Being aware of your brain's natural physical tendencies can help you understand the thoughts and feelings you experience around issues of love and sex, but your mind and spirit are more than the sum of your brain cells, chemical messengers, and physical components. Intimate relationships are deeply spiritual and emotional, and cannot be reduced to these factors alone. It is largely mysterious how your evolving mind and spirit can connect with another evolved mind and spirit, love deeply, commit to sharing yourself over time, and express love through the physical medium of sex. At the same time, by harnessing the power of your mind, you can enhance your natural ability to live in the mystery of love. Let's look at some important ways you can use your mind to build a strong love relationship and a healthy sex life. All of them can be put to good use in conjunction with other tools and techniques you'll see in the chapters ahead. While you're busy building your libido and your overall health, you can build a relationship at the same time!
Carrying out time: It may be obvious that you need quality time alone with your partner, without the intrusions of the world, to have a dynamic, supportive love relationship and experience great sex. Yet many people forget to find time to nurture the relationship, perhaps because they feel they are caught up in a culture that puts higher priorities on other things. One of the secrets of partners who grow together over many years, and continue to love each other and enjoy a healthy sex life, is creating time to spend together and fully appreciate each other—which means more than just making time for sex. In the modern world, many couples are separated on a daily basis by work and other responsibilities, but with the strength of your mind, you can turn this to your advantage. Humans are sometimes set apart from other animals by our unusual ability to delay gratification; we can imagine pleasurable experiences in advance, and doing so can increase pleasure. This relates not only to spending time with your partner, but also to having sex: In a sense, you can arouse in advance. If you have to wait, let the anticipation enhance satisfaction.
Communication and Sex: For many couples in healthy relationships, there are deep connections between the quality of their communication and the quality of their sex lives. When you share intimate thoughts and feelings with each other on a daily basis over time—not just discussions of household tasks, paying bills, or material possessions, but your most personal issues—you continue to grow and develop together, and you become closer in every way, including sexually. It’s almost as if the natural give-and-take of good communication, along with all its other relationship-building benefits, has an added aphrodisiac effect.
Sexual Trust: Building an emotionally safe, solid relationship can be crucial to the health of your partnership and your sex life. Many women have difficulty achieving orgasm, or even becoming aroused, unless they are in a relationship that allows them to fully let go, trust, and release control. Modern brain research backs this up; brain scans show that during orgasm—similar to men, who experience stimulation of their “reward” circuitry—women experience decreased activity in brain regions that govern self-control, moral reasoning, social judgment, and vigilance. Your capacity for pleasure appears to be closely tied to your brain’s ability to release inhibition, suspend judgment, and let your guard down, all of which are only possible when you are in a relationship that feels trusting and safe.
Supporting your right brain: Your brain is bicameral, meaning it is made up of “two houses,” or halves. Each has functions that offer you a different perspective of the world; your left hemisphere is more logical and linear, and your right is more intuitive and non-obvious. Many women function excessively from their left brain in the busy world of day-to-day responsibilities, but have lost touch with the holistic, nurturing potential of their right brain.
Tapping into the right side of your brain can help you maintain a balanced life, improve your sense of well-being, and nurture your capacity for a healthy intimate relationship. It can also get you in touch with your “sexuality mindset” — the natural capacity to experience all the joys of loving sexual union. Your two-sided brain is exquisitely designed to allow you full awareness of sexual pleasure; it is, if you will, your great sex duplex. But for many women, it is the power of the right brain that allows them to experience pleasure in the sense of intellectualizing sexuality, disengaging from other mental activities.
You don’t need a stroke to cultivate the capacity of your right brain; you can stimulate its neuronal circuitry with almost any activity that gives you a temporary reprieve from functions governed by your left brain and engages your natural intuitive powers. In addition to meditation, examples include art, music, dance, yoga, and many forms of spontaneity and sports.
