As an acupuncturist and a doctor of Oriental Medicine, I treat many patients looking for more sexual responsiveness, both male and female. This complaint even comes from young people who report feeling blocked, and is usually accompanied by other physical disorders as well.

I am happy to report that this sexual burn-out is reversible. As we all know by now, this condition is the accumulated short circuiting of both our mind and body. So we need to address the interface between our physical, mental, and emotional energies, and learn how the health of each is dependent on the other physiologically. Once we re-stimulate the endorphins, the natural high hormones, they plug into the receptor sites in every cell of the body and facilitate the optimum functioning of all systems--because the body functions best when the body/mind is overall HAPPY. The best example of this is how we get ill when we are traumatized

What do we seek to achieve?
1) A relaxed balance that can foster an energized state of arousal.
2) The ability of the body to let go and achieve one or multiple orgasms.
3) Reinvigorating our bodies to feel strong, lithe, and attractive to the opposite sex. This usually involves a tuning up and balancing of the internal systems, and a cleaning out of the channels.

So why is it that we don't bring more JOY to the bedroom, or even achieve enough joy from being in it? Are there reasons we don't know about? Although we've benefited from the sexual revolution, we still have inherited the physical and mental programming of our parents. Now with the stress of cities and the cyber world, we add a new layer to it. Yet it is possible to heal genetic, ancestral, emotional trauma---the psychic pain that we have inherited from generations of war and domination, famines, witch hunts, repression, and stultifying Victorian social conventions.

For instance, they say that anyone from northern Europe is either descended from a woman burned at the stake or from someone who did the burning! Several German towns had no women left. Or, we're descended from the other passive females who stayed home---who were not herbalists, midwives, or movers and shakers in any way. So whether it is potato famines or pogroms, we still carry the emotional scars of our forefathers-- in the DNA of our mitochondria. The good news is that this DNA, in contrast to the DNA in the nuclei, is accessible and re-programmable. This fact represents a huge breakthrough in our understanding of the alterability of our genetic make-up. (Luckily to our advantage, we also carry the DNA from an earlier era when our ancestors weren't so uptight and built open cities, not fortresses--- when women were free spirited, and when sharing, not domination, was the order of the day. I would like to believe that a revival of that paradigm will return after this endless warrior culture self destructs!) So let's delve deep and find that in us!

Back to sex: A sexual body is a happy body. Trigger point combinations have been discovered for opening up frozen chakras--the energy vortexes down the middle --stimulating the bio-electrical frequencies that can "teach" traumatized cells how to unlearn such dysfunctional behavior as fear, demoralization, inflammation, toxicity, and general systems blockage. The whole aging process!

How can we re-ignite our pleasure centers in the brain, without resorting to stimulants that later leave us lower (more hung over) than before? Ancient and modern Chinese formulas exist to stimulate and balance the sexual response because this natural activity was considered therapeutic at any age. Healthy sex was the signature of a healthy body. But what if we are too tired out?

Our body's energy system is like the engine of a car. How old was I before I realized that a car has no heater? When we turn the heater, we are really just opening the vents from the hot engine. Likewise, certain techniques can open up our internal vents. We have enough energy in one single atom such that if it were split we would have an atom bomb. But instead, most of this burning energy is blocked off and unavailable to us. Why?? Because most of it goes into our emotional soap opera that is playing constantly. I am the heroine of my novel "the story of my life" with all the chapters that provide the excuses for what I am today. This psychic-soap is lodged in the solar plexus, blocking all the meridians and general flow - a pressure cooker that is a burden instead of a transformer. It cuts the body in half so the top is too hot (headaches, heartburn, etc,) and the bottom is too cold (cold feet, frigidity, impotence, low back pain).

The solar plexus - with all its butterflies in the stomach - is the center of our emotional trauma time capsule that we revere and revisit constantly, especially for women. We are trained to be a long-suffering Jewish mother or Our Lady of the seven sorrows. After a few decades of this we can really be armored and shut down. Once we recognize that this has co-opted our energy flow, there are techniques to cash in our emotional chips and reap the earnings from all those years of pain. We can channel that negative energy until it is neutralized and becomes positive POWER, turning PAIN into PLEASURE. Just watch the channels open and our responsiveness start to blossom!

I will elaborate on this in future articles but for now start to play with your breath. Our language tells us that respiration means re-spiriting - filling our cells with spirit. For, although we seem to be material---muscles and bones, actually we are mostly pure energy. Our atoms are airy, bubbly balloons made up of 98% empty space, filled with the very same bio-electric energy that blasts us from the sun and bathes the whole universe. That means that physically we are really a luminous egg or field of energy. By paying attention to our breath, we can replace our worry thoughts (that waste our precious adrenalin) with positive thoughts which produce the happy chemicals serotonin and dopamine.

Experiment to see how quickly you can change your state while paying attention to your breath. From this and a larger customized program of exercise and other features, the resulting sexual sensations and sustainability are a natural outflow - the body in its natural state. These are the beginning steps to regaining the body's birthright: Feeling naturally GOOD! And the first step toward greater sexual satisfaction.

Although we can only graze the topic in a few paragraphs, I hope this gives food for thought and for action. To be continued