How Do Couples Make Love for Hours? Extended Lovemaking with Rahi Chun & Ariel Szabo

Lightly edited for readability.

[02:38] Darshana: Welcome back to Deeper with Darshana. Today I’m joined by two colleagues of mine, Rahi and Ariel, who together are doing a beautiful body of work, in partnership and professionally, focused on divine union and extended lovemaking. Rahi and Ariel, thank you so much for being here.

Rahi & Ariel: Thanks so much for having us.

Darshana: I’m going to start with something that might be a bit of a curveball. A teacher of mine, in the early days of my studying sacred sexuality, very clearly told me: don’t teach with your partners. She said that was the secret to her decades-long teaching career. I have done it and I have not done it, so I’m curious how the two of you came to this offering, which weaves the personal and the professional.

Ariel: It’s a great question to start with, because I’ve heard people say that as well. For us, we have such a shared purpose and a shared service of making sacred sexuality available, practical, and viscerally life-changing. We were each doing it on our own. When we came together, our lovemaking, and the expansion of consciousness that happened as a result, felt like a medicine that needed to be shared. It was almost like we were vessels or channels for this wisdom to come through us. Our course, Divine Union For Lovers, was a direct transmission from our lovemaking. So our offering is one vessel, not two separate people trying to make it work. It wanted to be birthed through our union.

Rahi: Yeah. One of the purposes of why we even came together is to do this work together.

Darshana: That makes a lot of sense. It reminds me of friends who channeled a body of work and describe it similarly: the “we” is what was needed as the vessel, something bigger than the parts.

Rahi: The very first time we got to experience a collaboration was a couples cacao ceremony with three couples, way before we created Divine Union For Lovers. The way it unfolded was almost like a baton handoff, the way we were holding space and building on each other’s insights. That was such an ecstatic experience for me. I was like, “Wow, what else can we do together?”

Ariel: And it’s not without its challenges. We have to be diligent about holding boundaries, because our work and personal life are so intertwined. Every Friday we have love labs. We dedicate the day to making love. It’s our personal nourishment and a way we tend our relationship, but it’s also part of our practice and where a lot of our discoveries come from. We might discover something and say, “We’ve got to teach this,” and also, “Okay, we’ve got to stop talking about work right now.”

Darshana: How gorgeous that you have Friday love labs. When clients ask me how to focus on intimacy more, the first thing I say is: you have to schedule it. As unsexy as that sounds, time held and honored as sacred is the foundation. What you do inside that time can have a tremendous range, but the container needs to be created.

[07:53] Rahi: What we’ve found is that when we have nothing scheduled for an entire day, the spaciousness allows what’s deep underneath to arise, whether it’s emotional metabolizing from a disagreement a few days ago or an individual experience that needs space-holding. That spaciousness allows so many unforeseeable things to come up and be held, seen, met, and made love to. We make love at other times, and we snuggle at the end of the night, but having a whole day open for intimacy has been very profound.

Ariel: For myself, we might have pockets of an hour during the week to be with our bodies, but my body can really unfold and open into ecstasy and new experiences when there are hours available. There’s a subtle softening that can only happen with time, and with knowing that there is time.

Darshana: For those listening who are thinking, “Great, you can spend a whole day,” I’m taking care of you, dear listener. Not everyone’s reality allows for that, especially if you’re actively parenting or have a schedule you’re beholden to. What would you suggest for people who don’t have that degree of spaciousness? How do you work with what you’ve got?

[10:04] Ariel: Even if it’s just an hour you can create some evening, make the most of that hour. Have some rituals that bring you into presence so you can meet each other as deeply as possible in the time you have. Maybe the ritual is sitting in a particular place you always sit before that hour, naming your intentions, doing a few minutes of breathing and meditating together to let go of the day. A way that’s really worked for us when our minds are active and we’re having trouble settling is taking turns asking for one-way touch: “I’d like you to caress my arms.” Start with a three-minute trade, then five, then ten. Pretty quickly, I’m able to quiet the monkey mind and come into presence.

Rahi: I want to underscore that, because time is a reality for people who are parenting. You can replace the quantity of time with a ritualistic way to honor that you’re prioritizing your intimacy and connection. I’ve seen couples caretaking for parents, with kids downstairs, who can’t find an hour, take just ten minutes a day, and the ritual really prioritizes it. Then they find, “I’d rather spend an afternoon together than go to a baseball game.” That prioritization switches something and moves it up the list.

