Does my sexiness offend you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance as if I have diamonds At the meeting of my thighs? MAYA ANGELOU

Your respiratory system is innervated by both your involuntary and voluntary nervous systems—it’s the only system in your body with that overlap. It’s where conscious choice intersects with unconscious programming. That means that your breath can become the ‘engine,’ pulling the ‘train’ of your state along behind. Anytime you want, you can become

If you predominantly stimulate one nerve pathway, you’re most likely to experience arousal and orgasm that are focused on its end-organ system. Thus, when you mostly play with the parts connected to the primary genital (pudendal) pathway, you’re likely to have a clitoral or penile orgasm. Utilize the pelvic nerve path and you’ll get orgasms that

THE ROOT OF THE WORD ‘SEX’ actually means to divide or cut apart, from the Latin sexus or secus. It comes from the ancient idea that gods and people were originally androgynous and had to be separated into unisexual beings. Thus sex is about the desire to reconnect and end that separation.

Sensual sound silences your chattering, critical mind. When your brain is being distracted by the sound track of your pleasure, it can’t also be reading negative subtitles. Your usual thoughts and worries get drowned out by your audible pleasure.

When you narrow your focus, you activate your sympathetic excitement system and go into an alert, up-regulated state. When you go broad and soft-focused, it takes you into a relaxed, down-regulated place.

• turn off your chattering front-brain and move into your animal arousal

What Happens in Altered States of Consciousness? • You experience reality differently from ‘everyday’ awareness. • You lose ego boundaries and self-consciousness—and become, in this limited sense, more like non-human animals. • You experience changes in attention and awareness including hyper-focus, expanded attention, increased awareness of self,

I wish we could treat our bodies as the place we live from, rather than regard it as a place to be worked on, as though it were a disagreeable old kitchen in need of renovation and update. SUSIE ORBACH