Add a Little Tantra Spice To Your Life 
By Philip Millroy - Relationship/Sexuality Coach

Tantra is an ancient spiritual tradition that honours the sacred union of the male and female energies. Tantra is the practice of allowing an individual to recognise their sexual nature and master their sexual energy. By exploring their sexuality, an individual is able to identify and bring to the fore limiting and restraining emotional blocks. Tantra teaches processes and techniques to heal these emotions and aid personal and spiritual growth, using the healing powers of sex and intimacy.

Sexual energy can be creative at all levels - physical, emotional and spiritual. As humans we feel attraction, arousal, awakening, alertness, passion, interest, inspiration, excitement, creativity, enthusiasm - Sexual energy is at play in these situations, Deepak Chopra says, "When we feel these states of awareness, we must put our attention on our experience, nourishing it, experiencing it feeling each moment with joy in our awareness." What Tantric sex looks like will be different for different people and you don’t have to have a partner to practice Tantra. Tantra is taught by many teachers around the world, who have their own take on it, influenced by the cultures they grew up in. Certainly a key feature of Tantric sex is the importance of breathing, and slowing down sexual behaviour compared to the hectic, orgasm-focused Western approach.

Intimacy - Create your Space
This should be a comfortable area that is playful and relaxed. First, clear the room of any attention-grabbing clutter. Next, decorate with flowers, candles and cosy fabrics. Scent is really important to our sensuality, so try natural oils like jasmine, ylang-ylang, or rose. Make sure your bed is as comfortable as possible with soft sheets and a number of pillows. Lastly, chose a soundtrack of music that you both like. Play it softly in the background to enhance your mood.

Breath
By harmonising your breath you're sharing all of yourself with your partner and is one of the easiest ways to sync with your partner. Inhale while they exhale and vice versa. As your partner breathes out, you'll find yourself taking their breath into and down through your entire body.

Eyes Open Contact
Holding your partner's gaze is one of the most intimate and spiritual aspects of sacred sexuality. It takes concentration and, most of all, trust. Keeping your eyes open is fundamental to a deep connection in spiritual intimacy. It is not easy to be seen, especially by the people we love; we may feel exposed, or even silly.

Slow It Down
Use this time to fully focus on each other. As in meditation, when your thoughts wander, gently guide your attention back to your partner and the magic of the moment. Foreplay is an essential joy and adds to the bliss in Tantra.

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The power of sexual healing is presence. What is presence? That deeply felt sense of awareness, strength, safety and trust that comes from being grounded and focused when a man is fully in his masculine. Being witnessed and affirmed in this healing by the masculine presence can not only heal emotional wounds but awaken the divine feminine which resides in every woman.

Sex education in society, for the most part, has been influenced by disease and dysfunction thanks to revenue driven pharmaceuticals, religion, media and X-Rated movies which portray an unrealistic picture that is usually just a cover up and the cause of disharmony in many relationships.

Today’s day-to-day stress makes it important to reconnect to love within your body. By allowing yourself to be sensually nurtured, you can start to relax and unwind. You will learn to slow down, stop the constant thinking (mind chatter), learn to be present in the moment, recognise primal triggers and to feel connected to yourself and within your body.

Your own sexual energy, no matter what social, religious or emotional blockages you might have around your sexuality, is the most powerful energy source you possess. Years of psychotherapy might not be able to achieve the immense emotional release of a tantric healing session. Your own sexuality can help you to free yourself up and to let go of past issues and self-imposed limitations.

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With gratitude
www.realfeelings.net

FREE Information sessions This Tuesday 14 May
The intention of the this session is to outline the Real Feelings  Relationship/Sexuality Coaching & Education offerings to see where you may be able to gain further understanding of the past habits, fears and emotional triggers that are shaping and sabotaging your current relationships and sexual fulfilment.

We will also discover ways of redefining current relationship boundaries, personal boundaries and sexuality practices to achieve a higher vibrational level of intimacy with yourself and/or a partner and demystify basic tantra as a way of life.
The sessions are participant driven, so this is your chance to ask questions around deepening your understanding and experience of relationship, sexuality and communication.

• Are you experiencing self sabotage?
• Feel fine when single, but needy in Relationship?
• Has your Relationship turned into a Partnership?

