Sheri answers the question “How Can I Help Bring My Partner Back Into the Moment?” during the Ask Anything about Sacred Sex webinar.
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Sheri answers the question: How Can Sacred Sex Help My Man Last Longer?
Sheri answers a question during the Ask Anything about Sacred Sex Webinar: My partner is great but doesn’t like to kiss. Is that a problem?
Sheri answers the question: Can Sacred Sex Help My Man Last Longer?
I answer the question: How Can I Use Sacred Sex to Heal and Rekindle My Sex Drive?
Check out Intimate Arts Online, our recorded virtual courses to learn at home and at your convenience!
Courses include 3- 4 classes, extra resources, & delicious home play assignments!
Find out more about Intimate Arts Online here and discover just how much pleasure, satisfaction and joy you can have!
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Sheri answers the question: Sacred Sex–I’m a Beginner; Where Do I Start?
Here’s one of the questions and my answer from last night’s Ask the Sex Teacher ANYTHING About Sacred Sex webinar.
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Bliss Dance by Tony Webster
All primal cultures recognized the sacredness of sex. After all, sex makes life, so how could it be anything other than sacred? In cultures that especially revered sexuality, Eros was considered a path to connect to the gods and goddesses, to the Divine. Sex was considered a prayer and an invitation to fertility for all life and all beings. Any babies that resulted from sex were an added blessing.
Many of these cultures used similar practices and techniques to draw on the power of Eros in service to the sacred. My approach to sacred sex is drawn from the many paths that cultures throughout time have followed to honor the spiritual in matters of the body and the bedroom.
‘Sacred’ means different things to different people. For our purposes, we can start with the idea that sacredness is what makes things feel special, cherished and unique. For me, it’s more than that, though. The ‘sacred’ is closely related to the notion of ‘spirit,’ which I see as something real and also to be celebrated.
When I refer to spirit, I’m not talking about religion or even spirituality. Perhaps because of my decades as a practicing midwife, I think of spirit as life’s incorporeal aspect, as the part of you that entered your body-mind when you took your first breath. It’s the magic spark that animates you beyond the mechanistic physical plane. But it’s not just in you—it’s in everything. When I write about connecting to spirit, I mean connecting to the sanctity of life, the holiness of all beings, and the sacred fire within you. It’s the Divine not as a separate, superior being, but as the mysterious force that’s manifest in everything. When your sex is integrated with your spirit, it can lead to not just transcendent mind-blowing sex, but a personal and ecstatic experience of the Divine.
Spirit is what the Native American Lakota people call Wakan Tanka, the ‘Great Mysterious Power’ or the ‘sacredness that resides in everything.’ It’s the ineffable energy that, among other things, connects the carnal erotic to the mystery beyond matter.
We have been endowed with tools that enable us to ride sex’s magic carpet into the sacred realm. Some of these are optional—sacred sound, for instance. One, however is not. This is sacred intention.
Sacred IntentionHolding the intention to make something sacred is your most basic spiritual tool. You can use your other spiritual tools to make your intention more concrete (which often helps), but your most essential skill is the intention to have your sexual practice be sacred.
There’s something magical in this. If you hold the intention for something to be spiritual or sacred, that’s what it becomes. It’s a simple yet profound practice. You can use sacred intention whenever you have sex, be it solo or partnered, a quick snack or a prolonged feast. Define a sacred purpose for your pleasure, create a consecrated container, touch on your sacred intention during your erotic activities, appreciate and affirm the holiness of your erotic actions—any of these choices can be transformative. If you wish, you can dedicate your erotic energy and your orgasms to a spiritual purpose such as enlightenment, blessing or healing.
You can practice sacred intention whenever you wish. Depending on the circumstances, it may not take you to the experience of the sacred. On the other hand, it may. One thing is certain—you won’t experience sacred sex if you don’t hold a sacred intention.
You Say You Want an EvolutionI’ve been a Wholistic Sexuality Teacher, midwife, nurse and gynecology practitioner and an enthusiastic sexually active woman for many decades and I still don’t have a simple answer to that question. I can tell you what it’s not. Sex isn’t just some brief lusty activity involving your reproductive organs, hidden behind a closed bedroom door. It’s so much more then that.
Sexuality is a force that is colossally complicated and mesmerizingly compelling. It’s an unavoidable part of being human, yet shrouded in mystery. Sexuality is an interplay of desire and denial, fantasy and reality. It’s a complex physical and biological template tangled with an equally elaborate cultural overlay. Sex is powerful and promising, chaotic and conflicted, ecstatic and blissful, frustrating and disappointing. For some it is demonic, for others, divine. Sex is emotional, energetic, and often overwhelming. Its power is personally pervasive and culturally ubiquitous, with messages both hidden and overt. Potentially, our sexuality can be deeply connecting; of us to ourselves, to others and to the great mystery of life. Unfortunately, that potential is never achieved for many people.
Currently, sex in our world is based on negative models grounded in ancient history, perpetuated by modern media and the convoluted chaos of contemporary culture. For many, sex is a source of unhappiness, frustration and a deep unsatisfied longing. We live in a unique time and place where sex is overtly in-your-face and covertly in your pants, all the while harboring undercurrents of shame, guilt, fear, denial, lust and self-loathing for our bodies, our desires and our pleasures.
I believe that we need a new model of sexuality that incorporates a bigger picture of what sex is, of who we are and what we can be as sexual beings. I see a desperate need for a model where sex is honored, celebrated and sacred. So I made one up.
We had a sexual revolution, with its bumpy gains, imperfect progress and some serious backlash. Now it’s time for a sexual evolution that I call Wholistic Sexuality. In essence, my Wholistic Sexuality model is about connection.
