Sex, when it’s good, can be powerfully satisfying. It’s a joyful, life-affirming experience that touches all aspects of our humanity: physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental. Unfortunately, for many of us, it doesn’t happen as much as we’d like it to. Or else it’s Groundhog Day in the sheets: It happens way too often, way too predictably. By the time we’re adults, any positive sexual experiences or sensations we have can seem like “magic” because our minds have been conditioned to short-circuit, go blank, default to predictable judgments about sex and bodies, or react to the topic of sexual feelings, erotic sensations, pleasure, and our “private parts” with confusion. Often, we don’t understand the factors that go into our positive (or negative) sexual experiences because we haven’t felt fully free to spend time exploring and understanding these factors, or getting the support we need to work through our mental and emotional blocks to doing this. And if we don’t know what makes sex good (or not so good) for us, how can we foster and nurture the external and internal circumstances we personally require to support the sex lives we want? Our sexual context encompasses all of the elements—internal and external—that influence our sexuality at any given moment. On a macro level, it encompasses our ever-shifting environment, the sensory stimuli that surround us, and our conscious and unconscious internal world. On a micro level, it’s our immediate surroundings and state of mind: beeping sounds in the street that distract us from our lover’s kiss; the stress and tension that makes it hard to relax and savor touch; or the music, candlelight, and prolonged eye contact with our spouse that allow us to exhale and let go. Context encompasses where we are and how we feel about it as well as who we are and how we experience ourselves. It affects our perception of sexual cues, our sensations, our arousability, and much more. To begin exploring what contributes to your ideal sexual context, try this:
