From our conversation on Your Body Remembers Pleasure, Season 3, Episode 11: Extended Lovemaking Principles and Practices
The 8 Pillars of Intimacy are slowing down, pausing, noticing, accepting, trusting, valuing, attuning and communicating. They aren’t eight separate techniques. Each one builds the next, and together they create the inner safety that lets two people meet fully, sustain arousal, and finally feel satiated rather than simply finished.
Listen on Apple Podcasts · Episode page & show notes
Your Body Remembers Pleasure · Hosted by Rahi Chun · March 4, 2025 · With Ariel Szabo
Key takeaways
- The 8 Pillars are slowing down, pausing, noticing, accepting, trusting, valuing, attuning and communicating, and each one builds the next.
- The first seven happen inside you. Communication works because you’ve done the inner survey first.
- Extended lovemaking shifts the focus from performance and orgasm to connection.
- Edging depends on the pillars: you can’t ride the arousal scale without slowing, pausing, sensing your number and saying it.
- Orgasm is beautiful, but climaxing quickly every time can be a way to avoid vulnerability. It leaves couples finished, not satiated.
- One-way touch shrinks the container to one person at a time, so long-held patterns can actually change.
- Slower and softer touch often brings more sensation, not less.
What are the 8 Pillars of Intimacy?
The 8 Pillars of Intimacy are the relational skills beneath every deep erotic connection. In order: slowing down, pausing, noticing, accepting, trusting, valuing, attuning and communicating. They work as a chain. Slowing down and pausing create the conditions. Noticing, accepting, trusting and valuing build your relationship to what you find. Attunement is what those six produce, and communication carries it to your partner.
We started naming them after a three-day couples retreat. Some of the couples were just beginning their relationships; others had been together more than a decade. No matter what we were practicing (one-way touch, genital mapping, edging), the couples kept coming back to the same eight capacities. Whenever things got crunchy, the way through was to return to the pillars.
One participant noticed something we now teach from the very first circle: the first seven pillars are all inner experiences. Slowing down, pausing, noticing, accepting, trusting, valuing and attuning happen inside your own body before a word is spoken. It isn’t until you’ve built that self-intimacy, that self-attunement, that you can communicate what you’re actually experiencing. That’s why the work begins with you, not with your partner.
Here is what each one asks of you. Slowing down, because at speed we bypass what we’re feeling, sensing and wanting. Pausing, a door that steps you off train tracks you never agreed to. Noticing, turning attention inward to what the body is saying moment to moment. Accepting, letting what’s there exist, whether it’s an unwelcome contraction or an unexpected opening. Trusting, knowing your body’s signal is true and knows something you don’t. Valuing, giving that signal enough authority to change what happens next. Attuning, tracking what’s shifting in real time, which is what the first six produce. And communicating, speaking from the inside so your partner can meet you there.
How do the 8 Pillars make extended lovemaking possible?
Extended lovemaking means staying in connection with your beloved over long periods of time and savoring every state of arousal (low, medium and high) while staying present with sensations, emotions and desires moment to moment. That kind of surrender needs a container of real safety and trust, and the pillars are how two people build it.
Edging shows this most clearly. To ride the waves of arousal without tipping over, you need to slow down and pause. You need to sense where you are on the arousal scale, and to tell your partner so you can ease things back together. The more attuned you are to the pillars, the more spacious edging becomes. There’s a psychological layer too: slowing down enough to notice our attachments to orgasm, and why we have them, is how old patterns begin to untangle.
The pillars also make room for the nervous system. When a memory from childhood surfaces in the middle of lovemaking and your partner doesn’t take it personally, stays present, and even brings pleasure to that part of you, the body gets a new ending to an old story. In this work we’re allies of each other’s nervous systems. One-way touch builds that alliance fastest. When one person receives and the other gives, the receiver can put all their focus on their own sensations, needs and desires, and the giver learns what their beloved actually wants. In a two-way exchange there’s often too much going on to change a pattern you’ve been in for years.
What’s the difference between finishing and being satiated?
Finishing is a release: the arousal rises, peaks and drops, often within three to fifteen minutes. Being satiated is a fullness: the body’s authentic desires have actually been met, emotionally and sensually as well as physically. You can finish without ever being satiated, and many couples do, night after night.
