Tag Archive for: “enhancing sex”

Play With Yourself (But Don’t Masturbate)

Image for FB1In our culture, masturbation still gets a bad rap. While we may no longer believe it causes degeneracy and disease or causes people to go blind (although I do know a lot of folks who wear glasses!), we still don’t celebrate solo sex for the wonderful, self-loving, healthy and pleasurable practice it is.

We don’t even have a good name for it. I rarely use the word masturbation, preferring to call it solo sex, sexual self-love, playing with yourself, or self-pleasuring. I never cared for the m-word and now that I know the derivation of the word, I like it even less. The Latin roots of the word mean ‘to pollute with your hand.’ That’s certainly not what I’m doing with my hand when it’s busy down below! Nor am I committing ‘self-abuse.’ When you’re self-pleasuring, you’re doing lots of things—giving yourself sexual loving, learning how to expand your responses, practicing skills, exploring your fantasies, enhancing your mental and physical well-being, improving your vitality, having a good time, receiving pleasure and relaxing. That sounds like a recipe for health and happiness to me! so I encourage you to play with yourself, but never to “masturbate.”

Our dominant culture still encourages guilt, if not of the mortal sin variety, then of the mildly shameful or “You’re being self-indulgent and wasting time” kind. I find this ironic since we get many of the same benefits from sexual pleasure (whether solo or partnered) that we derive from exercise and meditation. We feel virtuous when we work out or meditate, while taking the same amount of time to have some juicy solo sex is considered frivolous and decadent or worse. When will our puritan culture get over it and accept that solo sex isn’t a dissolute fall into wanton lust, but an ascent into self-love that celebrates your desire, hones your abilities and ultimately honors yourself? While the sex you have with yourself certainly isn’t all there is to your relationship with yourself, it’s an essential component.

Are you practicing sexual self-love? If your answer is “I don’t do that,” I strongly encourage you to start now. If you’re thinking, “but that’s not real sex, it doesn’t count,” it’s time for a new story. Think of your solo sex as an affirmation of your juiciness and an essential practice on your path to becoming sexually masterful.

For those of you who do have ‘do-dates’ with yourself, I have a question for you: how’s it going? While you can’t really have bad sex with yourself, you can certainly have mediocre experiences. If you’re disconnected from yourself or just going through the motions, your solo sex will refl ect that. Do you only give yourself quickies? Just having frantic fast-food snacks? Are you a poor lover to yourself?

I hope not.

How would your dream lover treat you? In what ways would he or she delight you? When you practice solo sex, that’s how I invite you to treat yourself.


Succulent_Sexcraft_Sheri_Winston

This post is an excerpt from my recent book, Succulent SexCraft: Your Hands-On Guide to Erotic Play and Practice.

Learn to become masterful with your own erotic energy, delight your partners and have more bliss!

Ecstasy awaits you so why wait?

Some Notes on Erotic Mastery

Becoming An Erotic Virtuoso

Angie Chung, Hand Shapes: Hill & Valley

Angie Chung, Hand Shapes: Hill & Valley

Don’t expect to become a virtuoso overnight. Mastery takes time, energy, attention and practice. Lots of it. This is true for playing the piano and it’s true for sex, too. It’s been estimated that becoming expert at anything takes at least 10,000 hours. Luckily, since we’re talking about sex here, you’ve probably already put in quite a few hours!

In addition, you have some very deep, hardwired sexual circuits that make developing your erotic proficiency much easier than mastering Mozart. This is one area of your life where you can make pretty quick progress on your learning journey once you have a guide, maps and the desire to excel.

Also bear in mind that while technique is an indispensable means to an end, erotic mastery isn’t solely about technique. Great sex isn’t about performance or ‘doing it right’—it’s a magical improvisational dance. Technique provides a foundation of embodied learning that you then use to play freely and imaginatively—it’s the underlying skill set that allows you to be fully in the moment and open to the flow. So learn your moves, practice your techniques, train your mind and body to excel—then forget all that and let passion and energy be your guide.

“The more technique you have the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is the less there is.” — Pablo Picasso


Succulent_Sexcraft_Sheri_WinstonI hope you enjoyed this little taste of my new book, Succulent SexCraft: Your Hands-On Guide to Erotic Play & Practice. It’s the place to go to develop exquisite erotic skills like becoming extraordinarily orgasmic, mastering erotic trance states and so much more!

 

OLC_Succulent_SexCraft_Website header_ProductAre you ready to have me personally help you learn to play your own instrument with skill and passion?

