These two questions will help you identify your unique sexual Core Gifts, the places of your deepest passion, vulnerability, and love; the amazing place where deep love fuses with deep passion. Get ready for a gentle journey to the zone of your deepest sexual and emotional gifts. Enjoy!
Two Questions That Help You Discover Your Sexual Core Gifts
Discover Deep Portals To More Meaningful Sex
There are two questions you can ask yourself to discover your deepest sexual Core Gifts. Stay tuned to this episode to discover what those questions are and what your deepest sexual Core Gifts are.
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Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. I’m Ken page. I’m a psychotherapist, author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating®, and Cofounder of DeeperDating®.com, an online environment where single people can meet in a way that’s inspiring, safe and meaningful. Today, I’m really excited to share two questions that will help you discover your own sexual Core Gifts. In this and every episode, I’ll share with you the greatest tools I know to help you find beautiful, healthy love, and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, and we all know that those are the most wonderful and important skills of all in life.
If you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating® path to authentic intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com, and you can sign up for my mailing list, and get free gifts, and learn so much more about how to use these ideas to transform your intimacy journey, and also there are complete transcripts of every single episode. Also, I just want to share that everything that I speak about in this podcast is educational. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment for any condition. If you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions or symptoms, please seek professional help. Finally, if you like what you’re hearing here, I’d love it if you could subscribe and leave me a review, so thank you so much for that.
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Questions And Answers About Sex And Life
Okay, so let’s jump in. Often, the questions we ask of ourselves are what finely carve the shape of our futures. A great question excites us and opens new doors, and invites compassion and curiosity. In this episode, I want to offer two questions that do all those things about sex. Your answers will teach you really rich things about your sex life and you, and your life as a whole. The questions are really simple and in fact, they’re obvious and they’re gentle, but like so many gentle things, they have the power to change us deeply, which is why we spend so much time avoiding questions like these. In any real adventure, always the first consideration is safety, especially around things like sex where so many of us have been traumatized in “small T” ways and “large T” trauma ways as well. Be aware that if anything is triggering for you or brings up difficult material or difficult feelings, see if you can find help and support to navigate that.
What Makes Me Feel Safe In Sex?
If these questions and what comes up for you feel like too much, stop, get support, take space. Honor your own feelings because especially around sex, there’s just such a backlog of history and secrecy, and maybe trauma, and terrible information, and disempowerment for almost all of us. Go gently and be gentle with yourself. The preliminary question is, what makes you feel safe in sex and the expression of your sexuality? What kind of relationship, what kind of ways of relating do you need from the other person or persons to help you feel a real sense of safety?
What are the commitments that you need to go into the sexual experience with between you and you that help you feel safe, knowing that you are going to protect your emotional and physical safety? What ways of being from you and from your partner create a sense of safety? Finally, in a really concrete way, can you be sure that you are not going to do things that hurt you in the sex act because you’re afraid to say no? In saying that, I’m not talking about consensual kinky sex, where that experience of somebody having pain is part of the shared experience. I’m talking about hurting yourself, hurting your health, doing something that doesn’t feel true or honest, or self-honoring for you, so that needs to be first, is this environment of safety.
Sexual Core Gifts: When we explore our wild side, we are playing in a landscape of sexual poetry. It’s a world of inner symbolism that may never make conscious sense.
This is like a whole world, right there, a whole world of growth, right in that kind of preliminary foundational question. What makes me feel safe in sex? It’s a deep and rich question that, of course, will be different at different times in your life, but it’s a beautiful and essential question to ask. It’s a question that when your unconscious knows that you are going to protect it, that you’re going to protect yourself, that you’re going to protect your inner child, that you’re going to protect your most tender parts by not doing stuff you don’t want to do, then your psyche can rest, and the walls can kind of come down and the doors open up. This is not an easy process to be this authentic, that we say what truly, truly, truly feels safe to me, but it’s a really rich one, and one for so much exploration, a wonderful, wonderful writing prompt is each one of these questions and this preliminary one, what makes me feel safe in sex?
The next question is, what turns me on the most in sex? I want to speak about this a little bit because often, like really often, our sexual turn-ons do not fit our self-image. Maybe we fantasize about being sexually submissive, but we feel humiliated and diminished by that desire, or maybe we fantasize about being sexually dominant, but we become afraid of who that’s going to make us, or maybe the things that really, really turn us on are embarrassing because they’re just so vanilla. They seem so basic and so uninventive, but whether exotic or not, whatever our deepest erotic sparks are, they are portals to a deeper experience of sex and self.
