When I see clients in my sex coaching practice room, I cannot help but notice how tensed their bodies and mind are. Troubled sharings, anxiety, pain, frustration, so much is palpable when sexual pleasure and sexual intimacy is at stake.
Read this sharing of a woman in sexless marriage:
“I must say after delivery, my sexual feelings are so much down. My husband is more into it. But I cannot able to give him company…I don’t know what happened to my sexual thought and feel after my delivery. If you ask me, I will say there is purely no reason… pls help me to overcome from this and make me happy and sexy person as before…
Because of this, there is more fights between us..My husband is thinking that I don’t like him, thats y Im not giving him company..but its not true…I like him more in this world than anyone..becoz of this low sex drive..I’m facing lot of issues. My daughter is 2years old not. This 2years is like a hell for me , because of fights..”
You can make out her emotional state from her sharing. Totally distressed she is feeling from inside.
The clients reach out to me with this hope that I will get them what they want: The prize of intimacy. A good sexual relationship, that does not feel like a burden, an obligation.
And I help them.
One of the first things I teach them is the art of relaxing the body
Our movies, porn has taught us incorrectly that good sexual arousal starts with an excited body.
But relaxation precedes excitement
Our limited sources have ignored the importance of a relaxed body in a satisfying sexual relationship, which is leading to so many sexual problems such as performance anxiety, low libido, painful sex etc.
Relaxation cannot be a wishful event but something you should have conscious charge of.
Learning to consciously relax muscle tension
In this blog, I will teach you how to consciously relax your body to build your mood for sex, and experience greater comfort, reduced stress and anxiety, and more pleasure in your sexual encounters.
There’s a beautiful Chinese proverb that says, “Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.” I find this quote to be profound and insightful, and it mirrors so much of what I see in my sessions in my clients’ bodies. Many people coming to me for sex counseling think they have a specific problem with sex, but it soon becomes clear that they’re carrying a far broader internal struggle throughout their entire body.
- Tightly closed legs almost zipped together
- Unconscious tension and contraction in the shoulders, hips, belly, buttocks and back
- Feeble voice, strain in the jaw, speaking less words
All of these create a blockage in a person’s ability to feel any deep sensation or pleasure.
Imagine our sexual arousal, sexual flow, sexual juice is like water running in a garden hose. If at any point of time, there is a constriction in the hose, the juice, the water will not flow and will get stuck
Our bodies are the hose in which our sexual juice flows
This stored body tension is invisible
Most of us don’t realise we’re clenching or contracting our bodies until someone draws our attention to that place. In this 9 am-7 pm work hustle, and social media stimulated world “tension has become a default”. Many people don’t realise they are breathing shallow until I remind them to take a deep breath. Many of my clients only realise that one or more of their body parts is contracted after I bring their attention to it by making them scan their full body and guiding them gently to release the muscular tension through intention and self-holding touch.
If this makes you wonder, ‘why am I so tense all the time’ then this blog will help you understand:
- why we hold tension,
- how to become more conscious of it, and
- how to let it go – not just as a physical release, but as a shift in the way you relate to and inhabit your body.
Body tension is your coping mechanism against stress
Muscular tension is not just a physical state – it’s often emotional, psychological, even cultural. We tense our bodies to handle stress, fear, shame, urgency, insecurity, and many other triggers. Some of us live in a near-constant state of fight or flight, like an alert soldier waiting for an attack that can come anytime. I remember so many times, when my partner John, he will say something in a not so warm tone, my body invisibly tenses up as I prepare my argument to counter him.
CHECKPOINT: Notice how your body tenses up as you get into a stressful situation.
We also learn to use tension as a way to suppress feelings that might be ‘too much’ – too angry, too much pain, too sexual, too vulnerable, too messy.
I remember a client saying in my intimacy coaching session, how he dealt with a sexless marriage. He did not voice it out, but instead suppressed it deep inside him, shutting himself down and he said in the end, his whole personality changed. He became a loner and this block still affects him and he is not able to date women even after coming out from marriage.
This unconscious tension that your body is carrying is not just limited to the muscles – which is why having a massage alone will not fix it. Body tension, muscle tension is controlled by your nervous system and the thoughts of your brain that gets relayed to your muscle fibers. For ex: Your nervous system can strain your body to keep you quiet and safe but that leads to tension.
Further in our modern lives with so much of workload, phone distractions, multitasking, our natural healing mechanism can get hijacked and we get stuck in a constant state of background tension.
As a sexual person, this #1 important skill you need to develop; understanding how your body and muscles store tension and how this stored tension can disturb your arousal, desire, orgasm, and having the actual act of sex.
Read next blog, Practicing conscious relaxation
