Connection Sex™


 

If you don’t get turned on by fast and furious penetration, multitudes of positions, focus on orgasm, kink, fantasy or porn, you might be longing for Connection Sex and not even know it.

If you’re a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) who needs time to allow connection with your partner and physical pleasure to open you sexually, before even entertaining the idea of sex, you will likely resonate with Connection Sex.

If you’re seeking a deeply connected, sensual, emotionally naked and intimate — even spiritual — dimension to the physical act of sex, Connection Sex is definitely for you.


 

Introduction

Couple in love connecting passionately through sex

Rooted in the ancient Tantric practices, Slow Sex movement, mindfulness, and the arousing power of emotional vulnerability, the Connection Sex approach weaves together sexuality, sensuality, emotional openness and awareness to create a deeply nourishing and spiritual experience of sexual intimacy. That intimacy, in turn, enhances the sexual experience, leaving the couple nourished, connected and empowered.

By slowing down and focusing on the connection, you pave the path to emotional opening, expression of love and nourishment through the physical act of sex. You experience the profound opening of the hearts as you open your genitals to each other.

Connection Sex is learned — by both women and men alike. With a commitment to growing through sexual experiences, you can create Connection Sex in your relationship and infuse your deep love for each other into your sex life.


OLD PARADIGM: PHYSICAL SEX


Result of a strong sense of horniness or need for sexual release

Focused on speed and achievement of goal of getting off

Energy releasing

Tension-based: focused on releasing sexual tension through fast, rhythmic movement

Focus on orgasm as culmination of activity and considered the reason for sex

For women: stimulating the body to create arousal, be ready for sex, and release energy

Feeling guarded and walking on eggshells to make sure that you do the right thing at the right time

Holding back on saying what you want in fears of hurting or pushing away your partner or “ruining the moment”

Rushing through foreplay and intercourse without taking time to get aroused and dismissing signals from the body

Engaging out of guilt or fear of losing your partner

Forcing sex by scheduling it or out of guilt after the monthly “It’s been a while” conversation

Going through the motions to get off with minimal touch and arousal, just enough to orgasm

Feeling ashamed of this part of your life, even though the rest of your relationship is loving and fulfilling


NEW PARADIGM: CONNECTION SEX


Result of simmering emotional and physical connection

Arising organically from depth of relating and nourishment

Energy building

Relaxation-based: focused on creating arousal from slowing down and relaxing into sensual pleasure

Focus on deepening orgasmic energy throughout the entire process lovemaking, including aftercare

For women: allowing the body to organically find its arousal and opening and build sexual energy

Letting your guard down and moving towards each other in an open and vulnerable way.

Communicating desires without guilt or shame and in ways that have your partner want to give it to you, deepening intimacy in the moment

Honoring each partner’s pace with sensual touch and communication, making pleasure part of the shared experience of lovemaking

Engaging from fullness and generosity of energy

Engaging in spontaneous lovemaking that arises out of extraordinary connection in everyday situations

Connecting deeply through touch and sexual play in ways that enliven and satisfy both partners

Being proud of what you’ve created together and never doubting that you made the right decision for your love


If this speaks to your deep longing in sex, I want you to know that you can have it. Connection Sex is learned, the way you would learn meditation. I learned it, my clients learned it from me, and you can learn too.

It does not require having a certain kind of body.

It doesn’t require you to be rabidly in lust, porn-star flexible or kinky.

It does not ask you to be anything but exactly who you are.

Connection Sex asks you to dare intimacy by slowing down and being willing to allow the process to show you the way to more depth and fulfillment.

It has been featured in an article I authored on HuffPost back in 2016.

For more than a decade of helping women who struggle with “low libido” or lack of interest in sex in a long-term relationship to find their way to sexual openness, time and time again, the Connection Sex framework I’ve developed over the last decade has transformed the lives of many loving couples.

It all started with my own transformation of how I experience sex.