Orgasms are beautiful and wonderful. We’re not saying never orgasm. But when climax happens quickly every time, there’s a vast terrain of sensation, pleasure and self-awareness that gets skipped. Sometimes orgasm becomes a way to avoid feeling vulnerable. It’s almost like a bandaid. The chemicals flood through and you feel good for a moment, but the depth of connection and authenticity both partners are wanting never quite comes through. We’ve become a culture of fast-food sex.
There’s a mismatch of timing, too. Many women’s bodies need twenty to forty-five minutes of arousal before their full orgasmic capacity is available, while the average lovemaking session in America lasts three to seven minutes. Every body is different, and extended lovemaking gives each body the time it needs. Something surprising happens when you slow down and don’t climax every time: desire grows. Ariel described carrying a low, medium hum of arousal through her day and wanting to come back to lovemaking more, not less. That’s satiation that keeps unfolding, sometimes over days, picking up where it left off.
The same is true for bodies that struggle with erections or lubrication. Extended lovemaking can be enjoyed erect, semi-erect or soft, and once the pressure comes off, erection worries often ease on their own. For vulva owners in perimenopause and menopause, pausing until the body is truly ready, rather than enduring penetration, keeps the tissue from armoring and shutting down.
“They realized at the end of the course that what they really wanted was authentic connection and intimacy. And they thought the way to get there was through sex.”
Rahi Chun, on a couple in their late 70s and early 80s
“The softer and slower things are, my body opens more and more, and there’s just more and more sensation.”
Ariel Szabo
Try this tonight
One pillar, one touch. Choose a single pillar, such as pausing. One partner receives slow touch anywhere on the body except the genitals for ten minutes. Every minute or so, the giver simply stops and rests their hands still on the body. In each pause, the receiver notices one thing they feel and says it in a few words: “warmth,” “I want more pressure,” “my breath just dropped.” Then switch. Afterward, share what you noticed in the pauses that you’d usually rush past.
Go deeper
The 8 Pillars are the foundation of our course, taught alongside one-way touch, genital mapping, the pleasure scale and extended lovemaking practices, step by step and with video demonstrations. There’s a solo path if you’re not currently partnered.
Frequently asked questions
They build on each other, so the order matters: slowing down and pausing create the space, noticing through valuing deepen your relationship to what’s there, and attuning and communicating follow. In practice you’ll move through them quickly, and you can always return to the first one when things feel stuck.
Yes. The first seven pillars are inner experiences, so self-intimacy is where they begin. Practicing them alone, in solo touch, conversation or daily life, is what makes it possible to bring them to a partner.
No. Orgasms are beautiful. Extended lovemaking simply takes climax off the center of the experience, so you can explore the full range of arousal and connection, and if orgasm comes, it comes.
Start with the pillars yourself. Slowing down, noticing and valuing your own signals changes how you show up, and an invitation to a short, low-pressure practice, ten minutes each, is often easier to say yes to than a big conversation.
Read the full transcript
Lightly edited for readability. Speaker names are added where the recording makes the speaker clear.
[00:02] Rahi: Today is a very special day. We have a new format on the podcast, and it’s based on a question we’ve been getting a lot: what is extended lovemaking? I’m here with Ariel Szabo. We posted two charts on our social media comparing goal-oriented lovemaking with meditative lovemaking, and there was such a response, so many questions — what is this, how do we get there, what’s this experience like — that we wanted to create a podcast just to answer them.
Rahi: I want to introduce Ariel Szabo. Like myself, she is a certified somatic sex educator, a sexological bodyworker, a psychedelic integration practitioner, and so much more. She’s very immersed in the world of plant medicines, working with Indigenous wisdom keepers over the years. And I would say an astute observer, practitioner and experiencer of what intimate relating is all about.
Ariel: Thank you.
[01:26] Rahi: So, Ms. Szabo, extended lovemaking. People are looking at these graphs and asking, what is this? How would you define extended lovemaking for yourself, and then we can talk about our experiences.
Ariel: Extended lovemaking is really lovemaking with your beloved over extended periods of time, and really satiating in all the different states of arousal that are available: low states of arousal, medium states of arousal and high states of arousal. And just being really present with what is, moment to moment. Sensations, emotions, desires.