When we know what our deepest turn-ons are and we’re with a partner, and there’s a mutual giving of shared deepest turn-ons, it is just an experience of shared joy. Often, these turn-ons illumine parts of ourselves that we do not know what to do with, because who has been really taught how to handle our most evocative sexual fantasies in a creative, celebratory, honoring, non-destructive, non-intoxicated way?
By hiding our most vulnerable, true sexual needs, we diminish the authenticity between our partner and us. Click To Tweet
Because we haven’t gotten that education, often, we can kind of judge our most kind of quirky or colorful desires as being odd, or maybe we feel like they are perverted. My dear friend, David Schechter, who is a theater director and lyricist for the Broadway musical “Soul Doctor”, he rescues the word perverse by proposing a really wonderful twist to it. Here’s what David says. He says, “What if perverse means per verse or through poetry?” Because when we explore our wild side, we are playing in a landscape of sexual poetry. It’s a world of inner symbolism that may never ever make conscious sense, and it doesn’t need to, but it still feels gratifying and deeply meaningful.
I think that the majority of us need help in embracing the things that turn us on the most, because like all Core Gifts, the closer we get to the very core of our being, the more we judge ourselves, the more we feel timid, the more we may feel awkward, the more we may feel worried about our authenticity, our originality, our truth, scaring other people away or being judged. I think it’s important too that we can distinguish between behaviors that are actually harmful to us and our partner, and those which are simply and wonderfully per verse.
Take a moment to think about what kinds of sex turn you on the most, and watch for the guards at the gate that tell you, “Oh, that’s not XYZ enough,” or “That’s too much ABC to the world to take or not to be judged.” Watch for those guards at the gate because you want to walk past them. It’s this kind of looking at yourself in the mirror moment and saying kind of, it’s an existential thing, “These really are the things that turn me on.” It’s just an important act of sexual adulthood to give ourselves the precious space to do that, so just take a moment now to think about that. What kind of actions move you, turn you on? What body parts, what behaviors, what outfits, what ways of being, and just give yourself room to just gently, easily, and lightly just reflect on that a bit, and just allow yourself the freedom of play when you do that.
Sexual Core Gifts: Like all Core Gifts, the closer we get to the very core of our being, the more we judge ourselves, feel timid, feel awkward, or feel worried about our authenticity, originality, truth, scaring other people away, or being judged.
You may hit these guards at the gate, these waves of discomfort. When you do, like I said, track them, but if they’re too disturbing or they’re triggering or traumatizing, do not feel like you need to push it. In that case, I would encourage you to get the help of a skilled, credentialed, nonjudgmental psychotherapist or highly trained coach.
If your fantasies just feel embarrassing or surprising, or out of the pale, see if you could just imagine embracing them. I’m just going to go back here for a moment and say, if you have experienced sexual trauma, that therapist and that coach need to be able to do trauma-informed work, because working with trauma is very much its own process. It’s a very precious and special one that it needs someone with training and deep sensitivity.
If you wish, just imagine now embracing these things that turn you on and even thinking, “These are gifts of mine,” and you could think about this. You could think, “How is this quality actually a gift in its tenderness, in its vulnerability, in its dominance, in its submissiveness, in its stillness, in its passion, in its fun and its exuberance? How are these soul qualities of mine being reflected in my sexuality?” Because a therapist of mine once said to me, and I just thought it was so wise and true. She said like, “Your sex life is an x-ray into your life. It captures kind of the deepest formations of self, and then it acts them out in symbolic ways.”
I just also want to say that whatever your turn-ons are, I promise you that there are many other people who share the same turn-ons, and with whom, sharing those turn-ons would be an act of deep mutual giving, and of course, our partner or future partner has hidden desires of their own. Following our own deeper turn-ons, including the ones we’re timid about exploring, deepen and enrich our entire sexual experience, but they deepen and enrich the relationship, because if we lead the way, our partner is going to be much more likely to go, and we all can be so timid around this material.
Whatever your turn-ons are, many other people share the same turn-ons, and with whom sharing those turn-ons would be an act of deep mutual giving. Click To Tweet
What Touches You Deeply In Sex?
