What To Do When Desire Isn’t So Hot!

No matter how passionate your relationship maybe there will always be times where sexual desire waxes and wanes.

There are many reasons why this happens, but it’s often difficult to maintain an erotic relationship when your sex life is competing against the stress of everyday life or relationship issues that flare up in even the best managed relationship. 

However, if you are committed to your long term relationship, regardless of age or condition, then it’s likely that simple sensual exercises, which you can do on your own at home, will allow you to rediscover both the sensitive and nurturing side of yourself and your partner.

The most common form of sexual difficulty that couples want to overcome is a lack of sexual interest. This can be due simply to stress or fatigue or anxiety.

It can also be due to anger or other feelings between the man and the woman which are inhibiting their sexual responses.

With good communication skills which allow these things to be expressed in a safe way (one that does not threaten either partner while maintaining both partners’ self-esteem), the sexual relationship will be strong and passionate again soon.

Why Does Passion Wane?

The intense sexual passion that brings us together in the first stages of a relationship overcomes the incompatibilities and points of friction we feel about being with our partners. And once the intense sexual desire has waned, either one or both partners may feel a buildup of frustration and a negative spiral of recrimination and mutual blame can develop.

How To Stay Connected and How To 
Carry On Pleasing Each Other in Bed!

Sensate focus exercises are a quick way to regain a sense of intimacy and pleasure in each other’s company and overcome sexual problems. They work by helping a couple change focus from penetrative sex to intimacy and emotional connection. This enables them to see each other in a non-judgmental way.

Sensate focus is a system which enables people to break behavioral habits which have become unhelpful within the relationship.

One of the ways it does this is to remove the pressure of being sexually intimate, giving a couple the chance to relax in a purely sensual way. This highly pleasurable was of connecting allows renewed sexual pleasure, perhaps in a different form. The original exercises were devised by Masters and Johnson, and were based upon the principle that sensual touching is, in its own right, extremely arousing, pleasurable, satisfying and fulfilling – even when not directed towards a sexual outcome.

This contrasts dramatically with the conventional view of sex: penetration, thrusting and ejaculation, regardless of whether a woman has an orgasm. Here, the speed with which couple engage in the final stages of sexual connection may deny them the true opportunity to experience each other’s sensuality.

Over time, such a pattern of behavior will inevitably cause one or both members of the couple to become disillusioned and withdraw from physical – sexual – contact, simply because it isn’t pleasing, satisfying or rewarding enough.

The human body has an almost infinite capacity for pleasure and indeed joy derived purely from touch and physical intimacy.

Sad to say, this is suppressed from the earliest days of life, as you see very clearly when you consider how children are discouraged from touching their own bodies and indeed things around them.

And in our culture touch is closely associated with sexuality. Yet touching between human beings is a very necessary function of emotional and physical health.

So every couple who experience any difficulty within the relationship, or where there is a breakdown in sexual connection, will find sensate focus helpful. 

I’ll give you a brief outline of sensate focus exercises so that you can see if they may be helpful in overcoming your own sexual dysfunctions.

First of all, select a regular time during the week when you can practice these exercises, to give them the full attention they deserve.

You need about an hour per session and you’ll need privacy, so make sure that will be no interruptions of any kind. You also need a comfortable bed to lie on, in a warm room in which you can both be comfortably naked.

In the first stages of the exercises you must refrain from sexual intercourse for a few weeks.

Instead, during this period you explore your tactile sensitivity and communicate with each other through touch, almost as if you’re exploring each other’s bodies for the first time.

You take it in turns to touch and be touched, and the person who is touching should remember that this is not about arousing their partner. It is simply about developing increased awareness of the sensory potential of your body, both as giver and receiver.

VIDEO – SENSATE FOCUS

In this exercise you can touch any part of your partner’s body except the genitals, breasts, and other erogenous areas.

Allow yourself to feel all the different sensations that the body offers through your fingers and hands. You can vary how you apply tactile contact using every part of your fingertips, palms, hands and the backs of your hands; experiment with touch, using one or both hands, and let yourself experience the different sensations as they happen. See which are pleasurable, and which are not.

The partner who is receiving touch has nothing more to do than to lie there and focus on the sensation of being touched. They should not try and touch the giving partner back; nor should they slip into fantasy.

To make sensate focus work, avoid analyzing the situation, whether that’s in terms of “Am I doing it right?” or “Does it feel good?”. This is about focusing attention on the physical sensations and pleasure, satisfaction and sense of fulfimment that the procedure gives you, whether you are the giver or receiver.

Sensate focus works best if each partner spends around 20 minutes giving and receiving touch before swapping roles, and it’s important you don’t go on for so long you become bored with what you’re doing.

There are, of course, other ways to ensure good communication and emotional connection between partners within a sexual relationship.

One is to study Tantric sex techniques, because they establish deep connections between the partners.

Another is to share the emotional techniques which will tap directly into your partner’s psyche. This is especially true of men approaching women, where the subtle mechanisms which men can use to seduce and attract women apply just as much to established relationships as they do to newly formed relationships. Check out this The Tao Of Badass review and this Badass eBook – and don’t be put off by the title. “The Tao of Badass” is only meant to imply a guy who has the skills to seduce and relate to women effectively.

The second stage of sensate focus is to continue touching in the same way as before while using oil to ease the flow of the hands over the receiver’s body.

This is not a massage, nor is it about arousing the person; it’s about discovering tactile responses in yourself and your partner. You can make different kinds of movements including pressing, stroking and kneading the flesh to enhance the experience of touch.

The third stage of sensate focus is to start touching the genitals, but this should only happen when you’re both ready.

You include the genitals and breasts into the program of touch but your tactile contact should not be intended to create sexual arousal – though it is of course entirely possible that this will happen anyway.

However, don’t start on the genitals – use all-over bodily touch with or without lotion. The only goal of this stage of the exercise is to experience the “present moment” of tactile awareness. If either partner becomes sexually aroused then a good idea is to move onto a less sexually charged part of the body.

It’s also possible when you’re touching your partner’s genitals for them to put a hand over yours and guide you to show you the kind of movements they find desirable on that part of their body. This will focus you on the parts of their body which they find really pleasurable and which will please them in bed.

If you move your hands in synchrony,  make sure you remain receptive to the passive partner’s directions so that you know how the partner likes to stroke him or herself and what variations of pressure may be appropriate when you stimulate them genitally.

However: again the intention is not to arouse each other but to gain a greater awareness of tactile sensitivity. At this stage of the exercises, if you do become orgasmic whilst being touched on the genitals you can continue your own manual touching to orgasm or use your combined hands and let your climax of pleasure occur naturally.

The fourth stage of sensate focus is to touch each other at the same time, which you can do while lying side by side, head to feet, exploring each other’s bodies with different strokes, using either your fingertips or the whole of your hands as you have done in previous stages.

Stage five of sensate focus is to use whole-body touch and sensual touching on the genital regions to deliberately produce sexual arousal and then to recommence sexual intercourse.

At this stage the man lies on his back and the woman climbs on top of him, kneeling across his hips. You can begin by just letting your genitals make contact with each other and absorbing the sensation as they touch.

The woman will take her man’s penis and gently guide it, very shallowly, into her vagina. At this stage thrusting and deep penetration is to be avoided because essentially the exercise is about exploring the feelings of pleasure (or otherwise) which arise with different contacts between your bodies.

As you become more accustomed to how penetration feels, become fully aware of the sensations produced by an increased depth of penetration, very gradually and gently focusing on your own physical experiences as you do, so that you get greater awareness of the sensations that are involved in sexual interaction.