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Dissolving Your Inner Walls…

March 1, 2018 By Annette & Graeme Leave a Comment

Our inner wall is the one thing we all have inside of us…

And it keeps us from what we most desire…A wall of ice

For those of you who are like us, devotees of The Game of Thrones, you’ll have seen the staggeringly impressive Wall, in the image above, many times. For those who haven’t, it’s a 700-foot tall, 300-foot thick, 300 mile long fortification made of ice that spans Westeros kingdoms’ northern border. The Wall was originally built to defend the realm against the icy creatures of death called the White Walkers, and defended by men who pledge their lives to The Night’s Watch.

Become your own Super Hero

This fantasy wall is a reminder of the equally impressive psychological walls we carry inside of us- walls we rightly erect to protect ourselves, not from White Walkers causing our physical death, but from emotional hurt and the death of our egos. And we not only have our own internal wall, we also have our very own Night’s Watch to help us become our own inner superheroes, allowing our ego to die over and over again and always come back to life.

vulnerability prevents body armouring causes sexual numbnessIt seems no matter how thick we build our wall, our emotional White Walkers still find us and we still get hurt. In fact, often the bigger the wall, the more hurt we feel, for the cracks have to penetrate more powerfully to reach us, so when they do, look out! And if our wall isn’t penetrated from the outside we find traitors rising from within to hurt us- traitors of loneliness, isolation and despair.

In reality our ‘Wall’ is still a fantasy one. It’s what separates our perception of our ego selves from our whole, soul or freer selves, depending on which language works for you, and it is often triggered in the intimacy of relationship. All you need is to see it for what it is and learn how to make the most of it.

Make it a practice to observe yourself.

This is not mentally obsessing about what you’re doing but simply noticing it.

Be your own man of the Night’s Watch, keeping an eye on your internal wall.

Notice when your wall appears.

It might appear as fear, a holding of your breath, or a tension, a physical resistance in your body.Boy in shame

It may appear as anger, resentment, self righteousness, superiority or contempt.

Or it might appear in the form of lack of trust, self doubt or thoughts of not being good enough.

It can even appear as a lump in your throat, a lump of words unable to be spoken.

Your wall may feel like loneliness, isolation and despair, a sense of the pointlessness of life.

And, surprisingly, it can manifest as a lack of sexual desire, a need to hold back, or a desire to come quickly.

Or finally, your wall might be something you have no idea about, it’s just a ‘sense’, hard to capture but real.

Once you’ve noticed it you become in charge of it, giving you the choice of how to deal with it.

  • You might take a few deep breaths, allowing your fear, resistance and the tension in your body to dissipate.
  • You can breathe into your heart, allowing your anger, resentment, self righteousness, superiority or contempt dissolve into gratitude or compassion (not thinking it but feeling it arise literally from your heart).
  • You can sit beside your lack of trust, self doubt and thoughts and speak to it as you would a small child, letting them know you’re there to support them and that you see how capable they really are.
  • You can bring your attention to the lump in your throat, breathe into it and see if the words you want to say appear. Then see if they need to be spoken, or just identified.
  • If your traitors are coming up from the inside, again just sit with them, feel them fully without making them wrong, and you will find your connection with the you that lives inside them, bringing you back to your connection with your humanity- whether it’s good or bad, being here is the point.
  • If your wall is manifesting in your sexuality, without making it wrong in any way, take the time to feel into it and see what lies beneath it, go under all the obvious reasons, let your body answer you, you might be surprised with what you hear.
  • And if your wall is of the subtle kind, not very clear but it keeps tripping you up, invite it to come close, sit next to it and make friends with it. Imagine holding it in the warmth of your hand and letting it dissolve like an ice block.

With stronger, deeper walls you may not get all the way there the first time but with practice you will.

Wth this practice you no longer have to fear, or be controlled by your walls, letting them limit you and keep you separate not only from your partner or those around you, but from yourself!

If you have any questions about this practice you can email us here or call 1800 TANTRA.

 

It’s the little things that will save your relationship

January 11, 2018 By Annette & Graeme Leave a Comment

Little things make a big difference in relationship…

All it takes is a little attention on your part.

What a wonderful intention to set for the New Year…

A concrete way of building connection and sustainability…

When we think of loving connection with our partners, as the thing that might keep relationship thriving for the long run, we can have in mind some romantic movie star moment of running into our partners arms on the beach, dinner in fancy restaurants or nights of really hot sex.

But studies by John M Gottman Phd have shown that it’s the little things we do in our relationships on a consistent basis that build the glue to keep us together for the long run.

In fact, the presence or absence of these things even predict the potential future of a relationship.

If these little moments of connection are happening, the likelihood of your relationship surviving, even thriving, is significant.

Gottman says that moments of connection are like an emotional bank account. When you’ve built them up to a sizeable tally you’re more likely to survive the moments of stress and fracture that occur in any relationship, due to the strength of connection stored in your ‘bank’.

It’s these little moments that can be so easy to lose in the busyness of our daily lives, caught up in our own heads; or to take for granted that they will happen without effort on our part.

But if you knew they would make the difference between happy ever after and the divorce court would you be motivated to make the effort?

What kind of things are we talking about here?

Well yes, there are the usual things like flowers and chocolates, or dressing up in lingerie. But they don’t even need to be as obvious as these.

