Your Wish List 12/28/2011
We hope you had a very happy and loving holiday season. Now that all the gifts are unwrapped, the ribbons in tatters and the stockings unstuffed, what is it that you are still craving? What gift do you crave that no store can sell, no box can contain? Is it more love? more affection? more time to enjoy with your lover? Is it a new kind of touch or sexual play? Prostate massage? Or foot massage? Each of us crave a unique constellation of pleasures - and we can only be satisfied, only be fulfilled when we discover our desires and ask for what we want. So now that the holidays have passed, ask yourself - what more do you want? Commit to asking for and receiving what you need to feel pleasured, loved and fulfilled. Pleasure, in any form, is the ultimate gift we can give and receive. Add Comment Communication is Everything! 09/07/2011
 Learning massage together will be a crash course in both verbal and non-verbal communication. Most relationship experts say that communication is the lifeblood of a healthy relationship. Massage is a beautiful way to use both language and body to communicate what you are feeling, what you need, and where your boundaries are. In the first stages of learning massage, you will learn to verbally communicate what works and what doesn't - being able to say "That feels great, but it would feel even better with a little more pressure" will make the difference between a good massage and a great massage. Likewise, when you are giving massage, it is essential to begin asking questions like "Will you tell me when this feels just right?" or "Would you like a little more massage on your back before I move on?" Asking these practical questions begins the conversation about physical desires. The translation to the bedroom can be seamless - you can learn to ask questions such as "Would more pressure on your clitoris feel better?" or "Would you mind touching my thighs more? I especially love light touch on the inside of my thighs" This communication doesn't have to happen during massage or during sex - often these conversations are more useful out of the bedroom. After every massage, you can ask "What were your favorite parts? What could have made it even better?" Communicating about your preferences and desires is not clinical or cold - it is a high expression of love and concern, showing you care enough about your partner to strive for ever more pleasurable touch. We communicate not just with our words, but with our bodies, sounds, touch, gestures. How close you sit on the couch together is a strong communication. Sharing massage and touch is like learning a new language together - it doubles your ability to speak to one another. A simple loving touch can communicate caring, support and compassion. Bringing more attention to your hands and bodies will make clear the areas that you succesfully communicate your love and other areas where you may need to evaluate what you are saying to one another with your physical actions. Stress Reduction is Pathway to Pleasure 08/31/2011
 For most people, the single biggest roadblock to experiencing pleasure is stress. Stress has a negative effect on both male and female libido: this much is simply fact. The question has become, what do we do about the fact that our stressful lives are one huge turn-off? The stress of daily life wears at us, literally, causing physical damage to our bodies and creating negativity in our relationships. Stress comes from many sources: work, family, concerns about money, health, global issues and personal worries. It is important to locate the top stressors in your life and begin creating strategies to minimize stress at it's source. But let's face it: we can't always quit a stressful job or get away from a stressful family situation. So the essential strategy is learning how to cope with stress and minimize it's effect on your life and health. There are many great ways to reduce stress: exercise, meditation or prayer, dancing, whatever activities make you feel relaxed and happy. There are two surefire stress reducers that also serve the dual purpose of strengthening your relationship and bringing you more pleasure: massage and sex.  No matter what your sex life is like right now, you can benefit from our proven techniques of pleasure. Learning massage together at home with one of our video guides is a crash course in intimate touch and communication that will benefit every aspect of your intimate relationship. Even if you are highly orgasmic, deeply connected to your partner and have no sexual complaints to speak of, trying something new will refresh and invigorate your intimacy. When we get into habits, or sexual ruts, even our favorite activities become less thrilling. Having a larger repertoire of touch can make erotic play better for both partners. If you have never had an orgasm or are feeling distant from your lover, sharing massage is a perfect way to begin the intimate communication and exchange of pleasurable touch. Wherever you are now, and no matter where you want to go, it is always worthwhile to focus on erotic enhancement. This is not about fixing any problems or creating yet another to-do list in your life. Prioritizing pleasure is simply recognizing pleasure as something that you are willing to make time for, and trusting in the immense benefits of experiencing more relaxing and pleasurable touch. Once you begin sharing more massage and receiving more touch, you can notice for yourself the changes in your life, and choose to spend more or less time focusing on pleasure and stress-reducing massage. Some couples will want to carve out a few hours a week for long, focused massage exchange. For other couples, it makes more sense to take a few minutes every day to offer one another touch. Only you know what will work for you.  