Mindfulness: A Lifelong Practice

Mindfulness is a lifelong practice not a sex therapy technique. However, opening your senses to an experience or becoming present changes that experience in profound ways. And sex is best when your senses are open.
 
In my last column, I introduced Jennifer, a client who came for individual therapy wanting to want to have sex with her husband, Bob. She began doing homework that I call “mindfulness sensuality” which I described last time. She also learned to masturbate in a more mindful way. After some experience with this, she wanted to apply her learning to sex with Bob.
 
I suggested that Jennifer convey to her husband how to do the sensual mindfulness and that they do this in bed side-by-side before turning toward each other for a mutual massage done again incorporating a mindfulness approach.
 
Here’s how to do the massage:

The person giving the massage should have his eyes wide open and look closely at the other. Smelling and tasting the skin should be incorporated. Feel the tips of your fingers touching the others skin. Listen closely to the others breathing, moaning, sighing whatever the other presents in the experience. 
 
The receiver of the massage should start off lying on their stomach. Feel the other’s fingers. Feel how the skin and muscles move when being touched. Notice how the other’s tongue feels touching the skin. Listen to the other’s breathing. After 15 or 20 minutes the receiver of the massage should turn over and repeat the focus on sounds, feelings etc. While on their back, the receiver should have their eyes open and take in the visual part of the experience.
 
As it turned out Bob and Jennifer were way too anxious about the experience to get much out of it.
 
Jennifer returned for her session angry at Bob because he had criticized the mindfulness approach as “boring” and “completely unnecessary” for him to get aroused. This, of course, was upsetting to Jennifer. It took me a while to get Jennifer to acknowledge that she too had trouble with some aspects of the experience. Specifically, she had trouble opening her eyes and “felt guilty” for significant periods when she was receiving her massage.
 
We decided to have some couple’s sessions since the problem was no longer something that Jennifer could work on alone.  
 
Bob was not a reluctant client. He felt that he had gotten a lot out of their previous couple’s therapy (described last time). His point was that he found it very unnecessary for Jennifer to touch his body mindfully or otherwise to get prepared for sex. He was an eager beaver without the prelims. He also thought it crazy that his wife was touching herself and he was touching himself when they were in easy reach of each other.
 
I assured Bob that our main goal was for them to touch each other in pleasing ways. The exercises were simply designed to separate each of them to give them responsibility to prepare themselves for sex.
 
Following our session, Bob and Jennifer were able to complete the sensual experience together. They came in for several more sessions and did several variations of the sensual massage and incorporated aspects of it into their sexual experience.
 
The most important question I asked Bob was:  “What if this is an optimal way of doing sex for Jennifer, even if it isn’t the best for you?”  Would he be willing and able to give this to her?
 
Bob and Jennifer seemed surprised by this question. Both of them had assumed that they would do the exercises, get the desired change and then return to their previous way of doing sex. I assured them that if they returned to exclusively doing sex the way they did it before, they would get the same results.
 
Here is some of what Bob and Jennifer learned from these experiences.
 
First, they learned a new way to think about sex. The reason that Bob initially resisted the sensual exercises is because he viewed sex as almost completely genital.  Foreplay was an unnecessary inconvenience for him and here I was adding some more steps.  His sexual expression was lust not sensuality. Lust should be part of sex, but to limit yourself to only lust is to leave some things out. Jennifer had simply been following Bob’s approach: after all, he sure seemed to be enjoying himself. 
 
Jennifer had to overcome her anxiety about receiving pleasure. She needed to learn to relax through her guilt at indulging in her own pleasure. She had to learn that she was responsible for communicating about how she wanted sex to go.
 
Bob had to learn to consider Jennifer’s desires as important as his own. Like Jennifer, he had mistakenly concluded that because he enjoyed sex, Jennifer just needed to relax and enjoy it the same way he did.  
 
So Jennifer came in wanting to want sex with Bob. She described herself as lacking desire for sex.  What we found out was that her lack of desire was for exclusively genital sex.  When Bob and Jennifer learned to be more mindful of their own and the other’s desires, they were able to develop a sexual relationship much more fulfilling for each of them.
 
 
Gerald Drose is an Atlanta-based couples’ sex therapist.  Visit Dr. Drose at Powers Ferry Psychological Associates, LLC.