Read The Multi-Orgasmic Couple: Sexual Secrets Every Couple Should Know for Free Online Page B

women experience orgasm only occasionally and another third do not experience orgasm at all. If you are one of these women, this chapter will help you reach your true orgasmic and multi-orgasmic potential.
    If you are a woman who already experiences pleasure and orgasms easily, this chapter and the next will help you to intensify the pleasure and orgasms you already enjoy. Even if you are already multi-orgasmic, we strongly encourage you to take the time to read and do the exercises in this chapter. The messages we receive as women about our bodies, our desire, and our pleasure are so pervasive it is difficult to embrace our sexual selves fully. This chapter will help you cultivate your potential for even more profound pleasure and intimacy.

    Desire is not just the impulse that leads us to the bedroom; it is the pulse that keeps us alive.

    For our sexual life to fl ourish, we need to make our pleasure a priority.
    Desire Is the Energy of Life
    Desire is not just the impulse that leads us to the bedroom; it is the pulse that keeps us alive. Sexual desire is related to the desire that motivates us in all other aspects of our life. For Taoists, sexual energy, or ching, is an essential part of our total physical energy, called chi. People who are in touch with their sexual energy will have more energy to pursue their goals and dreams in the rest of their lives. In chapter 3 we will discuss in detail how to cultivate your sexual energy and how to transform it to increase your overall energy. But first we begin by focusing on your current level of desire and pleasure so that you can learn to enhance them both.

    PRIORITIZING PLEASURE

    While we all have the potential for enormous desire and great passion, we face obstacles that make it difficult to experience them. The demands of work, friends, and family keep most of us busier than we’d like to be. Lovemaking often gets put off until bedtime, when we must choose between intimacy or much-needed sleep. In a recent in-depth study of more than 12,000 couples, the authors concluded that fatigue was the greatest obstacle to satisfying sex. 1 For our sexual life to flourish, we need to make our pleasure a priority.
    There is a widely held assumption among women that our sexuality and desire are not nearly as important as the other priorities in our life: our part-

    ner, our children, our work, our home. It is difficult for us to make our personal well-being a priority in any sphere of our life and particularly when it is something as self-focused as our own pleasure. But just as the other spheres of our life affect our sexuality, our sexuality can positively affect every other aspect of our life. A sexually satisfied woman is much happier and more optimistic, not to mention a better partner, mother, or worker.
    Like anything truly worthwhile, sexuality requires that we prioritize it and make time for it. Just as we need to dedicate time for our family and our job, we need to dedicate time each week away from phones, children, or other demands in order to nurture our sexual self. We would never expect our body to be in shape without exercising regularly. The same is true with our sexuality. To have a healthy sex life, we need to exercise our passion regularly.

    THE BEAUTY IDEAL
    Another common obstacle to desire for many women is the feeling that we are not attractive enough to be desirable or even to experience our own desire. Our society often conveys that there is only one kind of beautiful female body: an unrealistically thin one with large breasts. How unfortunate that the barrage of media images of airbrushed women’s bodies has made us lose sight of the fact that every body is unique and beautiful. And even more to the point, every body, no matter what size and shape, is capable of giving and receiving pleasure.
    We are enormously influenced by the body images we see on TV shows and posters and in magazines and cosmetics advertisements. Medically speaking, most models are far