Sexologists and sex educators often draw the cycle of an orgasm as a line chart - making sexual pleasure look more like a financial report than an erotic experience. While arousal and sensations are by no means a linear path - these charts can be useful to draw your attention to the patterns of your arousal. Conventional wisdom says that women need a longer warm-up stage, a smooth and gradual uphill climb towards arousal and orgasm. Once there, women might have several orgasms, the top of their chart looking like a mountain range. Then, a nice downhill descent towards afterglow. Men, it is traditionally believed, have a sharp uphill climb - turned on by just about anything, one dramatic climactic peak and then a sharp fall downhill towards a soft penis and sleep. We've all seen these charts and perhaps experienced a similar arousal pattern. If your arousal and orgasm are indeed a terrain of peaks and valleys - and if you were indeed able to chart your actual arousal, what would that chart look like? Would it be the same time after time, or dramatically different each time? We propose a two-tooled system of exploring your own unique terrain of arousal. First, make a map. Getting to know a familiar path of arousal and climax is an excellent idea. It is a powerful thing to know what turns you on, what kind of touch stimulates you, how to reach climax most reliably, and what kind of afterglow you like best. Once you have it, you can show your map to your lover and give them the confidence to arouse you and satisfy you. Arousal is a journey, an adventure - not a trip to the grocery store. Once you know your "sure thing" orgasm and have your map in your pocket, go off trail. Explore. But bring a GPS! With a GPS, you always know where you are and how to get where you want to go. This allows highway and byway exploring and spontaneous adventure. For sex, your GPS is your awareness and attention. By choosing to pay attention to your arousal, mapping it into new terrain, you can play with new sensations and still know that you can find your way back to arousal and orgasm. You can begin learning new sexual techniques and skills, without the risk of giving up what already works for you. If your lover tries something totally new - like scratching your inner thighs, giving you a foot massage, or (gasp!) suggesting something like prostate massage - you can try something new and simply pay attention. Do you like it? Does it take you closer or further away from climax? Or into another realm all together? Harder or lighter? What if they lightly stroked your thigh instead? What gets you off? What do you NEVER need to try again? Exploring is only fun when you are confident about how to get back home - to your trusted pleasures - when you need to. As you approach orgasm, you can become aware of your own peaks and valleys - are you about to orgasm, what if you back away a bit, breathe deeply, and then begin building sensation again? With awareness and attention, you can explore the infinite variety of arousal and sensation available to you - and never get bored of traveling the same path to orgasm again and again. That map is always there for you should you want a clear and direct route - but for those days you want to travel and see the sites, simply pay attention and begin pioneering the unmapped terrains of your own sexuality.  What is the one thing we could all use a little more of in the bedroom? The magic ingredient to make any intimate relationship stronger - and hotter? Massage! As you know, we are committed to sharing the skills of erotic touch so you can enjoy more pleasure and become a better lover. We draw on our years of massage training and experience combined with our knowledge as sex educators to bring you effective strategies for maximum pleasure. We are thrilled to announce the release of the newest addition to our video series. Over the coming months, we'll be bringing you guides to the skills of full body massage, so you can learn to touch your lover's entire body from head to toe. Massage is simply the best kind of foreplay - in just a few minutes you can soothe away life's daily stress and create a full-body wave of pleasure. Massage warms up the body, so it is easier to get hot when you are ready! The Pleasure Mechanics Guide to Butt Massage teaches you the skills of massaging the butt muscles, one of the biggest and most central muscle groups of the entire body. If you want to learn how to relax and pleasure your lover's body, learning butt massage is the quickest way to the best results. Butt massage techniques are an excellent compliment to the skills you can learn in our Sexual Technique Video Series. Our highest commitment is your pleasure and sexual fulfillment. Join us to learn proven strategies for immediate results! What Are Your Sexual Scripts? 09/09/2010
What are your primary sexual scripts? Most of us have a few scripts that guide the majority of our sexuality. It may be a role or archetype that you try to fit into. It may be a peak sexual experience from the past that you are trying to recreate. Our sexual scripts are informed by and in relationship to the culture we live in. Ever since we were born, we have heard stories, seen movies and witnessed sexual scripts all around us. Most of us can recall a scene from a movie that permanently shaped our sexual development - a scene that effected us so deeply that we try to emulate it, or capture the emotions of that Hollywood scene. TV shows, rock stars, books, and celebrities can all serve as fodder for the development of our own unique sexual scripts. For some people, sexual scripts are heavily influenced by our family life - either trying to live up to our parents model or trying hard not to recreate our parent's failed marriage. Most people have a sense of what a man "should" be like - handsome, successful, powerful, muscular, charming, funny, daring. . . the list of "shoulds" goes on and on. We