Celebrate love on Valentines Day by loving yourself! Being single on Valentine’s Day is no reason to miss out on sensuality and love! Humans are sexual beings and pleasure is our birthright.
Pleasuring your body is the ultimate act of self love. Indulge yourself and treat yourself to something special. Set aside some time to pamper yourself in a ceremony of self loving. Construct a sensual atmosphere. What gets you in the mood? What music do you choose? What scents will you use? What delightfully indulgent and wicked senses will you explore? Perhaps some dark chocolate or a ripe, juicy mango? A warm bath by candlelight?
Self pleasure enhances your neural pathways to improve your self esteem and confidence. Self pleasuring can teach you more about your body, how to have better orgasms or how to delay orgasms. Regular ejaculation for men helps keep the prostate gland healthy. Masturbation can help women with pre-menstrual symptoms and allow them to discover how to ejaculate, how to have multiple orgasms and where their ‘hot spots’ are located. Self pleasuring floods your body with endorphins, helps with depression, relieves headaches and unleashes your erotic potential!
Explore new places, positions and new ways to touch yourself. Try a toy or new lube amd focus more on the feelings than the orgasm. Don’t worry if you don’t orgasm; see this as an exercise in pleasure.
For those who have shut themselves off to pleasure or love it’s important to open up your mind and your body to sensuality, passion and creativity again. Try using self pleasure to appreciate and honour your own uniqueness, beauty and sexual gifts. Revel in the creative pleasure of life! This ecstasy can help clean away mental blocks that might contain negative beliefs about yourself.
Sexual pleasure has such potential for healing. Think of a positive statement you can repeat to yourself when your pleasuring draws to a conclusion. It could be gratitude for your physical body, letting go of shame or guilt, embracing compassion and forgiveness, or allowing yourself to let go of the past and move forward. Perhaps simply acknowledging your a sexual being with needs and desires is a good start.
Working with your sexuality can be a powerful path to self-improvement because you tune in to the deepest and most primal part of your pleasure-seeking unconscious. Freud recognised this as our strongest motivating force, noting it (subconsciously) governs many of our day-to-day actions. But Freud wasn’t the first to discover the pleasure principle. Tantric texts also discuss this sexual energy and emphasise its incredible healing capacity.
Regardless of your relationship status, you always have the capacity to give yourself pleasure. And how you treat yourself, your body and your sexuality inevitably influences your relationships.
Try writing yourself a love letter. Include five things you truly love about yourself, things you have to offer in a potential relationship and what you’re looking to invite into your life from this Valentine’s Day.
Happy pleasuring!
Cat O’Dowd: Sex Therapist, Relationship Counsellor, Expressive Arts Therapist
www.creativesexpression.com