When I discovered the principles of Slow Sex, a movement based in Tantric principles that’s about 20 years old, I was asked to slow down to listen to the whisper of my body and its desire. I had ignored what my body and heart wanted and needed, so I had no idea how to do that. Coming out of a sexless marriage that I thought was my fault because I was the one who lost my interest in sex, I was set on “fixing myself” and my lack of libido problem, which in my mind meant further ignoring what I want and need and becoming what my partner needed me to be. I was set on self-betrayal as a strategy to be sexual.

As I began to experiencing magic of slowing down and listening to my body, I found out that I was not broken — but I was unwittingly participating in the kind of sex that simply was not my cup of tea. Because fantasy, porn, and focus on orgasm never looked appealing, I thought it was because somehow I was broken. In reality, I didn’t want them because they were not what my body, heart and soul were longing for. It was when I started to listen to those longings in my body and heart that I began to awaken from what was a complete sexual shut-down and into aliveness.

I discovered in myself and later with my clients is that being highly sexual as a highly sensitive person (HSP) didn’t require any of those things I didn’t find appealing: speed, porn and focus on orgasm. It was the opposite.

When I experienced slowing down and learning to receive sensual pleasure, it was like my body had finally started to get nourishment. Like a parched plant that comes alive after a drought, my body responded with sensations, arousal and feelings that I had never knew existed. And there was another element I was discovering: the power of emotional openness and vulnerability and being an advocate for your truth. When I was open with my partner about what I wanted and felt, and he had his heart fully open to me, my sexual desire shot through the roof. My sexuality came online full force: the slower and more connected sex felt, the more I could honor my body and its sensitivity and connect vulnerably, the more nourished I became, the more my body craved more of it and move towards my partner. It was a beautiful upward spiral — and Connection Sex was born.

I’ve been teaching the Connection Sex framework to my clients for over a decade, and it has equally changed their lives, transforming sexless couples into passion-filled lovebirds where the passion only grows and deepens over time.

 

Principles of Connection Sex™

Connection Sex is a marriage of profoundly important human drives:

  • The drive for emotional and intimate connection: to be seen, met, and understood by another in our truth

  • The drive for physical pleasure: to enjoy being touched and touching another

  • The drive for sexual relating: to desire and be desired by another

  • The drive for play: to let your guard down and allow yourselves to be, without producing, performing or making anything happen

We are also equipped with the amazing capacity for self awareness — to notice our thoughts, feelings and sensations in our body — which allows us to be present with what is happening in that moment in ourselves. It gives us an ability to embody our experience through our senses.

Sensuality is a key component of pleasure in Connection Sex

SENSUAL CONNECTION — activate the senses and delight in each other’s bodies through touch, smell, taste, sound and sight

INTIMATE CONNECTION — reveal yourself and allow your partner to see into you and your pleasure

EMOTIONAL CONNECTION — meet through heart-to-heart connection and into your desires and needs, fears and joys, whatever is true for you

PLAY CONNECTION — unstructured time to be with each other and explore what the moment calls for


Altogether,

  • Connection Sex deepens romantic love and connection through the shared act of sexual pleasure.

  • On the other hand, it elevates the physical act of sex to an emotionally and spiritually transcendent experience.

Connection Sex is a process, not a blueprint. In fact, it’s not about sex at all. It is how you show up in sexuality, sensuality and vulnerability. It is not prescriptive in terms of what to do. It is about the process of having sex — or how you approach it with connection, awareness, attunement and sensuality. When you focus on the process, you develop tools to cultivate a connection to your partner and to yourself that’s both intense and profoundly nourishing.

Connection Sex is a commitment to the moment. Sex can often be driven by fantasy, or imagining something else other than the present situation or your partner. Connection Sex in contrast about being fully in the moment, and relishing the deliciousness of your partner’s presence, touch, body, and energy as well as your own feelings, sensations and desire. By mindfully tracking your own sensual experience and sharing it with your partner, you can experience the kind of shared ecstatic connection that I describe in an article I wrote for the Huff Post here, where I call this kind of experience Connection Sex.