also have a story about what kind of partner we "should" love and what that relationship "should" be like. Against this cultural background, our own sexual scripts are formed early in life and many of us never even notice that our relationships begin playing out like rehearsals, trying to fit ourselves and our potential lovers into roles that will satisfy us. With the easy accessibility of pornography online, we can narrow our sexual turn-ons into the most specific category as we wish - you can easily find a site of red headed cheerleaders if that is what turns you on. Or librarians with glasses. Online, it is easy to peruse page after page of explicit images and videos and discover new turn-ons - and yet many people stay within a narrow range of stimulation, living out their scripts in fantasy as well as in their real life. Our sexual scripts are not just about roles, romance and relationships. We all have sexual scripts hardwired into our bodies - ways of being touched or touching ourselves that are our quickest routes to orgasm. Some of these scripts begin with childhood masturbation - if you masturbated under the constant threat of parental discovery and punishment, you may masturbate quickly and quietly long into adulthood, even when you have your own place and can be as loud as you wish. Most of us masturbate in basically the same way every time, or have sex with our partner using the same sequence of events. The "porn classic" of a few seconds of kissing, followed by sucking on the female nipples, leading quickly to oral sex as a warm up for intercourse is one of the more common sexual scripts that couples find themselves repeating again and again. Our bodies respond to repetition. This can be a good thing, providing a sure way to get aroused quickly and providing a direct path to climax. But these patterns can also be too dependable, landing us in a sexual rut that is too much of a sure thing to try anything new. Scripts can be comforting and useful - if we are truly in touch with who we are and what we desire, it can be comforting to stay within your self-determined script and seek satisfaction. The problem is many of us never take the time to examine our sexual scripts and ask if we are truly being fulfilled, or if a wider range of pleasure is possible. We do the same sex acts over and over again, with the same fantasy in our heads, and then wonder why we are still disatisfied and unfulfilled. By examining your arousal patterns, you can map more consciously that which turns you on. If you choose, you can begin paying attention to a wider range of stimulation and arousal so you can feel even more pleasure. You don't have to give anything up - your major turn ons and desires can still play a large role in your sexuality. But by widening the sense of what is possible, and taking a close look at your routines, you can enjoy a wider range of relationships and pleasures, and possibly discover something even more satisfying. Reciprocity in the Bedroom 08/23/2010
Is there an imaginary scoreboard above your bed? Many couples act as if they need to stay "even" when it comes to giving and receiving pleasure. Yet, reciprocity is not a one-for-one exchange. It is important to make sure both of your needs and desires are being acknowledged, but you may also find that there is a natural balance within your relationship, or phases of your relationship, that are not "equal." Balance does not have to be symmetrical. What is essential is to check in with yourself and one another and make sure you are not developing any resentment about how much pleasure one person is receiving and how much stimulation the other is giving. If you are both satisfied and fulfilled by your sex life, that is indeed an accomplishment of a harmonious balance. Add A New Spark to Your Massage 07/09/2010
 Babeland's Body Massage Candle is a lovely addition to a sensual evening of massage at home with your lover. Made of soy wax and shea butter, this candle is designed to melt down into a pool of warm massage oil. Light the candle, give it a few minutes, then slowly pour or drip the thick luxurious oil onto your lover's skin. Unlike wax, this oil is the perfect temperature to provide a thrilling and sexy sensation, but not hot enough to burn even the most sensitive skin. Then, you have a pool of oil ready to be massaged into the skin for a lasting glow. We love the concept of massage candles - we support anything that encourages lovers to exchange massage, exploring one another's body and creating full body relaxation and pleasure! Our only critique of Babeland's Massage Candle is the scent - our friends at Babeland sent us a candle in the Pashmina scent to try out . The scent is delicious but very strong - and while some people may love this musky addition to their erotic explorations, we wish this candle was also available in an unscented variety so those of us who prefer less perfume could still enjoy the warmth and luxury of the candles. We definitely recommend you give Babeland's Body Massage Candles a try - in your choice of scents (ranging from Mango Vanilla to Citron Fig) This could be a fabulous way to surprise your lover - have the candle burning by the bed, begin playfully touching your lover, flip them over and then delight them with the incredibly sexy feeling of warm oil pouring onto their skin. At $6 for the small candle and $14 for the large candle, this is a very affordable luxury that can be used as often as you wish to add more sensuality and pleasure to your relationship. We be that massage is absolutely the best foreplay - so why not take it to the next level with a Massage Candle? After last night's midnight showing of Sex and The City 2, it is clear that you probably won't go see SATC for the sex advice. Go for the reunion with Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte. Go for the fashion and