Juicy Bits Blog

In Part One, I described some basic solo skills that can get you started on the path to orgasmic pleasure. Here are another five suggestions that you can use right now to have an orgasm. Or two. Or ten. Or more!

The same skills that can get you to your ecstatic peaks can also dramatically expand your orgasmic capacity

To learn or expand your orgasm-ability, you may want to start with your own self-pleasure. Your solo-sex is your foundational learning laboratory. After you figure out what works for you, you can share your discoveries with your intimate partners. But, like learning to play the piano, it’s best to start solo and then move to duets.

1.      Say Yes to Yourself

Give yourself permission to feel more, do more, explore and go further, deeper and wilder than you ever have. Free your mind and the rest will come along.

When playing with your new skills, resistance, fear, anxiety and propriety will likely arise. Fend them off by repeatedly giving yourself permission to feel all of the pleasure you’re capable of and to be a wildly free sexual being.

Give yourself permission, over and over, to release, to let go of inhibitions and to push yourself into new territory. Say, “Yes” to pleasure, “Yes” to getting wilder, “YES” to going further than you thought you could. When you start to orgasm, don’t let limiting beliefs stop you. Say, “Yes” to allowing yourself to keep going, and you will.

2.      Touch Yourself All Over

Treat yourself to the luxury of your own sweet touch. Connect to your entire body in a variety of delightful ways. Take your time exploring the feel of your skin and the sensations of pleasure. Add some wonderfully smelling massage oil and rub, caress and slide over your silky sensual surface. Be your own great lover and treat yourself to touch in the exquisite way you so richly deserve.

When you do arrive at your very own delicious genitals, explore all of the wonderful territory, tracing each contour, investigating every little nook, caressing each delicate cranny. There’s no right way to play with yourself, so just take your time and feel how it feels. When you find a stroke you like, repeat it. When you discover a move that moves you, do more of it!

3. Shake Your Booty

Rocking your hips is the basic mammal mating motion, so utilize that ancient pathway and pump your pelvis. Imagine your spine is a snake and undulate away. Even a small pelvic tilting motion will activate a basic sex reflex, so rock and roll your booty to enhance your turn-on and increase your climax. Pump it up, baby! Let your thrusting animal out and you’ll propel your orgasm sky-high.

4.      Relax

Sexual arousal is a dance between both excitement and relaxation, although our cultural model often focuses only on the revving it up part. Start to play with slowing it down as well. Dance with varying rhythms, from exquisitely slow through racing-car fast, and every speed in between. Sometimes you can even take time for stillness – in fact, that’s often where the pleasure and sensation can expand! Alternate speeding the rhythym up and slowing it down. Play with firing the energy up and cooling it down. Let go of the goal and focus on the experience. Enjoy the journey.

5. Practice and Experiment

The more you practice, the better you’ll get at anything. Practice allows your skills to become habitual. Sex is no exception. As you practice more, you’ll become increasingly proficient with your orgasmic abilities. So practice, lots and lots! It may not get you to Carnegie Hall, but it will get you where you want to go. And remember, your basic practice is with yourself. Partners are optional!

If you want to keep expanding your pleasure capacity, you need to keep trying novel things, running original experiments and exploring new pleasure pathways. Remember, there is no one right way to have sex or become mega-orgasmic. There are myriad paths to expanded sexuality. Don’t get stuck thinking about whether you’re doing it right or wrong. Just try different things; positions, fantasies, skills, toys and keep experimenting and exploring. Keep asking yourself, “What happens when I try it this way?” and run the experiment. Notice what works and what doesn’t. If something works, then add that to your practice.

Remember, even master musicians never stop trying new things and seeing where they can take their talents. An erotic virtuoso is always stretching toward new horizons, exploring new inner tools, and playing with the question of how far can I go. And the great thing about sex? You are your own instrument—and everyone has the capacity to access ecstasy.

Original post: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 10:05AM
by Carl Frankel

Intimacy is one of those feel-good words, like “community,” whose meaning we tend to take for granted. It’s a nuanced concept, though, and merits a closer look. So let’s do some unpacking …

Intimacy has two components: authentic sharing, and empathetic reception.

You can and often do have one without the other. Let’s say two partners have just had a painful argument, they’re in a dark and distant place, and Partner A tells Partner B, in a spirit of disconsolate but not angry sharing, how lonely she is in the relationship. Is that an “intimate” moment?

Yes and no. Yes because Partner A is authentically sharing a deep feeling, no because Partner B is so preoccupied with her own misery that her heart is closed in that moment.

