Feeling Through Sexual Numbness

There’s a big, dirty secret out there.

One that is subtly reducing the amount of lovemaking that’s happening in relationships.

We’re having less sex than ever before and why is this so?

We’re becoming sexually NUMB!

This sexual numbness means that when we DO make love- often after we’ve finished work, looked after the family, attended to all the really important things in life, we find our sexual pleasure isn’t that inspiring. Leaving us hurt and confused and making it a long time before we make sex a priority again.

What are we saying?

Our bodies can lose their capacity to feel huge pleasure and begin to feel lots of nothing- this is known as sexual numbness and it is unknowingly ruining sex lives around the world.

Here we talk about why this happens and what simple step (and some more time invested ones) you can take to help your bodies learn how to reawaken and really feel.

This is some of what the lucky couples coming to our Couples Retreat will be learning and enjoying the benefits of.

What is Sexual Numbness?

Sexual Numbness happens because of something called body armouring.

It’s the body’s response to feeling hurt and pain- it literally toughens up.

There are 4 main reasons for this:

1. We shutdown or avoid our emotional feelings. This seems a good short term choice but over the long run it doesn’t work. Our feelings (including our sexual feelings) are all energy and when we shut down one, we shut down all of them. We can’t avoid sadness and feel joy, avoid shame and feel bliss, or avoid anger and feel passion. We might think we do but these feelings become a mere echo of what we’re really capable of.

 

2. Our hearts become armoured from unresolved emotional wounding. When we’ve been hurt and haven’t known how to heal we logically go into protection mode to prevent further injury, like putting several coats of Armor All on our hearts. The armouring makes our hearts look shiny on the outside but leaves them hardened within and less available for anything new, depriving ourselves of new opportunities for love that come our way.

 

3. The same thing happens to our genitals- they become armoured because of sexual wounding. And sexual wounding isn’t limited to sexual abuse… sexual wounding can happen simply through “doing” or having “unfeeling” sex. The current pornographic model of sex, sadly our most common teacher, is focussed on the “doing”, and on what sex looks like because porn is a visual medium. Rather than focussing on what it might actually feel like which is what we are actually interested in.  Over time this hard and fast porn style thrusting by under prepared genitals just creates sexual numbness.

 

4. At a deeper level our bodies numbness can be a pathway to deeper self understanding. It’s our bodies way of saying “I need you to listen to me”. Perhaps you have been pushing yourself in all sorts of stress creating ways and your body won’t allow you to de-stress by sexual release, forcing you to find do so in a more wholisitc way. Perhaps your body is holding a little pocket of shame from being caught exploring your genitals with a boy/girl at school? Or it might want to show you a part of your sexuality, or your masculinity or femininity that you are denying. The possibilities are endless, but whatever the message is that your body is inviting you to look at by not being on automatic pilot, it will be one worth listening to.

Because believe it or not the tissues of our genitals are very sensitive- this is their original nature. This is a GOOD thing because sensitive genitals need a lot less attention to feel amazing. Remember back when you were teenagers and a mere touch was enough to send you into orbit? Over time a “doing” or “stimulating” type of sex leaves our genitals numb, making it harder for them to feel anything much at all. This results in fewer orgasms, reduced overall pleasure, weaker erections and a decreased libido.

The way to bring our bodies back to life is to “do” less and “feel” more:

 

• Breathe deeply when you’re making love. Deep and slow breathing awakens and spreads your pleasure through your whole body. Short, fast breathing stimulates your pleasure to a peak- but if the pleasure isn’t there to start with you’ll short change yourself so begin with deep and slow.
• Give yourself permission to make sounds, as to make sound we set up a vibration in the body which can help energy move, even little sounds can help start the process.
• Instead of “thrusting’ your hips like a porn star, which tightens the muscles in your butt, hips, thighs and pelvic floor try “rocking” your hips, which relaxes and open these same muscles. Pleasure flows through relaxed muscles so this is definitely the way to go!
• Try some short, deep thrusts, instead of relying only on full length in and out thrusts (which are better for the visual shots in blue movies but which become a bit boring at home). When you’re in deep only pull back only 2 or 3 cms at a time.
• Take some time outside of sex to gently massage each other’s genitals, with plenty of oil and without any sexual agenda other than to resensitize them. Ie. with no focus on arousal. If you can really surrender to it (and breathe fully) it feels amazing and will re-energize  your genitals in surprising ways.
• Connect eyes when you’re making love- this definitely brings up the feeling factor.
• To awaken further try some sexual healing for women and for men.
• If, in the intimacy of lovemaking you feel pain or closed-ness in your heart, feel it and also share about it with your lover. This helps you take a few coats of Armor All off your heart and open it to more love. Yes it can be raw, but raw is the new sexy!

If you’d like to know more an experience some of this for yourselves take a look at our next weekend coming up in Sept 2017