extravagance. Just seeing Liza Minnelli perform "Single Ladies" is well worth the price of a ticket. But in between the shots of high heels and couture, the Sex and the City ladies offer us an abundance of sex and relationship advice, targeted squarely at those in long term relationships and struggling to keep the "sparkle" of excitement alive. As sex educators, here are the top 7 lessons we noticed in the film: 1. Take Time Alone How much time do you take to nourish your own needs and desires? Whether you are a busy mom, overworked at your job, or both, taking time to be alone and replenish yourself is essential to a happy relationship and fabulous sex life. No matter how many demands there are on your time, taking a few moments each day to nourish your own needs will go a long way towards giving you more energy to share with your partner, kids and friends. Most of us don't have a second home to escape to like Carrie - we need to create that oasis within our own busy lives. What would you do with ten minutes a day, just focusing on your own needs and desires? 2. Capture the Sparkle As their relationship matures, Carrie misses the "sparkle" of the romance, excitement and glamour of their early life together. When she sees this sparkle return to her lover while he is talking to another woman, her upset is more than jealousy - it is craving. She wants to be wooed again. The longer a relationship endures, the more effort we need to invest in capturing the sparkle of the initial lust and romance. The best way to do this is returning to the source - remember the first days, weeks and months of your relationship. What did you do to capture one another's attention? How did you seduce one another? It worked the first time, it might work again. Replay some of the moments every now and then - do the activities you did on your first dates, go to your favorite places you've been together, remember what it felt like as you were falling in love. Just like Big pulling up in his limo, ready to whisk Carrie off into the New York night, create the opportunity to remind one another of how you fell in love in the first place. 3. Pay Attention Carrie Bradshaw unzips her gown to reveal sexy lingerie and lots of bare skin. The movie audience notices - but her lover doesn't pay any attention. He has seen her body before. He is more interested in what is on TV. This is the fatal flaw in many long term relationships: we stop paying attention. We take one another for granted. When your lover undresses, do you notice? When they make an effort to look nice, are you paying attention? What is more worthy of your attention - your lover or your television screen? 4. At Your Service Arriving for their all expenses paid trip in the (once) glamourous city of Abu Dhabi, each of the ladies is presented with their very own butler. The excitement in their faces is palpable as they respond to the concept of a young, attractive, gracious man who is completely at their service. The film doesn't linger too long on this relationship, but as Carrie's butler warms milk for her on a sleepless night, we have to wonder- who is taking care of us? Service is a luxury, usually thought of as the extravagant indulgence of the very rich. But we can all have the experience of being taken care of, of having someone "at your service" if we bring this into our love relationships. Bring your lover a cup of coffee. Notice if she is getting cold and bring a sweater or blanket. Anticipate their needs. Small acts of service translate to big feelings of love and desire. 5. Jealousy: Use it or Lose It! Jealousy is a natural response, and is to be expected in any long term relationship. It is one thing to be jealous when there is due cause. If your partner is beginning to stray, jealousy might be the first warning sign that a major intervention is called for. But if you are like Charlotte, getting jealous when she sees Harry noticing another (younger) woman's breasts, you either have to use it or lose it. Lose it - let it go if your jealousy is over something trivial and is not actually a warning sign of your relationship being threatened. Or, better yet - Use it! Notice your lover's desire and respond. Charlotte could have tempted Harry with her own breasts, bringing his gaze back to his own body. Transform your jealousy into desire and seduction - allow that emotion to fuel your passion. 6. Forbidden Pleasures In the sexually conservative landscape of Abu Dhabi, Samantha discovers a new sexual challenge: sublimating her sexual desire and tendancy to show off her body. As she tries to reign in her sexual displays, she meets a handsome stranger who shares her lusty personality. He describes his added arousal of being in the sexually conservative Middle East - by taming his desires they only grow. No matter where you live, there are places where sexual desire is less welcome than others - and you can use these "forbidden pleasures" to your advantage. If you notice desire in a "forbidden" place, allow the taboo to turn you on. 7. Design Your Own Relationship The movie opens with a lavish gay wedding, as unlikely lovers Stanford and Anthony tie the knot. As Anthony reveals their "rules for marriage" the ladies talk about what it means to be married. Leave it to the gays to remind us what we knew all along - every marriage is a unique agreement, and every relationship has its own character. Designing your own relationship happens whether or not you do so consciously. So take the time, and together with your lover to create the guidelines that support your relationship. What are your hard and fast boundaries? What do your vows mean to you? If a marriage is a contract, surely it is worthwhile to remind yourself of why you got married, what it means to you, and what kind of marriage you want to have together. | Download To Own
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