This book is based on Gina Ogden's groundbreaking survey	This book is based on inspiring stories of sexual health and pleasure
Purchase Book	Purchase Book

The Heart and Soul of Sex: Making the ISIS Connection

Dr. Ogden writes: "My goal in this book is to expand how we think and talk about sex-by offering information from thousands of women and suggesting how their experiences might broaden sexual meanings and language for all of us."

This book is also based on Gina Ogden's thirty years of clinical experience. It contains wise guidance to help you move toward more meaningful, satisfying sex even if you have a history of disappointment and abuse. Steps and strategies include guided imagery; intensive journaling; communication exercises; role-playing; values clarification; affirmations; guidelines for creating sexual ceremony; a guide to Tantra and the chakra system, and playful suggestions for increasing your sensuality, empathy, and spiritual sensitivity.

Excerpt from Chapter 4: The ISIS Wheel-Finding Your Path

The ISIS Wheel of Sexual Experience is a graphic way to think about the multidimensional nature of human sexual response. It is central to understanding the ISIS connection-the sexual meeting of our bodies, minds, hearts, and spirits. You can use this wheel to map your own sexual responses.

The paths of the ISIS Wheel connect all aspects of your sexuality with all aspects of your life-physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. As you can see from the diagram, these paths interconnect through the Center, which is wide open to them all.

The ISIS paths don't always follow the rigid boundaries shown in the diagram, however. As you travel them in the complex contexts of your own life, they're likely to twist and turn and wend, or detour or bump, or even come to dead ends. Sometimes following them can feel like slogging through a wilderness. Occasionally you get a straight shot to bliss.

Still, the paths of the ISIS Wheel do have defining characteristics. These are outlined below, and in the chapters that follow we'll explore each one in detail. Some of these paths may seem instantly familiar to you-most women recognize the physical and emotional paths of their sexual experience. But some women wonder what the mental or spiritual paths may have to do with sex. If this is true for you, please don't think there's something wrong with you. The point of diagramming the ISIS Wheel is to make all of the paths equally visible, whether or not they seem to be primary to your sexual experience right now.

The physical path: A full range of sensory experience-smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing. Movement and stillness. Comfort and safety. Arousal, orgasm, and other physical pleasures. The physical ISIS experience is characterized by heightened senses-brighter colors; increased sensitivity to touch, taste, smell and hearing; exquisite awareness of how all parts of your body connect.

The emotional path: A full range of feelings-love, passion, longing, anger, and fear. Whatever touches your heart. Empathy-the ability to feel what others feel. Compassion-the Dalai Lama describes this as the ability to love yourself and others no matter how conflicted your feelings may be. Trust-the ability to let go of control. The emotional ISIS experience is characterized by open-heartedness and heightened feelings.

The mental path: Beliefs and messages about both sexuality and spirituality. Imagination, intuition, memory, and dreams. Waking dreams and fantasies. Wishes, intentions, anticipations, and expectations. The mental ISIS experience is characterized by an open mind, increased understanding, expanded beliefs, and letting go of judgments about what sex should be like.

The spiritual path: A deep sense of connection with yourself, your partner, and/or a "higher power." This can include inner visions, communication with divine forces, experiencing yourself as part of all that is sacred. The spiritual ISIS experience is characterized by ecstasy, increased energy, lasting satisfaction, and transcendence.

In the Center
As you near the very center of the ISIS Wheel you enter a kind of high-definition Oz where everything seems vibrantly colored. "A place neither of us has ever seen before," writes a forty-four-year-old massage therapist from Scottsdale, Arizona. You may find as she does that it's also a place of mystery and paradox where opposites merge in an uncanny way: "We feel as if we leave our bodies in mind and spirit but feel intense physical pleasure and ecstasy."

Like all levels of the ISIS Wheel, the experience of the Center differs from person to person and time to time. It's yours to define. You may experience opposites, like the woman above. You may feel a sense of oneness and integration, shape shifting, and timelessness. You may experience extraordinary light-and lightness of being. You may find yourself communing profoundly with your partner, and with yourself. A forty-one-year-old survivor of sexual abuse describes it this way:

An inner explosion of energy.culminating in a sort of white light explosion in my head, that was sublime....What "it" is, I don't know. But it leaves me feeling a sort of awe mixed with tenderness for all of humanity. Like I get it all-why we're here-why I'm here. It all makes sense. I see my purpose. I feel it. I know it. I "grok" it. And I am deeply satisfied, content and renewed. Loved. In Love.

Each journey to the Center can encompass your whole life. There's no past and no future here, only a greatly expanded now. One woman calls her journey to the Center a "divine right." Truly there is divinity here. I've often thought it's no wonder so many of us cry out "Oh God!" at the moment of sexual ecstasy. It's a place of clarity and vision, of vastness, of unconditional love.