Rahi: So what I’m hearing is a container that allows and accepts the fullness of the experience without needing to get anywhere or have a result or a goal or any kind of performance-based orientation.
Ariel: Right. Shifting out of the performance-based orientation, shifting out of an orgasm-focused orientation, and moving into a focus on connection.
Rahi: I feel relief in my body just hearing that. A focus on connection, an orientation toward pleasure, and tending to everything else that arises within me or my beloved.
[03:12] Ariel: And everything that arises during that deep connection, in those deep extended states of erotic connection — it’s really surprising what can come up.
It really is. You never know. There’s so much it touches into, whether it’s our inner children or past sexual experiences. It’s almost like a container to metabolize what hasn’t been integrated in our cellular memory and our psyches. And also a container that can bring us into these clouds of bliss, where you feel more relaxed, aroused, expanded and connected than you’ve ever felt before.
It’s really amazing what extended periods of arousal do to our nervous system and our body’s psyche, opening it up to different portals.
[04:16] I want to talk about what is actually necessary for this deep surrender into these extended arousal states. Because there needs to be such a container of safety and trust for this to even be contemplated.
And in creating that container of safety and trust, there are a lot of skills that both people have, or start to build. It’s never too late to learn these skills.
[04:54] Ariel: And a lot of those skills we’ve actually brought in and called the eight pillars of intimacy.
Rahi: Love it so much. The eight pillars of intimacy. I love it because Ariel and I just hosted a couples retreat recently, and the eight pillars are so foundational for any depth of relating intimately. What we found was that throughout the three-day retreat, couples kept referring back to these eight pillars no matter where they were. We had couples just starting out in their relationship and couples together for over a decade, a wide range, and these eight pillars were kind of the keys in.
Ariel: Right. So slowing down. Pausing. So then you can notice, and then attune, self-attune. And then accept what your experience is. Trust it, trust your own body’s wisdom about what it’s communicating to you. Value it enough to take up space with your own experience, and communicate whatever it is that you need, to make any requests, any shifts or adjustments. And one of our retreat participants pointed out that the first seven are actually all inner experiences. Attuning, accepting, noticing, valuing — they’re all inner. It’s not until you really harness that self-intimacy, self-attunement and self-communication that you can then communicate what you’re experiencing.
[06:43] Rahi: So we spent time, from the very first circle, really laying these out, because over the three days we eventually moved into a lot of one-way touch and genital mapping, so partners could get really familiar with the specific erogenous, arousal and pleasure patterns of each other’s anatomy. But it kept going back to these eight pillars as that foundational base.
Ariel: And any time any sort of crunchiness comes in, you can just return to the pillars.
Rahi: Absolutely. What we emphasize is that it really requires that self-attunement, that self-intimacy, being one with oneself, in order to meet the other person.
[07:41] Ariel: And that’s what really allows the magic to happen. Another place the pillars come in, as a necessary piece of developing the body’s capacity to sustain long periods of arousal for extended lovemaking, is edging. In order to edge, you need to slow down and pause. You need to be able to attune to where your body is on the arousal scale. You need to be able to communicate to your partner where you are, so you can work together to slow things down.
Rahi: This is a great example of how the eight pillars begin with any form of intimate relating, but they’re so critical in a practice like edging. The more attuned you are to the eight pillars of intimacy, the more successful your edging experiences are going to be.
[08:28] Ariel: Right. And I think about both the physiological aspects of edging — attuning to where you are on the arousal scale, slowing down and pausing when you need to — and also the psychological aspects, like the attachments we might have to having an orgasm and the different reasons why. When you can slow down enough to excavate why we have certain attachments, and all the different things that brings up, we can start to untangle them and create new patterns together.
[09:08] Rahi: I feel like what you just spoke to is such a critical piece of extended lovemaking. It’s important for all of us to examine and become familiar with the train tracks that are conditioned into our body’s response once erotic arousal kicks in. It’s so common for the body to be used to going for orgasm once arousal kicks in, or, if we feel arousal kick in for our partner, to support their orgasm. What you’re speaking to — the attunement, the noticing, the valuing, the trusting — it’s all supportive to deconstruct what’s been unconscious in our bodies for years or decades and kept us from real, deep satiation.
[10:03] I think it’d be cool to talk about the different benefits of not orgasming.
