore ways in which you can engage your mind and spirit to enhance your health and change your life—especially in order to create or maintain a healthy love relationship and a fulfilling sex life. By tapping into the strength of your mind and spirit with the thoughts, tools, and techniques in the following pages, you can vastly expand your possibilities for enjoying great sex, naturally.

Your Brain: Sex, Love, and Limbic Linkage

Your mind and spirit are related to your physical brain, and thus in order to most effectively use the power of your mind and spirit to enhance your libido, it helps to begin by knowing how your brain can affect your sexuality. Let’s take a look at your brain health, and some critical connections between your brain chemistry, your sexual health, and the intense emotions you can feel in a relationship.

All of the steps you’ll discover in the next chapter for building the foundation of your general health and supporting your sexuality with diet, exercise, and detoxification also support your
brain
health; every feature of your Great Sex Lifestyle is brain boosting. At the same time, improving your brain health gives you additional paybacks everywhere in your life. Neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones play key roles in all your thoughts, moods, and feelings—including your ability to feel love, sexual attraction, pleasure, and orgasm. And as your most powerful sex organ, your brain contains everything you think about sex.

Sex, in turn, affects your brain by releasing the important brain chemicals oxytocin and endorphins, which can improve your moods and elevate your tolerance for pain. And research shows that when you have an orgasm, the area of your brain that controls fear and anxiety is temporarily disengaged, which potentially benefits your nervous system.

The sex-related brain chemicals released in your body can vary, depending on which phase of a relationship you’re in. When you first fall in love and during the early stages of a romance, you’re more likely to be bathed by the sex hormones estrogen and testosterone (this is true for both women and men) and the neurotransmitters adrenaline, serotonin, and dopamine. Increased adrenaline can elevate your heart rate and cause you to perspire when you think of your new love. A rise in serotonin may explain, in part, your preoccupation with thinking about him; research shows that serotonin levels of new sexual partners can be similar to those of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. And increased dopamine can incite strong sensations of pleasure that have effects on your brain similar to cocaine (but without harming your body), giving you surges of energy, reducing your need for food and sleep, and stimulating your capacity for focused attention—especially the attention you give to your new relationship.

After the initial stages of love, two hormones appear to play vital roles in the development of long-term attachment: vasopressin and oxytocin. Research indicates that vasopressin, which is released after sex, promotes bonding and devotedness. And oxytocin, the “intimacy hormone” released by both women and men during orgasm, also promotes bonding and deepens feelings of attachment, especially after sex. And your bond grows stronger, research suggests, with each act of lovemaking. In the realm of your hormones, as in so many others, sex connects; the more you make love, the more love you make.

As you continue a relationship, gradual physiological changes occur in a portion of your brain called the
limbic system
—the “emotional center,” developed in your infancy and childhood. Your limbic system helps you form attachments to others, and plays a part in your ability to find another person attractive and fall in love. During a long-term relationship, you become “limbically connected” with your partner; both of your limbic systems lay down new neural cells, in effect shifting your brain anatomies in response to interactions with one another over time.

Your capacity for limbic linkage explains, to some extent, the depths of feeling and commitment you can experience in a long-term relationship, and why you may feel at times as if your identity becomes fused with your partner’s. As Thomas Lewis, M.D., wrote of limbic connectedness in
A General Theory of Love:
“Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.” The force of limbic bonding is one reason why it can take years to recover from the loss of a long-term relationship; your limbic system’s circuitry is without its “other half,” the specific person it had formed for.

Using Your Mind to Build and Preserve a Healthy Relationship

Being aware of your brain’s natural physiological tendencies can help you understand thoughts and emotions you experience around issues of love and sex, but your mind and spirit are greater than the sum of your brain’s cells, chemical messengers, and physical components. Intimate relationships are profoundly spiritual and emotional, and can’t be reduced to these factors alone. It remains largely mysterious that your evolving mind and spirit can connect with another evolving mind and spirit, love deeply, commit to sharing yourself over time, and express love through the physical medium of sex.

At the same time, by harnessing the power of your mind, you can enhance your natural ability to live in the mystery of love. Let’s look at some important ways you can use your mind to build and maintain a strong love relationship and a healthy sex life. All of them can be put to good use in conjunction with the other tools and techniques you’ll explore in the chapters ahead. While you’re busy building your libido and your overall health, you can be relationship building at the same time!

—
Creating time.
It may seem obvious that you need quality time alone with your partner, without the intrusions of the world, to have a dynamic, supportive love relationship and experience great sex. Yet many people seem to forget to find time for relationship nurturing, perhaps because they feel caught up in a culture that places higher priorities on other things. One of the secrets of partners who evolve together over many years, and continue to love one another and enjoy a healthy sex life, is creating time to spend together and fully appreciate one another—which means more than just making time for sex.