Darshana: And the word sacrifice becomes relative there. We’re constantly choosing where we allocate our time, energy and attention. Some things are non-negotiable, like caretaking and earning a living, and then there’s what we do with the space that remains. When couples tell me it’s been three weeks and they don’t have ten minutes together, I say, that’s a choice. Not to make anyone wrong, but as an invitation: quality over quantity. So what else do you consider essential to growing erotic aliveness in partnership?

[13:35] Rahi: To piggyback on prioritizing time: what we find with a lot of people who can’t seem to find that time is that there’s something within them, or one of them, that’s too afraid to face. When we work with couples, we take an inventory of their sexual history, and we get real about what fears or shadow aspects are coming up around the vulnerability of intimacy, of expanding into emotional unknown spaces that may be bringing up childhood wounds they’ve never known about, much less addressed.

Darshana: So it’s nervous system tending, and a psychosomatic journey. I’ve gone through chapters where a silent seated meditation is the most delicious thing, and other moments where I’ll crawl out of my skin within ten seconds. Many people are surprised to have a similar experience with intimacy, because of all the social conditioning that says you’re supposed to want sex. But this is about more than sex. How do you help people lean into that vulnerability and access the goodness on the other side?

[15:25] Ariel: One of the things is for each person to get really real about what they’re desiring, and that can be so hard to even admit to yourself. A helpful mindset is knowing that things are always changing. Our bodies, desires and needs shift throughout our lives, and knowing that for ourselves and for our partners matters, because so much shame can make it hard to access our own desires or stay open to hearing someone else’s. So we’re always attuning: what are your desires right now? What are mine? Where can we meet each other?

Rahi: For that reason, we really focus on the art of attuning, with ourselves as well as with each other, because moment by moment we want to give space and permission for things to shift. A consensual yes ten minutes ago can change after ten minutes. The 8 Pillars of Intimacy are really about attunement: teaching couples and individuals the art of self-attuning and attuning to others.

Darshana: I love that you call it an art, because like any artistic talent, it can be cultivated. There’s a notion that some people are innately attuned and others aren’t, which I push back on. What are the eight pillars, and what are the practical steps to mastering this art?

[17:47] Ariel: The pillars are the skills, the internal capacities, we can practice with ourselves and each other that help us develop attunement. The capacity of slowing down. Of pausing long enough to notice what’s even happening. Accepting what’s happening. So many of us think, “I don’t like what’s happening, so I’ll push it away and pretend something else is true.”

Darshana: And notice you said accepting, not agreeing or liking.

Ariel: Right. This is what’s true right now. Then trusting it, and valuing it enough to do something with it. All of these add up to allowing us to attune. I think of attunement as moment-to-moment responsiveness to whatever is happening internally, externally, and in the space between us.

Rahi: So there are all these pillars of slowing down, pausing, accepting, trusting, valuing, and they’re all building blocks to learn how to attune, because they’re all necessary to get to attunement.

Ariel: And the eighth pillar is communicating: taking all the attunement you’ve built the capacity to hold and communicating it to your partner.

Darshana: Someone might be listening and thinking, “What the hell is attunement?” It feels almost ineffable to define, but we can speak to the experience of it.

[20:02] Ariel: I’m a very visual person. When I’m attuning to a body of water, I’m noticing where it’s coming from and where it’s going, not just that it’s there: the movement, the directionality, the speed. So when I’m attuning to an emotion moving through me, I think of it like water. Where is it coming from? What triggered it? Where does it want to go? How does it want to move through my body or express through my words? What does it need right now to be fully here? That’s accepting it, trusting it and valuing it enough to let it take up space and receive what it’s asking for.

Darshana: So I’m hearing presence and responsiveness to what is here in the present.

Rahi: And I would add feeling into it: feeling into the body of water that’s shifting moment to moment, the body of emotions of your partner, or the body of sensations that’s evolving moment to moment.

Darshana: Our bodies continually present information, signposts that say go this way, not that way. Many of us are accustomed to overriding those within ourselves, and if we can’t track them in ourselves, we can’t track them in another person. That’s why slowing down is so critical: to notice the flush of someone’s face, where their gaze is going, tension or relaxation in the body. When you pay attention, those point you in the attuned direction.

Rahi: That’s beautiful. We’re such dynamic organisms. Moment to moment, everything is changing. That’s the nature of nature and the nature of our nature. To travel along with those shifts is in itself very intimate.

Darshana: So far I’ve heard identifying needs and desires, presence, attunement, creating space. What else goes into the foundation of claiming our sexual aliveness and expanding that capacity in partnership?