This philosophy brings sex back into connection with all aspects of our selves and our lives in a way that honors the power of sexuality. Sexual expression, pleasure, intimacy, fun and joy are necessary to be integrated and whole. In order to be a fully vital human being, we need our sexuality to be intact, functioning and healthy.
This does not imply that in order to be healthy we must be in sexual relationships with others, but rather, we must create and maintain a good sexual connection with ourselves. In other words, Wholistic Sexuality is, first and foremost, about your relationship with your Self. This includes your relationship with your body, your history and experiences, the beliefs that you were exposed to as you grew up, your current and past relationships, your community, the media, your culture, and all other aspects of your world. All of these components and more create your internal sexual relationship. Indeed, your sexuality is a hologram of your inseparable mind, body, heart and spirit. Your sexuality is ultimately, about everything.
It seems everyone these days is striving to be healthy. Exercise, meditation and healthy eating are now mainstream ideas, supported by countless cultural messages. But sex hasn’t yet emerged from the shadow of repression and shame to become part of what is considered a healthy lifestyle. Only when you connect your sexuality to the rest of your life, will you become integrated and truly healthy.
I believe that a sexual evolution is beginning and will continue to occur. It’s a part of the evolution of personal and global consciousness that is occurring planetwide. And since I believe that evolution begins at home, I encourage you to explore and enhance your connection to your own delicious sexuality. After all, without sex, life itself would be impossible. And a whole lot less fun!
(By Sheri Winston and Carl Frankel)
Because Prince was the rare artist-celebrity who was both deeply religious and openly sexual, his untimely passing has placed a sudden spotlight on the topic of sacred sex. His view of the relationship between sex and God provides invaluable insights to people who want to practice sacred sex, but aren’t sure how to do it.
Many religious faiths are vehemently sex-negative—anti-sex and anti-pleasure. You can only get to heaven, these traditions tell you, by transcending the body and its shameful desires. Because these attitudes have permeated our culture, many people see sex as sinful and the farthest thing from sacred.
Prince was the absolute opposite of sex-negative. He believed that sex was one of God’s greatest gifts to humanity. For him, all sex was sacred. He believed that we can have sex that both feels amazing and connects us with the Divine. That’s a pretty radical belief in a world where sex has become deeply associated with sin.
Here are four takeaways from the Gospel of Prince about how to have sex that is both hot and holy.
1. Sacred sex isn’t ‘sex lite.’ It’s not sex with the raw, lewd, hot stuff stripped out. Prince made it clear that sex can be sacred and wildly profane at the same time. Since sexual desire was a gift from God, unbridled lust was one of many possible ways to praise Him. (An especially fun way!)
In Darling Nikki, he meets the song’s protagonist when she’s “in a hotel lobby, masturbating with a magazine.” They go upstairs and have a “funky time.” She’s quite the bedmate: Prince’s body “will never be the same.”
Sounds like quite the delightfully raunchy encounter, right? Only the song ends with a surprise—these words played backward:
“Hello, how are you? I’m fine, ‘cause I know
That the Lord is coming soon, coming, coming soon.”
Prince is suggesting that no matter how hot and dirty the sex gets, God is fine with it. Although Nikki turned him into a “dirty little Prince” whose one desire was to “grind grind grind,” that didn’t make him a sinner. He was “fine.” His journey into lust wouldn’t keep God from “coming soon.”
Great news! You can get down and dirty and still have it be sacred.
2. There’s a big gap between Prince’s view of sex as inherently sacred and the notion many people have of sacred sex as a sort of special sauce that elevates the usual sexual experience. Although many people associate sacred sex with ancient erotic traditions like Tantra, that’s not required. In Adore, Prince writes:
“When we be makin’ love
I only hear the sounds
Heavenly angels cryin’ up above
Tears of joy pourin’ down on us.”
There’s no mention here of special breathing techniques or any of the other sacred-sex moves you can study up on in the esoteric traditions. Prince and his partner were madly in love and making love. That was good enough to make it sacred. How do we know? Because the angels wept with joy for them.
Special techniques can help—a lot, actually—but sex doesn’t become spiritual just because you paint by the sacred-sex numbers. Sex is sanctified by what your soul brings to it.
3. Prince believed that the body is inherently sacred—both a gif
t from God and a path to God. In The Human Body, he writes:
“Can U get me excited?
Excited enough 2 thank the God above 4 the human body.”
Here, too, we see him making his familiar sex-and-God connection. If you turn me on enough, he’s saying, the spirit will come over me and I’ll cry “Hallelujah!”
We can follow Prince’s lead on this one, too. Sacred sex transmutes physical arousal into powerful feelings of gratitude to God for giving us hearts that can love as intensely as they do, and bodies that can experience such amazing pleasure.
4. For Prince, sex was right up there alongside salvation as part of God’s grand plan—so much so, in fact, that the Second Coming, as imagined by Prince, sounds suspiciously like a sex party.
From Sexuality:
“Stand up everybody, this is your life
Let me take u to another world, let me take u tonight
U don’t need no money, u don’t need no clothes
The Second Coming, anything goes
Sexuality is all u’ll ever need
Sexuality—let your body be free.”
That’s right, folks—Prince basically had his God presiding over an orgy. A holy orgy. Talk about radical sex-positivity!
Which brings us to our fourth takeaway: If you want to practice sacred sex, be like Prince and be sex-positive.
Prince left us many gifts, including his vast musical output and his amazing performances. Perhaps his greatest gift, though, was his unshakable belief that sex didn’t cause our downfall. Quite the opposite, actually—it’s what brings us back to the Garden.