Here are just a few we’ve complied:

  • Bothering to reply when your partner makes a comment
  • Doing kind things such as grabbing them a coffee on your way home
  • Looking them in the eye when they’re speaking, giving them your full attention
  • Asking about things you know are of interest to them
  • Sharing a smile that has a hint of sexual fire (without agenda)
  • Holding back that critical remark or cutting comment and taking a breath instead
  • Listening without giving advice
  • Touching the small of their back as you pass by them
  • Offering to massage their neck, shoulders, hands or feet (without sexual agenda)
  • Sharing a 10 second melting hug
  • Making your partner laugh in the middle of an argument
  • Watching TV or a movie together
  • Eating breakfast together
  • Choosing to go somewhere your spouse wants to go
  • Offering a sexual treat
  • Be willing to say I’m sorry
  • Shopping for groceries togetherSexuality of the Heart
  • Going for a walk or walking the dog together
  • Working at home, but still together in some way
  • Sharing a slow kiss
  • Gardening or washing the car together
  • Attending your children’s performances together
  • Sharing a sport, interest or hobby
  • Sharing a challenging task you can complete together
  • Supporting a point of view that is important to your partner by finding a positive in it
  • Validating them in their moment of vulnerability
  • Choosing to share some vulnerability of your own
  • Add in some of your own…

Some of these may sound so obvious as to not even need mentioning but in modern lives they no longer automatically happen. They’re powerful because they develop an important sense of “we” in your relationship.

Warning!Tangled rope on a pole

It’s important not to keep a tally of your partner’s acts of connection in order to build up a grievance against them. Instead focus on what you can do, rather than what you can’t.

If you feel resistant to the idea of doing things with, or for your partner take some time to feel into your resistance and get clear on what is behind it, don’t just ignore it.

If you offer and your partner is resistant, let their reaction be about where they are at, not you. Breathe your feelings of rejection into your heart and out through your body releasing them. Try again another time.

3 suggestions of things you can do that really touch your partner’s heart

To decrease your chances of rejection and increase the effectiveness of your moments of connection invite your partner to give you 3 suggestions of things you can do that really touch their hearts. Often when we want to give to, or connect with our partners we think of ways that work for us, when they may not hit the spot at all for our significant other. If we have something we know will really reach them (even if they seem irrelevant to us) it’s a lot easier to reach out with success.Authentic Intimacy

Share 3 things with your partner that really work for you, so they have a ready selection to choose from too. Avoid things that are a source of trigger between you, this is about connection not frustration.

Some great ways to bring some new life into the most treasured area of your life – your intimate relationship, that could literally mean the difference between the life and death of it.

If you would like to learn many more ways to connect join one of our events, a weekend or treat yourselves to a whole week!

Go To Hot Relationship Topics

 

Best Ever Intimacy & Sex

August 22, 2017 By Annette & Graeme Leave a Comment

This means dealing with the great debilitator – shame…

You wouldn’t think that a relationship built on mutual love and pleasure would have anything to do with the most icky and Man in shameuncomfortable feeling we as humans are emotionally capable of would you, Yet it does! This feeling is shame. In intimate relating we find ample opportunities for both creating shame and for healing it, particularly in our sexual intimacy. Dealing positively with shame will take your intimacy and sexual pleasure to a whole new place.

What actually is shame? Shame is a feeling of going blank or numb, of wanting to hide, to disappear, even cease to exist. Shame carries thoughts of being wrong, or not good enough in some way, even in every way. The pain of shame is what causes us to disconnect from ourselves, our power and our light, to be less than who we are. Shame is one of the great unspokens in the world and it’s not actually intimacy we fear but the shame that lies within it.. Deny it though we might, shame is alive and well under our shiny, all together surfaces to one degree or another.

It is this belief in our innate wrongness or inadequacy that creates our deepest blocks to real intimacy (in-to-me-see).

     Intimacy and the potential for shame coexist. To create intimacy, we need to expose ourselves, leaving us open to feeling shame. Shame disconnects us from ourselves, and we can only create intimacy with another to the extent we’re connected with ourselves. All the love and best intentions in the world cannot prevent moments of shame simply because in intimacy you have two different people seeking to connect their differences in the one place in order to be seen, understood, respected and loved. Our fear of shame keeps us from seeking the intimate connection we crave. It also prevents our surrendering fully to pleasure.

The joke here is that all of us are wrong.

Humans are about as imperfect a species as you can get! Yet it is in our imperfections that our perfections lie, it’s where we find as much of a meeting place as in the love and perfection we strive for. Shame is about wanting to hide, so it makes sense that healing shame is through its opposite- through openly sharing ourselves with another, inviting love into our shame.

Shame can be healthy of course, it is important to acknowledge the shame we feel when we’ve done something wrong so we’re motivated to correct it. What we refer to here is toxic shame that serves no real purpose apart from separating us from who we are.

For some, shame is a blip on the radar, for others it is a daily nightmare. Our shame gives us our core beliefs, even if we would rather die than admit to them.

Core beliefs such as:

  • I am wrong/bad
  • I’m not good enough/not enoughWomen are losing interest in bed and saying no
  • I’m not important
  • I’m not loved/wanted
  • I don’t matter
  • I’m a failure
  • I’m invisible
  • I’m unworthy/worthless
  • I’m powerless/unsafe
  • I’m alone/don’t belong
  • I’m different/crazy
  • I’m too much
  • I’m bad for wanting to be sexual

In our desire to avoid the icky, uncomfortable feeling of shame we understandably develop an armoury of strategies to keep us safe from it.