In our intimate relationships, we travel a path that takes us to and away from intimacy. Broadly stated, there are three stations on this highway:

• Estrangement. Partner A’s behavior is baffling, foreign, unfathomable. She could be from another tribe or planet. When one partner meets the other with estrangement, these are painful moments. Who wants their partner to have two heads and green antennae? Or to be seen that way?
• Understanding. The conduct makes sense, but the understanding is all in the head. It’s “from the outside”—there’s no walking in the other’s moccasins. Understanding is a whole lot better than estrangement but not what we yearn for.
• Empathy. This is understanding “from the inside,” with an open heart. And damn, it feels good to be on the receiving end! (And on the giving side, too.)

One of the main reasons we enter into intimate relationships is because we long to end the separation from others that is our natural (or, depending on how you look at it, un-natural) state. Lovemaking can achieve this: it dissolves boundaries through ecstasy. But this merging can also be achieved without physical intimacy, through empathetic understanding.

Focusing on empathetic understanding is also a great way to resolve conflict. The next time you have an argument with your partner, try the following exercise:

• Partner A: note what’s making you annoyed or angry. Is it because you’re being met with estrangement? Or is it because your partner is “only” showing understanding?
• If it’s the former, invite your partner to travel along the continuum from estrangement to empathy, starting with understanding. Have your partner mirror your emotions back to you until you feel they get it intellectually. Next, invite them to migrate that understanding down into their heart. Repeat until you feel they really get it emotionally.
• If the starting point is understanding, there’s no need for the first step. Invite your partner to move their comprehension from outside to inside, from head to heart. Do it until you feel empathetically understood.
• Switch roles and repeat.

Here’s my personal guarantee: once both parties feel empathetically understood, the bad feelings will evaporate. Once compassion fills a space, there’s no room left for judgment. There’s another reason, too. When you’re experiencing another person’s reality, you’re less caught up in your feelings and the storm of your own upset fades.

In our intimate relationships, there’s a continuum of the heart we all travel.

Estrangement is relationship hell. Understanding is its Middle Earth. And empathy? It’s our Promised Land. The station without a cross.

Carl Frankel

Don’t be so sure. “Love” means many different things.

by Carl Frankel

Love: the word means different things to different people—and different things to the same person at different times.

What’s in a word? Here are some meanings of “love:”

• Erotic love. We all know what this one means. It’s what we mean when we say we’re “in love.” It’s “I want to have your babies”–or sometimes just “I want to have your body.” It also tends to burn out over time.
• Maternal love. This one involves tenderness of the heart and the instinct to protect.
• Spiritual love. This isn’t directed at one person: it’s directed toward all people. The Greek word for this was agape.
• Deep affection and caring. Does this qualify as “love?” Absolutely. Lovely doesn’t have to be passionate. It can be quiet. It can be enduring. It can be deep.

In our culture, we tend to establish long-term relationships with people based on erotic attraction. Those eyes across the crowded room. That dynamite connection.

In many ways, this is a fine thing. Yet it also can create problems down the road. When “in-loveness” burns out, many people assume, logically enough, that they’ve “fallen out of love.” And then they start wondering if the relationship is right for them.

Not so fast, Ms. (or Mr.) Lonelyheart.

Here’s an alternative framing: maybe you’ve just switched categories of love.
Assuming your partner is a worthy person, the passionate feelings you had initially may have been transformed into deep affection and caring. You’ve become attached—connected at a very deep level.

Is this enough for you? That depends. If you’ve bought into our cultural version of love’s “true meaning”—or maybe we should refer instead to our cultural version of “true love’s meaning”—then you might feel that loving, rather than being in love, isn’t enough. If you think you should be in love—if you think you have a right to be in love—then simply feeling deeply connected to another person won’t be enough.

There’s another factor, too. We all have competing desires for attachment and autonomy. Sometimes our hankering for autonomy causes us to resent our deep attachments. When you’re feeling really bonded, it’s easy to feel you’re in bondage—and not in a good way.

Attachment isn’t easy. Attachment is—well, it’s sort of the Middle Earth of love. It’s got its ups and downs, in no small matter because, more often than not, you’re seeing your partner as he or she really is, without the projections that passion brings. Look at it this way: it’s a lot more difficult to love a wart than a fantasy.

Attachment is to sobriety what being in love is to intoxication. It inhabits the reality realm—and the reality realm, as we all know, is a mixed blessing.

Still, it’s important not to overlook the positives. The next time you’re feeling down because things aren’t as passionate as they used to be, take a deep breath and ask yourself these questions:

• Do I not love my partner any more, or is just a different flavor of love?
• What rewards do I get in having this person in my life to whom I feel so attached?

These questions may aggravate your discontent, and then again they may not. They may get you feeling grateful—and take the edge off the painful truth that, at the end of the day, we’re all citizens of Middle Earth.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011 at 03:57PM
by Carl Frankel

Imagine this: you and your partner aren’t talking. What scenario are you envisioning?

Perhaps you’ve assumed you’re arguing and the silence is pregnant with words not spoken.

