You and your partner have the opportunity to take advantage of this program, to make sex a wellspring of your relationship -- seize it! You can create a core of sexual vitality that sustains your connection. When you become expert lovers -- sexual artists, really -- sex will energize you, your partnership, and your enjoyment of life.

The Long Erotic Weekend has four principle parts -- one part for each day. We devote Day One to Tuning Into Your Sexual Energy. First, we will methodically challenge your old beliefs about sex, and present you with a fresh perspective on the relation of love to sex. We will introduce important ideas about sexual energy from non-Western traditions, and explore the idea of masculine and feminine polarity in depth. This polarity is the key to building sexual charge.

Perhaps even more useful will be the discussion of the Seven Dimensions, our original formulation of the energy structure of sexual relationships. We will ask you to evaluate yourselves for strength in each dimension, and help you identify specific actions that will help strengthen and enliven your sexual partnership. In other words, you’ll learn how to tune into your lover’s sexual energy on all channels as well as how to tap into all of your own. The experiential exercises we give you throughout the day will help you ground all of this in your body.

Day Two will be devoted to Pleasuring Her, followed by Day Three, Pleasuring Him. These two days are the heart of the program, where you experience the tremendous, transforming power of giving and receiving sexual pleasure. We will, of course provide you with a useful, up-to-date understanding of the essentials of human sexuality. You need to know about anatomical, physiological, and medical factors that affect sexuality, and learn some specific erotic techniques. Then, armed with this information, you’ll plunge into exciting and challenging structured assignments to help you explore the new ideas from Day One. Old habits are persistent, and at first “doing your homework” may feel awkward, but it’s only by doing that we develop new and useful skills. (And once you get over your initial shyness, you and your partner will enjoy the assignments. We promise.)

Day Four is the culmination of your Long Erotic Weekend: Putting It All Together -- and Making It Last. We will show you how to create a practical plan of action to extend the delightful learning and discovery of the previous three days into the rest of your life together. We believe that couples can, and should, make their sexual relationship an ongoing mutual project. By the time your weekend is over, you will have created a new “division” of your mutual “company.” Its mission will be to produce an ongoing stream of positive sexual energy that will flow to your “bottom line!” Then in your final pleasuring assignment, you will bring everything you have learned in the first three days together into a full, joyous multidimensional experience. You will celebrate the end of your weekend, and the beginning of a lifetime of the sexual ecstasy you’ve always dreamed about.

Along the way, there will undoubtedly be obstacles. Sex is powerful stuff, and changing anything about it has a way of bringing us up against our deepest, most difficult issues. At the same time, though, sex offers us a powerful way of working with and through these issues, and of becoming happier and freer people in the process. We have come to actually welcome difficulties and crises in our workshops, because they show exactly where change needs to take place. Do not despair if you encounter resistance in either of you along the way.

Touch Hands

We developed this exercise for our couples workshops to teach a type of non-verbal communication that is related to sexual exchange in interesting ways, to continue familiarizing participants with the feeling of energy flow in the body, and to energize the group after sitting for a time listening to lectures. We often prescribe it for couples who get trapped in verbal debates which prevent their getting as close as they’d like to. In the workshops, we have people do this exercise with several people of the opposite sex, and this usually gives couples useful insight into their interaction with one another.

The basic stance and movement are derived from the two-person form of the Chinese martial art Tai Chi, which is a game or competition known as Push Hands. Briefly, the idea in Push Hands is for each partner to serve the other’s growth and skill by trying to “uproot” him; that is, to force him to move his feet from their original stance. Skill in Push Hands consists of the ability to remain rooted to the earth through one’s feet while remaining relaxed and flexible enough in the upper body to absorb, evade, transform, and reflect back the energy coming from one’s partner, and to sense his vulnerability to being uprooted. It is not about size and strength at all.

In Touch Hands, we don’t try to uproot our partners, but we do send our energy, and receive theirs as well. We stay rooted through our feet and legs, but loose and sensitive in our upper body to respond easily to their intentions and to communicate ours clearly.

We use the most stable Tai Chi stance (it’s similar to an archer’s posture, so it’s called the bow stance) to connect ourselves to the earth, a very light but sensitive connection of the hands to our partner, and a basic rhythm of movement shifting weight from the back foot to the front foot. This forms a kind of bass line, drumbeat, or pulse upon which the improvised movements of the arms and upper body play (see illustration).