Shame Avoidance Strategies:

  • Intellectualizing, staying in our mind keeps us safe
  • Tensing up and contracting in our bodies
  • Disconnecting from ourselves to avoid feeling
  • Not breathing, or breathing shallowlyBoy in shame
  • Focussing on things outside of ourselves such as work, kids, social media
  • Avoiding our sexuality or having sex in a tense and defensive way
  • Dumping our shame on others through criticizing, judging or shaming them
  • Going into anger, fear or sadness to mask our shame
  • Numbing ourselves with any number of addictions to avoid intimacy
  • Seeking to be perfect as in perfection there is no shame (even though perfection is unattainable)
  • Being unwilling to trust each other, for if we don’t reach out there is no risk of shame
  • Keeping ourselves small, not taking risks, keeping our mask of persona firmly intact and not allowing our real selves to be seen
  • Not having boundaries- not having to say no, allowing our partners to steam roll us
  • Being in our Super Hero- when we’re larger than life shame can’t find us

Shame Busting Activities:

 It’s vital to know that avoiding shame is avoiding relationship, it’s avoiding intimacy and sexual pleasure beyond our wildest dreams. So what can we do to minimize the impact shame has on our intimate relationships? As you’ve seen, avoiding shame doesn’t work. Instead, try playing with some of these shame busters that will help you reconnect with yourself…

  1. Play with becoming empowered in shame. The next time you feel embarrassed or shamed rather than making it wrong, turn it around and make it ok. Connect with the feeling, move towards it and say to yourself ‘It’s ok to feel shame’, as making shame ok helps to disempower it. Take a few deep breaths and let the embarrassment flow out of you. If you can stay present with it, even if just for a few moments, and know that it is connecting you with your humanity and your core self, your shame will shift into love.
  2. Take risks with shame- where you want to close be willing to open, where you want to hide be willing to show up and deal with your shame as in no.1.
  3. Share some, or all of your shame story with your partner (or a non judgemental friend). Own it as your experience. Sharing with another helps you get reconnected to your humanity. Remember staying open to the feeling as you share allows shame to shift.Intimate sexuality
  4. If your partner shames you, take control by agreeing with them! Say ‘yes, sometimes I can be an idiot’ or whatever they’re attempting to lay on you and have a laugh at it, find the freedom in your humanity! The power lies with the one who can laugh at and accept themselves as the truly are.
  5. Because our sexuality is layered in cultural and personal shame being willing to own your sexuality as a positive thing is a HUGE shame buster. Own your sexuality by believing it is beautiful, even sacred, giving yourself permission to have pleasure, create it for yourself and sharing it. Rather than blocking shame out and locking it into your body, feel any that comes up during sex and move beyond it, allowing your sexual energy to flow more freely.
  6. Shame busting will also make it easier to reduce your own shaming behaviours (and yes, we ALL have them) because in not running away from your own shame you’ll know directly how bad it feels. Reducing shaming behaviours in your relationship will make it a happier, more respectful and loving place to be.
  7. When you want to act out an addiction feel the shame that lies beneath it, release it then make a choice about your behaviour from a clearer place.

So are you ready to bust shame in your relationship (and in your life)? The gifts are never ending…

 

 

The Sexiest Organ In Your Body

July 5, 2017 By Annette & Graeme Leave a Comment

Wait for it…The sexiest organ in your body is not your genitals, or even your mind…

It’s your heart!Your heart- the sexiest organ in your body

Your heart is a mechanical pump that pumps oxygenated blood & nutrients through the body in order to keep us alive. How can it be a tool for relationship, and as the sexiest organ in your body, be a tool for the best sex of your life? We show you how in 3 profound Heart practices below, but first a bit of background.

‘The heart is an organ if fire’ from The English Patient

Energetically, intuitively, psychologically and emotionally your heart is a whole lot more than a physical organ. It’s a whole lot more than the fluffy pink images we associate with  Valentine’s Day cards as well. Your heart is the centre of love, courage, wisdom, gratitude and forgiveness with its own unique brand of intelligence and communication that makes it powerful beyond measure. Your heart is the union place of the inner masculine and feminine- where we cease to be just male and female and become simply human. It’s also the place of creative possibilities.

This more typically eastern way of viewing the heart is today being backed up by western science studies done by the HeartMath Institute, amongst others, who say that ‘Heart intelligence underlies cellular organization and guides and evolves organisms toward increased order, awareness and coherence of their bodies’ systems’ www.heartmath.org/FAQS.

At Oztantra we see the heart as an important part of creating inspired, magical relationship and lovemaking, whether you believe in it in this way or not…We see it over and over again, couples getting in touch with their hearts and opening to each other (and themselves) in ways that defy description. If we had to put words to it, we’d call it being touched by Big Love. Not love as in romance or the giving of ourselves to another (though these flavours can lie within it) but something much more-maybe we could call it opening to the mystery of love.lasting longer lover

For those of you looking to get laid this might sound quite airy fairy and lacking a physical approach yet if you think back to the early days of your relationship wasn’t this some of the best sex of your lives, where the magic of it lived? This is not only due to the lust of young (or at least younger!) love but also the openness of our hearts, when you each thought the other perfect and there was no real hurt between you.

Your heart’s many qualities can offer moments of exquisite tenderness, boundless love, challenging lust, profound sadness, huge anger, blissful freedom, generous playfulness, fierce motivation and much more. Your heart has no agenda, it is not attached to things looking a certain way (like your ego), it just is. Your heart can help you see beneath your partner’s behaviour into their hurt that is driving their hurtful actions allowing you to choose an empathic response. And as surprising as it may seem your heart is a powerful tool for accessing greater sexual pleasure, as an open heart literally creates more room for sexual energy to flow freely through your whole body, leaving you feeling expanded, desiring and creative! Which sounds like a great place to make love from, or even just live life from.

The thing is, your heart might work mysteriously but there are things you can do to support this mystery to show up, starting with choosing to be in greater relationship with your heart.

So what is your current relationship to your own heart? Do you see it as mere mechanics, or are you open to the possibility of it being something more? Can you think of time when you felt heart open and really close to your partner, or you ‘just knew’ something in your heart that helped you, that you needed to listen to? Or a moment when even though you might have felt like strangling your significant other you suddenly notice how cute they look sitting there or you’re reminded of how much you love their smile you fall in love with them all over again in a single moment?

