How Tapping Into Grief Can Improve Your Sex Life
Tapping into our grief is both an individual and collective endeavor and it is truly an act of courage. Grief is part of the human experience, but like many other uncomfortable feelings, our tendency often is to push it under the rug and wait for it to pass. We need lots of time to let it land in our bodies, and the more vulnerable we can be in sharing our grief with others, the less of a grip it will have on us. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross named five stages of grief including denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. As far as I know, she mentioned nothing around sexuality, and indeed grief does seem to bear a heavy energy, so why does this article purport that grief can improve our sex lives? Maybe it has something to do with our relationship to it.
Grief is an essential part of life and Sexuality
Grief doesn’t always involve a literal death. It is an emotional reaction to change or loss, yet underlying the pain is a source of profound love. Grief is often felt when someone loses a job, a child goes away to college, someone dies, or personally, in my most recent deep grieving experience, when separating from my partner. It can be noticed on more subtle levels when we tune into the aging process, the changing world climate on all its various levels, or even the change of seasons. We feel grief in our bodies: our throats feel tight, our hearts break open more, depression shows up like a weight in our gut, or anxiety producing nausea. And more often than not, we may notice our sexual appetite wanes.
A Feel Good Society Leaves out the Power of Sadness
Generally speaking, in our culture we are taught to focus on what feels good in any given moment. But I notice that more often than not, when I accept something to which I initially resistant to accepting, I grow, I flourish, I blossom. And when I resist, it persists, until I pay attention. Consider the birthing process which can be extremely painful, and it can be easy to want to clamp down on the intense sensations flooding the body. Of course this doesn’t stop the process of childbirth; it only intensifies the suffering. I know from personal experience with childbirth that the more I invited in all the sensations, the more expanded and liberated I became; in many ways transcending the pain by going through it, not around it. The ecstasy of baby in arms is similar in many ways to the post orgasmic glow after an amazing sexual encounter with a lover. Flushed and red, throbbing with life force, and completely amazed with this person before you. Both are messy, raw, primal experiences that bring us completely into the moment.
From Heartbreak to Heart Breaking Open
Perhaps the same can be said of grief. The degree to which we surrender to it is the degree to which we fully allow for all the feelings and sensations to move through us and have their way with us. This is when what has felt like heartbreak evolves into the spaciousness of heart breaking open. This is when the sex can open more fully, because of the acceptance of grief and feeling it all, our sexuality included. This is when we feel most alive: when we allow for the feelings of grief to rattle us so completely that we lose ourselves in rapturous despair, opening to the raw urgency of feeling all there is to feel. And when we allow ourselves to be open enough to feel it throughout our whole body, we may be surprised to find ourselves able to receive deeper levels of pleasure than we ever thought possible. This is our total birthright and we can reclaim it by choosing to feel it all. By choosing to surrender to the ebb and flow of life. The deeper we allow ourselves to go, the more pain and pleasure…both…we will open to. Conversely, the more we numb ourselves in the name of staying safe, the more bland life will feel. Safe perhaps, but bland. Personally, I want to see with fresh eyes everyday what is possible when I open to feeling all the way into my grief, my sadness, my anger, my despair…and my sexuality. When we choose to stay open like this, these darker energies will show up, sometimes unexpectedly, knocking us on our asses. Perhaps they are asking us to feel deeply with the promise that if we can stay open enough to feel not only the lighter energies, but also our grief, we can stay present to the parts of us that create new life…the parts of us that make life worth living.
Practical Tips for Experiencing Grief
1. Embodied Breathing
Try erotic embodiment breathing the next time you want to tap into a powerful way to move grief through your body while connecting to your sexual desire. Here’s how you do it:
Part one: Take several deep, relaxing breaths into the chest, making space for the chest to gently open as you notice what feels alive in that area. Allow for any feelings to emerge and be felt fully.
Part two: Allow the breath to move down into your stomach and allow it to expand and contract like a balloon as you notice and sink into the energy of this part of your body.
Part three: Breathe all the way down to your pelvic floor and allow it to open and for all your feelings/energy to move through your cock or pussy. Squeeze the muscles of the pelvic floor on the inbreath (like you are stopping the flow of urine when you pee) and release them on the outbreath. Do this several times. On the last breath, squeeze all the muscles in the body and hold. When you release, allow all the sensations to flood through the body, and just be still and notice what is happening in the body and with the emotions. You may notice the second chakra energized and that grief has loosened its grip a bit.
2. Getting Cuddly, Attuning
Another way to move grief through is simply through cuddling and attuning. By maintaining eye contact with your partner while snuggled up with each other, you are allowing your nervous system to relax and sync up with the other’s. You allow yourself to be seen with whatever emotions are present which can be very liberating. The oxytocin that is created can bring about a feeling of relaxed arousal which can lead to some pretty connected, epic lovemaking.
My personal journey involves grief around letting go of the 21-year relationship I had with my husband. I now know that for a long while before the relationship changed, I wasn’t acknowledging my grief around how it wasn’t working anymore, and this denial only extended my silent suffering. While this coping strategy kept the wounds bandaged, the adhesive was always loose, and the pain was steady, reliable, and dull. Our sexual patterns were much the same, and we were both unsatisfied, but also unwilling for some time to fully acknowledge and deal with the personal work we needed to do.
When I started the process of separation and started living my truth, the pain didn’t go away, but its quality changed tremendously. Instead of numbing, I dove into periods of crying and emoting, followed by deep lovemaking with a new partner who could hold space for that. I used the grief as a portal into a deeper dimension of me and discovered an intimacy that arose from knowing and trusting myself to follow my truth, even when that truth contained some dense and painful processes. And even though it often hurt like hell, I found that sexual ecstasy was a part of the package. Kind of a reward for all the brave work I’d done in excavating myself by choosing to honor, not admonish the grief.
Grief is a tool and should not be ignored.
Of course, we don’t need to get divorced or lose a parent to tap into grief. It could simply be a feeling of loneliness or lack of fulfillment in your career. Especially at this time in history when policies are being put into place that don’t seem to serve the greater good, grieving can be a powerful catalyst for change. Shedding tears and finding ways to express anger, without projecting, can drop us deeply into our bodies, and if we choose to, move some of the collective grief through our sexuality. So next time you feel a heavy energy tugging at you, or you are pushing away a feeling, notice if grief is trying to get your attention. And listen to what it has to say. Life may be a roller coaster ride, but with love, awareness, willingness, and the torch of sexuality lighting the way, we are always on the right track.
Love Coaching With Wendy 