Ep. 33: Sexual Energetics

Robyn:                    Hey, everyone. It’s Robyn Openshaw, and welcome back to Your High Vibration Life. My book, Seven Days to Your High Vibration Life is coming out in the fall by Simon & Schuster. I can’t wait. I actually wrote 90,000 words and one of the chapters in it was called Sexual Energetics: The Most Powerful Force Field in the Universe. A few weeks back, I handed my manuscript off and I’d written the 90,000 word book and then I found out that I had to chop it down to 60,000 words. This chapter that I’m going to read to you today that we called the sex chapter, it didn’t make the cut. Reason it didn’t make the cut is just because there’s a lot of good stuff in there and we just couldn’t include it all. I’m actually sort of attached to it and today, I’m doing a book reading, only it’s the forgotten chapter.

You probably know that I’m a former sex therapist. I love the practice of tantra in an oversexed, undertouched world, so this chapter might not be for you. If you don’t want to talk about sex, you want to check out now. For those of you who want to stick around, I hope you enjoy this as you consider the effect of your sexual energies, your sexual choices, on your high vibration life.

Sexual Energetics: The Most Powerful Force Field in the Universe. How you use your sexuality has everything to do with your overall vibrational quotient. It would be easy to leave that subject out of this book as it’s not discussed very often in polite or academic conversations, but it needs to be addressed. It’s no secret that many otherwise smart, high-functioning people have sex and intimacy confused. The market for therapy and treatment for “sex addicts” is rising as more light is shined on this phenomenon and pornography of every type imaginable is available at the touch of anyone’s fingertips. The addicts themselves suffer at least as much as their partners do with the loss of more authentic connection and often, actual physical sexual dysfunction.

You could argue that the power to give life to another human being or to participate in that act, regardless of whether it culminates there, is the most significant power that regular human beings ever witness and are part of. In fact, think about it. Orgasm and conception are virtually simultaneous, but what is the act that initiates the orgasm? The act of sexual intercourse is likely the most intense form of energy exchange there is. Women describe literally being “pounded” and we should acknowledge here the damage that can occur to an energetically sensitive person and, in fact, any of us, as we are all sensitive, when we don’t understand and honor the power of that exchange. This suggests how careful we must be in a world where sexual liberation is taken for granted and sex is trivialized to allow this mingling of energies only when we know and trust our partner, when we feel safe, and when we are resonating on a similar wavelength.

Sometimes, one partner in a dance for two uses sex to try and level disparate frequencies when there’s been an energetic disconnect. This is generally ineffective as relationship repair and can, in fact, deepen the divide since sex is simply the manifestation of the synchronicity in a certain vibration, not the other way around. It can take an extended period of time for a sensitive person to recover from a low vibration sexual interaction. We know this intuitively as it is an act the vast majority of us engage in only highly selectively, regardless of religious background. The average person has only four sexual partners in a lifetime.

Archetypally, women have had, throughout history, one of two roles. One, a prostitute, a sexual object, or a sexual privilege for profit and pleasure, and two, a mother or a breeder. In order to do anything different than those two roles, there’s has been, historically, a need for women to adopt male traits or to behave like a man. This has been the modern woman’s uphill battle, to break into other power roles. When I was 20 years old and I got married, I hyphenated my name in conservative Utah. I hyphenated my surname with his and my own family, not to mention my husband’s, said things to me like, “Keeping your name is not your right. It’s your brother’s right,” and, “You’re clearly not ready for the commitment of marriage.”

Very recent history, the past two generations, have altered the popularity of the classic sexual archetypes, as well, although they’re still very familiar to all of us and are alive and well, though somewhat more underground. Those of us living the modern fantasy of empowerment for women are the beneficiaries of the updated social norms and opportunities, but we also have all the confusion of those vibrations around our historical past regarding roles and sexuality to work through. Generally speaking, those archetypes are that the male is the pursuer and the female is the pursued, the resistant partner, the submissive, and even the sedated. After all, men have, on occasion, sedated women for sexual purposes since the dawn of time. My own grandfather used to perform weddings and refer to wifely duties, a concept that divides the older from the younger generations.

