How Can I Use Sacred Sex to Heal and Rekindle My Sex Drive?

May 21, 2016/in Blog, Hot Tips, Relationships, Sexy Skills, Sheri Winston Blogs/by Sheri Winston

I answer the question: How Can I Use Sacred Sex to Heal and Rekindle My Sex Drive?

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Sacred Sex: How do I Bring it Up with My Partner?

May 12, 2016/in Ask the Sex Teacher Anything, Blog, Sheri Winston Blogs, Video Blog/by Sheri Winston

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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Keeping Relationships Hot! Shine the Love-Light (Part 3)

February 21, 2015/in Blog, Hot Tips, Relationships, Sheri Winston Blogs/by Sheri Winston

Keeping Long-Term Relationships Hot!

Shine the Love-Light (Part 3)

Opening the Windows

In part one, we covered kissing and in part two, touching like you did when you first fell in love can sustain the heat and turn-on your turn-up even in long-term relationships. Here, I offer one more area to explore: shining your love-light onto and into each other.

Seeing Into the Other

Eye-gazing is a powerful way to connect. Cliché though it is, the eyes really are like portals that allow us to see into the heart (and possibly the soul) of another. They show our true feelings, vulnerabilities and desires.

It’s not always easy to eye-gaze, though. Looking deeply into another’s eyes can be dauntingly intimate. You need courage to show up fully and stay present, to see and be seen.

When we’re first enamored of another, we tend to gaze deeply into their eyes, beholding the wonder of our beloved. Wanting to eye-gaze comes naturally, but it tends to be limited to those times when our love hormones are in overdrive. As the years go by, most couples spend less and less time looking into each other with wondrous love. Or, if we do look, it’s not with the open-hearted delight and passion that earlier overflowed through our eyes and face and heart. The result is less intimacy and connection.

New lovers don’t need to set aside special time to use their eyes to pour their love into their mates, but if we’ve been together for a while, we’ve probably fallen out of this habit. Help yourselves fall back in love, by remembering to look at your partner, with love, throughout your regular interactions. Make giving a loving look a regular and frequent occurrence.

In addition to making love-looks an ongoing habit, you can also set aside time for eye-gazing practices as another way to increase the flow of heart-energy between you.

Eye-Gazing Galore

Here are a few suggestions for some simple eye-gazing practices.

Get into a comfortable aligned position where you can easily look into each other’s eyes. Lay side-by-side or sit facing each other in chairs or have one partner straddle the other’s lap.
Decide which eye will be the focus of your gazes. One particularly useful trick is to look into each other’s non-dominant eye, which is theoretically more connected to emotional state. Look into each other’s eyes. Allow your gaze to be soft and relaxed. Let your gaze softly focus, resting on one eye. Try to avoid switching from one eye to the other or glancing at their mouth.
Simply look into each other’s eyes, breathe and be. Relax into the experience.
To make sure your gaze is filled with love, it can be helpful to silently say loving things like “I love you” as you look. Try doing that and notice how your heart expands as you repeat loving words and how more love-light shines out.
The more love you feel, the more you give, the more loved your partner feels, the more they give, creating a positive love loop between you.

Oh, Baby

Another practice is to see your partner as if they were a shining newborn baby. Imagine seeing your sweetie with the love, delight and open-hearted joy that greets a new and beloved child.

You Are Divine

One more option is to consciously imagine that you’re seeing the Divine in them.
To expand this practice, try to coordinate your breathing, so that you’re both in the same rhythm. As you sync up your breathing pattern, it often becomes easier to stay in a tranced out, heart-centered love space.

Let There Be Love

Incorporating the actions of new lovers into the habits of long-term ones is crucial to keeping our love luscious. The actions are simple: looks of love, sweet deep kisses and tender touches. Remembering to do these simple actions isn’t so simple. The new love biochemicals aren’t there to drive our impulses toward intimacy. To create sustained ardor, we must call on our conscious choice and our intention. When we add these sorts of fuel to our fires, they can burn on, and falling in love can be transformed into a sustainable life of living in love.

Want more long-term love lessons? You got it! Here’s Part One: Kiss Like You Mean It and Part Two: How Touching

Keeping Long-Term Relationships Hot! (Part 2)

December 17, 2014/in Blog, Hot Tips, Relationships, Sexy Skills, Sheri Winston Blogs, Succulent Sexcraft/by Sheri Winston

Touch Like You’re Madly In Love

How Touching

In part one, I discussed how the period of time when we’re madly in-love tends to come to an end for most couples. However, we can use the unconscious behaviors and actions that came naturally at the beginning of our relationship to keep the blaze burning over the years.

One key is to consciously choose to engage in the same type of intimate early-in-love behaviors. In my last post, I suggested that you fire it up with some liquid lip love, with luscious wet kisses.