Connection Sex is physically slow and rigorous in attention. Less movement. Less trying. Less doing. More feeling. More listening. More attuning. More opening up to each other with every touch. The reality is that our bodies can only go so fast, and they can only do a limited number of things. The faster we go, the more the sensations blur and the faster the body goes into overwhelm. It’s as if you’re in a car going 150 miles an hour, and you see nothing but a blur of details around you. In contrast, it is in slowing down that you can feel more — more sensation, more pleasure, more intimacy, more satisfaction. We hone our awareness and precision of feeling in Connection Sex, so that everything is in focus and spectacularly beautiful.

Connection Sex is about coming closer together with a partner through sexual pleasure. Intimacy is pathway to deriving profound pleasure through sex. While touch, kissing, stimulation, penetration, and orgasm can by themselves be pleasurable, it is by opening your hearts as you open your genitals to each other, you deepen the intimacy involved in sex. By engaging in sex at a leisurely pace, each movement is slowly savored, interweaved with emotional vulnerability and openness, and driven by erotic desire (not obligation or desire to please). In the end, the couple feels deeply nourished by the love they shared, which in turn feeds all aspects of their lives.

Connection Sex is about celebrating the human body and its capacity to feel. By slowing down, it becomes possible to notice the multitudes of delicious sensations and nuances that happen when you’re in physical contact with a beloved. The aliveness in the body is felt through sensations — the tingles, the warmth, or the throbbing of arousal in the genitals — whatever your age. In fact, the older you are, the more experience and capacity you have to be able to distinguish and relish the nuances of sensations. Regardless, the capacity to feel is something all human beings are born with, and it comes indiscriminate of body size, shape or color, and it becomes the seeds for shared pleasure and intimacy.

Connection Sex is sensual. Sensuality is the enjoyment and love of inputs of the senses: smell, touch, taste, auditory and vision. Your senses bring a lot of pleasure when fine-tuned to your sensitivity: the right amount at the right time. Just like in Slow Sex and Tantra, in Connection Sex too sensuality becomes pathway to connection. It is the raison d'être of being sexual with each other — not just the means to an end, like the couple of minutes of foreplay before the main course that traditional sex asks for. The shared pleasure of Connection Sex comes from feeling of your partner’s soft skin against you, their hot breath, their smooth and slow stroke on your skin, all of which feeds the connection, desire, and sexual arousal.

Connection Sex is about presence. When you have sex that’s focused on getting to the end quickly, you can easily get away with being distracted, not into it, or simply checked out. It will be over in a few minutes anyway. You will get to an orgasm, alright, but feel terribly alone in the process. Connection Sex is about giving each other the gift of presence that comes through fully being in the moment with yourself and each other. It’s in the slowing down that you can truly be each other — and that is nourishing.

Connection sex is conscious sex. While it is common to engage in traditional sex with a bit of help from alcohol to let go of inhibitions, Connection Sex thrives in the naked vulnerability and presence of a sober experience. It is when you reveal your naked self as you are that you get to experience seeing and being seen by another in deep intimacy.

Connection Sex is spiritual. It’s about meeting God through sex. That could be in the religious sense, in terms of living out God’s will for you and your partner, and it can be in the sense of feeling one with the Universe and a sense of belonging with all that there. This state of spiritual connection can be achieved through a slowing down to deepen the intimacy with each other.

Connection Sex is orgasmic. A momentary orgasm may be the culmination of all of this, but it’s the process of Connection Sex that can be far more orgasmic than the finale. By delaying orgasm to enjoy the closeness and intimacy as long as possible, orgasm happens when the body feels so full, so connected that orgasm flows. Here, you do not have to “make” orgasm happen; nor it is a pure release. It’s an exciting journey, a nourishment and a transcendental experience.

Connection Sex is never the same. When you focus on what you do in sex, at some point you run out of options. When you focus on how you show up, the possibilities are limitless. Your mood, the level of your awareness and presence, your emotional state, your availability all influence and add flavor to the physical act of sex, creating an infinite amount of possibilities and “newness.”