1. First learn the stance and movement by yourself. Stand with your left foot forward, pointed straight ahead, and your right foot back and pointed out to the right about 45 degrees. If you’re of average height (let’s say 5’6” or so), there will be about two feet (that is, 24 inches!) from the tip of the left big toe to the back of the right heel, and if you draw a line through your left foot the long way, it won’t come close to touching the right foot: it should miss the right heel by a good six inches, so that your feet are separated not only front to back but also sideways to give you the best stability. (This is not a ballerina pose with one foot directly behind the other). Bend your knees a little bit, let your spine be long, and your low back relaxed.

2. Now begin to shift your weight back and forth, from the left to the right foot and back. Do this by bending and straightening your knees and hips alternately. Your feet remain completely flat on the floor (so your ankles will need to bend and straighten too), your spine remains long and vertical, and your entire body above your legs (that is, your pelvis, abdomen, chest, and head) glides effortlessly forward and back. When you go forward onto your left foot, you straighten the right hip and knee to push you forward, while you bend your left hip and knee to accept the weight. When you go back on your right foot, the bent left hip and knee straighten a bit to push you back, and your right knee and hip bend to accept the weight. Breathe easily, take your time, and spend a few moments getting the feel of this basic, back and forth rhythmic movement.

3. Then stand in the same stance facing your partner, so that your left feet are parallel, a few inches apart, with each one’s toe even with the other’s heel. Place the backs of your hands touching each other, so lightly that if there were butterflies between them they wouldn’t be crushed, but firmly enough that they couldn’t escape.

Begin to glide back and forth with one another, adjusting to one another’s rhythm until you find a tempo that works for both of you, all the while maintaining the same degree of light pressure between the backs of your hands. You’re not pushing with your hands, but with your feet on the ground. Think that you’re moving from your center (the center of energy in martial arts is the lower abdomen, which is also the body’s center of gravity).

4. After you have done this long enough to feel that it’s easy and natural, change your hands so that your fingertips are touching with the same lightness as before with the backs of your hands. (You may want to reverse your legs now and again during this exercise if they get tired with the same foot forward all the time.) Start gliding back and forth again, and this time one of you (let’s say the woman) should begin to move her hands around. This is a freestyle movement, and can be anything that strikes her fancy—hands up or down, one hand forward and one back, large or small movements.

The idea is to make it interesting and fun for the two of you, maybe a little challenging, but not with the idea of defeating him in any way. His job is to follow you, maintaining the same light contact between the fingertips, not crushing the butterflies but not letting them escape. Find out where you can go with your hands without disturbing the basic rhythm of the pulse, the steady back-and-forth weight shifting. You can and should vary the speed of the movements of your hands and arms, have them do different things from one another, use turning movements of your trunk, anything you can think of, so long as your feet stay on the ground and you continue the basic back and forth rhythm (though it’s okay to change the tempo of the basic movement).

Try doing this with your eyes closed, and notice any difference in the quality of the experience compared with having the eyes open. (Many of our students are surprised to find that it becomes easier and more enjoyable with their eyes closed.) 5. Then reverse roles (and reverse feet if you want). The man leads the movement, establishing the tempo of the basic gliding back and forth (and changing it when he wants), and moving his hands about in interesting ways, while the woman follows, trying to maintain the same light contact of the fingertips the whole time. Try it with your eyes open and with your eyes closed. After a minute or two, pause and rest.

6. Return to the same stance and basic rhythmic gliding with fingers touching. This time, you’re to do the hand and arm movements with no leader, or more precisely, you’ll see what it’s like to lead and follow simultaneously. This is actually a very subtle thing, and requires a great deal of presence and sensitivity to the energy of the moment. You must be receptive enough to feel the very slight change of pressure and intention in your partner’s hands and body, yet creative enough that some movement will happen that is varied and interesting to both of you. You need to be both active and passive at the same time, yet neither dominant nor submissive. (Perhaps it is now a little clearer how this relates to the sexual connection.) Be sure to try it with the eyes both open and closed.

7. When you’ve explored this to your satisfaction, let it go, and come to stillness. Thank your partner, perhaps with a bow and a Namaste, and spend a minute talking with each other about what you noticed with this exercise, particularly as it relates to acting versus sensing, controlling versus remaining passive, sending versus receiving energy.