• Long time since you enjoyed physical touch?
• Just 'allowing' instead of 'receiving' touch?
• Problems achieving orgasm? Lack of trust?
  
• Feel your body tighten when you say 'yes' or 'maybe', but mean 'no'?
• Previous therapies just not worked?
• Feel drawn to find a fresh new way to live?

If you answered YES to any, discover more >>

When...  Next Free info session Tuesday 14 May @ 7pm, call to book please

• 2nd Tuesday evening each month at 7pm, Maroochydore, Sunshine Coast

              2013 evenings; 14/05, 11/06, 09/07, 13/08, 10/09, 08/10, 12/11, 10/12, 14/01        

• 4th Tuesday morning each month at 10 am, Maroochydore, Sunshine Coast

              2013 daytime; 28/05, 25/06, 23/07, 27/08, 24/09, 22/10, 26/11, 28/01

Who
All singles and couples 18+ (sorry child free) max 6 participants per session

Where
Primary School Court, Maroochydore Queensland (Just 5 minutes walk from Sunshine Plaza)

Booking
YES, booking essential... address confirmed upon booking

What to wear or bring
Just comfortable cloths and an open mind as to what else is possible in your life. 
The information session is very relaxed and fully clothed
Please bring and recommend friends
Tea / coffee / water will be available 

Cost 
Nil, just 2 hours of your time open minded without judgements

I look forward to our meeting and opening a discussion around all that is possible in the areas of relationship and sexuality your life, your invited to call 0419 171 664 to reserve your place, please consider others arrive 15min prior. 

What type of monogamy do you want?
by Steve Sweeney

At last, you have met someone special.

You’re feeling intimate, connected, sexually charged, excited and just cannot wait to get back in the sack and feel them again. Gaze into their eyes and experience once again that intoxicating, addictive mix that can only come from being with your new lover.

Time goes on and now you spend more time together, getting closer and deeper, it’s just what you have been seeking for so long now. As the relationship develops there are adjustments, compromises and decisions to negotiate.

This is a time where it is tempting to hold back and not be entirely truthful about what we really want, as we can feel like we run the risk of losing who we have just found. Or in having the passion and intensity diluted and diminished with disappointment, or unmet expectations.

It’s so easy to compromise yourself at this stage of a new relationship, and once done there can be hell to pay to change these decisions further down the track. Apart from the compromises, just how many of these negotiations and decisions are based on assumptions and unexpressed expectations?

Take the foundational concept of monogamy for example. It means the same for all of us - doesn't it?

You’re mine and I’m yours - we don’t have sex with anyone else - nothing could be simpler. But is it?

In my work with individuals and couples over many years, it is clear there is a range of very different ideas coupled with quite a large spectrum of varied sexual and relational behaviour, that is labelled ‘monogamy’.

And many, if not all of us, assume and expect that our partner has the same definition of monogamy as ourselves. An assumption, that can be the cause of much; hurt, disappointment, frustration, dismay and sometimes betrayal.

This range of ideas and behaviours seems to begin at one end, where a couple, or at least the dominant partner’s concept of monogamy, is restricted to mean they only spend time with each other and are definitely not allowed to look at another person - without causing great angst, fear or conflict within the partnership.

While another couple’s concept of monogamy, not only includes being able to appreciate attractive members of the opposite (or same) sex, but potentially the active pursuit of them as potential partners - in ménage a trios, or two couples exploring sexuality & pleasure together.

Further out on the edge of this spectrum, a couple may decide to have; a lover on the side, attend swingers parties, invite a sex worker, sexuality teacher, or tantric practitioner into the relationship – while still considering themselves to be in a monogamous, committed relationship.

There are many more variations to this spectrum. Yet the question is ‘Where are you on this spectrum of various behaviours and expression, that constitutes monogamy?

And maybe more importantly, where do you want to be?

These are important foundational questions to bring into honest and open consideration with your current, or prospective partner. Although challenging and definitely scary for many – having the safety within the relationship to consider these questions, gives permission for each partner to take more of a risk being authentic in expressing their sexual desires within the bounds of the relationship.

This in turn has the potential to deepen the trust, love, intimacy and bonding between you. Honouring the vulnerability experienced in expressing the depth and breadth of your authentic sexual desire, and what it is that constitutes monogamy for you.