Since the women’s movement and the sexual revolution, it’s no longer in vogue for women to admit to or relish or even talk about roles such as the submissive in sexuality or in any other arena. Some of the world’s religions forbid sexuality and virtually all of them attempt to police it and restrain it. Some individuals choose to metaphorically castrate themselves, including our dear Nikola Tesla, by the way, whose discoveries this book revolves around, although I refer specifically to monks, priests, and nuns who deny their own sexuality because it is more base or more carnal and they feel called to spirituality and divinity, long considered to be higher realms of consciousness. Our collective past is rich with examples of the idea that higher states of being and the sex act are mutually exclusive.

I believe that part of why we have so many conflicted feelings about our own sexuality stems from the male perspective that orgasm is the whole point in the bedroom. Orgasm is the point of conception and we spend the rest of our lives seeking it again and so sexuality is a highly manipulated experience where the male, archetypally, seeks to make the experience whatever results in an orgasm for him. The most a woman can hope for and fortunately, it is common in the modern age, is that he wants her to have that same experience. He cares that she has the destination experience, the orgasm. Men have been taught that they should care about their partner’s orgasm and many of them pride themselves on helping their partner achieve it through various means. They believe that this is the holy grail of sex. What if this is just a stepping stone on a far more evolved state of sexual intimacy where the revolution of the female orgasm, the fact that it’s socially acceptable for women to seek pleasure in the experience as well now, is just one point along the path?

A few men are realizing that sex can be a journey, rather than an event to be manipulated for orgasm as the concentration of all points of light or frequencies for the ultimate destination. When they discover this, they tap into a set of frequencies that are grounded and giving, rather than receiving. A man fully committed to this potentially experiences a transcendent sexual and overall relationship because he has accomplished the ultimate in female submission. He thinks that ultimate is to orgasm. He’s wrong. The ultimate for her, his job in the bedroom, is to make her feel both safe and loved.

Orgasm is the highest frequency we can bring into the physical dimension, but when we allow ourselves to tap the resonance of a journey sexual experience instead of the destination of the orgasm-driven experience, which we’ll talk about in this section, it can transport you to a different level of intimacy. Sometimes, when we experience tremendously powerful frequencies after a period of elation, a period of depression can follow. This high-vibing experience and subsequent crash could come via any of the experiences we discuss in this book, but it’s never more likely than with a powerful sexual experience. That’s because that ecstatic experience brings up your emotional blockages, unearthed by the electricity of your sexual experience.

Remember, a high rate of oscillation can detoxify a cell, so it similarly stands to reason that that same high vibration is going to dislodge some discomfort and some pain points in a relationship or, in effect, it can detoxify you if you allow for the emotional reaction and if you sit with the pain points it brings up and embrace the process. After all, any good energy healer will tell you after your session to expect some emotional fallout, some volatility, some colorful dreaming, and other subconscious reactions to a major shift in your energies. Sex can be therapeutic and not just because it feels good and causes a release, orgasm and oxytocin are good for you, but because it can be deeply intimate and loving, but also because it can identify some of your lower frequencies you may want to bring into the light and address.

After a profound sexual experience, couples often report conflicts over small things in the ensuing days. In some relationships, it can even result in breakups or one partner pulling back and she doesn’t even know why. If this has happened to you and it’s mystifying and frustrating, just know that this is energetics playing out and they can be resolved. If we become reflective about the causes, we identify personal and relationship blockages and this can be a gift in a relationship.

Sex isn’t just for making babies and it isn’t just for releasing tension or getting off. You probably have a modern enough consciousness to know that it isn’t sinful innately. I hope so because throughout time, the religions that ban or vilify sex just drive it underground and cause it to take sinister forms. In fact, this type of sexuality, the higher vibration body of tantra, which I’m going to propose to you, can be a profoundly powerful healing tool because merged vibrations are so heightened and so very intimate.

“Orgasmobiles is how women are often seen by the men who hunt them,” Michael Brown says, in his book, The Presence Portal. He discusses how energies shift as the male partner removes orgasm as the end goal and decides in advance that he will stop or change anything in the sexual experience when it gets too close to orgasm for him. He will have a journey rather than a destination experience, which may positively transform his relationships, not just with his partner, but with all women and all human beings, and Brown recommends to put several days in between sexual experiences for the low vibes to come out and be worked through between sexual experiences.

