Can you have your mind and your body on the job at least momentarily, when you’re engaging in sex?
So instead of thinking about your grocery list or what you need to do tomorrow or what your butt looks like, you can be more present. Cyndi said it’s like that saying you may have heard, that:
Cyndi: Being present simply means being able to have your mind and your body on the job, whatever the job is at the same time. And then for long enough, you know, over back to back sessions, to allow for the desire to start to emerge?
I love that she used the word “momentarily.” Feeling connected to the present during sex doesn’t require doing away with all other thoughts, which isn’t possible or easy for many folks.
As we’ve talked about before here, if your mind feels busy or distracted, arousal can take over as you move along – making it a very centering, soothing thing. In the meantime, take those moments to check in.
Going back to responsive desire, I asked Cyndi about the role turning ourselves on might play in all of this. Because it could be easy to assume that responsive desire makes us dependent on someone else. Someone else to seduce us or “get us there.” But that’s far from the case.
Cyndi: Some people, find that their turn ons are mental. And so that could be thinking about things, hearing things, reading things, anything that sort of engages the mind in stories of pleasure and eroticism that engage that part of ourselves.
For some people, that preparation might be physical. So it might involve, masturbating a little bit. It might involve making sure that your vibrators are fully charged and ready to go.
And be able to feel what’s going on inside your body, as well as outside your body enables you to have more leverage, enables you to have more skills at navigating sex, rather than just running with the story that’s in your head
It might involve quietening, the fear stories in your head about, you know, do you smell funny? Do you feel funny? That you wanna take a shower and make sure that all your bits are washed and everything’s clean, that the sheets on the bed are clean? That you know, the door is locked and the phone is silent and you’re not gonna be interrupted. For some people that is a way of engaging in preparation. So that notion of sort of responding, you are responding to things around you, but you’re not necessarily responding to a person, although that can be part of it.
You are also responding to a series of contexts and conditions, many of which you 
have a lot of control over. And I think one of the big things that people need to remember is that if you have this passive kind of relationship with sex, where sex is something that’s done to you, where sex is something where you get taken on a journey.
Even if that’s you want and that’s okay to want it, you still have to be able to participate in creating that journey for yourself. It’s unlikely that someone is going to be able to access those deep parts of you without your permission, first of all. And secondly, without you really even knowing what those parts are. You don’t need to have a crystal clear vision of them, but you at least need to be curious.
You need to be willing to be curious about yourself and find out, well, what are the conditions that best suit me? And, and sort of work backwards from times when it’s been good, to work out, if I were to take a wild guess about the kinds of things that are gonna get me in the mood, what would those things be?
