just because we happen to be naked in the bedroom with a sexually attractive partner. Sure, the sheer raw power of sexual energy can overcome many blockages (‘I just couldn’t help myself.’) but what does that lead to? A rush of energy that is wonderful at the time but afterwards can leave you with a curious feeling of regret and emptiness. To go back to the stream analogy, it’s almost as if the stream finally bursts through the dam holding it back and then completely floods the garden leaving a right old mess afterwards. A far cry from the steady, nourishing flow of Sexual Qi we need to keep ourselves growing and thriving. Sacred Sex practitioners recognized this and saw that many of these blockages were based on previous unhappy experiences and that the memories of these are ‘stored’ in our bodies. You can see how this works with this simple experiment: just try and put your finger in the flame of a candle. Notice the hesitation? You learned at an early age that fire hurts and now you exercise great caution. So how does this work in regards to sexual energy? An example could be if your
tantrapp 16/7/05 5:30 pm Page 57 Practising Sacred Touch – The Background 57 mother (or primary carer) did not like touching your genitals. As a result, you would have been given a message very early on that ‘genitals are bad’. How many people have had their hands slapped as a small child when they touched their ‘private parts’? Negative body experiences such as these leave their marks deep in the psyche and our body memory and are a powerful part of who we think we are and what we believe about our sexuality and ourselves. To work successfully with Sacred Sex you need to undo this conditioning. This is where having a willing partner comes into its own. It’s much, much easier to work with another person to peel away the layers of the onion of negative body conditioning than it is to do it by yourself. The good news is that our bodies are longing to be freed from the tension and stress that this negative conditioning has created. For most people it’s simply a matter of slowly and gently healing the wounds by replacing those old, unhappy experiences with new, wonderful ones. Stephan’s Story I’ll be honest. Our sex life wasn’t great when we started off with Sacred Sex. I was pretty frustrated both with Mieke and myself. I found out later that she was just as unhappy. It seemed that, no matter how hard I tried, I really couldn’t get much energy going between us. I didn’t know how to talk about it with her and I guess I just sort of hoped that somehow the sparks might fly again like they had when we met. We did have a good time once in a blue moon, as I used to say, but I could never figure out why. I certainly had no sure-fire method I could use to get the sexual energy going between us. I knew Mieke felt as bad about this as I did, but we just didn’t have any way to move out of the rut we were in. To top it off, we were stuck in what I now realize is called a ‘negative feedback loop’: I would show sexual interest without checking to see if she was interested first; she would not want to disappoint me and tried hard; I saw that it wasn’t working and felt bad about it; she saw that I felt bad and felt worse. Great, eh? From what I’ve heard and read, I now understand that this sort of situation is not at all uncommon, but that’s not a lot of help when you’re stuck in it. So when we started off with some of the massage and relaxation exercises, it was tough going for me. I’d never done much massage and approached it pretty much the way I approached everything; in other words, read the instructions, do the best I could and hopefully Mieke would enjoy it. It didn’t help that, as usual, part of me was afraid that I would do something wrong and I was, as often, hypersensitive to anything that might sound like a whiff of criticism.