A Return to Natural Sensuality

Sensuality is the inner warmth that radiates from some people and makes them objects of desire. Sensuality is not the sex appeal generated by the contemporary social icons of a “hot body” That is a short-term, artificial, outer image. Sensuality is a deeper, longer lasting, and richer essence that appeals to the opposite sex, a warm spirit that we carry within.

A sensuous person is a warm soul. This warm appeal is in all of us at birth, but many of us have lost it because of the layers of false images that have been instilled in us by society.

People are sensual when they feel sensual. What we feel inside is radiated to the world. But too many of us are sending the wrong signals because we have been brainwashed with false images of sensuality, images that have smothered our natural sexuality.

We entered this world warm, naked, and sensuous, unashamed and encumbered by hang-ups. From that time on, our natural sensuality was altered by our parents, peers, and misdirected influences from our culture. Because we have fallen from grace from our own original sensual spirit, we carry subliminal attitudes and body language that turn off—rather than on—people we are attracted to. And yet it is still here, our God-given, natural capacity for pleasure in our physical body and mind.

Many men grow up to believe that a woman’s sexual appeal is somehow wrapped up in the contours of her body I have heard women in heir twenties rate a man’s sexiness in the same way These individuals ire out of touch with their own sensuality.

We are a civilization of people hungry for sensual love while drowning in an ocean of sexual frenzy. Never before have so many women and men been so sexually fixated and emotionally unfulfilled. What was nce a good-night kiss is now expected to go much further than that, et we are emotionally starved while being sexually saturated.

The sex being marketed to us by every medium has a pornographic quality. It conflicts with the true nature of our sensuality.

Men and women have had their natural sensuality smothered by
false images. Sensuality isn’t a brand of perfume, silicone in breasts, penile implants, or bathing suits that let it all hang out. It’s not something you pump up at the gym or buy at the lingerie counter.

Nor does beauty equate with sensuality Physical attractiveness and sensuality are not the same, but our society has put such an emphasis on superficial outer beauty and sex has been so commercialized—and impersonalized—that most of us have been dulled emotionally.

We may vary in physical appearance—few of us are the stuff of magazine covers. It’s not a question of how good-looking we are; the world is full of people who have happy, passionate, sensuous sex lives but couldn’t get through the door to a beauty contest.

But that natural, sensual warmth we were born with is still within us, ready to be drawn to the surface to be rediscovered and used.

People who are not sensuous have lost touch with the sensuality
they were born with. It became tarnished as their sexuality was shaped by their parents and society Few of us are aware that we are carrying this supression that causes us to feel inadequate or to freeze up, sending the wrong signals rather than expressing our honest passion.

We can reclaim our original nature through eidetic imaging, the science of emotions that is on the cutting edge of psychology. The process treats the brain like a computer. The brain stores and processes information in the form of “images” that commonly run through our minds like film clips. With imaging techniques, we are able to replace negative images (the baggage we carry) with positive ones that permit us to glow with our natural sensuality The first step to reclaiming our natural sensuality lies in our desires, and imaging can help us discover them.

What are your desires? Are you looking for a permanent, loving relationship? Are you in a relationship that needs to have passion infused back into it? Do you want to make yourself more desirable? Become a better lover? Or do you want to experience the divine, the spiritual aspect of sex that most of us never achieve?

Some people just want to be ravished. Some want to be savored, their body caressed by sensitive, knowing hands. Some want a deep experience of spiritual merging with another.
What are you looking for? Take a moment. Imagine that you are with your ideal lover. Let the scene play out in your mind like a movie.

What are you doing to each other? How do you feel? In this image of desire, there is a key, a clue, to what you are looking for about yourself and your sensuality But you will not find the answer to your quest, your desires, in fantasy. Fantasizing doesn’t bring about the necessary insight that you need to understand why you can’t achieve your desires and what you can do to obtain them.

The key to change, to achieving our desires, is found internally, in
our minds, and in a form that is similar to the fantasy lover we just imagined. These images are “film clips” in our minds, but they are not scenes we invent. Instead, they are part of our memory bank.

Let’s assume you want a loving relationship with someone but have not been able to achieve it. Rather than imagining a fantasy that won’t help you achieve your desires, you can access your memory bank and see in your mind’s eye an actual scene in which you spoke to the person. The actual scene, a visual film clip from your memory bank, is called an eidetic image. All of your interactions with other people and situations are filed away in the memory bank of your mind. Just as we scan a computer disk to bring up information we’ve registered, we are able to call forth our actual experiences from our memory and examine them. From that examination, we gain insights and new perceptions about ourselves and other people. Once we understand who we are and how our present sensuality was formed, we can make changes.

