Let’s pretend you’ve just bought the car of your dreams. It’s sleek and shiny and exactly the right color. The genuine leather seats and polished dashboard exude the ultimate new-car fragrance. You pull out of the dealer’s lot and happily drive away.
When you get home, you open the glove compartment, eager to find the owner’s manual and learn all about your precious new vehicle. To your dismay, the manual does not say “Mercedes SLK300.” It says, “Generic Automobile Manual.” It points out that you have tires, doors, windows, and mirrors. It’s filled with crazy-making advice such as, “If the flashing symbol on the dashboard looks something like this, it could either mean that you are out of gas, or that your tires need inflating, or that your engine is about to seize.”
You’d be pretty upset, right? You’d spend the next weeks and months tentatively trying to get to know your car by trial and error. Just when you think you’d gotten it all figured out, some new mysterious flashing light would throw you into a panic as you tried to evaluate what it meant and if it was serious. If you had owned several different cars of various makes before this one, you would have a better idea of how cars work and a better idea of what the warning signals might mean. If this were your first car, you’d most likely be mystified and maybe even terrified.
This is pretty much how all of us navigate through sex and relationships. Very few of us are trained mechanics. Almost all of us have learned by trial and error. The information available to us, especially when we are just starting out, is dangerously one-size-fits-all.
How do you begin to understand how you’re built as an erotic, ecstatic being and how you run? How do you operate? What reference manuals and tools will you need for optimum care? And how can you effectively communicate this information to others so that they can love and enjoy you more easily and more effectively?
Get a blank notebook. If you like, you can title it: My Ecstatic Sex and Relationship Operating Manual: Instructions, Troubleshooting Tips, and Advice on Lifetime Maintenance. Give your notebook a title that invites you to write in it and read it. In my new book Ecstasy Is Necessary, I include exercises to help you begin to discover who you authentically are as a sexual being and what you most want and need from your relationships right now.
And right now is the key phrase. We are all in a lifelong process of sexual evolution. It begins the day we are born and lasts until the day we die. As in any evolution, we shift and change constantly. Sometimes your progress may seem
low or even non-existent. At other times changes will happen overnight. At 40 years old we may have desires for things we never even knew existed when we were 16. At 50 we may wonder if we will ever feel sexual again. At 60 we may be more sexually active than we were in our 20s. The process is all very personal and individual.
This is where your sex- and relationship-operating guide comes in. As you create your operating guide, your authentic sexual self will reveal itself to you. What do I mean by your authentic sexual self? I mean the you that has been shaped and motivated by your values, your needs, and your desires. When you know who you are and what you value, need, and desire, it’s a snap to select the most exquisite choices from the menu of infinite erotic possibilities. You’ll save yourself time, anxiety, and heartache and you’ll experience a great deal more joy, pleasure, love, and ecstasy.
Before you can start to imagine, appreciate and choose from your totality of erotic possibilities, you’ll need to know three things about yourself:
- What do I value?
- What do I need?
- What do I desire?
The answers to these three questions will set you free.
Excerpted from Ecstasy Is Necessary by Barbara Carrellas. Copyright © 2012 (Hay House).
Barbara Carrellas is an author, sex/life coach, sex educator, university lecturer, workshop facilitator, motivational speaker and theater artist. via healyourlife.com
Jim Woods is an author, life and business coach speaker, innovation consultant, motivational speaker, and university professor. For speaking engagements or a free coaching session you may reach Jim at 719-266-6703 or Email.
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