Yet we have a tendency to ignore our heart

We do this for one of four reasons:

  1. We haven’t connected with it in this ‘intangible feeling’ way, we judge it as ‘woo woo speak and don’t believe in listening to it.Tantric fire in the heart
    2. It takes a moment or two of ‘dropping our story’ to hear what it has to say.
    3. We often don’t like what it has to say, for the heart cuts through the bullshit of the ego mind, the part of us conditioned to stay safe and look for approval, and gets to the ‘heart’ of matters.
    4. Our heart is where we can carry our deepest emotional hurt and we’d rather avoid this than take the time to feel and heal it.
    Are you willing to listen to what your heart has to say?

In the beginning it can be tricky to know what is truly your heart and what is your ego’s needs masquerading as your heart. How do you tell the difference?

Your head (or Ego brain) speaks from 2 Value Logic:

Amongst much analysing, thinking and questioning your Ego Brain uses both positive and negative judgements, along with self-justification and an underlying need to be on top of, or in control of any given situation or person. Head talk is driven by our internal programming, our belief systems, our memories and our self-identity with its fears about the future or blaming from the past. Your head focusses on two value logic- this is black and white, right and wrong thinking, saying ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’, or ‘It is this’ or ‘It is that’ with no other possibilities. Often these choices leave us in a conundrum in our relationships, struggling with win/lose, good/bad choices, where one person has to lose and of course we never want to be that person.

Your heart (and Soul) speaks from 4 Value Logic:Maintaining Your sense of Self

Heart talk is simple yet limitless, infinite and unrestricted, possibilities and is ok with not knowing. Your heart won’t tell you to ignore your fear, instead it will take you beyond it given a chance, to a place of deeper logic. This is four value logic, rather than just the two value logic of right/wrong, good/bad, all/nothing. Four value logic is ‘I am this, I am that, I am both, I am neither’, ‘this is right, this is wrong, this is everything, this is nothing’ all at the same time. It allows us greater understanding of a situation and of ourselves. For example, from our hearts we can say, it is ok for my partner to love another person even though they already love me because the heart is capable of much greater love than our minds can comprehend, instead of only listening to our fear based ego that says because this person is in a relationship with me they cannot love, look at or even think about anyone else’.

The heart uses simple language

It may speak about letting things be, letting them go, finding compassion, acceptance and understanding. Sometimes it might say it’s time for you to get off your butt and having a go or doing the one thing that is the scariest for you, such as maintaining a boundary or giving out some tough love. Heart outcomes are ultimately the most satisfying, better for you and those around you (even if they can’t see it straight away), helping you break out of old ways of being and motivating you to maintain the new ones you choose. Our hearts never seek power over another but power within ourselves. Our hearts also have a very good in-built bullshit detector and will call us on the places we (or others) might be avoiding our/their higher truths.

Love is not blind- it sees more not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less. Rabbi Julius Gordon.

Whatever energy we expend in our lives comes back to us either directly or indirectly so it’s worth putting out there what you really mean from your heart because this is what you’re going to get back!

This has been true in Annette & Graeme’s own lives, our hearts started off being a very nebulous woo woo concept to us and have now become a rock solid part of our self-understanding, a pathway to connecting with each other and those around us. Whenever our minds are overly busy with unhelpful thoughts we know our thoughts are probably out of alignment with our hearts inbuilt bullshit detector so we better take a moment to check in and listen…We offer you 3 Hea

Practice 1: Connecting with your Heart man meditating

Take a moment now just to stop and feel your heart. Close your eyes, breathe deeply, feel into your body then focus your attention in the centre of your chest, slightly to the left. Think of something that you appreciate in your life and feel the physical sensation of that for a few moments. Is your heart open, closed, full, warm, heavy, light or blank? Is there sadness, love, gratitude, even anger or shame there? Whatever the feeling is just be with it exactly as it is for a few moments. Do this as often as you can to start building your relationship with your ‘energetic’ heart for the more you connect with it the more it will speak to you. Your heart doesn’t speak in words but in intuitive knowing’s- those things you just know, even though you might not understand how you know- it’s magic.

Practicing when you’re in a place of ease can help you access your heart’s intelligence more easily in times of intimate challenge, to hear it speak from wisdom rather than fear or resentment, creating connection rather than dissonance.

Practicing when you’re about to, or are making love will bring you into a deeper place of openness and connection with yourself. Breathing this openness through your body allows your sexual pleasure to become more full bodied as you’ve made room for it, for pleasure that you can then share with your partner, along with the openness that created it. Again, it’s magic!

Practice 2: Falling On Your Sword 

There is no doubt about it, feelings can really hurt sometimes, especially those in our hearts. They can even occasionally be overwhelming, too much to bear, leaving us instantly overwhelmed, lost, light headed, nauseous, cramped up, bent over, filled with intensity or thoroughly wretched. And it is a very natural impulse to want to resist this hurt. Yet we have found in our own experience, and in working with others, that welcoming these feelings in (remembering that our feelings are just energy in motion) and literally letting them penetrate us, even penetrating our hearts, helps them to shift more almost immediately.

It’s a bit like imagining you’re falling on the sword of your feelings…taking a breath in helps. The only difference being that unlike with a real sword, being penetrated by our feelings won’t kill us. In fact, it will free us from the quite thick walls most of us have built around our hearts. It sounds like a crazy thing to do but if you give it a try you’ll see it really works.

However, this doesn’t stop our logical ego minds from believing the intensity of the feeling is going to kill us. This is merely the ego’s desire to protect itself. The opposite is actually true, not feeling is more likely to hurt us if we block and lock these feelings into our bodies, turning them into stress and eventually disease.