You can do it in the comfort and privacy of your own home with Intimate Arts Online Education!

Join us for a 4-week deep dive into Succulent SexCraft: Supercharge Your OWN Pleasure for a lifetime of MORE!

Amplified arousal, easy orgasms, expanded orgasms and access to your own ecstasy awaits you!


The Six P’s of Touch

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photo CC by SA Nelumba

You can become a touch savant by playing with the six p’s — presence, purpose, patience, precision, pattern and progression. When you do so, you get to the ultimate p -— Pleasure!

Presence

It is in the imperceptible space between that which touches and that which is touched that one body can be felt, no matter how closely, to be different from another.

When you are fully present and in the moment with your touch, it will be exquisite. paying relaxed, soft-focused attention is a great way to let your kinesthetic intelligence emerge. If you’re touching your partner’s thigh, be present to the thigh. Don’t think about where you’re hoping to get to after that. delight in the delicious now.

Use your own sexcraft skills to stay present. if you find yourself in a thinking or distracted place, slow down or better yet, get still. Get centered back into your own experience using breath, awareness, intention (or whatever your favorite centering tools are.) Then shift your awareness back to your partner.

Purpose

Touch transmits intention. If someone is rubbing your back as a prelude to getting into your pants, you’ll know it. If someone is intending to give you pleasure, their touch will transmit that, too.

I encourage you to create conscious intentions when you connect erotically with yourself and others. Focus on connection, pleasure and co-creating a great improvisational journey, not on getting or achieving.

Patience

When I’m asked for one single bit of advice about how to have better sex, my answer is this -— take your time. Quickies can be fun snacks, but extraordinary sex usually occurs when you slow down to enjoy the feast.
While I certainly recommend taking time to have leisurely encounters, I mean something else as well. Don’t be in a hurry to get from point A to point B. Dogs (or should i say, core-yang people), this means not diving directly into your pussycat’s nether regions. If you want to do some muff munching, consider starting at her toes, taking time with every digit, then traveling oh-so-slowly up her leg until she’s desperate to have you dive into her glorious genitalia. Slow is good -— it creates anticipation and builds arousal. The more patient you are, the hungrier your kitty will be and the more you’ll be rewarded when you feed her (or feed on her).

Precision

By precision, I mean touch that’s discerning, accurate and exquisitely focused. it’s one of the keys to touching masterfully instead of just “okay-fully.”

It requires you to toggle your attention and awareness fluidly back and forth between yourself and your partner. as we get more turned on, it’s easy to lose our focus and get wild and sloppy with our movements. as things up-regulate and your brain heads down toward the basement, do your best to pay extra attention to the importance of precision!

It also requires presence —- you can’t be precise without being present.

Pattern

If you touch someone in the same way over and over again, it can get monotonous or irritating. if you deviate non-stop, it can feel incoherent and chaotic and keep the recipient from going into trance. There’s a middle ground between chaotic and boring. Masterful touch is like music -— it creates patterns with its combination of rhythm, repetition, harmony and syncopation. Repeating a move creates space for appreciation and feeds anticipation. It creates a pleasing expectation -— a sort of touch security, as it were —- and escalates entrancement.

Syncopation offers an accent note. It delivers the element of surprise, and it does so without taking the recipient out of the zone. Use motion and stillness, just as music works with sound and silence. Remember: stillness is a ‘move’ just like motion is a move. Play with a beat, melody and cadence. Use repetition, surprise, rhythm, syncopation, tempos and motifs to create your very own symphony of touch.

You can also play with touch as if it were visual art. Pretend you’re finger-painting, sculpting, outlining or shading. Here, too, use designs, motifs, recurring themes, and gradually changing patterns. Doodle with their body! There’s a larger takeaway here: touch is an art form—and mastery equals artistry.

Progression

Pattern and progression are closely related. in fact, progression is how you get from pattern a to pattern B, or from location a to location B, without having it feel rushed, jumpy or chaotic. Let your touch have internal consistency, a sort of touch logic. Don’t jump around randomly from one place on the body to another. Play with progressing coherently from place to place, or from one layer to another. Shift fluently between languages. Transition gradually between tempos or from broad strokes to detailed ones.

Generally, use smooth, gradual transitions (except when you want to delight with the surprise of an accent note). For instance, going from deeply therapeutic shoulder massage directly to genital stimulation might be disconcerting. However, if you move from deep kneading of the big back muscles down to the buttocks, shift to a lighter sensual rhythmic stroke down the thigh, followed with a teasing, feathery flit up the inner thigh, a quick brush past the crotch, to almost touching the genitals, and finally to landing there with a deliberate firm hand — well, that can be utterly delicious.