Next on the list: the fine art of touch.

Tender Touching

Touch was your first sense, beginning while you still floated in your mama’s womb feeling held, surrounded and safe. You were already touching your own body before you even emerged.

Touch is so fundamental that without it, babies will wither and die. As grown-ups, we won’t die from touch deprivation, but we won’t be as happy and healthy as we would be if our minimum daily touch needs were met. Yet most of us are starved for this essential tactile nourishment.

For people without intimate partners, it can be challenging to get all the touching you want and need. Even people with partners may be touch deprived if we’ve allowed the frequency and the spectrum of touch to diminish.

Articulate Touch

Touch is a basic form of communication—we all speak this universal tongue. It’s also one of our first languages of love, beginning with mother and infant.

At a subtle level, touch transmits intention, emotion, energy, relaxation or tension, and the rhythms of the body. If someone is touching you in a loving way with the intention of giving you pleasure, it feels very different than if they’re touching you solely for their own enjoyment. Comfort, anxiety, caring, attention and distractedness are all transmitted through physical contact.

While touch is a language everyone shares, many people are tremendously confused about the purpose and value of touch, how to share it appropriately, and how to do it masterfully. Touch is complicated, delicate territory. It’s easy to miscommunicate about it. And it’s not always easy to touch with great skill and finesse.

Whether or not a particular type of touch is pleasurable is completely subjective. For instance, the sensation of being tickled may be something you find dreadful or delightful. Personal preferences notwithstanding, when we fully activate our kinesthetic intelligence, we’re most likely to touch our partner in a way they enjoy.

Remember, though, that no one is born knowing how someone else wants to be touched. Which is why we can’t rely on touch alone. To give exquisite touch, even if we’re totally attuned, it helps to add other modes of communication like sound (“Umm!” “Aah!”), words (“More pressure, please”) and body language.

Play A Touching and Feeling Game!

Play this game in total darkness or use blindfolds. This will remove all the visual stimuli and help you focus solely on the sensations of touch.

Touch each other with full attention and awareness. Use your breath to get centered and stay present. Use sounds of pleasure to amplify the sensations and give feedback..

Alternate your attention: Shift your awareness to the part being touched, then toggle back to the part doing the touching. Imagine that you’re stroking velvet as you slide your fingertips along your partner’s skin. Focus on how lovely it feels on your palm, then toggle your attention back to your partner’s skin. Run your fingers through their hair, alternating your awareness of its texture against your fingers with attention to your partner’s pleasure in having their hair stroked. Try to balance your focus so that you’re really feeling as you touch.

After you’re done, have a chat about what happened, what worked or didn’t and what you learned.

The Four Languages of Touch

There are four languages of positive touch—nurturing, healing, sensual and sexual. To keep a relationship vital and satisfying, I believe we need to share all four types of touch.

Here’s a brief introduction to the spectrum of touch.

Nurturing touch transmits caring and acceptance. It’s the kind of tender touch a loving parent gives their beloved child. It helps us feel loved, valued and worthy of being loved.

The second language of touch is therapeutic touch—any form of contact that heals, eases stress, promotes well-being, repairs bodily damage, restores health or palliates pain.

The third language of touch is sensual touch—any form of contact designed to heighten the senses, amplify body awareness and magnify perception. Sensual touch is not explicitly erotic. While it might be a warm-up on the path to arousal and is often an excellent prelude to sexual touch, it’s not designed to be a turn-on in and of itself. Think of it as turning on the senses, not the genitals.

Last but definitely not least, there is sexual touch—any contact that arouses and stimulates. Sexual touch entices your erotic energy to come out and play. It teases, titillates, ignites and (hopefully) satisfies erotic desires.

Remember, new lovers caress, hold, rock, stroke and creatively explore all kinds of different ways to discover and delight with contact. An important strategy to sustain your relationship’s passion is to consciously incorporate all four touch vocabularies into your connections.

Want to know how to fall in love over and over again? Did you miss the first part of this series of posts? No worries — here’s Part One: Kiss Like You Mean It and Part Three: Shine the Love-Light.

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Keeping Long-Term Relationships Hot! Luscious Kissing (Part 1)

December 15, 2014/in Blog, Hot Tips, Relationships, Sexy Skills, Sheri Winston Blogs/by Sheri Winston

How to Fall In Love … Over and Over Again

Look around at couples in any busy restaurant and you can probably tell which ones are madly and newly in love. It’s easy to recognize the telltale signs—they gaze into each others’ eyes, can’t keep their hands off each other, seem fascinated by everything their partner has to say and find opportunities to kiss.

