Few things do touch us in the same way as ecstatic and powerful sex. It pulls us out of our regular, controlled state of being, and releases our breath, senses, emotions, and our heart too. This can be so lovely and beautiful, but also disturbing or exposing.

Vulnerable parts of us may come out when we open up sensually, triggering various emotional reactions. They must come up, because it is our heart opening in trust that makes for truly great sex. You need to understand what impact emotions have on your making love if you want it to be truly sacred.

Even if you are an expert lover, feelings can make or break the best sex, as you probably have experienced firsthand at some point. We must allow our feelings to play their role in sacred lovemaking, or no sexual know-how, Tantric technique or special energy exercise will have any true meaning. Fully opening into divine sexuality is all about trust. Without it, any knowledge or expert technique is in danger of remaining rote and mechanical.

The reason people don't have deep and fulfilling sex is often because they do not trust this emotional movement. Yet the more we open sensually, the more the shadow side of ourselves will come up also – that is, the unlived, unresolved and unhealed parts of us, all the elephants in our rooms. This is especially powerful in the case of trauma survivors, but it is true to some degree for almost everyone.

You cannot open your heart selectively. You can't open just your “sexy, happy self” and keep other facets hidden. If you try to do that, sex will be mediocre at best. If you want to go really high, you need to be willing to go deep as well. If we do not allow this movement of emotion, then grace can open up within us. The metaphor for this truth-that we must embrace our shadow side in order to transcend it-is the beautiful lotus blossom that rises out of the murky mud. Through loving sex we can help heal our bodies, our hearts and our entire beings.

Here is an example: Robert had always been proud of himself on being a very capable lover, expert, even. And he had always enjoyed lots of sex throughout his life. However Robert is childhood had been very tough; his mother was schizophrenic and so she was alternately neglectful and loving toward him when he was a child. To endure the pain of such unreliable love, he learned to protect his heart and not let anyone in. He had been in several relationships, which he thought were reasonably satisfying, but then one day Robert fell in love, completely, totally in love, like he had never felt before, and a disturbing thing began happening.

When Robert was making love with his new partner, he felt sad old emotions of hurt rise up. As he began to trust his new lover, he became aware of how his heart was hurt by those earlier events in his life. Being a strongly masculine male, he felt that to be a good lover he had to be strong at all times; he could not show weakness especially to his new love whom he was so anxious to show his best side.

During lovemaking, when those vulnerable parts of him arose to distract himself from these emotions, quite unconsciously, he became more vigorous in his making love. This did not please his partner, Evelyn, because she could feel something was hurt in his heart. She started saying that his sex was mechanical and too rough. Evelyn had a natural and deep understanding of sacred sex and she truly loved him so she kept inviting him to be softer and to show her his vulnerable sides. With time the trust between them grew so much that he could begin to feel and speak about his hurt, and he could allow those moments of emotional pain to ripple through him as they made love. He realized that it was not only ok, but that it made it possible to enjoy a depth of sensual feeling, pleasure and intimacy in making love that he never knew existed.

The body follows the heart; when the heart is open the body opens too.

Our great mystics and spiritual experts knew this. And our most famous poets down the ages often speak of this too: how joy and rapture are entwined with longing, rage, grief and despair. Making friends with your emotions will improve your sex life, whether these feelings are joy, fear, bliss, rage, sadness or love.

Allowing feelings to well up while we're sexual is important for beautiful love making. Of course this contradicts the perfect picture of romance and hot sex that we often have in our heads. It's especially tough when we consider that the emotions that might come up for us could be anger, fear, grief, or other less acceptable ones. Yet there's so much erotic juiciness held in feelings, so much intimacy to be gained from allowing them, often especially from the ones that we try to restrain because we consider them unfit for the bedroom.

It is this holding on to that makes sex be less then satisfying. When we don't allow feelings to well up in us, we go numb instead. All of a sudden, from one to moment to the next we do not feel anything where before we were quite alive. Men and women tend to react quite differently in this situation.

The mistake men often make is that they know something is not there, they can feel that sense of numbness, but they do not know why it came over them, so they go for purely physical gratification. They go for the orgasm. In the long term they might reach out for sex toys or resolve to learn some fancy new expert sex technique, or they ask their partner to go to an S'n'M club, and so on. These can all be great fun things to do but they might not give you what is missing.

Women often react in a totally different way. When women ca not feel and go numb they are done, they just lose interest in sex. They have the proverbial headache. And so they do not get the intimacy and passion that was possible either.

So make a little more room for your own emotions and those of your partner in your sex life. You won't need to stop the lovemaking when something comes up. You can cry and lovemake. You can cry, and hoot, and enjoy pleasure all at the same time. Letting your tears flow is such a healing force. You can also feel rage and make love simultaneously. This can get quite wild and you may need to negotiate with your partner beforehand what is acceptable and what is not. More often than not, our partners have more room for our emotions than we do.

For example, if you find yourself getting angry in the middle of lovemaking, let your partner know and ask them if it is OK to go with it. do not hurt each other. You can experience the energy of anger without hurting someone. You can growl, you can grunt, you can hiss. It can be a tremendous turn on and a lot of fun! Enjoy it as energy and let this energy arise until it changes again. Great intimacy can be invoked if you both allow your emotions to flow freely as they come up during lovemaking.

I was working with a young couple where the sex had not been good for some time. Through discussion it became clear that when the making love got deeper, she felt anger arising in her. She felt the urge to hit her partner, push him away, and yet still make love with him. So we negotiated that she'd have permission to do exactly that, with two conditions: she was not to hurt him in any way; and if she had the impulse to push him away he would hold her even more strongly instead, so she could feel his love. Both of them said that their sex life had never been hotter from the first time they tried this.

Ultimately it's the ability to surrender and to let go of control that makes for great sex. It is ok to sob or chuckle at the same time as you are in a passionate embrace getting close to orgasm. It's ok to growl and hiss or to tremble and shiver in fear. When you are willing to let your emotions flow, like clouds passing across the sky, and you feel safe with that, you come to trust that they make for scorching hot, beautiful sex. These feelings are like a thunderstorm or a rain shower that washes everything clean. Emotions can be negotiated in way that they are not hurtful or traumatizing, but rather enriching and enlivening. Let your emotions be like the weather, do not avoid them, do not seek them out, just let them come and go.

It's not only the darker feelings that we are afraid of. Many of us are also afraid of being somehow “too much”, too intense, and so what we mostly repress is missed joy, giggles, and rapture. Most of us carefully monitor the noises we make: we have acceptable sex noises and unacceptable ones, right? Of course it's good to be considerate of your neighbours, but whenever the circumstances allow, it is great if you can just let go.

If your partner is experiencing emotions welling up as you are making love, you can be supportive by letting him or her know that it is ok. Giving and receiving permission is sometimes all that's needed to relax and let love flow through.

The reason I call this kind of making love a spiritual practice is because, like any practice, it involves developing certain muscles, certain abilities and skills over time. Just Like when you're not in shape and you start working out you don't become strong overnight, as in meditation practice it takes a little while to get the hang of it, so it is with sacred lovemaking. It takes regular practice to become better, and eventually, an expert. In this case you are developing the muscles to be able to be truly within your senses, sensitivity and intuition, emotional transparency, the skill of intimate communication, and the ability to trust and surrender. Your sense of sacred lovemaking will grow with practice, and with time, you will enjoy not only more pleasure, passion, love, and delight, but also you'll experience the transcendental vibrations of divine rapture and ecstasy. You can open yourself to all that is sacred in life by learning to make love in this way.

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