Letting these feelings in can feel like the most illogical thing in the world, yet we’re not trying to be sadistic here. It is like the beautiful Buddhist practice called Tonglen, which is about letting go of resistance to suffering and having it transformed into joy or love.breaking open the heart

Rather than trying to avoid the inevitable hurt in intimate relating you can see it as a tool for moving beyond itself.  Over time you minimize your suffering and build on your moments of Big Love by being able to live more inside your heart.

The only way to understand the benefit is to try it for yourself, perhaps beginning with a small moment of hurt. Rather than contracting, take a breath in and imagine the energy of the hurt literally penetrating and moving through you. You will find, if you can totally let go of resistance the hurt transforms immediately.

It works with big hurts as well. Although big hurts such as betrayal by a partner, loss of a job, an unexpected financial loss, death of a spouse can have several (or many) layers of hurt to move through. It may take longer, but the practice is still the same. The gift of this practice is that your vulnerability in it will invite your partner closer to you rather than pushing them away, creating a deep intimacy rather than chaos and withdrawal. The intimacy of being with a partner in this depth of process is indescribably beautiful.

Heart Practice: Re-Opening Your Heart 

Just as your feelings are either flowing or not, your heart cannot be fully open to one person and closed to another, it is either open or closed to all. This means that you cannot fully embrace a new lover (even though it might feel like you have) until you’ve let go of the hurt from lovers of the past. In fact, you might find that opening your heart to a new love releases hurt from the past, this is the gift that love brings. Just because you choose not to live with a past love doesn’t mean you can’t still love them from a distance, your heart is large enough for all, the more the merrier!  vulnerability mends a broken heart

Take a moment just to stop and feel your heart as in Practice 1. Once you can feel your heart imagine your past love in front of you and feel any feelings that arise in you, whether there is grief, anger, resentment, fear, shame etc. Don’t judge them or be in the story of them, just focus on the feelings in your body and let the memories move through your mind. Breathe any associate feelings through you, feeling yourself becoming lighter and your heart more open. Acknowledge any regrets, allowing your 4 Value Logic to find you a new perspective on this love. Notice something about them or your time with them you can feel grateful for, even if it is just something that you learned, because gratitude is a great heart opener. You might need to do this a few times till you feel complete but it is time worth spending for the greater love you will have access to as a result.

We trust you have a newfound (or newly reinforced) appreciation of your heart and its capabilities as the sexiest organ in your body. If you have any concerns or fears about trusting your heart in this way we can support you so contact us on 1800 TANTRA or email here.

 

Owning Your Shadow

June 7, 2017 By Annette & Graeme Leave a Comment

Owning your shadow is the most powerful thing you can do for your relationship…

When we first fall in love it seems we are perfect for each other. As time goes by you see the cracks beneath the surface where they seem not so perfect for you, but in fact they still are. It just means its time to start owning your shadow.

Because even though at a conscious level we choose someone to be in relationship with, the attributes that live our unconscious mind even more powerfully choose someone for us who is most able to activate our shadows.owning your shadow

Our shadows are the parts of us we hide from ourselves. They’re the parts of us that we have decided are unacceptable and we need to hide them or we won’t be loved.

They can be negative traits or even positive ones. We hid the positive ones because they were unacceptable to our family, culture or religion of origin.

But what we hold in shadow leaves us feeling incomplete, always lost and looking for what is missing.

We can look for it by our neediness and in our addictions- to each other, to love, sex and the list goes on. But the answer isn’t there, it’s in us.

Our partners show us our shadows by unconsciously triggering us into feeling them.

They do this by pissing us off. When our partners are pissing us off they’re actually giving us a gift.

We find it by looking at ourselves rather than pointing the finger and trying to change them. For pointing the finger and trying to ‘fix’ our partners or our relationship is where most relationships start to fall over. Over time when our partners are no longer willing to accommodate us, or us them, is when relationships end. We miss the gifts they offer us along the way, gifts that will take us deeper into connection rather than push us away.

How do we recognize our shadows?

When your partner pisses you off drop your righteous ego and instead of focussing on their behaviour, what they’re doing wrong and how they should fix it to stop you from hurting instead look at your own feeling for the answer. This feeling will be one we’ve tried to shut down in ourselves and accessing it will take our relationship much further than blaming our significant other. This doesn’t mean we have to accept any and all behaviour our partners give us, far from it. It just allows us to sort it from a clear, untriggered place.

Owning Your Shadow Practice:

(a) Centre and ground yourself with your ABC and think of something your partner, (or even ex-partner, parent, anyone) does that pisses you off or hurts you the most. Take the time to really flesh out this experience in your mind- how are they looking, what are they saying/doing and find the feelings that always come along with it.Crying man being told I don't love you anymore

(b) Detach the image of your partner from your mind and focus on your own feeling instead.

(c) Identify where in your body your feeling is. Feel it fully, staying with it even if it’s painful.

(d) Trust this feeling has a message for you and go into it to see what lies inside it- notice whether there is there a word, an image or another feeling you can identify

(e) Ask yourself what is this calling forth in you? Keep going deeper until you find the original pain point in you.

(f) You’ve got it when you see it is really nothing about your partner at all but something in you.

(g) Ask yourself what does this need to be healed in you- just acknowledgement, something you need to express, a new belief or behaviour to choose? What support do you need to do so? Can you imagine it in your mind’s eye and give it to yourself? (Your mind cannot tell the difference).

(h) The next time you observe this behaviour in your partner notice how you can choose to respond differently and create a better outcome in the same situation.

With major triggers that have a lot of emotion or layers in them we may need to do this process a few times to get it all.

How do you know when a shadow has been fully seen and owned?