Like other animals, our biological mating template is in full force when we connect to a special and especially delicious partner. These behaviors are the result of a biological cascade—we’re awash in a falling-in-love chemical soup. It’s a delicious, intoxicating, delirious cocktail … and it doesn’t last. For the vast majority of people, the in-loveness compounds run out within the first four years of a relationship. We can continue to experience all sorts of other forms of a love connection like caring commitment, deep attachment and special friendship. But the sparks of ardent desire usually evaporate and our burning passion cools.

What can we do to sustain or rekindle the fires of desire?

One technique is to act like you did when you first fell madly in love. Think of the in-love period as your relationship training wheels. Now, after so many years, the biological support system is gone and you’re on your own to feed the fire and keep the connection sizzling.

Act Like You’re Madly In Love

Here’s one suggestion for using the falling-in-love template to keep those hot and heady feelings alive or to revive them if they’re slumbering.

Photo See-ming Lee. CC Lic.

Kiss Like You Mean It

Remember how when you first were in love you wanted to smooch, lap up, sniff and nuzzle your lover? Can you recall the pleasures of sweet soft lips pressing together? Remember the sensations of that delicious yielding mouth slowly opening, followed by hungry exploring and some serious deep wet kissing.

Have you forgotten? Has your kiss fountain dried up and become a scarce desert of dry little pecks? When is the last time you had a hot make-out session with your long-term sweetie?

If it’s been awhile, then it’s time to put wet kissing back on your menu.

Kissing creates a sexual circuit between lovers, an intoxicating reciprocal scent and taste response loop. Arousal heightens your senses, increasing your pleasure in the flavor and aroma of your partner’s body. As you get more turned on, your arousal causes your mouth to become tastier while heightening your senses—you taste better to your lover and they to you. The more you do it, the more turned on you get, and the more delicious the kissing becomes. You’re creating a positive kissing feedback loop.

Not only is your sense of taste intermixed with your ability to smell (and get turned on by scent), but your mouth, lips and tongue are some of the most richly innervated areas of your body. That’s why licking, kissing, sucking and nibbling are such significant erotic activities. You get the delicious combination of taste, aroma and tactile delight all rolled into one delicious ball.

Biochemical Bliss

In addition, kissing mingles hormones and biochemicals in a way that not only shares but literally increases the body’s love and lust substances. You can literally taste and smell your playmate’s arousal. Arousal tastes divine!

One of the simplest ways to get some juice flowing is to take up the art of ardent kissing. Have a minimum of three ‘wet kiss dates’ a day. They can be sweet and soft gentle explorations or hungry feasts of ravenous desire. Your kiss trysts doesn’t have to be long—even a minute of serious succulent smooching will start to shift the energy from ‘ho-hum housemates’ to luscious lovers.

Put a ban on the parched pecks! Shift from dry lip skims to liquid lip love when you wake up, leave for work, come home or go to bed. Or take ‘kiss breaks’ and do a few minutes of lusty lip locking a few times a day.

There are so many ways to kiss. You can use your lips, mouth and tongue (and occasionally even your teeth) to give and receive, to be soft or fierce. Your oral equipment provides a huge variety of perfect ways to play with your lover.

Serious smooching is an easy yet powerful relationship fire-starter. It’s an intimate and inspiring way to lubricate your relationship and re-ignite your partner passion. Make time for making out!

Want more ways to keep long-term relationship hot? You can have it. Here’s Part Two: How Touching and Part Three: Shine the Love-Light

Want even more? You can have that, too!

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What Open Relationships Are NOT!

January 26, 2012/in Blog, Relationships, Sheri Winston Blogs/by Sheri Winston

Unashamed Love Rites!

With all this public talk about ‘open marriage’ it might be helpful to define what it is not. It is not having an adulterous affair. It does not involve lying, cheating or stealing (as in stealing your partner’s choice about who does what with whom). It is not that one person wants more sexual partners and the other does not. It is certainly not when one person is already having an adulterous affair. That’s not open, that’s cheating!

Open marriage is a consensual agreement about relationship boundaries. It includes non-monogamy in many forms, polyamory and swinging being two common ones. In general, polyamory focuses on relationships that include intimacy and erotic connection with more than one partner. Swinging tends to focus on the sex, with a more recreational, non-ongoing connection, although the intimacy may creep in with repeated liaisons. In any case, the hallmarks are that everyone involved is open and honest and in agreement about what’s happening.

I wince when I hear uninformed people talking about how “open relationships don’t work”. They often add that “I tried it once (or a friend did) and it was unsuccessful” or, more likely, that it was a relationship disaster. I often respond by acknowledging that while that may be true, and that clearly monogamy “doesn’t work” either. Otherwise why would we have such high rates of divorce, dissatisfaction and adultery?

