Great sex with your beloved is a private indulgence, a sensual experience and the ultimate luxury.
It is difficult to have good sex on an empty heart.
Sex is a wonderful part of life.
For starters, without it we would not be here! Sex is made up of touch, feeling, aroma, emotion, sound, sight, color, ritual, imagination and celebration.
Sensuality and pleasure flows from within.
As Kim Cattrall wrote in her book Sexual Intelligence "When we eat without paying attention to what we're eating or how it's been prepared, we rob ourselves of pleasure.
"Sexual pleasure works in the same way.
Eroticism, another ingredient in great sex, is subtle magic.
Just as knowing how ingredients work together leads to more creative cooking, so an awareness of desire's many nuances makes sex more creative and satisfying.
It often even summons a sense of the divine.
Through love, the body experiences itself as a doorway to the divine.
Sex is one of the universal pathways to feeling good.
As always there is a shadow side.
When used in a destructive and angry manner deep wounds are created.
There are many who struggle with sexual issues due to these woundings.
Often we see in the media a tendency to become fascinated and focused on the abusive side of sex.
It appears in a multitude of ways, and under many guises in our every day life, sometimes being used to sell everything from cars to food, it can be everything and it can be nothing.
For the young in each generation, sex often begins with looking for love, approval, and validation.
This can become a game, a game that provides the fleeting feelings of 'loving' and 'being loved'.
Especially if one is driven by the desire to be noticed, desired, sexually attractive and great in bed.
The question of morality often left behind in the seeking of these seemingly more potent experiences.
Peer pressure and the strong need to be accepted opens the doorway to experimentation, for better or for worse.
Love is not on the agenda here, it can be more valuable to experiment, to shed innocence and naiveté.
Speaking to a young woman recently, who, after many years of sexual emptiness, has now set out upon a path of self discovery.
She had this to say, "Each time I chat with someone, meet someone, have sex with someone -or not - I uncover more about who I am and what I am looking for.
It's a great way to discover things that you didn't even know turn you off, turn you on or turn you upside down.
" My own experience was not very different.
My sexual experiences were how I defined myself, believed I fitted in and was good enough in the eyes of my peers.
Intimate connections came and went as I set about finding and experiencing the sexual comfort I craved.
My lust for life's experiences led me to understand that there are many ways to be sexual and I would be simplistic to suggest that sex is only meaningful where there is love.
Maturing along my journey, I understood and came to experience sex as the nearest way to receiving or experiencing bliss.
Sex certainly provides some profound moments when I am able to go beyond past inhibitions, connecting and opening up to heightened pleasures.
It is true that in that space I teeter on a precipice outside ordinary experience.
Thomas Moore in his book The Soul of Sex states "In sex the soul has an unusually powerful opportunity to join body and spirit.
Sex focuses our attention, as perhaps nothing else can, on our sensuous presence in this world and on another person, while at the same time it fulfils our desire for emotional and spiritual union with another, for transcendence of our self-consciousness, and for meaningful experience.
If our sexuality has soul, the whole range of human experience is contained there.
Sex can put us in touch with the sublime.
While making love, or afterward, we may feel utterly fulfilled, and the whole of life may be renewed by the experience" Even as we enter mid life and the latter years, sex continues to renew and find a way to express itself.
It becomes more than the act itself.
Maybe it is when the body begins to change that our attitudes towards sex do as well.
This does not mean we lose interest, rather it is that the biological urge is not so pressing.
It is pleasing to report that there are many women, who finding themselves alone or widowed, who are able to take advantage of the ever changing face of options available to them in this modern day.
More and more women of all ages are discovering self-pleasuring and enjoying their sexuality through the amazing range of vibrators available these days.
What was once taboo is becoming, for some, normal (even if not universally accepted) as intimate products ensure physical sensations continue to be as splendid as ever.
There are changing attitudes towards sex whether between partners or alone.
The tendency to live the single life is fast becoming more chic along with the desire to be more inter-dependent in relationships, rather than co-dependent.
Women are no longer expected to take a passive role in sexual intercourse.
Sexual freedom and enjoyment has become more acceptable.
Sexual pleasure and orgasm continues to be of great consequence in people's lives, with both women and men understanding more and more what the other needs and requires from sex.
Weaving sex into our lives, being deeply sexual and loving, adding the mystery of desire and the exquisiteness of orgasm, basking in the afterglow, indulging in erotic play, seasons Life itself! ©copyright - 2007