SURFACING FOR AIR
HOW MANY OF US grip our sphincter, tense our abdomens, brace ourselves against the world as we walk around all day?
Compelled to keep our bellies from spilling over our waistbands, tucking our tails under to maintain some sense of protection during this awkward stage between birth and death. Seriously, how many of us?
Show of hands please?
My hand's up. I just caught myself doing it while I was typing. Perhaps you don't even realize your body is tensing up, armoring against what's going on in your world, and, more likely, your inner life. Repeatedly contracting these muscles restricts your breathing, blood flow, and your digestion. Limits the amount of oxygen, hormones, and neurochemicals that your entire body needs to function and flourish. Please wrap your fingers around your own throat and press in; until you're uncomfortable and have trouble breathing, it's like that.
Are you familiar with your sphincter? Contract it right now, as you read this. Breathe in as you slowly pull your sphincter muscle in and up into your body - like you're in an elevator and trying hard not to fart. Contract a bit higher... further still. Inhale more deeply as you pull up just a little more. Now release.
It's likely you'll feel a tingling cascade of energy. Perhaps your eyes even brightened a little.
"Jerking ourselves off in the privacy of our own bodies!" Dr. Gil Hedley exclaimed as he directed all 54 of us in the Integral Anatomy Dissection Lab to slowly open our anuses, contract and relax them in unison, by gently raising each contraction higher and higher as you just did. We're pleasuring ourselves from deep inside, while we move our molecules. This conscious contraction and release stimulates and massages our muscles, fascia, fat, nerves, erectile tissue, veins, and arteries in our pleasure rich pelvic region. In turn, stimulates our whole body; and it feels really good.
HAVE YOU TOUCHED YOUR MESENTERY TODAY?
Beyond our own ass, we have over 50 different sphincter muscles throughout our body, some voluntary, like the one you contracted a moment ago, others on autopilot. There's the sphincter of Oddi, controlling digestive juices from the liver, pancreas, and gall bladder, into the duodenum.
Your mesentery is made of two sheets of whisper thin, resilient tissue called peritoneum, sort of like a hammock, and connects parts of your small intestine to the back wall of the abdominal cavity. Touch your belly, and you touch your mesentery. Between each sheet of this supple fabric are blood vessels, lymph vessels, and nerves so your small intestine can move freely. Controlling blood flow are microscopic precapillary sphincters, cuffs of smooth muscle around each capillary acting as valves to regulate your blood flowing in and out of your stomach, intestines, uterus, aorta, even the artery to your right testicle.
There's a pupillary sphincter, which encircles the pupil of the iris - in your eye. You may have laid eyes on the sphincters in whales and dolphins that power their blowholes as they surface for air, releasing carbon dioxide, clearing and filling their lungs before diving down again. A sensational experience of awe and wonder - deeply resonating.
When you surface for air roughly 21,000 times a day, revel in the magnificence of your own breath.
Inhale fully, and fill your lungs with wonder. Exhale audibly with a resonating... awe.
(Excerpt from my new book, Sensual Intelligence: An Introduction to Your Body's Language, available everywhere books and audio books are sold 
Make the First Move
The mind leads and the body follows. More often than not though, it isn’t leading us into a pleasure den. So, what gives?
“Well, we always want to point the finger and go, ‘oh no, the bad stuff’s out there, over there, somewhere far from me.’ In fact, it’s inside all of us. The shadow is us. So the thing to do is look within and work on ourselves, ” says Deborah King, Ph.D., author of Truth Heals. Begin to recognize the feedback loop of sexuality and stress. Agitated thoughts – not external factors - produce high blood pressure, nervous stomach, persistent feelings of discomfort, lack of desire, sexual dysfunction, an inability to relax or sleep, frequent displays of displeasure and outrage. Basically, feeling like crap.
I’m Gumby Dammit!
When unobserved and unmanaged, negative levels, recurrent thought and emotional patterns prohibit a healthy body; inhibit sexual pleasure and an overall sense of well being. Thoughts are our energy that shape our temperament and color our emotional health.
Stop ‘knee jerk’ reacting and improve your response ability. By understanding and managing our (e)motional undercurrent, we then create a framework for a more thoughtful, effective response. To begin, let’s break down the word: E(motion) = movement, our emotions don’t just kick back inside that box you shoved them into, arms crossed, waiting for you to deal with them. Nor do they hang out under a shady tree inside your mind whistling Dixie while you stockpile even more to avoid.
Nope, for you intellectuals - the word 'emotion' is derived from the French word émouvoir, based on the Latin emovere, where e means 'out' and movere means 'move,’ Science buff? The brilliant pioneering scientist Dr. Candice Pert, Ph.D., author of Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind – Body Medicine has something to add…”what we experience as an emotion or a feeling is also a mechanism for activating a particular neuronal circuit – simultaneously throughout the brain and body – which generates a behavior involving the whole creature, (uh, you) with all the necessary physiological changes that behavior would require.” That’s a long sentence for an instantaneous action from first thought through embodiment. How about thinking of it this way? It takes one thought for a man to get an erection – say, ‘sexy bare thighs’, if that, and tada! Up springs a woody. It takes but one contrary thought, let’s say ‘Sh*t, I forgot to send that IRS check today,’ And down goes the crotcheroo.
As Dr. Christiane Northrup, author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom puts it: “Every thought has a biochemical reality in the body. Uplifting thoughts and emotions are associated with an entirely different mix of neuropeptides and hormones than are thoughts of panic, fear or anger. So entertain thoughts that produce the biochemistry of health and joy.”