Relationships, whether monogamous, polyamorous or open in any sense all require good relationship skills to thrive. Maturity, the ability to work things out and, above all communication skills are needed for sustainable intimate connections to prosper. In general, I would say that open relationships do require a higher level of skill. But let’s face it in order for any relationships to sustain over time, to be joyful, loving and remain connected takes work (and play too, but that’s another topic).

It is so past time to start to shift our cultural attitudes about relationship forms. The time is now to support integrity, honesty and tolerance for consensual agreements of all sorts. I would love to see a world where we valued honesty and integrity as the standard for all relationships whatever form they take.

Sexless Marriages: 5 Tips For Re-Igniting The Spark

July 1, 2011/in Blog, Relationships, Sexy Skills, Sheri Winston Blogs/by Sheri Winston

It’s all over the news—there’s an epidemic infecting long-term intimate connections. Partners still love each other, but they’ve lost that erotic charge.

Sexless marriages are apparently commonplace. I hear the moans (not the good kind!) all the time in my classes and practice. “The honeymoon is over.” “I used to be so hot for her.” “We never have sex anymore!”

Where does it go? Why is it that the most burning passionate relationships fade to a warm glow? Does monogamy inevitably lead to monotony and from there to sexual indifference? The fact is that the biochemicals of in-loveness, that simmering pheromonal soup of sexiness, does indeed diminish over time. Across cultures, the average time that a couple stays together is only four years, just when that complex and heady perfume of lust and its chemical underpinnings fades away.

It’s just reality—familiarity leads to feeling like, well, family—and we’re biologically programmed to not want to have hot steamy sex (or any sex at all, for that matter) with our family members.

While it’s definitely natural for desire to wane, we do have the power to keep the flame burning if we know how to stoke the fire. So what’s a couple to do if they want to stay together and sustain a state of loving lusty heat with each other?

Personally, I believe that great sex is the glue and the lubricant of long-term relationships. So, to battle the forces of boredom and combat the spreading tide of lustlessness, here are five tips to sending that sizzle arcing between you again:

The First Kiss of Adam and Eve by Salvador Viniegra, 1891

1. Hot, wet, kisses! No kidding. Cut out that dry peck of a kiss as you go off to work. Forget about that quick cool little lip press that you could just as easily give your mother. Really deeply kiss each other. It doesn’t have to take long, but a minute (yes, a whole minute) of soft, wet, slippery lips and tongues is an instant antidote to feeling like family. When we taste each other, we’re sharing and stirring the chemical stew of seduction and putting the burner on simmer for later feasting. I recommend a minimum daily dose of 5—10 seriously steamy kisses per day.

2. Eyes to eyes. Think of new lovers and how they devour each other with their eyes. Long, soulful looks pass between them, as they shine that love-light into each other’s eyes, which connect directly to their hearts. Prescription: act like lovers, look at each other the way lovers do and you’ll fire up that ‘you’re so yummy, I can’t take my eyes off of you’ energy.

3. Go to bed early. Turn off the TV, the computer and the phones and go get in bed! Make an intimacy date to snuggle and talk, to pet and play. It’s okay if you’re tired. Make the date about connecting, without the pressure or expectation of sex. Just make time to touch and be in physical contact, to unwind and share. Sometimes it will lead to sex, sometimes not. That’s alright. Just make the time to be in your bodies together, and good stuff will come out of it. Turn the outside world off, and you’ll create space to turn on to each other. Recommended dose: at least once a week, and more is definitely better!

4. Have play dates. Laughing leads to sex. Smiles warm the cockles of the heart (and elsewhere). I don’t know where I got the idea when I was younger that sex is serious business, but it’s also about fun, play and creativity. Toys and props are good, but nothing beats the power of your own imagination and inventiveness. (What if I slather this there and rub that on this?) Make up games. (I’ll show you mine if you show me yours!) Play pretend (pirates anyone?). Remember, it’s sex play, not sex work! Joy really is the best medicine in the bedroom, so giggle, tickle, wrestle and romp and you’ll be sure to have your minimum daily requirement of sexy fun.

5. Breathe together. Breath is one of our most basic tools for connecting with ourselves and others. When we breathe together, we entrain all the rhythms of our bodies. When we play with exchanging breath, we fire up our erotic energy. There’s no one right way to us to breathe, so feel free to make this a game to explore and experiment with. Slow down and let your breathing relax you and help you tune in to yourself and your partner. Or speed up and allow your breathing to pull you into deeper arousal. Encourage each other not to hold your breath, but to keep it moving as you ride the arousal and orgasmic waves. My best medical advice: practice conscious expanded active breathing often. Do it alone. Do it together. Do it with love. Do it often to get a healthy erotic flame flowing freely between you.

If the embers of your relationship are going out, now is the time to stir the coals, add some fuel and get the blaze burning again. Let’s end that insidious epidemic of sexless relationships and show those newlyweds that old fires can blaze even hotter than new ones!

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