During all of this, of course, you’ll want to practice another of the ‘p’s —- patience. There’s an art to finding the balance between taking your time and being too slow. Here, look for the receiver to give cues. as long as they’re loving it, linger there. When they’re not responding positively, it may be time to move on to something else.

Receivers, there’s a message in this for you: Be actively responsive. Not only will this amplify your pleasure, you’ll be letting your giver know how you love to be touched. And that’s a positive pleasure circuit!


This is the Prime Directive of Sex

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The following is an excerpt from Succulent SexCraft: Your Hands-On Guide to Erotic Play and Practice.

THE PRIME DIRECTIVE: SEX IS ABOUT CONNECTION

1. Your sexuality is first and foremost about your connection to your self. Your whole self.
2. Your sexuality is also about your connection to others. Naturally that includes the people you have sex with—partner sex is fundamentally about connection. And it’s also about your connection to everyone and everything, including all life on this planet.
3. Sex is both natural and learned. While an important part of our sexuality is based on our inborn animal templates, an astounding amount of human sexuality is learned.
4. To fulfill your sexual potential, it helps to have structure, support and guidance — and, more specifically, accurate and effective maps and models. Anything short of that is like trying to find a special spot in the woods without a map (or with one that’s just plain wrong).


Connections your sexuality is connected to everyone and everything. Here are aspects of the web of life that surrounds and supports you, and that co-created you:

YOU

• Hardware: nature, evolution, genetics
• Software: learning, environment, culture
• mind, body, heart and spirit
• energy and matter

EVERYTHING ELSE

Families

• your family of origin (the place where nature and nurture overlap and sometimes collide)
• your families of choice (the people you choose to create family with)
• your families of creation (your kids, if you have them)

Partners

• including any people with whom you are or have been intimate, sexual, and/or romantic
• current partners
• past partners
• fantasy partners
• potential partners

Communities

• friends, acquaintances, and all other communities and connections
• where you live
• political institutions, spiritual, religious and other institutions
• other institutions
• the media
• your work
• all living beings
• the world
• the ALL… The mysteries (leaving room for all of the energies and influences that we don’t know or understand)

An Easy Way to Play with Your Pleasure: A Sexual Breathing Practice

My book, Succulent SexCraft: Your Hands-On Guide to Erotic Play and Practice is jam-packed with games, exercises and practices. Here’s a teasing, tempting taste! I find this practice super-useful in a wide variety of sexy situations.

anne-anderson-wind-blowsSexual Breathing Practice

Your brain is one of your most powerful arousal engines. You engage it through your awareness, focus and imagination. Joining it with your breath is a winning combination!

In this simple Sexual Breathing Practice you imagine breathing through your bottom (genitals, anus and perineum) at the same time that you pump your pelvic floor muscles (PFMs) and, of course, breathe. You can coordinate the pattern in whatever way is easiest for you. Try doing it the way I suggest and if that doesn’t work for you, do the reverse.

Here Goes

Take a deep breath in and pull up on your PFMs. Exhale and release them. Continue the pattern of coordinating breath and pelvic floor muscles. Begin to imagine that your breath is actually being sucked in through your bottom as you inhale and is being released from your bottom on the exhale. Imagine that you feel the air flowing into your genitals as you pull it in on your inspiration and flowing out as you exhale and release. Feel the sensations of the air rolling in and out.

Find the rate that is easiest for you. Practice and play with it until it feels natural and effortless.

Relaxing Rhythm

You can use this practice with a slow rhythm to relax. Make it nice and easy, using a pace that’s a bit slower then your normal rate. Get that leisurely rhythm going and bask in the calming practice.

Ramp It Up: Slowly Get Faster

Play with using this practice during erotic play. See what happens when you start slow and slowly increase the speed until you’re really rocking it. Take your time going from slow to rapid. The more time you take to shift gears, the better.

Fast and Furious

Try breathing at a rapid rate to turn up your turn-on. Make sure to keep each breath deep as you go fast. Use your energetic breath as a way to fire up your erotic energy.

Breathing Plus

Use a combination of various breath rates and rhythms, along with pulsing of your pelvic floor muscles and engage your imagination. Imagine that you’re using your upper and lower pumps to pump up your arousal! (You actually are doing exactly that.) Imagine that your mouth and throat are connected to your pelvic floor and genitals. (They actually are!)

Orgasm Additions

Add conscious breath practices to your next climax and see what happens. Experiment with breathing slow for one orgasm and breathing fast for another. Notice what happens.

