Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century (43 page)

If you have ever been curious but a little shy about trying sex in groups, I hope you’re now feeling more inspired and encouraged. If you’re a longtime group sex ritual lover, you’ve now got some more ideas to incorporate into your own rituals. Finally, if you and your partner would like to experiment with some group play but are feeling apprehensive about its impact on your relationship, you’ll find a few guidelines on the following pages that I hope will help. Play safe and have fun!

How to Try Group Sex without Fracturing Your Relationship

1. The single most important rule to expanding your erotic life beyond your primary relationship is this: you must be completely honest, honorable, reliable, and trustworthy about the agreements you make when you try group sex, or any other kind of polyamory. If you aren’t prepared to tell the truth, behave with integrity, and keep your promises, it won’t work out, so you needn’t read any further.
   
2. Discuss with your partner what specifically interests you about group sex. What delights you? What terrifies you? What would you like to discover for (or about) yourself in the experience? Is your partner interested in exploring it as well? What would they like out of it? If they are not interested, would they be open to your trying it alone? Under what, if any, circumstances would it be okay with them? (Perhaps a workshop would be okay, but a private party would not.)
   
3. What kind of erotic play do you each want to explore? If you want to explore Tantra and your partner wants to explore BDSM, it’s likely you’ll need to go to different events to get your needs met. Will you accompany each other to events or attend different events (on the same night or different nights)?
   
4. Decide what size and type of group would best serve your needs. A small workshop? A large play party? A medium-sized swingers’ evening? Would you prefer to go to a couples-only event, or not?
   
5. Make mutually agreed-upon rules for yourselves. Which activities are you comfortable with and which are you not? For instance, you and your partner may decide that you’d love to have sex in a group setting, but only with each other. If you and your partner are comfortable being sexual with others, set limits. For example, perhaps it’s fine with you if your partner gives someone a hand job, but not a blow job. Your partner may be comfortable with you participating in a BDSM scene so long as there is no genital contact. Perhaps all lower chakra penetrative sex is off limits, but oral sex is not. Whatever your rules, follow them scrupulously! If you find them too restrictive, don’t break them and then tell your partner; follow them and then discuss modifying them with your partner later.
   
6. Set time limits. Agree on how long you are willing to be apart or engaged with someone else; tell your new partners at the beginning of your encounter and set the timer on your watch. If you and your partner attend separate events, or if one of you is attending an event without the other, agree on a time and place to meet after the event, and be there on time.
   
7. Go slowly. Give yourselves time to discover your limits and your needs. If either you or your partner is feeling hurt or uncomfortable, it’s time to create a new rule.
   
8. Make sure both you and your partner are getting your needs met. Ask yourself, “What is best for me, my partner, and my relationship?” If you fancy someone and want to play one-on-one with them, but it makes your partner uncomfortable, then, obviously, playing with them would not be best for your partner or your relationship. Don’t do it. On the other hand, if you want to go to a sex workshop that you feel is important for your personal self-development and your partner feels threatened, you may decide that you will attend the workshop anyway. If you have demonstrated that you are honest, honorable, reliable, and trustworthy in your other agreements around sex and groups, it is likely that your partner will be able to accept your decision.
   

The possibilities of sex and sexual
expression are infinite. If you have begun to practice Tantra you’ll probably have noticed that your concept of what sex is and what you can do with it has expanded significantly. Now you’re ready for the next step. It’s time to take sex past the boundaries of pleasure and even of expanded consciousness and spiritual growth. It’s time to enter the realm of sex magic.

I first discovered Tantra and sex magic when I needed practical and spiritual tools to help me cope with the illness and death of dozens of friends in the AIDS crisis. Not surprisingly, I first used sex magic for healing. This is still my primary use for sex magic, although over the years I have expanded my definition of healing to include not only personal but also social and political issues. I have even used sex magic to help me understand and accept death.

In this section of the book you’ll see how you can use sex and sexual energy to heal yourself and to help others heal. You’ll learn how to say “sexual prayers” for people, places, and causes you wish to support. Most of all, you’ll learn how the art of sex magic can transform your relationship to your community, your world, and All That Is.

According to the Tarot, magic is the art of transformation. We have been practicing sex magic since page one. There is nothing all that magical about sex magic. It’s as logical and often as predictable as technology. A century ago, it was magical that a voice could be transmitted through a telephone wire. Fifteen years ago, it seemed equally magical that a signal could be transmitted from one mobile phone to another without wires. Sex magic also comes in wired or wireless. The hardwired aspect of sex magic is the mind/body connection.

You experienced that when you focused all your attention on to one little finger in the Focused Awareness exercise (see
chapter 2
). Remember how that finger became more sensitive and alive than your other fingers? That’s an excellent example of a hardwired mind/body connection that seems like magic. But what about wireless sex magic? What about the other day when you thought of someone you hadn’t heard from for years and they called you the very next day? Is that a coincidence? Is it magic? Or might that be an example of some kind of wireless connection between you and that other person?