Excerpt from Chapter 10:Is It Dysfunction or Is It Cosmic Sex? Mapping Yourself from Performance to ISIS

The performance model is based on intercourse and physical orgasm. Intercourse is a natural act, as they say. You may be one of the many women who love it-the closeness, the sensations of enveloping your lover, the idea that you can co-create new life. If this is your story, you also have the satisfaction of knowing you're in the sexual mainstream. The problem comes when your partner's not a man or if intercourse isn't your thing. Or when a goal of orgasm becomes an on-demand performance that inhibits other kinds of sexual expression. Then sex becomes institutionalized into what I call the "cultural missionary position," male standards on top-a big problem for many women.

My ISIS research shows that if you're in a strictly performance-based relationship, you're likely to experience a high degree of sexual constraint, fragmentation, and numbness. For instance, of the ISIS survey respondents who said spirituality is not necessary for sexual satisfaction, more than half reported having these emotional blocks.

In a performance relationship you're also likely to take some pleasure in controlling your partner-perhaps to compensate for feeling controlled yourself. Even so, strictly performance-model sex may work for you if you happen to be Jenny One-Note. But some ISIS women say they're frankly bored by intercourse-either because they don't feel very much on vaginal stimulation or because they find their partners to be emotionally closed, relationally clueless, or so locked into repetition that meaningful contact is out of the question. A 34-year-old paramedic from Independence, Kansas (I'm not making this up) writes of breaking away from ten years in a performance marriage: "I am finally free...to discover who I am and what I believe and what gives me pleasure."

The ISIS connection is much more complex. As you've seen in earlier chapters, it opens us to a multidimensional world of body, mind, heart, and spirit. This ISIS world corresponds with the latest brain research, which shows that we're hardwired for such sexual complexity (I'll say much more about this in chapter 11). It also corresponds with the chakra energies and with time-honored Eastern spiritual traditions including Tantra, where sex and spirit are not separated from each other (more on these in chapters12 and 13).

My research shows that if you're in an ISIS relationship, chances are you have a high degree of honesty and caring (true for some 80 percent of the women who answered the survey). Also a high degree of connection with yourself, your partners, and the divine (true for almost 70 percent of the ISIS women). If you have a history of sexual disappointment or abuse, your ISIS journey may help you restore your sense of self and pleasure-there are no numbers available on this, but scores of ISIS letters document this idea.

Clearly, performance and ISIS are two very different ways of looking at sexual experience. Does either of them feel like you? Perhaps you possess some characteristics of both. Below is an assessment chart to help you clarify where you are on your sexual path, and where you want to go. Other methods of assessment will follow. This one is especially for people who like to see their options lined up in rows.

It's important to understand that these columns represent the ends of a vast continuum. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle. And everyone's experiences are unique, so some of us fall off the edges of both columns. Still, it's interesting to see how the same experience can have different interpretations depending on which column you use to judge it.

Excerpt from Chapter 18: Desiderata: Your Rights to Intimacy and Pleasure

It's important for you to know what your sexual rights are-no matter what your age or sexual orientation or physical ability. Some of us seem to know our rights instinctively and are able to set effective boundaries and ask for what we want. But many of us have never thought about our rights to intimacy and pleasure-or even imagined that we had such rights. When we're unaware, we're extra vulnerable to being taken advantage of by others, whether they intend to take advantage of us or not.

I originally devised the bill of rights below with Beverly Whipple when we were writing Safe Encounters, the first book to guide women how to say yes to pleasure and no to unsafe sex. Here, in the context of ISIS, I want to link it with your longings for heart and soul connection as well as for physical safety. The word "desiderata" means the things you desire.

My Rights to Intimacy and Pleasure

1. I have a right to my own body and all of its sensations, including pleasure and pain.

2. I have a right to think my own thoughts, whatever they may be.

3. I have a right to feel the full range of my emotions-excitement, joy, and anger, sorrow and depression, love and fear-whether or not my feeling them is acceptable to others.

4. I have a right to acknowledge my memories, whether they are memories of delight or abuse, and to base present relationship decisions on them.

5. I have a right to be-or not to be-a sexual person at all ages and stages of my life, and a right to choose how I define what I mean by sexuality.

6. I have a right to expect that my partner respect my body, thoughts, feelings, and general well-being, and a right to insist on respect, if necessary.

7. I have a right to ask for what I want.

8. I have a right to say no to any sexual encounter that feels unsatisfying or threatening-physically, emotionally, spiritually, or sexually.

9. I have a right to say yes to pleasure that is physically, emotionally, spiritually, and sexually safe.

10. I have a right to feel good about saying both yes and no.

I've often used this list with clients, college students, health professionals, and other groups. It's an effective and moving way to start discussions about what women really want-and don't want. I especially love bringing it into small groups, where women can read these rights around a circle. Each woman reads one, then passes the page on to the woman next to her. When there are more than ten women in the group, we keep passing the page until each woman has had a chance to declare at least one right. (When there are fewer than ten women, we pass the page around until all the rights are declared.)

It's important for us not only to know our rights but to say them out loud. Too many of us have never spoken up. When we do speak up in safety, we invariably feel validated. I can't tell you how many times I've heard: "That statement I just read-it must've been written just for me."

Click here for information about Dr. Ogden's other book, Women Who Love Sex