In the modern world, many couples are separated on a daily basis by work and other responsibilities, but with the strength of your mind, you can turn this to your advantage. Humans are sometimes distinguished from other animals because of our unusual capacity for delayed gratification; we can imagine enjoyable experiences well in advance, and doing so may enhance pleasure. This pertains not only to simply spending time with your partner, but also to sex: in a sense, you can
enhance in advance
. If you have to wait, let anticipation increase gratification.

—
Communication and sex.
For many couples in healthy relationships, there are profound connections between the quality of their communication and the quality of their sex life. When you share intimate thoughts and feelings with one another on a daily basis over time—not merely discussions of household functions, paying bills, or material possessions, but your most personal issues—you continue to grow and evolve together, and you become closer in every way, including sexually. It’s almost as if the natural give-and-take of good communication, along with all of its other relationship-building benefits, has an added aphrodisiac effect.

—
Sexual trust.
Building an emotionally safe, solid relationship can be critical to the health of your partnership and your sex life. Many women have difficulty achieving orgasm, or even becoming aroused, unless they’re in a relationship that allows them to fully let go, trust, and release control. Modern brain research backs this up; brain scans show that during orgasm women—unlike men, who experience stimulation of their “reward” circuitry—have reduced activity in brain areas that govern self-control, moral reasoning, social judgment, and vigilance. Your capacity for pleasure appears to be closely linked with your brain’s ability to release inhibition, suspend judgment, and let down your guard, all of which may be possible only when you’re in a relationship that feels dependable and secure.

—
Supporting your right brain.
Your brain is
bicameral
, which means it’s composed of “two houses,” or halves. Each has functions that offer you a different perspective of the world; your left hemisphere is more logical and linear, and your right more intuitive and nonlinear. Many women caught up in the busy world of day-to-day responsibilities function highly from their left brain but have lost touch with the holistic, nurturing potential of their right brain.

In
My Stroke of Insight
, Jill Bolte Taylor describes how, after being trained to rely heavily on her left hemisphere as a brain scientist, she experienced a stroke that damaged her left brain and opened her eyes to the workings of her right hemisphere. During her recovery, while her right brain dominated, she experienced blissful sensations of love, compassion, peace, and interconnectedness with all things. Her descriptions are reminiscent of the teachings of Eastern religions and ancient meditation practices on becoming “one” with the cosmos.

Tapping into the right side of your brain can help you maintain a balanced life, improve your sense of well-being, and nurture your capacity for a healthy intimate relationship. It can also get you in touch with “the sensuality mentality”—your natural ability to experience all the joys of loving sexual union. Your two-sided brain is exquisitely designed to allow you full awareness of sexual pleasure; it is, if you will, your great sex duplex. But for many women, it’s the power of the right brain that allows them to experience pleasure while disengaging from other mental activities, in a sense liberating sexuality from intellectuality.

You don’t need to have a stroke to cultivate the potential of your right brain; you can stimulate its neuronal circuitry with virtually any activity that gives you a temporary reprieve from tasks governed by your left brain and engages your natural intuitive powers. In addition to meditation, examples include art, music, dance, yoga, and many forms of spontaneity and play.

You Can Change Your Mind, Whenever You Want

The quotation at the beginning of this chapter says it all: your “mind is the most powerful instrument in the universe.” You can do practically anything you put your mind to, and you can put your mind to practically
anything
. Your thoughts influence your feelings and behavior from one moment to the next, so at any point in time you can change your thoughts and change your life. As Louise Hay has written in
Heal Your Body
, “by changing our thinking patterns, we can change our experiences.” Your conscious intentions and beliefs can shape your destiny, and you can choose happiness, health, beneficial relationships, love, and sexual fulfillment. The most important step you can take to enhance your sexuality is to consciously choose a set of thoughts and beliefs that will create, not negate, great sex—in short, a
credo for your libido
.

This is underscored by an understanding of how your brain functions. One of its most wonderful qualities is
plasticity
—its capacity to be malleable and changeable. By consciously altering the thoughts that dominate your life, you redirect your perceptions. Over time, this changes neurochemicals released, and reshapes your brain’s circuitry by creating new nerve tracks and altering your very cells. By choosing new thoughts, you can thus “rewire” your brain, override old patterns of thinking and behavior, and ultimately transform your relationship to the world and to your sexual partner.

The key to choosing new, more health-affirming thoughts is becoming conscious of your present thinking patterns and choices and how they may be affecting your health, relationships, or sexuality. By increasing your awareness, you can discover areas where you may be unknowingly working
against
yourself—for example, with thoughts that subvert your health or sabotage a relationship—and replace them with thoughts you need in order to make better choices. As Wayne Dyer says in his book
There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem
, it’s a matter of keeping your focus on what you want in your life: “If your thoughts are on what you don’t want … you will act upon those thoughts and more of what you don’t want will keep showing up.” You’re well on your way to achieving a great sex life if you simply keep your eyes on the prize.