The data is out: From studies around the world, some couples have become closer since the covid pandemic began. Some of us are beginning to feel safe enough to re-engage since we’re not batting down the hatch so fervently.
Some of us, however, have experienced more stress and less sexual and emotional satisfaction over the last few years. If you are one of those couples, it’s easy to feel hopeless. Yet it’s good to understand that sexual issues arise in all long-term relationships, not just troubled ones.
And, in our Awakened Intimacy couples retreats, we’ve seen over and over that erotic challenges can be the fertilizer for growth and connection rather than impediments to “great sex.”
1. Shifting your perspective from the outside-in. Time and again, we’ve found that an embodied mindful approach is more potent for recovering erotic creativity than learning new moves or receiving directives from the outside-in.
Passion and Presence® is primarily about shifting our mindset to meet fresh, which is especially important after spending hours at home together. Instead of going on automatic and engaging in the same old thing, we help you cultivate a spirit of curiosity and exploration, enabling you to tune into yourself and your partner.
Our exercises will teach you to listen and respond to signals from inside yourself to awaken your pure erotic potential and experience novelty with your long-term partner.
2. Making a plan for sex. At our retreats, we can teach you how to tend eros through your relationship seasons and in good times and bad. That includes these current whacky times of enforced confinement and simultaneous loss of privacy.
Among other things, tending eros can involve creating the space in your schedule for sex, even if that seems un-romantic. Yet couples that do so overcome their fear of connecting. They start to anticipate pleasure and feel more intimate and supportive when dealing with other life challenges.
3. Generating Desire. Many of us expect to feel turned on before engaging in lovemaking, so we wait for the desire to kick in. Even for the most devoted couples, the initial “passion cocktail” will inevitably fade away. While this can feel like dis-enchantment, research shows that we have the power to generate desire after we start connecting physically and by tapping into our erotic imagination. We can help you get things going through exercises that reawaken a stalled-out or routine sex life, so you start looking forward to your bedroom adventures.
While the typical prescription at this stage is to “bring in sexual novelty,” it’s not one we advocate because it’s an outside-in remedy that can often feel like more pressure to “perform.” Couples who attend our Awakened Intimacy couples retreats typically find that their sex lives become a lot more creative, but this growth comes from the inside-out.
4. Completing the Stress Cycle. With so much on-going stress around, it’s essential to come out of the Threat Cycle, or Stress Cycle, because stress shuts down desire and arousal.
One of the main reasons our approach is rooted in mindfulness is that studies show that it can increase our tolerance to stress. Mindfulness also allows us to put things in perspective better, let go of negative thinking, and re-set our nervous systems. The latter is especially important if we are anxiety-prone or have experienced trauma. To have more physical pleasure, we need to be able to hold some charge in our bodies without going into a threat response.
At our Awakened Intimacy retreats, we build this capacity by slowing down, pausing, and adjusting in practice exercises. We recover safety and a sense of being in control that paradoxically allows us to surrender. Awakened intimacy enhances pleasure and connection in the bedroom and can enrich all areas of life.
So, we hope you’ll consider learning more about our retreats, now online, as our response to this pandemic.
Warmly,
Maci Daye