Or maybe you’re imagining a time when you’re feeling totally relaxed and comfortable, and enjoying the opportunity to simply be with your partner without having to make chitchat.

Here’s a third possibility: You’re occupying the same physical space and doing something independently. You’re not arguing and you’re not relaxing together. You’re simply sharing space as couples do, and not talking (or talking very little) because you’re each doing your own thing.

This third type of silence can be a problem, depending on the psychological makeup of the partners.

Sandra and William have been together for three years. They are building a business together and spend lots of time in each other’s company. Sandra sometimes wants down time when she doesn’t have to interact with William. When she’s feeling this way, she tunes him out, not because she’s angry with him but because she needs her space.

William was raised by a volatile and unpredictable mother whose silence made him anxious because he wasn’t sure what would pop up next, something good or trouble. For him, silence is a warning sign—there may be danger ahead!

For the first couple years of their relationship, these competing need systems created tension and unhappiness. Seeking re-assurance, he would break their silence with a joke or comment. She would respond curtly, if at all. This left William feeling even more anxious (“She’s not being nice, so I guess there really is trouble ahead!”), and Sandra feeling annoyed: “Why does he keep yakking when he knows I need my down time?”

Once they realized that these silences were creating unhappiness and distance, they discussed what was going on and came up with a straightforward solution. Whenever Sandra wanted private down time, she committed to giving him a big loving hug and telling him how much she loved him, and that she was going to go into her private space for a while. William pledged to self-soothe if anxieties arose about her silence, rather than going to her for reassurance.

Have you and your partner discussed what your silences mean to each of you? It’s important to do so—otherwise, it can lead to misunderstandings and unhappiness.

It’s not good to be silent about silence.

Carl Frankel

Wednesday, June 29, 2011 at 03:24PM
by Carl Frankel

Our culture specializes in compartmentalization. In medicine, for instance, we have cardiologists, dermatologists, orthopedists and so on.

We do this vis-à-vis our relationships, too. We tend to think of them as distinct from the rest of our lives, but this is only partly true. Our relationship strategies are a subset of our life strategies. By and large, we’re as successful at our relationships as we are at life.

I’m not talking about the external trappings of success—the rich or gorgeous partner, the fancy home, the luxury car. I’m referring to our wisdom path. If we’re wise in life generally, we’ll be wise in our intimate life, too. If we’re self-defeating in life, we’ll stumble in our relationships as well.

I’ve got a specific wisdom strategy in mind here. We all tend to kvetch about things. That guy who cut me off on the highway earlier, my partner’s really irritating habit of interrupting me, those damn Washington politicians, and so on … and on … and on.

I’m not suggesting these things aren’t actually annoying. We don’t have to voice our irritation, though. When we express our unhappiness, we create a climate of negativity, grouse by grouse—and clouds are less pleasurable than sunshine.

There’s a second downside to this habit. Once we start giving voice to our negative feelings, we tend to complain about our partner, too, often to their face. It’s an unhappy habit that carries over from that aggressive driver and those stupid politicians to the person we love more than anyone else in the world. And this, predictably, drives a wedge between you two and creates undesired distance—or worse.

The solution? Practice positivity, not just in your relationship but throughout your life. Choose to walk the sunny side of the street. When that driver cuts you off, if you must comment, go for something compassionate. He’s not a jerk, he must be having a bad day. And when your partner interrupts you again, don’t blurt out, “Why must you always cut me off?” Instead, try something like “Love, may I finish my thought, please?” Not only is it kinder, but it’s also likelier to get you what you want.

The simple (and cosmic) reality is that there are two archetypal forces in the world— love and fear, which our psyches interpret as light and dark. We have it in our power to choose love and light, and to do so over and over again. Doing this can certainly be challenging. Sometimes if can feel almost impossible. It can be done, though, no matter how difficult the circumstances—and this, in fact, is what all the great sages teach.

To the extent that we succeed at doing this in the intimate sphere, we bring love and light into our relationship.

I’m not counseling denial here. There is evil and ugliness all around us. Fear, anger and rage are real and totally understandable emotions. Still, we can choose love without wearing blinders. How? By going into our heart and choosing compassion and understanding over anger and fear. By choosing what we say and how we say it. By taking it one choice at a time.

No one bats a thousand at this. As a practice, though, it makes life more beautiful, and it transforms our intimate relationships to a place where the weather is sunny much more often than not. And wouldn’t you rather live in Hawaii than Siberia?

If your partner is up for it, I invite you to try playing The Positivity Game. For an agreed-upon amount of time, say nothing but positive things to each other. No matter what the subject—your kids, politics, your relationship—stay upbeat. It may go against your grain and seem cloying at times. Do it anyway.