Let’s do an eidetic image so you can see how simple the process is. Relax for a moment in a quiet spot. Now, keeping your eyes open or closed (obviously, you will need to open them to read these instructions), see your parents standing before you in your mind’s eye.

Examine the image for a moment. Who is on the left and who is on the right side as you look at them?

Now see whether you get a feeling of personal warmth from your
parents bodies. Whose body gives you a better feeling of personal warmth? What kind of feeling does the other parent’s body give?

Concentrate on your mother’s body How do you feel? Now concentrate on your father’s body How do you feel?

Images of our parents are prime images imprinted in our minds. For most people, the image of their mother has been imprinted on the right side and their father on the left.

The fact that your parents had a certain body temperature in your images of them, and a position (left or right), has significance in terms of your connection to them and to your own connectiveness to the world and your personal life force. No matter how old we are, no matter how long we have been away from them, we tend to unconsciously emulate our parents—or to react in the opposite way. As we get more involved in imaging and practice, we will discover that things as simple as the body temperature of our parents and their position in our mind’s eye have influenced how we deal with the world.

We will probe ourselves and our relationship with our lovers (by
lover, I mean spouse, significant other, or someone we desire but haven’t yet connected with). We will examine how our parents, culture, and other factors shaped our sexuality In doing these and dozens of other images, you will gain enormous insight into your own sensuality and the sensuality of those you desire.

We will know our full potential only after we peel off those negative images that get in our way.

Unfortunately, even if you had the nicest parents and most comfortable circumstances, you will have to unearth and resuscitate the marvelous person who is you, the person you were at birth before layers of fear and self-doubt coated you or left you at war with your emotions.

To be the best you can, you need to rediscover yourself.
Sometimes the negative images seem subtle or too simplistic.
Let me give some examples from my own life.

When I was about four, my girlfriend and I were playing “doctor”
with a friend named Tommy Checking his body, we discovered something different, and we found it interesting because we didn’t have one. So we decided to put toothpaste, the “medicine” we were using, on Tommy’s special part. He was lying naked, and we were rubbing toothpaste on him when my mother came in and yelled, “What are you doing? Shame on you!”

That was the first time I felt shame about sexuality Most of us experienced some sort of embarrassment during our sexual innocence. Usually it was triggered by a minor incident, but the parental attitude that caused the embarrassment is more subtly (and sometimes savagely) hammered into us for the first two decades of our lives. Later on, these “minor” incidents become land mines that explode in our inner mind when we deal with another person in a sexual way The second shame I felt was when I was five. My girlfriend Sylvia, who was a little older, had somehow watched her parents have sex, and she showed me a sexual position, simulating their movements. Of course, at that age I didn’t understand what sex was. That night, when my father was putting me to bed, I said, “Look what Sylvia showed me,” and rocked back and forth with my hips. I looked up at my father’s face and saw shock and shame. I felt ashamed of myself, but did not know why. That I can remember these “minor” incidents is an indication of how strongly they affected me.

Sometimes the emotional scarring is not that subtle. A woman in
her thirties who consulted me was very uptight and controlled during lovemaking. She couldn’t relax and was losing her lover because of it.

Through imaging, she unraveled layers of her past, including many “minor” sexual incidents. She also realized the effect of a very major one.

As a girl, she was very confused about sexuality Her parents were strict churchgoers, and she attended a religious school where girls got the impression that any sort of sexual contact was sinful. And yet she knew her parents hid pornographic magazines in their bedroom
closet.

One morning, she masturbated before going to church, and so she went to Holy Communion feeling unbelievably guilty She knew she had committed some kind of sin. She didn’t know if it was a mortal sin, but she knew it was bad, that her purity was tainted, and that she didn’t deserve a relationship with God.

Over twenty years later, those images of “tainted purity” were still controlling her sex life and smothering her sensuality.

THE UNSENSUOUS WOMAN AND MAN

During lunch in a restaurant with two associates, we quietly observed other diners.

At one table sat Ms. X, who appeared to be in her late thirties. She was well groomed in a midnight-blue business suit, and her hair had a fashionable blown-wet look. Her makeup and jewelry (a single strand of pearls) were in good taste. She wasn’t the stuff of magazine covers, but she was stylish. She wore neither a wedding band nor a diamond ring, so we assumed she was single or divorced.

Ms. X struck all three of us as a woman who wouldn’t have a problem attracting a man—but who probably would have a problem establishing an ongoing, romantic, fulfilling relationship. Even though she was outwardly attractive, there was a hollowness about her. She lacked sensual appeal. As we talked further about women who have “it,” we acknowledged that they exude a sense of inner mystery that Ms. X did not have.

Women hold the mystery of all life. Within a woman, life springs
forth, develops, grows, and emerges fully formed. The secret of this mystery is that she contains knowledge of both the masculine and feminine within her womb. Within its shape is an opening or space formed exactly in the configuration of his phallus.

