Tag: motion

The arousal response is your body’s natural mechanism for accessing pleasure. Although often confused with the genital swelling that accompanies our arousal response, the ignition for our arousal lives in the sexiest organ of our body: Our Brain.

Specifically, in the limbic area of the brain, which also processes memory and emotion and is conveniently co-located with our olfactory bulb, which explains why our sense of smell invigorates our emotional process, our access to memories, as well as our feeling of being turned on. Truly, your orgasmic potential begins with your ability to cultivate your arousal mechanism. Interesting studies have demonstrated that working with your physical arousal response can actually instigate sexual desire, rather than the reverse of waiting for desire to jumpstart arousal. This is heartening news because tapping into and enlarging our capacity for arousal is no different than developing any other physical response. Here are four helpful tips to get acquainted with and befriend your arousal mechanism.

The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life." ~ Wilhelm Reich

Some of my most vivid memories of my early sex life are not of the satisfying post-coitus elated release, but the opposite. It is hard to forget the many years when sex was more a path of frustration than pleasure; when I was still figuring out how my body responded and why it often didn’t. In retrospect, I think it was my strong intention to find pleasure that kept me coming back to try again—of being willing to live inside the questions I had about pleasure even without many answers. And even now, some 30 years later, I often notice that it is this same deliberate attention, the essence of wanting to want, that gives me the courage to keep seeking out my own erotic truth.