  • The first step is you being able to see it.
  • The second is that you feel like it controls you.
  • The next step is being able to see it with some detachment and less emotionality.Freedom
  • When it’s fully shifting you might experience an inner feeling of a letting go, or ‘shift in yourself.
  • Sometimes you can ‘see’ in imaginary veil clearing before your eyes as you move out of illusion into greater clarity.
  • You can sit in ease in situations that in the past would have triggered intense emotion.
  • You feel open to the other person in the situation yet without attachment to any ‘stuff’- yours or theirs.
  • You can see your shadow and have a really good laugh at yourself.
  • You can play out owning your shadow in your sex lives, (with a consenting lover) eg. the bad boy/bad girl, the naïve innocent, the powerful dominant etc.

If you need support in seeing and owning your shadow contact Annette or Graeme via email or PH 1800 TANTRA.

Vulnerability: Curse or Blessing?

April 17, 2017 By Annette & Graeme Leave a Comment

Vulnerability: The Blessing And The Curse of Intimacy

We’re caught in the trap of desiring intimacy but resisting vulnerability with all kinds of mind games and psychological protection. In the end we think it is easier to learn the skill of vulnerability…vulnerability prevents body armouring causes sexual numbness

We’ve been told that vulnerability is a scary, dangerous place. In fact, vulnerability is simply deep openness. It’s beautiful. In fact, it’s how we actually create intimacy. Without it we can share each other’s company, do things together and share common interests. But without it we stay on the surface of each other, and of ourselves.  We repeat- vulnerability is the deep level of openness and availability that will make your relationship work. Being vulnerable means we’ve let our psyche’s emotional walls down, allowing ourselves to be seen- both by others and by ourselves. It can happen in moments of joy, such as at the birth of your child, being fully loved by another, being given a moment of grace when you feel most undeserving, as much as in moments of fear. In fact, it’s in the openness and space created by vulnerability that love can enter, we have to make space for it. Love can enter by itself and magically create a connection yet if you’re willing to make vulnerability a practice you will experience a much higher level of Big Love in your relationship, and in your life.

vulnerability mends a broken heartVulnerability is always scary but any danger comes from our lack of understanding and inability in dealing with it. When we think of vulnerability we’re conditioned to think of something being wrong, that we’re literally in danger. Vulnerability has warning signs around it saying ‘don’t go there, don’t go there’. From here we make the logical choice to try and defend ourselves or attack that which is making us feel vulnerable. When we do this we miss out on the love, connection, healing and self-understanding that lies on the other side of our vulnerability.

The key in Vulnerability

Is if you can make the paradoxical choice to make your vulnerability ok and welcome it in our need to defend ourselves drops away.

When we make vulnerability ok, choosing to feel it, allow it, even welcome it in, we are in a very powerful place.

We’ve been taught that vulnerability is about exposing or opening ourselves up to another person, or to something outside of ourselves. We call this vulnerability without. In vulnerability without our focus is on opening ourselves outwards where we leave ourselves vulnerable to attack or rejection, especially if we are looking for something from the person we’re opening to.  It is emotionally risky because in doing so we expose the mask of our most unfamiliar, helpless and wounded self.

From here we either:disconnected couple

  • Contract in our feelings, creating an experience of intense emotional and even physical pain
  • Go into a story to justify our fear or woundedness, whether it is true or not
  • Become desperate for the person we’re exposed to to validate or comfort us
  • Pick up on any potential threat in what our partner says or does and react, whether the threat is real, or our projection
  • Go on the offensive, attacking the other to stay safe in ourselves
  • Close down as soon as possible and put our defences back up

Many a relationship has been destroyed by attacks that come from the discomfort of this kind of vulnerability.

Vulnerability Within

on the other hand is opening in to ourselves, holding on to ourselves rather than to another. It is about literally opening inwards rather than opening out. This Crying man being told I don't love you anymorevulnerability within ourselves becomes a place of strength, going beyond our weakness to where we no longer feel the need to hide or protect ourselves. We find we are not weak and helpless but vast and powerful. We’re less dependent on our partner’s response. We’re totally emotionally open and available to ourselves and to our partners, even to love itself.  We surrender to ourselves, our mind sinks into our heart. We’re freer and more connected to our essence.

We don’t say these things lightly

When we say vulnerability within ourselves leads us into experiences of more love than we ever dreamed possible we’re very serious. As a society we are becoming more physically comfortable, smarter and more in control of our ego selves and our world. We have an ever increasing number of ways to escape feeling discomfort. The byproduct of this shift is more loneliness and depression and missing out on the gifts Big Love can bring. We’re creating more external success but our question is, does this replace the value of Big Love itself? Experiencing Big Love, love beyond description is one of the benefits of facing our vulnerability.

If we stop buying into the fear stories of vulnerability we find it is a feeling like ‘come and get me world, do your worst because here I am, with no more walls and nothing more that can hurt me!’

What makes vulnerability uncomfortable is merely our resistance to it. The more willingly we embrace the power of vulnerability within the easier and more rewarding intimacy becomes.

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change” Brene Brown

Understand that if you only experience pain and not freedom in your vulnerability No oral sex orgasmyou have probably remained contracted in your feelings rather than fully dropping though them into the essence of you that lives underneath your pain and your story.

Holding on to yourself

is choosing to stay present with yourself and your feeling body whilst you show up, no matter what you feel. In this way intimate communicating becomes an act of self acceptance, validation and love, a way of maintaining your sense of self and becoming intimate and available in your relationship at the same time. This is the magic of intimacy.

In his wonderful book Passionate Marriage David Schnarch, Phd states that “Intimacy hinges on validating yourself rather than trusting your partner to make you feel safe.” 