The job of the archetypal aggressor, or male, has been to make the world safe for dependents, such as a woman and children. The world, in so many ways, is an unsafe place for women. My 21-year-old daughter scrapes her pennies together and heads off for another continent every Summer. She works two jobs. She lives on pennies. She saves for her adventures and every time she leaves, her father and I are terrified because she does not know what an unsafe world it is for her gender.

Recently, from Greece, she texted me, excited to show photos of her on a sailboat in the Adriatic with two older men. Because she paid them and because they do this work professionally, she believed herself to be completely safe out in the water, two female college students with two older male strangers. You don’t even have to be a parent to have the same reaction I did. Her father and I were losing our minds and calling her all but shrieking, “Have you seen the movie Taken?” or Taken 2, for that matter. Her father and I have seen both, contributing to our anxiety. Liam Neeson unleashes superhuman powers to extricate his daughter from a sex trafficking operation while she travels with a friend in Europe. Obviously, you can see the connections. We don’t sleep well at night when she goes on her couch surfing European trips. “But mom,” she says. “There’s a couch surfing website and people we stay with have ratings.” The world is unsafe for women and the reasons for that run bone deep and, in fact, are contained in our DNA because women in the world, since getting booted from the Garden of Eden, have not been safe and we still aren’t.

A friend of mine read the first draft of this chapter, including the tantric sex exercise in our next episode. What she said in response was indicative. She’s married to a committed, good man who loves her, but even for her, the response was, “I’m not sure I want him looking into my soul.” Now, many would read my friend’s comment and their thought would go to the archetype, men want sex more and women resist. My mind goes to she must not feel entirely safe and if, even in committed relationships, we women feel hunted and we feel like an object of desire with the neverending quest for orgasm as the end goal, it defines and limits the sexual relationship.

How many marriages do you think have ended in part because a man did not realize that his job in the relationship is to make the woman feel safe and loved and failed to do so? All this has roots in thousands of years of human sexual behavior, all of your ancestors’ consciousness and behavior coming to play in the very charge of your DNA. There’s no need to feel guilty about it if it’s a revelation to you that most sexuality is limited and limiting by definition. However, a transcendent experience completely different from your personal experience thus far is entirely possible. We’re going to explore the art of tantra because I believe it embodies that potential to use sex for a different and higher cause, that is, exploring the high vibration of sex for awareness, healing, and stronger connection. This is very different than using your partner for sex and love to achieve a selfish goal.

Let’s now back up a bit and talk about the energetics of touch. My friend Dallas Hartwig, coauthor of It Starts With Food and The Whole30, says of the modern age soaked in electronic communication replacing most others, “We are all oversexed and undertouched.” Touch is powerfully healing, as much science has shown us, including for newborn infants. Infants who are touched more have much higher positive life outcomes than infants whose basic needs are met, but who are not touched often, such as is often the case in some orphanages, as well as in families. It’s been shown that especially for newborns, skin-to-skin contact helps to calm them and they cry less and sleep better. It also facilitates their brain development and they’re at a lower risk for emotional, behavioral, and social problems as they grow up.

It’s also part of what is so jarring in a transactional sexual relationship with chaotic frequencies. This tends to occur when one or both partners are under the influence of a substance, when they do not know each other prior to the encounter, when one partner is paid for the transaction or is non-consenting, or where there is no love or trust in the interaction. There’s a significant amount of loving touch in most sexual interactions between people who love each other and there’s far less touch in sex between strangers or sex while under the influence of a substance.

Fully half of us are single, even in midlife, when we were far more likely to be married a hundred years ago and social media has replaced much of what used to be our social life. Porn is ubiquitous and it makes up a huge percentage of the commerce on the internet. Ten years ago, 93% of boys and 62% of girls were exposed to significant pornography before the age of 18 and those rates have only gone up. Regardless of whether you feel pornography has a viable and healthy purpose or whether you think it’s caused the degeneracy of the modern day Sodom and Gomorrah, which are two ends of the spectrum on how you might view it, there’s an epidemic of sexual dysfunction, as some men have now been exposed to thousands of hours of pornography that affect their ability to, if I may be graphic, get an erection, maintain an erection, or complete an orgasm. Reconnecting sexual practice to the beautiful, powerful, but positive energetic that I believe it was meant to be is the purpose for the next section.

That, my friends, takes us to the end of this section, but next time, we’ll have part two, An Introduction to Tantra: The Highest Vibration Sexual Experience. See you then.