Remember a time when you felt like you really were making love? Maybe it was back when you first fell in love, where the slightest touch was ecstatic. Your hearts were so open, and love directed and dominated the whole experience. It was not about sex, it was much more than that. When you really surrender your heart, you open up to and unleash powerful, exhilarating, intimate love-energies together. It is one of the most fulfilling experiences a couple can have together.

What then "spices up" sex when you are not opening up to these rich, sublime energies? Interestingly, when there is not enough presence of love, man and woman must fall back on their imagination. They use erotic images and fantasy substitutes to stimulate pleasurably-charged feelings. The focus starts to shift to doing things that will trigger highly charged fantasies and emotional imprints -- what we call "turn on's."

For many men, sexual cues like lingerie, the size or shape of her breasts, her tummy, her thighs or buttocks, erotic videos, or certain acts can stimulate highly aroused, imprinted memories and fantasies. Women tend to respond to different cues, like symbolic romantic images, or fantasies of feeling desired, or that she is loved. The raw sexual act, in and of itself, is not enough to fulfill most women. That's why women seem to need some semblance of love to have sex with a man. Or at least be able to project her fantasy bond of intimacy and caring affection into the act.

Since childhood all of the pleasurable and painful experiences around sex, intimacy, and love have been registered in the emotional brain centers. These potent imprints are easily re-stimulated. Certain visual images, sexual talk, even the thought of sex can elicit pleasurable or unpleasant feelings, depending on the person's past experiences. When these imprints are stimulated, whether they are turn on's or turn off's, they can release intense feelings that take over the experience. Turn on's unleash pleasurable, aroused feelings that amp up the intensity of the experience, whereas turn off's release inner tensions, fears, and insecurities that mar the experience together.

Either way, whichever feelings are elicited, these energies overshadow your natural innocence and presence. They take you out of the present with your partner. You are now more connected to the source of the pleasure (or distress) within yourself than you are with your partner. You are no longer fully present in the innocent connection together, where real love is experienced and made.

You readily see this effect with "turn off's." When you trigger someone's "turn off's," you are stimulating painful or scary feelings that were registered from earlier traumatic experiences or conditioning around sex. Suppose, for example, your partner was abused sexually growing up. Whenever those terrifying memories are triggered in sex, the same original, intense, aversive feelings come right up. They now dominate the experience the person is having. If it is the woman, she is no longer purely innocent, or present, in her connection with you. Her experience now is being generated from her past. It now feels abusive. But it is all happening up in her head. She is no longer in the now with you, or connected to the depths of her being where these pure, love energies are unleashed.

Interestingly, this same binding effect happens when you elicit "turn on's." If you ever have sex without the connection of love, the experience is purely physical. Like touching someone's elbow. So you want to add some emotional content to "spice it up." That requires stimulating fantasies and highly-charged erotic imprints that will unleash intense, pleasurable, arousing feelings into the act. So the focus now is on doing things that will "turn you on" inside. Maybe you put on a video to get in the mood. Or have your partner do things specifically that are turn on's for you.

The problem is that, just like with turn off's, the experience now is coming from stimulating memories and fantasies up in your head. The experience becomes a sort of private euphoria, where you are literally using your partner to stimulate pleasurably-charged imaginations inside, within your own mind. The experience is not unfolding from opening your hearts in the connection with your partner. Instead, it is a encapsulated, solitary experience. After all, people can have very intense, pleasurable sexual experiences by themselves with porn on the internet, or on the telephone with someone they don't even know.

This is why people will say that sex is all "in your head." That may be true if you are looking for just physical or erotic sexual gratification. Erotic imagery and intimacy fantasies can generate strong, pleasurable feelings. Intense, yes. But the source of the experience of pleasure is not love. Nor is it the same as love. Nor is it lovemaking. Those aroused feelings stimulated within you are not the same energies as the more profound, intimate and fulfilling, natural, spiritual energies of the Universe that emerge from your innocent, heartfelt connection with your partner. Focusing on turn on's actually overshadow and prevent a truly intimate connection fully unfolding -- with your partner, and deep within the core of your Being.

Certainly, you've experienced this with your partner. Times when you notice that your partner is off in his or her private inner world of erotic or emotional revelry. He or she is no longer truly present in the experience with you. They have lost themselves in highly charged imagery in dreamland. In truth, more fantasy is being made than love. In effect, you have both borrowed the other's body to make love to your own sexualized images and emotionally arousing archetypes. Such an insulated encounter actually inhibits the conscious, timeless union of the male and female energies in true lovemaking.

Now ask yourself: Why does a man or woman need to stimulate their imagination to make love? To get in the mood? To get an erection? If there is not enough presence of love, if the man or woman does not know how to open their Awareness to richer levels of sensation and experience, then naturally they will need erotic or fantasy substitutes to "spice it up."

Remember when you first fell in love and kissed your partner. Remember how ecstatic each moment was? Now imagine it going further. Your hearts open and connected together, where every sensation is attuned to, experienced, and savored. Just before intercourse, what if in that moment your partner stopped and said, "Let's put on a sex tape right now to spice this up." Wouldn't you think, "Why would we need that?" Is this lovemaking or is this sex for him or her? Are you seeing the difference?

When you both know how to open up to these profound core energies, you don't need your imagination to make love, because you are with the real thing. The actual living man or woman opens you to the most incredible Life-force in the Universe. It gives you the most delicious, ecstatic, fulfilling sensation that you can imagine. In the flesh, and not in the mind. In your heart, and not up in your head. And into the depths of your souls, uniting together. In the now.

In this new teaching, you learn to make love together in the present. Where the focus is in connecting together to these deeper, more sublime energies. Where you connect to each other, feel each other, love each other. Instead of "doing" together, you are being together. With practice, as you free yourself from the past conditioning, the process restores the purity of your innocence. The man learns how to approach his partner, attune to her, blend with her natural rhythms and pace, and make it safe for her to fully surrender into her heart and body as the make love together.

The woman finds the process enables her to truly relax and attune to her being, innocently letting go into the moment-by-moment unfolding experience with her full Awareness. Every moment -- each incredible sensation -- is a pure delight. She opens up like a flower. She experiences every sensation and every feeling to the core of her being, where it reverberates deeply throughout her whole body. She becomes truly responsive to him, fully alive in her love and passion.

For the woman, her deepest fulfillment is when she can totally surrender her heart and body, take him completely into her, take everything he is, while in return releasing every bit of her feminine self for his fulfillment. In taking him in her core, she feels the wonder, power, and fullness of his masculine love. And, in response, she surrenders her heartfelt, sacred energies into his being. As a result, they both find themselves moving deeper into their hearts, their bodies, and souls, where ecstatic intimacy is found. Woman's total sexual motivation is to make this divine union with her man and surrender these heartfelt energies.

When the woman can relax, and savor each moment, the effect is profound. Her energy and inner sanctum becomes yielding, soft, fully lubricated, welcoming, undemanding, sensitive, fully responsive, open and alive. For the woman, the lovemaking becomes purer, sweeter, and more deeply fulfilling. It feels effortless, and so natural to her nature as it moves her into her core. This is what she always dreamed in her heart making love to a man would be.