Making vulnerability OK and practicing taking your vulnerability within takes both courage and practice. Choose respectful places to practice your vulnerability in, places where you can hold onto yourself if it is unseen or rejected. Ask permission of the person you’re sharing with if they’re open to your sharing. You can start outside your relationship if with your partner feels too big, or start with subjects with manageable levels of vulnerability for both of you.

 Vulnerability Practice:

When you are next sitting down with your partner (or a friend), practice your ABC, look them in the eye and notice what comes to you as something about yourself that would be challenging for you to share. Ask their permission first and choose to share it, using ‘I’ language. Share whatever it is without looking for any particular response. The importance is not what you are sharing but the opening you’re creating in yourself by sharing it. Hold onto yourself and validate yourself for going there. Don’t need your partner to do it for you, if they do see it as a beautiful bonus.Heart to Heart communication

The magic in all of this is that because you are taking this risk in showing with your walls down and your partner is more than likely to feel drawn towards you rather than to reject us as you fear, for your exposure of your essence creates attraction. And if they do happen to reject you, you are ok because you are connected fully to yourself so there is no abandonment and little pain.

‘I’ language

Go to any personal development workshop and you will most likely be invited to speak in ‘I’ language. This happens for good reason. Our culture has a habit of saying ‘you’ when we really mean ‘I’ or ‘me’ that subtly disconnects us from feeling our own experience fully. Saying “I” also lets the other person hear us more easily as we are clearly talking about our own experience.
Make it a habit to practice ‘I’ language when talking about your own experience.

Your partner’s response: Remember your partner’s response is about them not you, just as your response is about you not them.

What we are responsible for is about us. Remembering this makes it easier to hold to ourselves when sharing.

Supporting someone in being vulnerable: If someone asks you to hear them share something vulnerable there is much you can do to support them:

Bring all of who you are into the moment:
Clear your mind
Connect with your body
Breathe into your heart
Gently focus your eyes on them
Be in silence
Don’t try to understand them at an intellectual level, let their words penetrate you, feel their heart
Feel what is behind their words
Meet them in who they are being
Validate them
Share what their sharing may have touched in you, which is a beautiful way of validating their offering.

“The way you become divine is to become wholly human”. Bishop Shelby Spong

If you would like to learn how to practice vulnerability within join us for one of our upcoming events here

 

Training for the hardest job in the world

February 7, 2017 By Annette & Graeme Leave a Comment

 

That’s being in authentic intimate relationship…

And it’s a job we receive very little, if any, relationship training for…

Intimate relationships can look very different from the inside to what we hoped for at the beginning, can’t they? The person who started out as our soulmate somehow becomes the one put on earth simply to frustrate us! From the seeming the best person in the world to be around to one that can feel scary and even unsafe.

If this is you, then you’re not alone.Tantric Touch in the grass

Even though you might be thinking everyone else seems to have their relationships sorted we can tell you that this is not true. People have been doing relationships for thousands of years and though their nature keeps changing the one constant is that they all offer their challenges.

We often hear that problems in relationships are simply due to poor communication but we’ve seen the reasons are more complex than this singular factor. Especially in today’s world where our expectations of relationship are higher than ever before. We want our partners to be partners, lovers, friends, providers, nurturers, buddies, therapists, mind readers, sex Gods and much more. Our lives themselves have become more complex, involving much change and challenge, we’re living longer than ever and our relationships need to be resilient enough to cope. Not only this but the person we choose in relationship with may not be the boy or girl from down the road we’ve known all our lives but someone from across the country or across the world, with a different set of beliefs, perhaps a different culture or vastly different life experience. Love doesn’t seem to adhere to any particular sets of rules.

Our intimate relationships are now expected to offer us:

Safety/Security/Support/Comfort/Belonging
Familiarity/Identity/Certainty/Longevity
Curiosity/Pleasure/Excitement/Adventure
Fun/Exploration/Playfulness/Edginess
Intimacy/Connectedness/Freedom/Autonomy
Love/Sex /Mystery/Meaning

Remember when relationship was automatically about strolling down the aisle and committing to stay together “till death us do part” no matter what? For some of us it may still be. We’ve been taught to plan our futures according to this currently existing model of relationship in society. We’ve wanted to grow up, fall in love with someone of the opposite sex, get married, have a successful career- at work if you’re a man, at home if you’re a woman. We’ve aimed to live together in this ideal family unit that will be there forever and a day. Yet no matter how we try our lives don’t necessarily conform to these ‘rules’. We fall out of love, our work becomes more important than our relationships, we fall in love with someone of the same gender, we get ill and change the way we think about life, our children build our relationships or tear them apart, our goals change, we fall in love all over again with the same person or with someone different. The old ‘rules’ no longer apply, yet we still feel like we’re failing if we haven’t abided by them. This is why we need a new model of what intimate relationships are.

We like to focus on fixing the communication aspect of relationship because it seems like it should be an easy thing to fix, but the bigger picture of the relationship means it is not that simple. We believe that part of the struggles that occur in relationship are due in part to a lack of adequate training.

happy coupleOur intimate relationships are potentially the most important and fulfilling part of our lives yet we receive very little training for them.

Let’s face it, if we were offered an extremely challenging job requiring multiple skillsets we weren’t sure we had very few of us would be willing to sign on without negotiating some training and ongoing support. Particularly if our income was based on the quality of our daily performance. It wouldn’t make sense.

So why do we do exactly this with our relationships, stepping into them blind and not asking for help?