Here’s what I predict: you’ll find that you relax and become less on guard with each other. This is because evolution has designed us humans always to be on the lookout for danger. Negative communications are signals of danger—they’re announcements that there’s something to be afraid of. Eliminate these negative signals and your defenses go down. No predators! When the sun is out, we tend to bask and relax.

As a regular practice, The Positivity Game can transform a self-defeating life habit into a wise habit—and it can transform your relationship from a dangerous place requiring ongoing vigilance to a sanctuary of peace and light.

Carl Frankel

Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 08:33AM
by Carl Frankel

We’ve all fallen for someone, but that doesn’t mean the object of our affections is right for the long haul. How do we know if he or she is great for a fling, or Mr. or Ms. Right? Here are seven qualities to look for in a “keeper.”

Integrity. A worthy long-term partner will have a commitment to speaking the truth, both to themselves and you. They’ll also believe in keeping their word. If they make a commitment not to stray, they won’t—you can take it to the bank. Their integrity won’t be situational, as in, “I’m really committed to not cheating, but she was so hot!” It will be through-and-through.

Humility. A partner who knows better all the time is not a long-term partner for you. We all have blind spots. We all can get better at something, not least of all at being human. An appropriate long-term partner knows they’re on a long-term learning journey, and that they’re taking that journey with you.

“Humility” in this context means another thing, too—the ability to say “I’m sorry.” The partner who can’t apologize is a partner to say goodbye to, early.

Respect. Aretha Franklin was right. R-E-S-P-E-C-T matters. A lot.

There are two aspects to this: self-respect, and respect of others. Self-respect is a necessary first step: people tend to treat others as they treat themselves. People without self-respect tend to self-medicate, and more broadly to engage in addictive or outrageous behavior that will ultimately confirm their negative self-image. They tend to make a mess of their own lives, and of their partner’s by extension. If you want a messy, melodramatic life, then commit to a person who’s seriously short on self-respect. If you want a life of love and light, then no.

Being respectful also means not trampling borders. Just because you’re intimately partnered with someone doesn’t mean there are no boundaries. There are always boundaries between people, and in an intimate relationship it’s especially important to honor them. Respect means asking permission to cross a boundary, not doing so willy-nilly. “May I make an observation about why I think you’re doing this?” is fine. “You’re acting like your mother” is not. “Would you do me a great favor and shop for dinner tonight?” is courteous and appropriate. “Go buy dinner” is not.

Fair & Balanced. I’m not talking Fox News here. I’m talking about power dynamics. We all have a will to power. Somewhere inside all of us is the desire to be on top—or, in some cases, on the bottom. Power struggles are endemic and perhaps inevitable in intimate relationships. Who calls the shots? Who, as the outdated and sexist expression has it, wears the pants? An appropriate long-term partner will have a deep-seated commitment to “power parity.” No one on the top, no one on the bottom, but rather a commitment to equality and, yes, democracy. No winners, no losers, but rather, as the wonderful Scottish poet Edwin Muir put it, “playing to make each other glad.”

In the bedroom, of course, different rules may apply. There, power play can be a delightful way to make each other glad. In the broader relationship, though, unless you’re one of those rare individuals who’s comfortable with a 24/7 dominant/submissive relationship, you’ll want a partner who cherishes equality.

Positivity. Life’s road is tough and fraught with challenges. If we’re going to have a partner on our journey, it helps if they’re biased toward the bright side. Not only does it makes the journey more fun, it also increases the odds that we’ll succeed. A positive attitude goes a long way. It’s great if our partner is there to help.

To be perfectly clear, I am not speaking out for the sort of cheeriness that goes hand-in-hand with denial. It’s always better to see the truth than not. A partner with a positive attitude can help us cope better with that truth, no matter what it is. Nor am I suggesting you should dump someone if they get depressed and can’t see the light.

Which brings me to my next virtue …

Steadfastness. All relationships have their rough spots. Many have their crises. A keeper hangs in there. They have the faith, or maybe it’s just plain stubbornness, to stay the course even when everything inside them is telling them to cut and run.

Complementarity. Partners help us grow. This won’t happen unless they differ from us in important ways. If we’re shy socially, it’s great to be with an extrovert who’ll make it easier for us to have fun at parties and learn to be more gregarious—or, alternatively, more comfortable with not being especially social.

In a healthy relationship, partners rub up against each other in both good and bad ways. Complementarity is the grit in the oyster’s shell that helps us learn and grow.

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In relationships, there are no guarantees. Even if your partner seems like a keeper today, that may not be the case someday down the road. Still, there are some basic virtues to look for that can increase the odds of long-term success. Integrity. Humility. Respect. Fairness. Positivity. Steadfastness. And complementarity.

For the most part, it’s a conservative list. An old-fashioned list.

It’s like Sam sang it so famously in the classic movie Casablanca.

The fundamental things apply.

Carl Frankel