Oh, for sure. When we speak about extended lovemaking, we’re not saying don’t ever orgasm, or that orgasm is bad. Orgasms are beautiful and wonderful. However, if we’re conditioned to have an orgasm every time we make love, and it happens rather quickly, there’s so much of a vast terrain that we’re missing. Not just emotionally, but in sensation and pleasure. And what we’ve found in our extended lovemaking is the depth of self-awareness that comes in understanding our intimacy, our self-intimacy, and our patterns of avoiding intimacy in these extended states.
[11:01] Rahi: And it’s important to note — I see it a lot in my clients — that people can go for orgasm as a way to avoid feeling vulnerable and feeling deep intimacy. It’s ironic. So many couples are in the habit of: okay, orgasm, now I can get to the rest of the day’s work or deal with the kids or do the laundry. And a lot of men will start to feel vulnerable and then ejaculate quickly because they’re too afraid to feel that vulnerability.
[11:41] Ariel: It almost feels like a bandaid to me. There’s this really deep level of connection that a lot of couples both want, and they’re just not quite sure how to get there. If you both have an orgasm, there are chemicals that flood through you and you can momentarily feel really good, but there’s a depth of connection and authenticity that’s not coming through. So there’s never actually a level of satiation.
[12:16] Satiation — it’s so big. It’s almost like fast-food sex. I feel like we’ve become a culture of fast-food sex. And the irony is, I’m of the belief that sex is what created the entire human species. It’s our primal urge. And somewhere along the way, rather than being about connection and intimacy, sex became about performance and goals and affirming one’s sexual identity and ego. I’m sure porn culture has a huge role in this. There are entire generations weaned on porn culture thinking that’s the norm. But what everyone’s really wanting is deep connection and authentic intimacy.
[13:12] Coming back to extended lovemaking: we talked about the eight pillars of intimacy, and such a huge part of allowing for extended lovemaking is really understanding the role your nervous system plays in your body, particularly when it comes to sexuality, vulnerability and intimacy. The more I learn about your nervous system, for example, the more we can be allies of each other’s nervous systems and really work together for those extended states of lovemaking.
It’s so big. And I feel like it’s a missing piece out there: really understanding the depth to which the nervous system affects all of our sexual responsiveness. So many couples are getting triggered and they think it’s about them. If we just understand each other’s nervous system histories, we realize, oh, that’s from childhood when this happened, or young adulthood when that happened, rather than thinking, oh God, I messed up.
[14:25] And with that knowledge we can really start to not take things personally. Then we can, like you said, be allies with each other and actually repair in the moment. So if I get triggered and some memory from my childhood comes up, and you don’t take it personally, and you just stay there in presence with me and perhaps even bring some pleasure to that part of me, it can do a complete rewrite in my body.
I find that to be the most powerful repair and reconditioning, as it’s happening in the moment. Now you have an ally who understands your nervous system, doesn’t take it personally, and is present with you, bringing love and pleasure to a past rupture that was unpleasant. I’m such a big fan of somatic reconditioning. When the body can experience something similar to a past dynamic or experience, but with a new ending where it has its choice and voice and feels supported and empowered, it creates a new story in the body about that experience.
[15:52] That’s really powerful. Speaking of reconditioning somatic patterns, something foundational in our training as somatic sex educators is the practice of one-way touch to recondition and re-imprint, and really repair a lot of ruptures that happened in the past, both somatically and relationally.
Right, because the one-way touch container gives the person receiving the touch the opportunity to put all their focus on their own sensations, their own needs and desires. It becomes like a mirror that brings everything to the surface, some of which may have been subconscious. With the focus all on you, you have the space to let your body guide you in what’s needed for the repair, because your body knows. You just have to learn to listen, attune to it and provide that spaciousness. One-way touch containers inherently offer that.
[17:01] Rahi: I find that clients always learn something new about their bodies in one-way touch containers, whether it’s a part of their body they didn’t know felt good, or the power of voicing their no or their adjustment and having it addressed right away. It’s like a new kind of norm in the body that gets upgraded.
[17:26] Ariel: And for couples who really want to make some changes to the tracks they’ve been on together, one-way touch containers are a necessity.
Rahi: I agree.
