Sex and Yoga

Sex and Yoga

I wanted to start this article with one of my favorite lines from the movie, “Enlighten Up”   The main character Nick goes to California to practice yoga with former wrestler Dallas Diamond Paige whose philosophy about yoga is summed up by the statement, “You say Namaste, I say more T and A”.  So much of what we men see in society today bombards us with images of overt and superficial sexuality.  In this intense environment, it becomes difficult to overcome that appeal to our base male desire instead of developing a deeper relationship with a lover that can lead us to greater sense of peace, calm and yes, sexual satisfaction. 

One of the benefits that I find in my practice is the concept of being nonjudgmental.  Being able to observe and acknowledge what exists without judging it.  So much of what society feeds the male mind is exactly the opposite.  The clothes are flashy and revealing, the bras push up, the magazines air brush and so on and so on.  All of this done in the name of providing men with what is judged to be the perfect image of sexuality. 

Now, a man going to yoga class to counteract this can seem a little confusing these days.  Society’s overt marketing of sexuality is steadily making its way into the world of yoga.  The most popular video on elephantjournal.com is the Playboy video of a very attractive all nude women performing yoga.  I will admit I watched the whole video but only for the purpose of research for this article.  Believe what you want. 

We also recently had the humorous incident with Lulemon and the see-through yoga pants.  Quite a lot of comments were generated with the Toesox adds in Yoga Journal featuring nude photos of Kathryn Buding wearing  nothing but Toesox while performing some very impressive yoga poses.  Of course the photos of Kathryn are at camera angle that don’t reveal too much but the viewer is aware that she is nude.  The photographer of those ads is Jasper Johal who does take fully nude photos of women in pilates and yoga poses that are a lot more revealing than the Toesox ads.  And of course, there are some women in yoga class that are very revealing in what they wear.  Yoga women are definitely not wearing baggy sweatpants and tee-shirts to class.

So as I said, this bombardment of imagery can be confusing to the male mind.  For me, the practice of being nonjudgmental has helped calm my mind.  So much about sex in today’s society is about judging.  We learn to place value and make judgments on certain physical aspects of a woman’s body. 

The practice of yoga is one in which we turn our minds inward and focus on ourselves within our yoga mat.  With this inward focus, our practice teaches us that thoughts will come and when they do, we acknowledge that they exist but we resist the urge to pass judgment.  We learn to accept and love ourselves for who we are and all that we are instead of expecting perfection. 

As we begin to experience freedom from the expectation of perfection in the performance of our poses.  We can then appreciate how the pose makes us feel instead of how it looks to others.  Once we have mastered this in our yoga practice, we can then start to translate this deeper appreciation of ourselves and other people to different parts of our lives.   Our new-found appreciation helps us to stop judging and stop finding value in women for only how they look.  If we can continue this practice it leads to a calmer mind which makes it easier to master self-control and thus we cannot be easily manipulated by society’s marketing of sex.

When our minds experience freedom from manipulation we become more in tuned to a deeper value in ourselves and a deeper value in what a women has to offer us in a relationship.  This is our path to achieving a deeper satisfaction within ourselves and with our partners.