Breath is for Solo Or Partnered Pleasure

You can do sexual breathing alone or with a partner. When you do it as a duo, you can synchronize by both doing the same pattern at the same time. Or you can do opposite patterns, with one of you inhaling while the other exhales.

Play and Experiment

Remember, there’s no right way and no way to do it wrong, so go ahead and experiment. Play with breathing through your bottom and pulse your way to more pleasure.

Read more

Non-Genital Orgasms: Question & Answer

Illustration - Baruffi - Woman on Wave

Baruffi – Woman on Wave

My “Ms Orgasm” segment on TLC’s Strange Sex is about my ability to have (and teach others to have) hands-off orgasms. That’s led to some questions, one of which I want to answer here.

NGOs? What do non-governmental organizations have to do with sex? Oh, you mean non-genital orgasms! Oh, well, that I get!

But not everyone will understand this phrase. Having been dubbed Ms. Orgasm for my segment on TLC’s Strange Sex show, I’ve been getting some good questions from folks about what an non-genital orgasm is. So here goes!

Here’s the question. Clarify please: an NGO means no genital stimulation is required to arouse an orgasm but the genitals are still affected? Yes? No?

Great question! A variety of experiences fall into the non-genital orgasm category. It includes having orgasms from stimulation of other body parts. The easiest to learn/experience are parts like nipples, nape of the neck, fingers and mouth as these have hard-wired connected pathways to the genitals. Also included is the ability to have what I call ‘hands-off’ orgasms. Some people call it ‘thinking off.’ These are orgasms that result from using inner pathways and usually utilize breath, sound, intention, imagery, movement and sound. That’s what I was doing on the show.

The key to all of it is that these are LEARNABLE skills for anyone and everyone who wants to learn. NGO skills tend to be advanced abilities that take some practice and training, although some folks can just ‘get it’ and off they go. (Or come.)

By the way, this is for both solo and partnered folks. You can learn to do these things by yourself or with a friend or friends!

And, finally, yes the genitals are affected, though in varying degrees. Men can have experiences that do or don’t involve erection (which is NOT required for orgasm). For women, there is generally lubrication and engorgement, although again it may or may not be to the degree attained with direct stimulation.

MRI studies of ‘thinking off’ demonstrated that in terms of physiological response, NGOs are no different than the traditional genitally stimulated orgasm.

I hope that answers your questions. Please let me know if you have more.

Succulent SexCraft Video Mini-Classes

Watch the Video Mini-Classes

There are four videos: An Introduction, followed by three lessons.

Introduction

You have tools of the mind, body, heart and spirit that you can use to expand your arousal and orgasmic abilities. In this mini-class I present your primary mind tool, awareness and your primary body tool, breath. I’ll give you some ideas for various ways to play with your tools. These are the skills you can use to turn-up your turn-on!


Lesson 1: Awareness and Breath

Your most foundational mind tool is your awareness. The foundational body tool is your breath.


Lesson 2: Sound & Intention

Sound can amplify sensation. Intention directs energy. Learn more about using sound and intention.

Lesson 3:  Move It!

Movement is another multi-purpose tool to increase your arousal and expand your orgasms.


OLC_Succulent_SexCraft_Website header_ProductLike learning about how to have more pleasure and amazing sex ONLINE?

Are you ready to have Sheri personally help you learn to play your own instrument with skill and passion?

You can do it in the comfort and privacy of your own home with Intimate Arts Online Education!

Join us for a 4-week deep dive into Succulent SexCraft: Supercharge Your OWN Pleasure for a lifetime of MORE!

Amplified arousal, easy orgasms, expanded orgasms and access to your own ecstasy awaits you!


Vibrator Series (part 3) – Hitachi Magic Wand

A great starter vibrator for women: the Hitachi Magic Wand preferably with the right attachments. It serves multiple purposes – external stimulation to the clitoris and other outer parts of the vulva plus, with a firm g-spotter attachment, you can stimulate the g-spot (urethral sponge).

Will a Vibrator Cause Nerve Damage? Vibrator Series (part 2)

Another vibrator myth toppled. Vibrator use will not cause temporary or irreparable damage! Allow me to explain …

 

Will Using a Vibrator Ruin Sex with Real Live Partners? Pt 1

Vibrator Series: Part 1

People worry that using a vibrator will spoil sex and will make it impossible to ever get off just by using your hand or using someone else’s various body parts. I get this question all the time. Allow me to reassure you and dispel this myth.