Ariel: Because there’s so much going on in a two-way exchange. If you’re really trying to make a big shift in a pattern, for me it feels almost impossible; there’s too much going on. So you make the container smaller by shifting the focus onto one person at a time. Then you can each build up a new muscle, and when you feel ready, you can practice bringing it all together in a larger container where there’s more going on.
[18:06] Rahi: Exactly. And again, we go back to the pillars. It’s about slowing down, pausing, noticing and attuning: what does my body authentically want? So often, from the time we start dating, we sneak the boyfriend or girlfriend home and we’re going at it, and who knows what’s going on. Hair’s being pulled, things are being touched and squeezed, there’s just so much happening. But when we slow the whole process down, I’ve had so many couples learn so much about their partner’s body that they had no idea about.
[18:56] Ariel: And then they also learn what they’ve been doing that their partner hasn’t been that crazy about, for years or decades. That’s such a common thing for couples: something your partner does that you’ve been enduring, and it’s been going on for so long that it becomes scarier and scarier to say something.
[19:24] Rahi: Totally. I have a client, married thirty years, and her husband does not realize that she doesn’t like his touch. How do you share that after thirty years? If they engaged in a one-way touch container, which he’s not willing to do, he would learn so much more about what she actually likes. That would make him feel so much better about their lovemaking and bring so much intimacy to their relationship. And it would make it so much easier for her to voice what she’s wanting, because there’s a container set with the intention for her to do that.
[20:07] So these containers we set up are what anchor us and create the safety. It’s almost like permission to only experience what the body is wanting. Nothing else.
[20:20] Rahi: And what I love about the couples retreats we do is that we have a day dedicated to a process called genital mapping, which is also a foundation of somatic sex education. Again, it’s one-way touch within that container of the eight pillars: slowing down, pausing, attuning, all of that. I find that when clients can advocate for the specific erogenous areas of their genitals, they feel more empowered. Those erogenous areas get more lit up and turned on because they’re being spoken for, and the partner learns so much more about how to pleasure their beloved.
[21:09] This long-term couple, together over a decade, learned so much about each other — not only about their genitals, but the entire erogenous body, and what they each need for their erogenous body to come fully into its capacity.
[21:37] I feel like this leads into how important it is, when we talk about extended lovemaking, for lovemaking to be non-genitally focused. Not to exclude the genitals, obviously, but in our culture we’ve been conditioned to think sex is genital to genital. And there’s an infinite range of ways to make love that aren’t penetrative or genital-to-genital.
[22:11] Rahi: And I feel like that’s what this particular couple really learned: instead of starting at the genitals, I can start by connecting heart to heart and then engage the body. It was a real breakthrough for them.
Ariel: So it’s a rewriting of what sex even is.
[22:35] Rahi: Exactly. I had a couple, I think they were 78 and 82, in my Three Keys course. They realized at the end of the course that what they really wanted was authentic connection and intimacy, and they thought the way to get there was through sex. So rewriting what sex actually is, I think, is necessary for all of us.
Ariel: So necessary. And so expansive.
[23:05] Ariel: There are a couple of other things coming in for me around slowing down. One thing I’ve experienced, and also witnessed my clients experiencing, is that in the slowing down, my body actually becomes more and more sensitive. I’m able to start tuning into more and more subtle energies, and then the pleasure starts to expand more and more. The more I slow down, I reach new heights of pleasure, which is so counterintuitive to the way we’ve been conditioned and the way most of us think about it: I need more friction, I need more intensity, I need it to be harder. Now I can see that usually makes my body go more numb, and the softer and slower things are, my body opens more and more and there’s just more and more sensation.
[24:17] Rahi: That’s so beautiful. It reminds me — I often share that it’s a cosmic joke that I’m a penis owner. As a teenager I used to masturbate to magazines in the family bathroom, afraid someone was going to knock on the door. So we actually train our bodies to come quickly, to go fast. For some people it’s a stress release; others rely on vibrators for a quick release. And to your point, slowing it down can open these portals of sensation and, I want to say, terrains of consciousness. When there’s an alchemy of erotic energy being exchanged, it’s so expansive. It’s almost like being on plant medicine.
[25:12] Ariel: It totally is. You can go into some serious altered states of consciousness and have visions come in, if you tend to have an open vision field. All sorts of things. It’s wild. It’s super fun.
