If we wait until everything's "just right," especially if getting up close and personal with another can only begin in the dark and under the influence, we'll miss out on a whole spectrum of shades of tenderness, tactile wonders, and the glories of sensuality.
And if human lovemaking were meant simply for reproduction, this blog post would be superfluous.
Today I want to talk about your capacity for joyous, healthy, unfettered sensuality and sexuality, with you yourself and with another in mutual joy. In our dualistic world of either/or thinking, puritan inhibition fights an unending boxing match with sex-as-hot-commodity. When we add a heaping dose of ignorance and the prickly barbed wire of STD angst, how can we begin to imagine a life that includes the endless wonders of intimacy?
Let me start out by asking you, dear reader, a few salient questions to ponder.
1) What images or experiences first come to mind when you think of "intimacy"?
2) Is this topic primarily one of your future, present or past?
3) Is there someone in your life now with whom you can feel free to converse about the most personal forms of being close with another?
and
4) Take a few moments now to picture a way of being intimate in a delicious manner. Do you feel you know how to get there?
First, some obvious yet vital truths: men and women tend to look at and experience intimacy rather differently; unspoken cultural and personal rules can cloud one's vision; and, intimacy exists across the widest of spectra.
Consider physical intimacy. To start out with, as we grow from childhood into adolescence, we tend to become self-conscious. The feedback loop of feeling new desires while becoming increasingly embarrassed about our changing bodies can become deafening. When was the last time you looked lovingly at your own naked body? What might you do to regain intimacy with yourself, to cultivate a tender, compassionate regard for your here-and-now self, body and soul? I believe that through not just accepting but actively loving one's current incarnation, great powers and shining beauty are unleashed.
To throw oneself away with another, in the dark, in throes of passion, denying oneself and one's partner all the shades of foreplay, makes for a one-way street that may be fun to read about in a romance novel, but bears little resemblance to the splendid topic at hand.
Being a gay man who was living in his peak years of desire as the AIDS crisis ravished my generation, I've found first hand that necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention. Becoming an inventor of my own delight, compelled to speak about finding joy in responsible ways before diving in, I have given this subject a lot of thought.
My message comes down to this: sex and sensuality with yourself and with another or others is your birthright. By considering, on your own and openly, freely with another, all the ways you can bring pleasure to one another, you are liberated from the fears and shame that are otherwise so constricting.
Sensuality -- feeding one another juicy berries by candlelight, stroking and massaging to beautiful music, wrapping yourselves in a big blanket and looking up at the stars, skinny dipping in clear, cold water and then warming each other up --- (I could go on and on!) -- is yours for the doing. Feeling trust is requisite for sexual intimacy, and sensuality, over time, sober and tipsy, with lovers and friends, can be a delightful way to grow trust.
Don't believe the claptrap about keeping all of this unspoken. We are lead to believe that speaking about desires and boundaries and fantasies is unsexy and will quash the romance. Baloney! Guys are often even more embarrassed than girls to speak intimately. But when desire is burning, without personal intimacy coming first before physical intercourse, booze or powders or pills so often take its place to grease the wheels. Anesthetized, we tend to lessen or lose not only our good sense, but also our good senses. One must learn how to use ingested substances to actually enhance the experience together. We aren't slot machines.
Finally, the more you explore the breadth of your spectrum of the senses, rejecting the voices that claim that every sensual touch starts you on the slippery slope to unwanted pregnancy or STDs, the more your capacity for pleasure, given and received, shall grow.
I don't pretend to know your particular pathway to joy and pleasure, dear reader. I just know that you deserve a lifetime of it. And that silence and shame won't get you there. Throw open the shutters. Breathe deeply. The fruits of life are inviting you to come taste them.