 

When you dare the intimacy of connection, sex becomes a means of fulfillment that goes beyond the borders of the body.

 


How Connection Sex Can Improve Your Relationship

 

1. Fall in love with each other every day

That’s right, Connection Sex has the power to keep you seeing each other anew every day and finding what you are in love with with each other. Because it is focused on daily verbal, physical and sensual practices outside of sex and within it that give you the opportunity to open your hearts to each other, falling in love can happen again and again and again. This is in contrast to just falling in love once, when you meet, and forgetting it when life gets busy. While relationships certainly can last just on love, it is falling in love with each other over and over on a daily basis that keeps the relationship sexually passionate and evolving through the decades.

2. Sustain sexual passion in a long-term relationship

The truth is that Connection Sex is the only path to sustainable sexual passion in a long-term relationship because it is intentionally cultivated — not left to develop when the stars align or the chemistry shows up. When hormonally-driven (or chemistry-driven) passion dies out as quickly as a few months or a couple of years into a relationship, couples find themselves questioning their attraction and love. Neither is at fault here. There are reasons why sex dies in a long-term relationship and why Connection Sex is offers couples the path forward.

Watch this popular video I recorded back in 2019 to understand why:

 

3. Improve communication

Connection Sex asks you to be vulnerable with your partner, be it by opening up about what you want, sharing what you’re experiencing, and redirecting from something that you don’t want to something that would give you pleasure. Words allow us a window into our hearts and our physical experience.

Connection Sex is a process and journey to find words and build the courage to reveal your truth to your partner, creating a sense of intimacy that in turn heightens sexual energy and further deeps the connection. The process is so confidence-building that my clients are known to use their intimacy communication to powerfully convey what they need to others such as in their workplace, with family members and even children.

It also unites the couple in a shared purpose of connection. It’s no longer the “You get me off, then I get you off” paradigm of getting your own. Instead, we together go on the journey and create the experience.

4. Sync up different biological sexual desire

Men’s biological sexual desire peaks in the mornings.
Women’s biological sexual desire peaks once a month.

Herein lies the problem. The desire discrepancy is built into our biological systems because men and women experience sexual desire differently.

That is why a model of long-term sexual passion cannot be based solely on biological sexual desire. That’s a recipe for disaster in the long-term.

Connection Sex focuses on the building of sensual, sexual and emotional intimacy that is a powerful input to a woman’s responsive sexual desire that leads to delicious, deeply sensual, connected sex that deeply satisfies both men and women.

Which leads me to the next two benefits:

5. Improve and Feed Women’s Libido

Time and time again, I have found with my clients that Connection Sex is the magic pill for women’s responsive sexual desire in a long-term relationship. And that is especially true for Highly Sensitive (HSP) women.

Connection Sex is rooted in creating deep physical and emotionally safe space for a woman to open up sexually at her pace. To engage in Connection Sex, a woman doesn’t need to want sex or feel sexual. Because sexual touch, stimulation and connection are done without the goal of sex, women are able to enjoy the connection, relaxation, and eventually arousal without any pressure to “be in the mood and ready.” It works with women’s responsive sexual desire: that spaciousness, safety and connection to build sexual energy for its own sake, which then eventually overflows into “I want you!”.

6.  Provide men what they had no idea they crave

Most, if not, all men learn to be sexual by masturbating as young boys — a process that is usually quick and all about release of sexual tension. While the sexual urge that drives that urgency is powerful and real, by releasing quickly, men miss out on the sensual and intimacy aspects of sex — which are all about feeling the exquisite pleasure of slow touch in the intimate presence of another. That is especially when it comes to receiving touch, which masturbation naturally does not contain. Men who seek out more sex, more often falsely believe that if they have more fast and to-the-point sex, they will somehow fill up on the sensual. Unfortunately, these are apples and oranges. More fast touch and more often when it is devoid of the sensual aspect will never provide the sensuality that they crave.