Rahi: It’s amazing. I feel like our course came through these kinds of portals of consciousness. Downloads. Transmission. Because these portals were opened through our alchemical divine union practice, it just made sense: this is what wants to be shared with the world.
[25:47] Ariel: There’s another thing that came in for me around slowing down. I can imagine some couples thinking, I barely have enough desire to want to have quick sex — how could I ever want to do this? What I’ve found in slowing down, and also in refraining from having an orgasm every single time I have sex, is that it makes me want to have more and more sex. There’s an energy that’s been building, and I don’t release it all. I go throughout my day in this low-to-medium state of arousal, just walking around life turned on, which feels so delicious, and my body is like, I can’t wait to get back.
[27:02] Rahi: Yes, totally. This is what happens when the yearning and the tumescence continue to build. The vibrational frequency of that erotic state can be sensed, certainly by the animal world, and by the human world as well. I think this is what magnetism is. We were interviewed by Claire recently, and she told us she was at a stoplight in the dark, and a man at a gas station across the street just whipped his head around and looked right at her and smiled. That magnetic energy.
Ariel: I really just want to explore that state of buzz.
[27:59] Rahi: It is so magnetic, and it really evolves. I’ve found with us that after making love for an extended period without going over into orgasm, when we return to it later that day or the next day, it almost picks up where we left off, and then it continues to expand and evolve. It’s fascinating, fun and feels so good.
[28:39] Rahi: Listeners don’t have the visuals of the graphs we created, so just so they have a picture — you describe the goal-oriented lovemaking, because you were really the one who put it together.
Ariel: In goal-oriented lovemaking, your arousal starts to rise, there’s a plateau, and then it rises until orgasm. Then there’s a drop and a recovery period.
Rahi: A sharp drop after the sharp ascent into orgasm.
Ariel: And on average, this may happen within a three- to fifteen-minute period.
[29:27] Rahi: Since we’re talking about time, there’s a study done in the U.S. showing that the average woman requires somewhere between twenty and forty-five minutes of foreplay for her full orgasmic capacity to be available. And the average lovemaking time in America is three to seven minutes. So part of why we’re such big advocates of extended lovemaking is to make sure the full capacity of both lovers gets met, and they can really explore the alchemical consciousness expansion that’s available.
[30:05] Ariel: There’s a big disparity between male and female bodies in arousal patterns, and even between female bodies, or between male bodies, there can be huge disparities, because of course everyone’s body is different. Then the other graph shows meditative lovemaking, extended lovemaking. Arousal starts to rise, and then you come into meditation, stillness and presence. From there the arousal might actually heighten just from bringing more presence to it. Then you might come into more stillness and presence, and then it might drop a little, and then you re-stimulate. You’re following these waves of pleasure and continually coming back into presence and stillness after you’ve built up a certain amount of erotic charge, to integrate it into the body, and also to really be with the moment and elongate the experience.
[31:10] Rahi: And this is again where the eight pillars of intimacy come in. The slowing down, the pausing, bringing erotic embodiment into a place of stillness, so the body’s cells can actually absorb that energy and expand it through the body, so it doesn’t need to discharge into ejaculation or orgasm. You could do this for an hour. You could do this for five hours. It’s endless. The body is really malleable, very adaptive. In our experience, from the early part of our relationship, when we’d enjoy extended lovemaking during an afternoon, now it goes over a period of days or weeks. It continues to teach us and almost show us the way.
[32:26] Ariel: And once you’re really able to drop into these extended periods of arousal — the reason we describe it as an altered state of consciousness is that the boundaries start to morph, similar to working with plant medicines. The boundaries between you and your partner can start to dissolve. The boundaries between you and the universe can start to dissolve. That feeling of oneness.
[33:05] Rahi: When we’re deep in an erotic state, there’s almost no identity. And when there’s an awareness of that, I can support it by choosing to let go of identity and drop into that alchemical erotic energy, an ego-less state, really becoming energy forms moving in concert, in partnership, in harmony, showing us where it wants to go.
[33:33] The way we created this course was to really listen for how it wanted to create through us. And I’m just realizing now that the more we experience those extended lovemaking states, where we can surrender and allow the energy to guide us, the more that develops the practice of doing that in life.