So the next time you find yourself intoxicated with lust filled, starry eyed wonder with a new lover, that has the potential to evolve into a committed relationship. Create the safe non-judgmental space to engage in a mature ongoing, and possibly shifting conversation, about what defines monogamy for each of you. And what would it look like if you both entered into a long term, committed, relationship?

Subjectify Me: The Unfinished, Backsliding Consent Projectby PAMELA HAAG
APRIL 30, 2013, 5:44 PM

What’s the most perfect, ideal, pure act of sexual consent that you can imagine?

Maybe it would be you and your most favorite lover, ever, in a hotel room for the afternoon: “You and me! Right here! Let’s have sex!” you both say—at the same time, out loud, in the same language, soberly, sincerely, and with obvious relish.

At the other end would be the gang rape, beating, and murder of an Indian woman, on a bus, or rape used as a systematic tool of war and social destruction in Congo, or Syria.

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Many incidents fall in between the brutally, unimaginably violent, and the ecstatically consensual. Rape is an act of violence, not desire, but it anchors the extreme end of the spectrum of consent.  It’s the most grievous, profound, felonious example of non-consent to sexual contact.  

We think of consent and violence as an opposition but it’s more like a spectrum. A man I knew in my 20s told me of feeling mildly haunted by a sexual experience he’d had, in which he still wasn’t sure if his friend really wanted to have sex. (This isn’t the kind of conversation between men and women that happens often, but maybe it should). Nothing was said about it, and not a lot of words were exchanged. There was no “no,” but nor was there much of a “yes” feeling to it. Had he forced the issue? He still wasn’t sure…. A woman recalls her experiences with a long-term boyfriend in high school.  They weren’t violent but, in her mind, nor did they meet a high but reasonable benchmark of consent. She had an impaired capacity to understand what she wanted, partly owing to a childhood history of sexual abuse; she didn’t feel that she had a plausible social option to say no; and she didn’t give sex much thought one way or another. She just thought sex was something that happened to you. Looking back, her experiences, she felt, “were on a spectrum—a spectrum of not-consensual.”

A Kaiser survey some years ago asked young women why they had sex—what inspired their consent. It’s a basic, overlooked question. Forty-five percent (45%) said they had sex because “the other person wanted to;” 28% did it to “make the relationship stronger;” 16% because “many of their friends had.” I kept expecting to read something like, “I had sex because it felt good” or “I did it because I wanted to.”

What do we call these experiences?  They seem to fall in a range—where not-violent, not-illegal sex is being had in the spirit of appeasement or acquiescence, or with ambiguous desire, at best. 

If we had a substantive definition of women’s consent—for one possibility among many, that consent means a woman wants to have sex for its own sake, without other financial, social, emotional pressures and incentives involved—then these encounters might fall on the spectrum.  

To be clear: I’m not arguing that having sex because your boyfriend whines you into it is an act of rape, or even “victimization,” whatever that word means.  Many of us would have rap sheets a mile long if there were laws against mercy sex—or boring, buzzed, thoughtless, exigent, careless, stupid, and quid pro quo sex.

If an encounter falls short of a consent ideal that doesn’t mean it therefore becomes illegal, or an act of violence, or a moment that reduces the woman to the now-ridiculed category of “victim.”  An incident could be legal and non-violent, and even chosen, but still fall short of the consent bull’s eye.  

This is part of the problem. The dichotomies that grid and organize the sexual universe—legal/illegal;  violent/non-violent;  victim/non-victim—keep us from recognizing what affirmative consent would look like; in other words, how we’d think about consent if it were treated as something more substantive, material, and tangible than just the vague negative space surrounding the illegal, violent, and coercive.

And without this substantive, robust concept of consent, we can’t understand clearly what “no” means, either. The terms are made legible in relation to each other. Without the capacity to say yes, the capacity to “just say no” and to have it be respected  gets unstable, too, because it’s assumed that women’s sexuality—their “yes”—is coy, disingenuous, inscrutable, or prohibited. Scholar Susan Rose discovered this in research with Dutch and U.S. teens. To the Dutch teenagers, “no means no” made sense.  “When someone says no that means no.” But to U.S. teens, bothboys and girls, no was mired in fine print.  They gave the “it all depends” answer. Whether no really meant no depended on a variety of factors: how forcefully or frequently she said no, whether she was giving double messages, either verbally or non-verbally, what the girl was wearing, and how she was acting when she said no.