Connection Sex allows men to fill up on the deliciously nutritious sensuality aspect of sex that fills their sexual cup in a way that they’ve never known how. It allows them to learn to receive pleasure without the pressure to perform or do for others. It is a hugely healing aspect to men’s sexuality, which our society presents as just about giving and performing well.

7. Invites you to be sexual regardless of age, body condition or stage of life 

Because Connection Sex is not about sex as a means to just get off, but a way that develop deep sexual intimacy, it can be done at any age or life stage. You don’t need to be porn-star flexible or have a fit body. If you have performance anxiety, Connection Sex uses intimacy to help you feel safe. If you’re recovering from childbirth, it’s about being sexual without any requirements to get “back into shape” or engage in penetration that you’re not ready for.

Connection Sex meets you where you’re at and allows you to find the form of sexual expression that fits your situation — that is connected and mutually enjoyed. You get to decide what is right for you: it can be penetration sex or not, with or without orgasm. It can be sensual touch and erotic massage. It can be one-way pleasure, or mutual enjoyment. It can be energetic sex that doesn’t even require touch at all. Connection Sex can be practiced well into old age, even when the body is no longer capable of sexual acrobatics. Because it’s not about sex.

 

Connection Sex FAQ

 

Q: Are you born with some innate ability to do Connection Sex, or can it be learned by anyone?

A: Because Connection sex is about establishing new habits that foster intimacy and connection, it can be learned by anyone who is willing to apply curiosity to learn about themselves, listen to their body and desires, and take an emotional risk to open up to a partner in sensual and sexual touch. It’s equally about learning to pay attention to the same things with a partner and meeting them where they’re at. Connection Sex is truly about risking intimacy to open up your heart and genitals to your beloved. None of this depends on having specific innate traits. It is not easy but it is 100% learned, like you would learn how to do meditation or yoga. Everyone who has an interest and a willingness to learn has equal access and opportunity to practice it.

 

Q: Does Connection Sex require a lot of time?

A: Understandably, time is always a constraint for busy couples, especially with children. Connection Sex is meant to be developed as a slow burn, and sensual and sexual sessions are typically quite long, around 3-4 hours. Plus there is the time to have daily heart-to-heart connection that needs to be taken into account.

What I’ve seen with every couple is that, like anything you learn anew, there is a significant time commitment upfront. Over time, emotional, physical and sexual connection becomes easier to cultivate and takes less and less energy. In fact, in the long run, it feeds you energy, making other things in your daily life easier to accomplish.


 

Q: If we slow things down too much, aren’t we going to just fall asleep?

A: Couples who are new to slowing down in sex often do fall asleep, which is normal and actually healthy. If you fall asleep the first couple of times, it’s a sign that you’re simply tired and need to slow down and rest. So slow down and sleep!

However, if falling asleep is a repeating pattern that’s not dependent on fatigue levels, three things might be happening:

  1. Your body is accustomed to only two modes: fast or asleep, which means that you are missing a whole area of in-between where you can experience a lot of passion, intimacy and sexual connection.

  2. Your awareness and your “feeling body” are turned off, which means you cannot feel your own body or your partner’s, and that makes slow touch “boring”. That happens to people who struggle with disassociation or are simply not trained in being aware of their own body sensations.

  3. You’re accustomed to equating intensity and speed for depth, but they’re not the same thing. Intensity goes fast, but stays shallow. It is in slowing down to focus on the emotional and physical connection to yourself and your partner that you can create depth of relating.

This is exactly what Connection Sex will help you develop if you stick with the practices.


 

Q: Does engaging in slowing down to have Connection Sex mean that we can never now enjoy a quickie?

A: Connection Sex is an approach to sex based on mindfulness, not an absolute prescription to what you do, which means that you can apply the underlying principles to a quickie and still have an experience that is rooted in connection and vulnerability. 


 

Q: You said that Connection Sex is based on Tantra, which I’ve read involves a lot of esoteric practices such as chanting, breathing and weird movements that simply don’t appeal to us. Is that also part of Connection Sex? 