Sex magic can be as simple and as wired as masturbating to relax or to fall asleep. Sex magic can be as unwired as sending an orgasm as a prayer to promote peace in the Middle East. For people who believe in a higher power and talk with or pray to that higher power, sex magic may seem either logical or heretical, depending on the nature of your beliefs. Sex magic has a lot in common with prayer; we do conscious sex magic to accomplish any or all of several intentions:

* To connect with a higher power

* To send healing energy

* To influence the outcome of a given situation

What else might you do with the sexual energy you raise?

Sex magic is what happens when you put your sexual energy where your intentions are. Dedicated sex magicians feel that the earth is their church and their body is their altar as they dedicate their sexual energy for the benefit of themselves, their
community, and their world. Sex magic is not religion, although it can certainly feel like a physical prayer. It is not Paganism, although it can be included in Pagan or Wiccan rituals. It is not at odds with any spiritual practice. It can be practiced within the structures of most nonfundamentalist religions. What makes sex magic different from other types of magic or prayer is the sheer power of the erotic. When you are in a high state of sexual excitement, enormous quantities of energy are released in the body, producing a trancelike state of consciousness. When you are in this hypnotic state of sexual excitement, you become especially receptive and impressionable. Visions you hold—and words you hear—at this time are powerfully imprinted on your consciousness. (This is why partners need to be especially aware of what they say to each other during lovemaking.) This combination of energy and receptivity offers a unique opportunity for transformation.

Sex and Healing

A few years ago, an article that appeared in the health section of the
New York Times
reported the less-than-astonishing news that a scientific study revealed that positive experiences can significantly boost the immune system, while negative events were shown to suppress it. This was reported as though millions of people had not already discovered this. There was one interesting twist to the study. The boost to the immune system that results from pleasant events can last as long as two days, while the negative effects of a stressful encounter mainly take their toll in just one day. So finally, there it was in print in the
New York Times: a
scientific study that clearly demonstrated that pleasure is more powerful than pain. Yet it is remarkable how rarely pleasure is ever mentioned as a tool when dealing with disease, illness, and pain.

I once observed a terminally ill cancer patient feel tremendously better after a half hour of watching Annie Sprinkle’s sexually explicit one-woman show on tape. Color came into her face, she was more alive, and she was suddenly interested in having a little something to eat. No, she wasn’t interested in having sex with anyone. That’s not the point. Using our sexual energy as healing energy does not necessarily mean being turned on erotically or being interested in having sex with a partner. Our sexual energy is our life-force energy. When we activate it, we can use it for our healing and empowerment.

My brother Bill once drove across the state of Florida to be with his lover, Drew, who was then in the hospital. They were both in the late stages of AIDS. Bill called me from the car phone, sounding so terrible, so desperately ill, I didn’t think he was
going to make it to the hospital in Ft. Lauderdale. I felt completely helpless. As we spoke, one of my guardian angels whispered in my ear, “Tell him to stop at a gas station and cruise some guys.” I thought that was pretty weird, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I said, “Bill, why don’t you do what we always used to do when the drive was long and boring. Pull into a gas station, stand around, and cruise some guys.” Bill said dispiritedly, “Oh yeah right. Those days are long gone.” He was on so many body-numbing drugs that he hadn’t felt sexual for months, if not years. But I kept trying. I teased him by saying, “You know those hunky guys in the tank tops with the gorgeous biceps that quiver when they pump the gas … the ones with the suntans and the blonde hair and the cute little buns?” After a few minutes of that kind of banter, he finally laughed and said, “Look, there’s a gas station up ahead. I think I am going to stop.” He sounded like the healthy Bill I used to know years before. That little shot of sexual energy got him across the entire state of Florida.

You can use your sexual energy for your own health and well-being. Let’s look at some examples of the healing power of sex that you may already be familiar with and some that might surprise you.

Using Sex Magic to Relax and Relieve Stress

How many times have you had sex—with a partner or with yourself—and then gone straight to sleep? How many times have you masturbated in order to relax and be able to go to sleep? Wilhelm Reich, the revolutionary sex researcher, made the study of orgasm as a vital healing force his life’s work. What Reich found in his scientific studies wasn’t so different from what had been discovered centuries before in Asia. Reich claimed that orgone energy (which other traditions call Kundalini or chi) streams up and down the body from the top of the head to the bottom of the feet and back again. This energy is built up by taking in food, water, and air and is subsequently discharged by normal human activities such as emotional expression, the thinking process, body heat and growth, and excretion. In the normal course of one’s life, more energy is built up than is discharged. This buildup of energy creates a tension—even without the stresses we experience in today’s modern life. The most reliable method that nature has created for the release of that tension is sexual orgasm.