Awakening Your Inner Lover

by Margo Anand

In launching yourself into this adventure of sexual discovery, your first question is likely to be "Where do I begin?" Many of my clients, when they come to work with me, assume that the answer is, "by finding the right partner". They believe that if only the right man or woman would come along, their lovemaking would be wonderful. Even if they have been through a number of such "right" partners, they still want to believe that the next may hold the magic. They don't realize that by searching outside themselves, they are relinquishing responsibility for their pleasure.

Unless we start by accepting who we really are now, with our so-called imperfections, we will not experience the personal power needed to develop our true potential in the realm of sacred sexuality.

It is time to discover yourself as the lover within — that essential part of you that is already whole and capable of experiencing the fullness of sexual pleasure. Instead of looking outside for the right partner, you give to yourself first everything that you would give to your beloved. It is liberating and exciting to acknowledge that you hold your sexual destiny inside yourself. This is what I mean by awakening your Inner Lover.

Loving yourself in this way does not mean being self-absorbed or narcissistic, or disregarding others. Rather, it means welcoming yourself as the most honored guest in your own heart, a guest worthy of respect, a lovable companion.

Your Inner Lover is not separate from yourself, nor is he or she a dreamlike phenomenon. Your Inner Lover is more like a quality, a feeling, that you can recognize in moments of joy or stillness when, moving deeply inside yourself, you connect with a natural innocence, simplicity, and spontaneity. The Inner Lover is expressed in your ability simply to be as you are without trying to be other than you are.

Loving You

The practice of awakening your inner lover has roots in the Tantric tradition, in which devotees were encouraged to visualize in great detail the form and qualities of a divine lover, such as the God Shiva and the Goddess Shakti. Their aim was to focus with such devotion on the spiritual beloved that they ultimately attained union with the deity, thereby manifesting in themselves the divine qualities of the Godhead.

My goal is to inspire you to fall in love, not with a symbolic deity, but with yourself as the spiritual beloved. When you enter a loving relationship with yourself, you become both the lover — the one who gives love — and the beloved — the one who receives it.

Through this self-directed lover, you can experience yourself as a limitless being, in tune with the whole of existence. The purpose of meeting your Inner Lover is rooted in the understanding that the more self-accepting you are, the more orgasmic you can become. Let me explain what I mean. When you criticize yourself, one part of you is fighting another part, and consequently your energy is in conflict. In a state of self-acceptance, your energy is unified. Only then can you enjoy pleasure and become fully orgasmic in love. Orgasm, by its very nature requires your total participation. By connecting with your Inner Lover and experiencing self-acceptance, your potential to be orgasmic is greatly enhanced.

The Breath Of Life

The first step in the process of awakening your inner lover (Ed. Note: Specific exercises are outlined in more detail throughout the book itself and are not included within this article) is to become aware of the way you breathe and of what breathing does to your body. Conscious Breathing helps you to connect with your physical sensations and to amplify them. It focuses your attention on the life energy that courses through your whole body. This is important because your ability to awaken your Inner Lover depends on your capacity to experience yourself and your sensations from within. You are going on an inner journey, using your breath as a vehicle.

As you become more sensitive to the flow of your breath, you will find that you can direct your attention to any part of your body, breathe into that part, create tingling sensations of warmth and aliveness, and then spread these sensations to the rest of the body.

To show you what I mean, let's conduct a simple experiment. Take a few minutes, close your eyes, relax, and imagine that a familiar hand comes to rest gently on your own hand. The hand feels good. Because you are relaxed, you are receptive to the touch. You find that you can "listen" to it, welcoming its warmth as if it were a subtle current of energy. Feel this sensation of warmth spreading through your hand. Inhaling deeply, feel as if you are drawing the warm energy from your hand into your feet and then to the rest of your body. With practice you can welcome the subtlest sensations, allowing them to be enhanced by deep breathing. This is how breathing can serve you as a vehicle for pleasure, eventually turning your whole body into an instrument, even a symphony of pleasure.

Many forms of spiritual practice and methods of self-development place great emphasis on breathing. In the East, teachers of meditation emphasize breathing in a slow and conscious way — that is to say, with attention fully focused on the inflow and outflow of breath. This constant awareness of breathing switches your attention away from the thought processes, an important step in quieting the mind. This creates an inner silence that allows sensory perceptions to be much sharper and more intense. In addition, some meditation schools teach certain techniques of breathing that fill the body with prana, the universal life force. The deeper you inhale, the more prana you can absorb.

In High Sex, deep breathing is what connects us to our sexual centers. The deeper we breathe, the more we come into contact with our sexual energy. Most of us, however, live on a beggar's ration of air. The average person inhales one pint of air per breath, while our lungs can actually contain seven pints when fully expanded. This is one of the reasons that the range and depth of our experiences, especially sexual sensations, disappoint our longings. We simply do not breathe well enough to reach our full orgasmic potential in love.

Be Who You Are

In sex and love, we have been deeply conditioned by the role models offered by the glamorous worlds of entertainment and fashion. We absorb romantic ideals from Hollywood and deep down long to be Supermen and Superwomen with perfect figures, perfect hair, stunning good looks, casually assured in conversation, and irresistible to the opposite sex.

What this means is that we long to be someone different from whom we really are. Or we feel trapped into behaving in a certain way when really we are experiencing something quite different. For example, we might feel angry toward someone, yet, want to appear compassionate and loving. Or we may want to be the best lover in the world, while in fact, we do not feel aroused or excited. There is a conflict within and this has unfortunate consequences; for unless we start by accepting who we really are now, with our so-called imperfections, we will not experience the personal power needed to develop our true potential in the realm of sacred sexuality. High Sex depends on your willingness to awaken the real, authentic lover in you.

The above was excerpted with permission from the book, "The Art of Sexual Ecstasy", by Margo Anand, published by Putnam Publishing Group, Jeremy Tarcher/Perigee Books.
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About The Author

Margo Anand has studied with many Tantric masters, and conducts ecstasy workshops throughout Europe and the U.S. She holds a graduate degree in psychology from the Sorbonne. She is the author of several books. Visit her website at www.margotanand.com

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