A: It is true that practicing classic Tantra involves special techniques in breathing, sounds and movements that are used to activate sexual energy. Even though they may be beneficial, it is not something that Connection Sex requires. In fact, Connection Sex rests on the principles of following the energy in your body and listening to what feels good in the moment. So instead of specific techniques to guide activation of sexual energy, the choice rests in you to decide what you do and how. 


 

Q: As a man, I always fear that if we take sex off the table with my wife, she will never want it. She can just linger in cuddling for hours and it never turns into sex. This is what Connection Sex sounds like. How can I get her to want sex?

A: You’re not alone. This is a common assumption of men that has some truth to it — and a whole lot of nuance too.

Let me unpack this. Most women have not had the kind of safety, slowing down, and sensuality that Connection Sex allows often in their life — sometimes never. Take a busy woman, mother to boot, who has little to no time to slow down at all, and she will want to simply relax in the arms of her beloved for hours. When given the opportunity to slow down and cuddle, yes, nothing obviously sexual might happen. But something is happening and it’s very important: she is getting a sense that she can be herself with you, that she can relax and recharge, and not have to force the sexual opening before she is ready. Once her cup is truly full, that’s when things can start to shift — but most couples never have the patience (from both sides) get to this point. If you speed this up, you might get sex, but the next time, she’ll want it less.

And there is something even more important at play here that men can take responsibility for. When men first hear that Connection Sex is all about sensual touch and not orgasm, they decide that they then must shut off their sexual self to participate. “Why bother getting all aroused and not have sex” is their thinking, so they decide to just platonically cuddle and put away their sexual desire. So when a woman is cuddling with you for hours, and she senses that you’ve turned off your sexual self and are just there to cuddle platonically, she respond with just cuddling. And nothing happens. 

What men have to learn in Connection Sex is to stay connected to their sexual self and arousal while participating in goal-less sexual and sensual activity. It allows men to meet women where they’re at and build up sexual energy together, side by side, in a titrated way (instead of firehosing with sexual desire). That is opposite of shutting things down or speeding things up to make sex happen. Engaging in Connection Sex teaches men to be exquisite lovers, not just a man having sex. 

Lastly, I want to invite you to a paradigm shift that can help you have more sex. You cannot “get” a woman to want sex. You can, however, engage with her in such a way that allows her feel safe, vulnerable and open — a point from which she can take over with her sexual desire. The Connection Sex framework provides an approach that works with her sexual desire and allows you both to cultivate sexual energy together.


 

Q: Connection Sex speaks to me but my male partner just wants to have fast “get it over with” sex. How do I convince him to have Connection Sex?

A: Getting your partner on board to want to do something new in the bedroom, especially when he is resistant to the idea already, requires letting go of the convincing mindset in exchange for a vulnerability one. Instead of providing logical reasons of how Connection Sex is better or what it does, lead with what you want and your desire to engage in slowing down and building intimacy with your partner. Share with him what it would provide for you — the kind of connection, enjoyment, closeness, etc. Don’t forget to make a request too, not just assume that because you’re discussing it, that you’ve asked for what you want. He might not be responding because there was no actual request made.


 

 

Read real-life case studies of “Intimacy Warriors” who dared intimacy to transform their sex life & relationship from gridlock to passion, intimacy and sex through Connection Sex.

 
 

On the brink of divorce after 25 years together, Shannon and Bill fought to save their near-sexless marriage. Their experience led them to discover levels of emotional and sexual intimacy that they did not know existed.


Al & Blair, a couple in their 30s, were in a gridlocked place of defensiveness and power struggles that made sexual intimacy impossible. As they found their way to each other and to deeper intimacy, they discovered more freedom and fun.


 

After their child’s birth, Alan and Grace fell into a sexless marriage that threatened their relationship and love. After losing a year trying to fix this with couples therapy, they fought to find the support that would turn things around.


After 25 years of deep love and connection, Shannon & Greg feared that “differences in libido” would end their marriage. Learn how they broke through damaging patterns to sexy intimacy and even more love.



Beautiful sensual watercolors from www.tinamariaelena.com