[23:10] Rahi: There are two things I want to touch on. When we work with couples, we want each of them to take an inventory of each other’s sexual history. Not to go through the past with a fine-tooth comb, but to understand each other’s nervous system responses to intimacy, to orgasm, to sexual expansion, so everyone’s on the same page about how this nervous system responds and what the history is, particularly if there’s trauma. Then, going back to the pillars, the slowing down and pausing are absolutely essential when hypervigilance or fight-or-flight happens and someone can no longer attune.

Ariel: And if one person gets triggered, the other can have an easier time not taking it personally, because there’s an awareness: “I know what’s coming up for this person. It has nothing to do with me.”

Darshana: I’ve experienced it both ways, and hands down it goes way better for everybody when we’re informed. Otherwise it’s that reactivity of “I’ve done something wrong,” and we’re ping-ponging the activation and disconnection, instead of one person having their experience and the other having the capacity and context to say, “I see this for what it is, I know how I can support, and I don’t have to make this a story about me.” What a gift to a relationship.

Ariel: It really is. In those moments, rather than ping-ponging, one person can hold the other while they’re triggered, and that can be a beautiful moment to deepen intimacy. Even in the middle of lovemaking, you can bring pleasure to the part that’s activated, the part that’s wounded, and use the lovemaking and the pleasure to bring healing to it.

Rahi: It reimprints and reconditions a new story and association with the trigger and the nervous system dysregulation. It creates a new neural pathway and a new somatic response, and that’s what we’re going for.

Darshana: So many of us, unbeknownst to ourselves and our partners, are playing out the familiar script of how A to B goes. When a trigger arises and is met with presence, and even pleasure, what a healing opportunity that becomes: “I didn’t know I could have this experience. I didn’t know pain could be transmuted into pleasure.” There’s so much richness when it’s well held.

[27:23] Rahi: So much richness. And to answer your earlier question: yes, there’s identifying our sexual desires and needs, and understanding our history and our nervous systems. But there’s also the expansion and exploration of new skills that teach us about our partner’s erogenous areas, their likes and dislikes, and how to expand the capacity for arousal and pleasure, with breathing and nervous system regulation, so that you can make love for as long or as short, as intensely or as gracefully, as you desire.

Darshana: When I hear “extended lovemaking,” part of my brain goes back to the tabloid days of tantric sex for hours and hours. Let’s demystify this. If you were giving a play-by-play for someone with no context, are we talking about marathon penis-and-vagina intercourse, or something more creative?

[29:02] Ariel: There are layers, but I’ll start with the most zoomed-out: shifting the paradigm about what sex even is. The media, pornography and dictionary definitions tell us sex is penis-in-vagina penetration. What we’re inviting is a move away from this goal-oriented, performative paradigm. Instead of performance, let’s focus on presence. Shift the goal from climax over to connection. And expand what sex is and what you do while you’re having it. Penetration is wonderful, and there is so much else available. Then also expand our body’s capacity to hold erotic charge. That can look like maintaining erotic charge for hours and hours. It can also look like experiencing more pleasure, and new sensations of pleasure, than you’ve ever discovered, whether within ten minutes or two hours.

Darshana: When you talk about holding an erotic charge for hours, does that mean staying at peak arousal the whole time, or dipping in and out? What might someone newer to this expect?

[31:22] Rahi: It might help to bring in the pleasure scale. On a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 is climax, this goes back to attunement: self-attunement, and attuning to where your partner is on that scale. Another way of saying extended lovemaking, as Ariel mentioned, is extended erotic charge, or extended intimate connection. Framed that way, the lovemaking can be penetrative, it can be with your mouths, with your hands, so many ways. The erotic charge is the constant. So the play-by-play might start with caressing, and arousal builds to a four or five. Then, organically, the hands or the mouth may come in. We’re really big on non-penetrative lovemaking that also involves the genitals, in any configuration that heightens and plays with the erotic charge from a six to an eight, while refraining from penetration, which builds up the charge. When there is penetration, it might travel between a seven and a nine. We have an expression: riding the nines. We love riding the nines without dipping over into a ten. And if it does, that’s beautiful too. That can go on for hours, and then we have to eat and go to the bathroom, and when we get back into bed it picks up where it left off.

[33:23] Ariel: This is going to look different for everybody. People ride waves of arousal and reach different points on the scale. I notice a lot of people don’t have much experience luxuriating in low to medium states of arousal, because the culture is so focused on climax. We get on that escalator and ride it. There’s so much richness in letting the body learn what it’s like to stay between a two and a four, then maybe a medium range of five, six, seven. There’s so much available at every place from 0 to 10.

Rahi: Something really important in what Ariel’s bringing up is that we’re very interested in decoupling higher arousal from higher states of nervous system up-regulation. Pairing lower states of arousal with a deeply down-regulated nervous system seems to expand the body’s capacity to hold erotic charge.

