Sexual Desire and Arousal: Why You Cannot Make Them Happen

How many times have you stood in the check out aisle at your local grocery store only to bear witness to the most titillating of tabloid titles? 21 Ways to Turn On Your Lover! How to Make Your Wife Horny!! 10 Steps to Giving 10,000 Orgasms!!! One Right After the Other!!!!... of course!!!!!

You’ve got to be kidding! Yes… we are kidding. No… believe it or not, you can’t actually turn on your lover, make your spouse horny, or give your partner even one orgasm. YOU CAN AID AND ABEIT BUT THEY HAVE TO TURN THEMSELVES ON WHILE YOU DO LIKEWISE. THEN THE FEDBACK LOOP OF AROUSAL SET  INTO ACTION!

Why can’t you turn on someone?

‍It’s simple. All you need to know is brain neuro-anatomy. You’re totally on top of that, right? We’ll make it easy. There are three major parts to the brain:

1. The infamous reptile brain, the most primitive one that is the seat of our basic, vegetative and physiological reflexes like breathing, sleeping, digestion, and instinctive behaviors;
2. The mammal or limbic brain in which our emotions and memories are centered; and
3. The cortex that allows us to be conscious, to think, and to act intentionally.

While we have direct control over much of our cortical activity, we don’t have direct control over our limbic, emotional brain, and we really don’t have direct control over our reptilian, instinctual brain. Sexual desire and arousal are both physiological and emotional, just like enjoyment and relaxation (and all those not-so-pleasant experiences like anxiety and anger). This means that they are located in the reptile and mammal brains that we do not control directly. Whereas most of the success we experience in life is the result of intentional hard work, sexual “success” is the opposite because the parts of the brain that fire up sexual response do not respond to direct hard work. You can’t make SEXUAL RESPONSE  happen for yourself or anyone else.

Here’s the really crazy thing:

‍In fact, the harder you try to make sexual desire and arousal happen, the less likely they are to happen. Perhaps even crazier, the less you try to make them happen, the more likely they are to happen! [Example: Sleeping] That’s reverse psychology for you (emphasis on the psycho part)!

So what’s a lover to do?

‍Do what you do in meditation and other mindfulness practices: you keep turning your attention away from intentionally trying to make desire and arousal happen, and onto something that will allow your natural responses to happen on their own. In the case of desire and arousal, you keep refocusing on concrete sensations, on touch, sounds, sights, smells, and tastes. If you do this with practice, your conscious mind will get out of your way, and Mother Nature will take over. Voilá! Desire and arousal are much more likely to happen by themselves! And there you have it!

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