Thus, she contains the All, the totality of all life, by having both the male and female structures, physical and psychological, within her. She is whole and already unified. Males
can only experience this wholeness by coming into her. He has knowledge of only the masculine, of himself. By coming into her, only then can he know both sides of creation and complete himself. This is the secret of her allure. This is why men desire to come home to her... to experience the totality of life through sexual union with her. For this reason women are held in glory and pursued to the ends of the earth.

This is the secret of her power, her beauty and of her magnetic draw The most attractive woman is one who values and loves life first. She conveys a feeling that she has everything in her. She feels desirable. The man sees in her eyes that she “has it.” When she sees in his eyes that he is attracted to her, then she gets turned on to him. She is the source of the attraction.

Women who know this are the most sensually attractive. They
instinctively know their value first, and then they value the man. If they
think the man is more desirable than themselves, they lose their appeal.
Women have it. Most cartoons and love stories have the man chasing
the woman because she is the one with the desired sensual mystery.
And the secret is that she has knowledge psychically deep inside, of
both her and him.

Women who are comfortable with their role as the physical and spiritual home for a man’s sensuality are warm and lush within, and this warmth radiates from them. They have a knowing confidence. And men instinctively pick up on the mysterious aura around these sensuous women.

Women who are ill at ease with being home for a man’s emotionality are not in harmony with their feminine sensuality They may think that they are hot stuff. They may think that every man they meet wants to bed them—and they might be right. Many of these women have fabulous bodies, and some appear frequently on the covers of fashion magazines.

But even if they attract men, either they can’t keep them or they don’t want the type of man they attract. They have cold sex lives, not because they were born empty of sensuality, but because their natural feminine essence has been dispelled by life’s negative events.

The male is designed by nature to unify and bond with the female physically, emotionally, and spiritually The sexual organs—the vagina and the penis—are made for each other, but they are merely vehicles given to us to make the connection to each other’s spirit. A man wants to go “home” because he wants to join with a woman and find ultimate peace and joy within himself, and he does this by resting in her.

By nature, a man is always looking to bond spiritually with a woman. And a woman is designed to be known by a man.

When a woman feels comfortable about her sensuality, she is comfortable being “home” for the male part. Because it is how nature meant her to be, a woman filled by the male essence finds the experience deeply pleasurable and satisfying. She knows that her lover is the vehicle that will take them both to the gods. A woman who enjoys being home for a man, by his presence, knows the mystery of her femininity, th~it she is the temple at which a man comes to worship.

What made it obvious from watching Ms. X that she would not be comfortable being “home” for a man? Sensuality is by definition a matter of the senses, and the aura surrounding her was not one that appeared inviting. She would have had this almost subliminal coolness even if we had seen her wearing a bikini on a beach in Tahiti.

We’re not psychic, but we have treated so many women like Ms. X that we could draw some generalities about her that would not be too far from the mark. Watching her, her body language and her mannerisms, and hearing her voice, it struck us that despite her pleasant appearance, she was not a woman who knew how to unite spiritually with a male. She was not a warm soul or a warm bedmate, because she lacked the radiance with which women who are in tune with their sensuality glow. This woman was outwardly attractive but inwardly empty.

“My mother was slightly obese,” my male associate confided, “yet
she radiated a sexual warmth that attracted my father, who was a slen der, well-built man. Her weight increased after my father died, but men were still attracted to her.”

Ms. X was not glowing confidently because she seemed too tense and controlled rather than at ease with her spirit and body Appearances are very important, but all the beauty money can buy won’t get us true love. No matter how much a woman thinks she is comfortable about sex and her relationship with men, obvious and subliminal signals coming from her can eventually turn off most men.

Looking at Ms. X, I felt empathy for her. She was a victim of her
upbringing and of society, yet she had no clue. Somewhere along the line, she was programmed not to expose her true heart, not to know her essence in dealing with men, but she had no idea that it had happened.

I felt that somewhere deep inside her must be frustration, anger, and even fear. Her surface persona was one of confidence, but internally she had an intuitive knowledge that something was wrong.

From working with thousands of people with intimacy issues, I
could see by observing Ms. X that she seemed to have a fear of being overpowered, dominated, and controlled by a man. She reacts by being uptight and rigid rather than by expressing that confidence and inner fullness with which nature had equipped her. She thinks she has power in dealing with men; she probably has made more than one man jump through a hoop. But she doesn’t understand that while she has the right “package” of clothes and looks, the way she uses her feminine energy ultimately turns men away.

