Monthly Meditations to Invite Eroticism (March)

At Center for Healthy Sex, we find inspiration from many sources to treat sex addiction, love addiction, sexual anorexia, and sexual dysfunction. Meditation and affirmations are helpful tools that build esteem, create procedural memories, reduce anxiety, slow the heart rate, and increase blood flow to the brain.

Attachment theory is a component of our philosophy -- behavioral patterns imparted in infancy affect the way we grow up to live our lives. Because this early programming becomes so ingrained, it takes consistent and sustained effort to rewire the neural pathways.

These monthly meditations are similar to the affirmations we use with clients. They are intended to provoke deep thought about core beliefs and inspire open communication with a partner. (You may sign up for our free daily meditations here.)

Meditation for Week 1 -- BOUNDARIES

"And this is one of the major questions of our lives: how we keep boundaries, what permission we have to cross boundaries, and how we do so." ~ A. B. Yehoshua

Dysfunctional families use boundaries to punish, intimidate, and control, imposing rigid rules and regulations on their members and often crushing their souls. Members of those families usually end up emotionally cut off from their hearts, unyielding, and angry at life. Chaotic families, on the other hand, exercise no boundaries, invading one another’s emotional, physical, and psychic spaces and leaving no room for individuality. In both cases, each individual’s wants, needs, and rights are violated, whether by being forcibly opposed or utterly ignored. Members of such families rarely feel safe or cared for, so they don’t develop a solid sense of their own identity.

Healthy boundaries are physical, emotional, and psychological constructs we create and maintain in order to feel that each person’s own identity is safe in the world. While they may be flexible, boundaries help us set limits so we can be in functional relationships that enrich, support, and inspire us. When we respect ourselves and set good psychic and physical boundaries with others, we give ourselves a protected space that lets our unique abilities and characteristics bloom into our full potential. This form of self-care, in turn, invites us to love an equally unique other in safe and functional ways.

Daily Healthy Sex Acts:

• Think about each person in your life with whom you need to set boundaries. Is it your boss, family member or friend? What have you been avoiding saying to set those boundaries? What is the best way to say it? When is the best time to say it?
• Are you tolerating something in your relationship that you resent because you don’t want to upset your partner? If so, act today by telling the truth with an open heart.
• Be willing to listen to your partner’s need for boundaries and to be flexible when necessary. Good boundaries make good lovers!

Meditation for Week 2: QUESTIONING

"I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The process of questioning, like any activity, requires moderation to be healthy. Without moderation, questioning can turn self-devouring, where the question itself becomes a means of avoidance and dissociation. Questions can be manipulative, as if asking enough questions might almost resemble caring. Questions can be used to distract from the real issues, from really being seen and experiencing real intimacy. There are also those questions that are really statements, serving only to confirm fears, doubts, justifications and assumptions. Such leading questions create their own reality.

How you respond to questioning can also reveal various defenses and deep-rooted patterns. This might mirror your schooling or upbringing: Were questions asked and answered in a healthy way? Or did you practice counterfeit ways of asking and answering? If you learned the art of inauthentic communication very young, and practiced it and honed it in adolescence, should you be surprised that it would seep into every relationship?

The reason we ask and answer any question is to invite truth to come into consciousness--truth that is beyond our grasp at the moment. It is an act of faith, a way of surrendering oneself to the fact that we're human and don't have many answers, but we may receive them. True responses to true questions are more than intellectual information; they bring a shift in consciousness.

Daily Healthy Sex Acts:

• Today, take a moment to consider the right wording for your unresolved questions. Observe whether your questioning stems from and leads to intimacy or distancing.
• The next time you are asked a question, rather than spout statistics or disconnected info, pause and repeat the question out loud, and bring it within yourself to find your own answer. Is it possible to let any answers emerge to the important unasked questions from yourself and others in your life?

Relationships Essential Reads

7 Reasons People Send Mixed Signals In Relationships

7 Questions That Only Secure Couples Can Handle

Meditation for Week 3: NARCISSISM

"Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his." ~ W.H. Auden

Narcissism is simply the inability to recognize others for who they are, as unique individuals in their own right, who exist separate from the narcissist. A narcissist is capable of responding only to people who perfectly reflect the narcissist--the identical psychological content expressed in the same style. Their allergic reaction to “the Other” makes real relating impossible, and results in much reactive isolation.

People often confuse narcissism with vanity. But unlike the self-admiration of the vain, true narcissists possess surprisingly low self-esteem. Healthy interest from and about others was rarely modeled in their early lives. Missing that experience led to a lack of healthy differentiation--the ability to maintain and express one’s own identity while simultaneously allowing others to maintain and express theirs. This ability marks a true relationship; it is not a piecemeal, fragmented or compartmentalized relation in which one can endure others only in small doses. In vibrant relationships, the parties may have different values, but can accept each other as separate, distinct, and equally worthy persons.

As in the Greek myth about Narcissus, who fell so in love with his own reflection in a lake that, trying to cling to it, he eventually died, narcissists simply cannot see beyond their own image. This difficulty surfaces especially in love and sex. It's ironic that with a narcissist, the most physically intimate act can sometimes leave a lover feeling the most shut-out and unseen.

Daily Healthy Sex Acts:

• What would it be like to experience just one day without pursuing your personal agenda? What would it be like to bask in the exquisite otherness of the universe and others as if exploring new terrain?
• Let go of familiar feelings and goals, and embrace the unknown world beyond the wall of your perception.

Meditation for Week 4: AUTHENTICITY

"Love is much more fundamental than any kind of thinking or believing. It is the root and basis of who you are, at the most fundamental level. This means that anything other than love as an expression of your being is artificial and unnatural and is a result of not knowing who you are." ~ Bill Harris

Living in authenticity is one of the great challenges of being human, and living an authentic life is an aspiration. So prepare to blunder along the path! Risking telling the truth at all times requires both courage and finesse because truth-telling can be hurtful to others, especially those who are fragile. One sure way to measure how fully you’re in your truth is to track the sensations in your body. Trust your gut over your thoughts and pay attention to what answers arise for you. Also notice what happens to you when someone asks you a question that puts you on the spot: Do you answer authentically or do you veil your answer to accommodate their feelings? If you choose the latter, what does that do to your feelings about yourself? It’s possible to stand in your authenticity by making it a practice to pause to see if there’s a more “politic” way to speak your truth without hurting others.

Scores of comedians cite the supposedly typical scenario of a woman putting on a new outfit and asking her husband if it makes her look fat. The gag is that the woman doesn’t want to hear the truth, and that the man should know he’d better lie. Such jokes make both men and women look like simpletons whose relationships are founded on manipulation. How would you answer such a question from your partner? Can you handle hearing an authentic answer, and can you give kind, authentic answers?

Daily Healthy Sex Acts:

• Spend a day noticing when you bend your truth in order to accommodate people around you–especially your partner.
• Practice speaking your truth in kind, authentic ways.

Sign up here to receive free Daily Meditations by email written by Alexandra Katehakis and Tom Bliss of Center for Healthy Sex to help you develop sexual and emotional intimacy.