Here’s the next question. What touches you most deeply in sex? This is a question that is rich and beautiful, and I really encourage every sexual adult to enjoy and relish and reflect on it. Here’s like an interesting thing is that this question often leaves us feeling more vulnerable than the question about what turns us on. Somehow, there’s a way that kind of articulating what turns us on can become almost like a menu choice that we’re pointing to once we get familiar with doing that, but the question of what touches you most deeply in sex, that’s a really rich question.
Have you ever been emotionally touched during sex in a way that took you by surprise? Have you ever been moved to tears or just felt like a sense of love or joy that kind of overtook you? Just think back on that and remember maybe moments, glimpses or fantasies. If you haven’t had these experiences, just imagine having them, because as you do this kind of work, the chance of them becoming part of your future is much, much, much, much greater.
Have you ever had the feeling of lust and love fused together? Maybe have you ever had the experience where sex leaves sex far behind? What happened to create those experiences? Let yourself kind of think back. What kind of relationship, what kind of touching, what kind of pacing, what kind of presence from you and from your partner? What are the things that allowed that deep experience? What were the emotions inside you for your partner and for yourself that allowed you to feel that?
As you think back on what triggered these feelings or in your fantasies, what does trigger them? This will tell you worlds about who you are, and worlds about your deepest sexual Core Gifts. Are there maybe parts of your body, which when they’re touched in a certain way, trigger deep emotion? A whole other series of questions is if you’re partnered, if you’re dating someone or even thinking back if you’re not, on people that you have been partners with or dated, what touched them most deeply in sex? Looking back with that lens, what were the things that really touched them? This is a gift we give ourselves and our partners to think about both of these beautiful questions, along with the fabulous and important and foundational safety question.
Here’s a story about a couple I know, a heterosexual couple. When they first had sex, they were like falling in love already. They were really falling in love, and something happened that felt odd to, I’ll call her Jill. They were having really enthusiastic sex, and in the middle, her boyfriend started to slow down, and then he just completely stopped moving, and he just enwrapped her in his arms as he lay on top of her. He just laid perfectly still, and she didn’t think that he had climaxed. She was bewildered, but she went with the moment. As they lay together in this embrace motionless, she felt a kind of shaking inside her. Out of nowhere, she began to weep, and they just held onto each other, not knowing what hit them. This beautiful ritual kind of became a hallmark of a number of sexual episodes that they had through the years.
Sexual Core Gifts: By hiding our most vulnerable, true sexual needs, we diminish the authenticity between us and our partner..
I think that in sex and in life, we are mostly more wild and more tender than we feel comfortable with, or we feel the world would be comfortable with. Both of those aspects of our sexuality are portals to our deepest self and to our richer expression in the world. You can ask yourself these two questions, not in sex, as a way to think and get to know yourself more. You can ask them in sex as a way to guide you and your partner to these deeper portals of intimacy and fun and joy and connectedness. What expressions will touch you and your partner most deeply on an emotional level? How can the two of us follow our trail of deep turn-ons at this moment?
When we avoid risking, which all of us do to different degrees by hiding our most vulnerable, true sexual needs, we diminish the authenticity for us, between us and our partner, because there’s this kind of like bond that happens that sex creates. If there’s deep truth in it and deep wildness, and deep freedom, and deep vulnerability, it’s such an, “I love you.” It’s such an, “I trust you.” It’s such a deepening of the bond. When we give up on our deep authenticity to keep things safe, sex tends to become bland, and then we start retreating from it, fantasizing about other people, because when experimentation dies, Eros kind of wilts.
As much as you can, as much as all of us can, bringing Eros into the relationship, and bringing our hearts and soul into our sexual relationship means sharing with our partners the things in sex that move us most deeply, and turn us on most intensely, and listening for the same with our partner, and kind of moving step-by-step together to the sexual soul of your relationship. Whatever stage you’re in, wherever you are in the continuum of from single to committed couple, you can use these questions to deepen and evolve your sexuality. You can experiment with these ideas in your sex life, in your relationship, in your masturbation fantasies, and just in your reflections. I wish all of you wonderful adventures in your journeys to richer and more deeply, spiritually, and emotionally gratifying sex. Thanks so much for listening. I look forward to connecting with you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating® Podcast.
There are two questions you can ask yourself to discover your deepest sexual Core Gifts. Stay tuned to this episode to discover what those questions are and what your deepest sexual Core Gifts are.