It’s largely because everyone around us does exactly the same, including those we learn the most about relationships from, our parents. It’s as if we carry an inbuilt belief that once we get in to a relationship everything will magically be ok because we love each other. It’s the same with our sex lives, they should just ‘happen naturally’. So it’s easy to take them, along with our partners for granted, getting into the habit of making them our last priority instead of our first. This unconsciously creates the loss of spark in long term relationship we dread, leaving us thinking that we’ve fallen ‘out of love’. And in this disposable world we can fall into the trap of constantly having an eye out for a replacement, seeking a new and supposedly easier option, draining further energy from our current relationship and reducing its chances of survival. We see this over and over again in our work, couples thinking the spark has gone, when actually it’s just been dimmed by the suffering that’s been put on top of it.

Heart to Heart communicationThis is why it’s vital to get the training you need to address the challenges your relationship offers rather than bury your heads in the sand, becoming machine like and operating from habit, wishing things were different without taking action. Or doing the same things over and over and expecting different results. This is just suffering.

Where you’re at is not your responsibility. Staying there is your choice.

 

Understand that as a result of this lack of training when things go wrong you blame either your partner or yourself for being inadequate, uncaring or not good enough, rather than seeing a person simply lacking in skills. A person just like you, who dearly wants connection, who is probably trying just as hard, hurting just as much as you, and is just as much in the dark as you.  So the next time you want to cast blame or judgement for your hurt, take a moment to remember it’s not so much a lack of lovableness creating the friction in your relationship as a lack of knowledge and skill. This makes is easier to give each other a hug, rather than a blast.

If you want to learn more about how to be good at relationship come to an event, or contact us today…

 

 

 

 

 

Getting to know the stranger

January 25, 2017 By Annette & Graeme Leave a Comment

Listening with curiosity rather than judgement…

It’s human nature to get into habits…

And these habits are also a way of avoiding  living constantly in the unfamiliar, which can be highly stressful for some…

In relationship, habits can work both for and against us.

Creating habits does work for us in the building of unique little rituals only we share, creating feelings of connection.

Some habits can also work against us, in creating and allowing  unhealthy relationship patterns, such as taking our partners for granted.

Habits like taking our partners for granted can be a fast track to relationship boredom and dissatisfaction.

Here is how it can happen, and that it is also possible to learn embodied listening with curiosity as a way out of  boredom and  into fascination.

In new relationship there seems to be so much to talk about.

In the bubble of new love you’re completely fascinated by each other, literally hanging on each other’s words.

You’re fully engaged in the moment with them, hours seem to disappear, making time seem meaningless.

If you think back on it, you were probably not only hearing their words you also noticed their facial expressions, the nuances of their body language, subliminal messaging and even their tone of voice.

Your own body was involved in the conversation as well, feeling tinglings of excitement, an openness and an aliveness that felt totally engaging.

But after a while it begins to seem as if you’ve heard it all before.

You assume there’s nothing new coming and your interest level wanes.

It becomes easier to check out the TV, Facebook or your emails rather than give your partner your full disconnected coupleattention.

You believe you know what this once fascinating person is going to say before they even open their mouths and quickly start to tune out and think of other things.

It’s the same thing with your own sharings, you think they’ve heard you all before, that they’ll be assuming they know it all and that you will have little new to say.

Sharing becomes a bore and you wonder where has the spark gone?

But the spark hasn’t really disappeared, it’s just that where you’re coming from in your listening isn’t creating or allowing the spark to ignite.

You’re listening to your significant other from your intellectual self, where your judgements and assumptions come easily.

Are you judging your partner based on the past rather than experiencing them fully in the now, as you used to do ?

Are you assuming you know what the other’s talking,  rather than actually listening to what they are trying to communicate?

This becomes an assumption that you know everything about who the other person is, and listening to answer, rather than listening to actually hear and feel into what they trying to communicate.

You might actually know who they’ve been, but you don’t know who they’re being right now if you’re not truly listening, and miss out on seeing their growth and change.

And you’ll miss who they’re becoming as it hasn’t happened yet.

Don’t you want to be there to find out?

The information they’re sharing may be the same as they (or you) have shared before.

But this person has lived more of their life since the last time they shared and their life experience makes the different.

They may be in a different space emotionally or energetically.

Don’t just listen to the story and assume you know all about it, and therefore all about them (which is not only Creating Safety in Intimacylimiting it is also shaming).

Do yourself a favour and see your spouse in this moment as a whole new being you’ve never met before.

Do all those things you used to do without thinking, put all of your attention onto who they are being right now, observe rather than judge, listen with your body, listen with your heart rather than your head, feel into them as well as hear them.

Ask open questions, inviting more of them to emerge..

Ask opening questions that invite deeper sharing such as ‘how was that for you?’ or ‘can you tell me more about that?’

This spark of curiosity in you allows previously unforseen questions to arise in you so you can ask them.

All this extra information will be totally new and interesting as it has never happened before in exactly this way.

The same is true for you, you’re different from the person you were when you last heard this information. What is it that you are noticing in yourself?

Relationships are either growing or dying

One of the things that stops us from fully seeing or listening with our whole self is that we may feel uncomfortable or have fear over what we may find.

We may hear our partner’s pain, feel their walls or maybe their lack of presence with us.

We’re tempted to make this about us but the skill is in seeing that where they’re at is about them.

How we perceive them is about us.

If you can separate yourself from them and hear, see and feel them as a multi layered, unique being at this particular moment in their own world, having their own experience from a place of curiosity you will find a fascination that never leaves.

Offering our presence in this way can allow our significant other to share more openly as well.

There’s nothing like an engaged, available listener to inspire a person to new heights.

After all, isn’t that what used to happen?

Your partner will feel seen, heard and even loved, unconsciously inviting the same from them.

Yet this is about being curious for ourselves, to create our own satisfying relationship experiences rather than expecting anything in return, for expectations deny possibilities.

Practice: Experience your next conversation with your partner as above rather than just listening with your intellect and see what happens!

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