News flash: sex is good for you! It is, in fact, a great way to grow all aspects of your self and your relationship.
Sex is good exercise. Not many people get enough activity of any kind during the day, and especially missing is strenuous exercise. Great sex, the kind that leaves you sweaty and exhausted, is the only natural (not contrived) human activity that works every muscle group in the body simultaneously. A single orgasm burns about 300 calories, and works your body’s core muscles. Everything leading up to it works arms, legs, abs, back, chest, plus muscles you didn’t know you had (ever been a while without great sex and been sore in places you weren’t familiar with?). Sex combines cardiovascular and strength training in a single session, and you don’t even realize how hard you’re working… let’s face it, your focus isn’t on the muscle strain.
Sex is good for the mind. Sexual exploration is about imagination, testing and trying new things, and being immersed in the now. Sex facilitates being connected with your senses of touch, smell, taste, sound, and sight without all the filters you normally put on them. If you want, sex can be a path to clear the mind or a doorway to generating new ideas and expanding your creative self.
Sex is good for the emotional heart. Emotional connection requires lowering your guard and being vulnerable. When you do that, you experience emotions that are normally locked up out of protection or defense. Sex naturally takes you there. It puts you in touch with your true self. The endorphin release that goes with sex, and especially with orgasm, turns off the little voice for a while and strengthens confidence and security. Exploring fantasies and trying new things is a pathway to enhanced awareness and connection with the primal experience. The work you put in before and after sex to communicate your wants, needs, desires, fantasies, concerns, and motivations with your partner strengthens your relationship. Sex reinforces trust and establishes bonds in ways that other activities or just plain willpower can’t.
Sex is good for spiritual growth. Sex is similar to meditation in that it gives a context to clear the mind of all the junk you’re carrying around. When you choose to let go of that junk a little, when you open up to your partner’s experience and let your partner in to yours, you feel a newfound connection and freedom that enlightens and enlivens your experience. Sharing such a primal human experience with another involved individual frees the mind to just be for a while. A growing connection with yourself and with your partner deepens your love for life in general.
Want the growth sex has to offer? Don’t just ‘have sex’… sex is not a spectator sport, it’s a contact sport, a participatory act. The healthiest, most beneficial results come from immersing yourself in the experience. For each component above that you include, you get that set of benefits. When you include all of them, the overall results are much greater than the sum of the parts.
Open your heart. Open your mind. Open your spirit. And have fun!
Bonus
On a related and entertaining note, here’s 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about orgasm:
In the news
- What is ’sex’, anyway? Americans aren’t explicit when defining sex
- Some ideas to get you started? Picturing sex: Kinsey explores what turns us on
- Really, I don’t bite: Vaginas with teeth — and other sexual myths
Quote for the week
Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling…. Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love. – D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
Sexy thoughts,
Jeff