Oh, absolutely, because it is somatic re-imprinting. And that is how our course came about. We were just listening to the downloads. Sometimes we’d just need to do more research — which was lovemaking — for the next exercise or the next lesson to come through.
[35:05] Rahi: For me, extended lovemaking is a portal to spiritual consciousness. I wonder if that state of surrendered, energetic bliss is some part of our psyche remembering what it was like in the womb of the mother, when we were one with everything. It’s almost a way to return to that state, but with the maturity and consciousness we have now.
[35:38] Ariel: And I’ve found it to be such a beautiful practice in receiving. When I learn to do it here, I see it happening everywhere, in the way I’m able to just receive life.
Rahi: Isn’t that fascinating? The container of extended lovemaking can become such a teacher. Somatically, our bodies are already getting the downloads of those lessons and incorporating them, so that in our regular life, it’s just there.
[36:26] Ariel: And we start to make love to life.
Rahi: Exactly. And it’s such a synergy and alchemy that it supports collaboration, creativity, intuition — so many wonderful opportunities in life. Well, we’ve covered a lot. Is there anything else that wants to be shared around extended lovemaking? Anything students have asked about?
[37:15] Ariel: Nothing’s coming to me in this moment. What about for you?
Rahi: I just want to say that for penis-owning bodies, ejaculation control and erection issues are the number one and number two concerns. Part of extended lovemaking is taking the priority on erections off the table as well. Extended lovemaking can be done erect, semi-erect or soft. There are so many different states of the body that can enjoy pleasure and contribute to erotic energy, without the pressure to be a certain way.
[38:12] Ariel: And there are so many times we’ve seen in our work with people that once that pressure is taken off, a lot of the erection issues actually resolve. There can be various reasons, and some can be more physiological, but a lot of it is often emotional. There’s way too much pressure put on male bodies to have an erection all the time.
[38:37] Rahi: And likewise, vulva owners going through perimenopause and menopause think they need to be lubricated, so they rush the process and allow themselves to be penetrated before their body’s really ready. That causes armor and starts to shut the body down. The body does not want to endure sensation or penetration before it’s fully ready.
Ariel: Before it’s fully ready.
Rahi: So again, it encourages us to take our time, to slow down, to pause. If you’re wanting to experience communion but your body’s not quite there, you can pause and enjoy so many other non-penetrative ways of lovemaking. We made a point to emphasize this — there’s a whole module on it in our course — because people are so fixated on lovemaking being genitals to genitals, penis and vagina. “I’ve got to take advantage of my erect penis because it’s going to go away.” But lovemaking is lovemaking, and we really want to de-emphasize what’s glorified out there, because there are endless possibilities.
[40:14] Ariel: Particularly in hetero relationships, there’s so much focus on penis inside vagina as the be-all and end-all. The beginning and the end. It could be a meditative, wonderful part, but just one of a gazillion parts. There’s just so much else available.
[40:41] Rahi: Well, Ms. Szabo, thank you for spending this time with me today. It’s been such a joy and pleasure, and I think we have a lot more research to do.
Ariel: Endless hours of research. Not enough time in the day.
Rahi: And with that, we encourage all the listeners to really slow down. Pause when your body needs to pause. Take time to notice what your body is wanting, desiring, needing, moment to moment.
Ariel: And then attuning. Attuning to what is present and what is real for you.
Rahi: And then accepting it. Accepting it all. Sometimes it may be challenging to accept what’s actually happening, but the body deserves your faith and your trust in accepting what is.
Ariel: And then trusting what your body is telling you. That’s a big one: really trusting your body, knowing that it knows.
Rahi: And then valuing it. This really speaks to honoring your body and its inherent wisdom.
[41:55] Ariel: And then you actually have the inner investigation, attunement, acceptance and love to share and communicate what your truth is with your beloved, your partner, or whoever you’re with. And that alone is going to deepen and cultivate intimacy.
Rahi: All of this is actually the key to connection and intimacy, because so many people have been trained to believe that self-abandonment is the way.
Ariel: Now I spot examples of that in popular media all the time, in pop songs, glorifying codependency and abandoning yourself. No — really taking care of yourself is the way.
Rahi: Is the way. And if you want true intimacy, and the satiation of your body’s authentic desires, the eight pillars are pretty spectacular. We’ll sign off here. Thanks for listening.