Darshana: In my work I call that relaxed arousal. A foundation of relaxation and receptivity in the nervous system lets you access a more fulfilling, sustained, even higher level of arousal and pleasure, and if you ride that wave to climax, often a far more expansive one, because the nervous system wasn’t armed against potential threat. Rahi, you do a lot of work around de-armoring. Could you define it and talk about how it connects, especially for those who experience dissociation or numbness, or whose sensation never gets beyond a two or three?

[36:39] Rahi: In the course I teach, The 3 Keys to Genital De-armoring, armor refers to the unconscious guarding or self-protective patterns within the tissue and fascia of the pelvis and genitals. They occur unconsciously, as a very wise response the body has for self-preservation. I always say the best way to de-armor is conscious, present lovemaking, when you’re moving at the pace the body desires. This goes back to the 8 Pillars: learning to slow down enough to attune, and to attune enough to know when to slow down. It goes in both directions. And going back to extended lovemaking, I don’t want to give the impression it’s a marathon. It’s really allowing the organic life force between two people to move and dance the way it desires, moment by moment. During that process we touch into unprocessed emotions and past physical or sexual traumas, and that’s where the de-armoring happens. When that’s met with love, patience and understanding, the tissues feel safe enough for the life force, the arousal and the pleasure to come back online.

[38:20] Ariel: As someone with the lived experience of moving from a very armored body to a fully alive body: years ago I had a lovership where we never went beyond about a five on the arousal scale. My body just didn’t go above that during that time. But we would meet every week, touch, and just luxuriate in low states of arousal. That completely rewired my system. Now my body is available to every single number. But I needed to respect that for years, and not push myself to a place where I could no longer be present with it or enjoy it.

Darshana: There’s something about trusting the timing, that it takes the time it takes. When I first started my journey into conscious and sacred sexuality, the idea that sex was more than trying to get off, or making sure my partner got off and checking the box, was so nourishing and transformative. Even now I love getting to a seven, eight, nine and then backing down into a five or six for a while to feel the subtler sensations I can’t track at higher arousal. I think a lot of people don’t know that’s possible. Tell us more about Divine Union For Lovers: what does it encompass, and what might people expect?

[41:46] Rahi: It covers everything we’ve spoken about, but the foundation is the 8 Pillars of Intimacy, because they teach people how to self-attune and attune not only to their partner but to the whole experience of lovemaking. There are many video demonstrations of the one-way touch practices we facilitate as sexological bodyworkers, including Body Awakening, erotic ecstatic massage and genital mapping, all on live bodies, so people can track how this applies to their own bodies and partnership. Then we get into the extended lovemaking, or extended erotic connection, practices that grow your erotic container. And the pleasure scale of 0 to 10, as you both point out, is relative to each individual body. There’s no universal scale. As erotic capacity evolves, a seven might become a 7.2 or a 7.35. It becomes more and more specific.

[43:41] Ariel: We also have a solo path in the course for people who aren’t currently in a lovership but want to engage with the material, with alternatives for practicing on your own. Even couples who take it together practice on their own, because these are skills we need to cultivate within ourselves before we can meet someone in this way.

Darshana: I’m assuming this material is just as well adapted to a body with a penis as to a body with a vulva. Orientation and body notwithstanding, Divine Union For Lovers is for everybody?

Ariel: Right. Whatever body you’re in, whatever sexual orientation, however you like to have your relationships, it’s about exploring the unique union of any lovers who come together.

Rahi: We’ve put a lot of intention into the video demos as starting points for people, a basic framework for whatever bodies and configurations want to come together and discover their own practices and their own explorations of erotic charge.

Darshana: Take it and make it yours. These are templates and jumping-off points, not a rigid standard, and that’s where the creativity comes in. What is eroticism if not creative energy and expression?

Ariel: And to create the foundation needed so it can become sexy, fun playtime again.

Rahi: It’s like training wheels, so you can then go off on the mountain-biking adventure.

Darshana: We all need a little support in the beginning, and it’s ultimately in service to more freedom.

Ariel: Absolutely. This comes back to the spaciousness of our love labs, or of any devoted, prioritized ritual time, because we want that time to be devoted to exploring the unknown and expanding beyond what we’ve experienced before. That’s what we offer in the course, and that’s the space we hold for ourselves.

Darshana: Where can folks find you?

Ariel: It’s divineunionforlovers.com. My personal website is sacredmoonflower.com.

Rahi: And mine is simply my name, rahichun.com.

Darshana: Thank you for this beautiful conversation, for the work each of you has done for yourselves, and for the space you hold. I know this is in service to the more beautiful world we want to be living in.