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NVC in sex

Here is a text Bonno wrote about his travel into NVC in sex:

NVC in Lovemaking:
First of all to acknowledge that, at least in my life, I experience sex as a very vulnerable topic. Since I want to care for any discomfort around this topic for anyone on the planet, you’re very much invited to check with yourself: ‘do I want to read this article which is about sex?’.

And I also want to bring clarity that I’m writing all this from the perspective of being a heterosexual, male. 

My story about bringing NVC to the bedroom:

About a decade ago I had my first experience of empathy. The person in front of me (Yoram) offered his presence without doing anything (no fixing, advising, explaining, diagnosing, asking questions….), even when I was rolling on the floor shivering, trembling and making strange noises that seemed to make no sense at all… For me it was a life changing moment and since then I’m practicing offering both myself and others this color of presence in most activities in life: To love what is, welcoming everything, trusting the body that any message is there to serve life.

At the moment I feel very inspired to practice this color of presence there where I can experience both the utmost pleasure, strength and joy, AND where I can feel the deepest pain, fear and insecurity:

SEX

I feel like sharing a tiny part of what applying empathic presence in sex brought me so far.

First, I saw how much I was hiding myself in sex. Hiding my insecurities, hiding my dreams, fantasies. Also I found out I was quite goal oriented (orgasm) and with that missing a lot of availability to be present with my previous partner(s) which, looking back now, I mourn….

I saw how full I was with ‘have to’s’ and ‘should’s’ in sex like: ‘I have to be aroused’, ‘I should like my partner’ and many, many more. This brought immense pressure to my body and I developed a core belief ‘I’ll never experience fulfillment in sex’.

For time’s sake I’ll skip the outcome of connecting with all the different voices and the underlying needs in those moments, because I want to move to what happened as a result of this in the bedroom.

I was less aroused and mostly lost my erection or did not have any at all. Very hard… I also connected more clearly than ever before with so much tension in my body, that for whatever reason seems to be there 24 /7. Very, very hard and seemingly very far from ‘sexy….’

Yet, when I included all of that in my Lovemaking, when I offered presence to all my sensations, the pleasant as-well as the unpleasant, while being inside of my partner, genitally connected, when I moved the focus from ‘doing’ in sex to ‘being’, I noticed sensations I never encountered before.

Although I do like orgasm and being fully aroused, this exchange between two bodies was on a level of wisdom and pleasure that I did not imagine to be possible for me. As far as my capacity to put these events into words goes, my experience was and is that the sexes (finally) get a chance to interact without me or my partner interfering, for them to communicate and create something that I considered to be beyond my capacity. And that for me feels like magic….

On a sensory level: I notice such a variety of dreamingly, ecstatic, pleasurable sensations and an immense sense of respect and love for my partner, her whole body and how it functions.

As well in a wider perspective, as a manual HOW to ‘make love not war’. It seems such a paradigm shift in Lovemaking to focus on bringing myself fully instead of getting something out of it. And I imagine that if everyone would do this and experience the result of that, we would be in complete awe of the other person in front of us and want to fully, fully care for their well being, their body, their whole system and doing everything in our power to support that their needs are met especially in Lovemaking.

This for me brings the trust that sex can be a safe place to explore what brings pleasure to any human being in a safe way and I imagine this will contribute to care, respect and peace on the planet.

With meaningful presence of welcoming EVERYTHING,
Bonno