A Soft Cock Sex / Beyond Erections reader named Francois (quoted with permission) wrote this to me yesterday:

I have long been aware that my body has drastically altered over the last year or two. To the point that I can say that I’m experiencing a ‘crossing of a Body threshold’ akin to that of teenagers … requiring a complete revision of the first hand experience, and the knowledge that there is no going back to the ease of physical ability I had before.

What he put into a nutshell is the way primal body changes, particularly to our sexual being, simply pull the rug out of under us. This calls on us, as he says, to completely revise what is possible.

Letting the body lead

And for me it links to an unlikely book I read this week. It’s a 50 year old classic called The Inner Game of Tennis. The author is a tennis pro who realizes that correcting people’s footwork and strokeplay is not as effective as enabling their bodies to learn for themselves, free of judgement and pressure.

Where it becomes relevant to adapting sexually to body changes, is that he talks about the problem of being “in a groove” with an ineffective aspect of our game. He describes the terrible contortions people go through to force their bodies to perform according to a Tennis Pro Bible. They are trying shift their groove to achieve the best way to play the shot. He points our attention to the way children learn:

A child doesn’t dig his way out of his old grooves; he simply starts new ones… A child doesn’t have to break the habit of crawling, because it doesn’t think it has a habit. It simply leaves crawling as it finds walking an easier way to get around.

Most of our sexual patterns are set in our teens

So this begins to ring bells for me. I learned how to be sexual in my early teens, prompted by a penis that kept popping up and demanding attention. So it is not surprising that over the next 50 years I developed quite a strong erection-centred sexual groove.

But, continues our tennis pro Tim Gallwey, “fighting the fantasy of old habits is what causes the conscientious tennis player to strain and tighten unnecessarily… there is no need to fight old habits. Start new ones.”

Now that really had me prick up my attention. How many times has my sexual pleasure been haunted and blocked by “the fantasy of old habits”? How many times did I wonder if I was hard enough instead of feeling the sensual pleasure of lovemaking? How many times did I “strain and tighten unnecessarily” everywhere except where I wanted to tighten up?

I have definitely spent most of the last five years fighting to get my old erections back. I have even been blessed with some modest successes.

But the bigger shifts have come when as Gallwey recommended for tennis, I simply allowed my body to take the lead and enjoy itself in its new groove. The really hard part was to achieve the following part of Galwey’s advice:

Starting a new pattern is easy when done with childlike disregard for imagined difficulties.

Discovering new grooves

Francois, quoted above, shared a personal example that really resonates with me:

I’ve had to adapt. Then finding the ‘gold’ that it has opened the way to. Btw, I’ve started thinking that maybe it’s more realistic to think of myself equipped with a clitoris :-)

Who else has experienced this? A big milestone for me was the day my wife and I were making love and my erection faded, and then we simply started diddling our two “clits” together. Once my judgmental mind was set aside I was able to feel the sheer delight of loving – and hot! – sexual connection.

I believe we can adapt sexually to body changes. It seems to help when we are able to let our bodies take the lead.