We need a concept of sexual subjectification that’s just as vigilant, observant, and vital as feminist critiques of sexual objectification.  (Although even that voice against old-fashioned “objectification” is pretty weak. As a writer in the UK  Guardian laments, while she used to think feminists were annoyingly “strident” in their sexual politics, she now misses their voice against the pornographic objectification she sees every day.)

I know it sounds scary—that we should be advocating out loud that women have sex lives, or not, of their own choosing and design—but now isn’t the time to shirk from the elephant in the room principle of sexual agency, realized in full. Failure to do so—to defend “yes”—indirectly exacerbates the rape culture in which “no” isn’t respected.

Being subjectified doesn’t mean having (more) sex. Increasingly, in the hyper-sexualized day and the Viagra regime, it doesn’t feel like a genuine option to choose celibacy, but if we lived in a more pro-sex culture, this would be a legitimate, respected, non-pathologized stance, too, for people who didn’t want to have sex, and who were able to arrive at that position without subtle coercion, or for reasons other than the degradation of women’s sexual desires generally as gross and abhorrent.  The relevant thing isn’t which action gets chosen—sex, or not—but that a choice gets made that meets a high instead of a weak standard of consent. Consent would mean something more than “not-violent, not-coercive, and not-illegal.”

Sexual agency gets defended and highlighted in some feminist communities. But subjectification needs to be a proud, conspicuous part of mainstream feminism, especially in reproductive politics. Too often, defenders of abortion rights point to non-consensual examples of violence or “women’s health” concerns to make their case. Victims of sexual violence, or women who need abortions or birth control for health reasons, are obviously important. But we need to stand up for women who have non-procreative sex that they desire, and who use birth control for this rather obvious but largely unspoken purpose. The fear of even rhetorically highlighting this subject makes abortion rights activists appear embarrassed and ashamed about women’s sexual agency.

It also makes them seem as disingenuous as the anti-abortion folks when they claim that their only concern, really, when they mandate that abortion clinics have extravagant, unnecessary hospital-grade design features and facilities is “women’s health.” Both hide behind the skirts of women’s health, and the dodge is equally lame in both cases.  

Here are 6 reasons why you need to be touched on a regular basis.

1. Feel connected to others. We are social beings, and although we all fall in different places on the introversion – extroversion scale, we all need to have that sense of connection to other members of our tribe. While some of that connection can come from having conversations with others, touch also plays an important role in human communication.

2. Reduce anxiety. Simply touching another person can make us feel more secure and less anxious. It can make us feel grounded and safe and not so all alone. It’s not just children who could use a warm, reassuring hug to make things a little better, so if you’re feeling like a bundle of nerves, go ahead and ask for a hug.

3. Bonding. Touch is one of the ways romantic partners bond with each other and parents bond with their children. When partners and families get busy and let touch go out the window, they’ll often find that they don’t feel as close and relationships suffer. Regular touch is one of the ways that we continually renew our bonds with those we love.

4. Lowers your blood pressure. Studies have shown that those that get regular touch often have lower blood pressure than those that don’t. Even having a pet can have beneficial effects! Touch can also slow the heart rate and help speed recovery times from illness and surgery.

5. Improve your outlook. It’s harder to get into a pessimistic funk when you feel the confidence of being connected to others. Touch can make people feel more optimistic and positive and less cynical and suspicious. A positive, trusting attitude towards others can reduce tension in our daily lives and improve our relationships.

6. Give us the sensory input that we crave. Scientists are just discovering how truly important it is to exercise all our physical senses for proper brain and emotional development. All the various kinds of touch from butterfly kisses to deep tissue massage send our brains the physical inputs it needs to make sense of the world. So, along with touching other people and pets, make time to explore different textures and touch sensations such as letting cool sand run through your fingers or taking a warm relaxing bath.

Don’t let yourself get too busy that you starve yourself of touch. It’s important for your physical, mental and emotional well being to touch others and let others touch you.
By: Intergalactic Shamanic Mystic Angel