Within her are layers of false sexuality, which smother her own
innate knowing. She is a victim of the wrong messages, often subliminal, that parents send us, and on top of that of the false images of superficial sensuality that magazines and TV bombard us with. Perhaps her father was very controlling and she saw her mother dominated, or maybe her mother had inhibitions about men that she subtly passed on. Or perhaps a deep fear of sexuality came from strict shame-inducing and misdirected religious training.

Whatever the reason, Ms. X was not in touch with her own true sensuality The fact that it is not her fault, and that she isn’t even aware of it, doesn’t make her pain any less. If she were to probe the images that form the basis of her present sexual attitudes, she would find that something from her upbringing has restricted her natural sexuality And it probably not only affects her sex life, but permeates other areas of her social interaction as well.

There is a direct correlation between sexual coldness or warmth and a person’s emotional disposition toward life. God and nature did not design us to be cool sexually We are designed physically and emotionally to reach sexual highs that no drug can take us to. So when our sexual energy is being obstructed, it will usually reflect itself in other areas of our life.

A Return to Natural Sensuality

A man we covertly observed in the restaurant—a slightly overweight guy with a diminishing hairline—was different. Mr. Y emanated an inviting sexual warmth. He was an example of the type of attractiveness that doesn’t stem from physical appearance. He was taller than average, but he was no hunk. In fact, he had love handles, and he probably hadn’t been in a gym since high school twenty years before. His com panion was a well-proportioned and very attractive female. And she was enthralled by Mr. Y’s every word.

While a woman coming into contact with him might not realize why she was attracted, a woman can instinctively sense that Mr. Y is a man who enjoys women—touching them, caressing them, making love to them, admiring them. Women pick up on that subconsciously, and it’s a sure turn-on for them. What women feel about Mr. Y is that he is comfortable with his masculinity, comfortable with himself to the point that he can relax and truly enjoy a woman. He has nothing to prove.

Sex isn’t a game of conquest for him, but he savors women the way some people savor fine wines. He will celebrate a woman, will love her, will love her body, her hair, her skin.

The fact that Mr. Y couldn’t win a male bathing-suit contest is not a turn-off because he oozes a warm sensuality to which women are attracted. There was an energy about him that told the woman sitting next to him that he would be comfortable coming “home” to her.

Men who are sensuous also have an inner spiritual warmth that radiates from them. The sensuous man is comfortable uniting physically and spiritually with a woman. Too many men have treated sex as part of their ego—a trophy to possess—and they act like their fast car or big bank account is an extension of their physical maleness.

We realized that Ms. X and Mr. Y reflect much of what is going on in our society The man was in touch with his sensuality, and the woman despite her more polished appearance, was not.

Ms. X is a victim of life’s forces—parents, religion, peers, and society in general—who altered her natural knowledge of sensuality with layers of irksome baggage. She, like so many of us, ended up with a variety of unnatural mental and emotional states. Some people are promiscuous; others are frigid; more of us simply give off the wrong signals. Few people unable to establish a permanent, loving relationship realize that the problem is in themselves—and not in someone else.

The natural state of sensuality that we are born with is still there. It is just hidden under negative layers that are placed on us by parents and society I know few women whose introduction to womanhood—the problematic advent of their menstrual period and the development of breasts—was not without negative impact. Conversely, few men reach manhood without being falsely conditioned about “acting like a man,” with all of the repression that involves.

The purpose of Images of Desire is to get you back to that natural, sensual state within you. It is a book for people who want to change. To change, you have take an inner journey and unlock your sensuous spirit. We will take a closer look at what sensuality is and why we are— or aren’t—sensuous; how “sexy” differs from “sensuous” and how sex differs from romance. We will look at the reasons romance and sensuality are affected by modern living: the primordial roots of our sensuality, how our history has tarnished it, how to improve our sensuality, how to assess our lover’s sensuality We will also cover a number of areas of specific interest, from having a permanent loving relationship to having an affair, from mercy sex to teen sex, to the form sexuality takes as men and women grow older and women enter menopause.

In a sense, we will be making a journey, an inner one, not to foreign lands but back to 6ur natural self. The journey will be made through the process of imaging.

While the concept of imaging may be new to you, eidetic imaging
techniques are as old as the ancient Greeks and as fresh as psychology in the third millennium.

Just as many of the great movements of the science of psychology are identified with specific people (Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, B. F Skinner, and others), the pioneering work in imaging in the last half-century has been associated with the name of Dr. Akhter Ahsen. Today, as a result of Dr. Ahsen’s seminal studies, the practitioners of imaging are associated with many of the great universities - including Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Yale, and institutions around the world. In my own work with imaging, I have been privileged to be associated with Dr. Ahsen.

With imaging sessions, we will literally peel back layer after layer of negative aspects about ourselves and our sensuality We will unload the baggage that has been placed upon us since birth, those negative aspects that keep us from being the warm and luscious person we want to be, and return to our natural sensuality.

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