Sex and Yoga

Q. Becca asks ; What do you think about sex and yoga?

A. Masso answers; Yoga increases sensitivity, enhances sexual pleasure and performance by priming mind and body while  it  may make possible to somewhat better manage externally manufactured/intensified desires and hyped sexual urges. Additionally, sexual yoga Tantra, is a fusion of sorts and almost a different type of practice de-linked from mainstream yoga practices. 
I have utilized and recommended yoga to 'sexual dependency groups' as a greneral 'sexual self management tool', with hi positive results experience reported  by members who had difficulty managing their sexual desires.

Meaningful sex can enhance life's quality while sexual desires accelerated by external stimulants can diminish both quality and intensity through time. Since sexual desire is a lifelong effect, we need to have long range managing plans and avoid short term, unsustainable spikes.

LTR.vs STR.

Q. Norma asks; Finally I made a decision to seek LTR only. I am setting up meetings and interview-like dates to find my match. Emotions out, it is not much fun and spontaneous.  Do you have any advice?

A. Masso answers; Norma , you cant have LTR by interviewing. 5 minutes speed dating is for people who want to get laid and over it.
LTR is complex natural process, evolves from one stage to another and can even go further into the unknown..

That said, it is great to start with LTR minded people to begin with, but then no one will admit it unless they are pushed to that corner via previous STR experiences that have failed and feel secure only if there was a commitment. How can you trust someone on LTR when they failed STR?

There is no known and set criteria for STR vs. LTR. If a person sustains desirability interacting with you they will be desirable in all stages.

However, they already may have solid plans, to go to Africa. Iraq and do missions, peace corps, or Drs without border thing, etc...
Maturity and experience plays a role in LTR , that you know you must compromise and never act upon a momentary emotional prompts, knowing that emotions will change next minute and you ll be sorry..!
You must also always be fair minded and never take more than you give vesuvius, so never end up with a huge deficit or gain to constantly carry around. As in yoga balance is the answer.
Honesty is number one though, since you both will loose valuable time if you play games and be dishonest.
Talking about time value.. get out of it soon as you find out it wont work or it is unbalanced and going that way. You will find out time is the most valuable asset as well as lengthy inappropriate relationships will jeopardize your future relationships and can do irreversible damages.

A. Becca answers; Norma .. there are no LTRs at our time. If our parents stayed in it forever and ever , it was out of co dependences and needs. Each relationship we get into is a risk we take hoping that outcome is what we dreamed it up to be. Every body is a potential one way or another. Do your best but be prepared for anything.

Q. deNise Asks; Merits of Sexual Brahmacharaya vs. Tantra.

A. Masso answers; deNise , I hesitate to give any hints about directions on this matter. My role is to introduce and reflect both, with as much as detail  without biasing the opposing views. Please let me know what your own views on Brahmacharaya and Tantra are.

Ancient Hindu Brahmacharaya philosophy has its own negatives as well as Tantra Yoga. Brahmacharaya denies sexual acts as well as thoughts about sexual acts as demonic. On the opposing view, some believe that there are positive links between development of life's energy, creativity, perception of forms of aesthetics and pure sexual desires plus the naturally expected procreation. Depriving mind and body from natural sexual desires may prevent one from cultivating and developing creativity, sense of beauty and health.
Each person is in a certain stages of growth in their lives and need different applications. If any path needs to be  recommended, then  it is best to  match that path with the person's sexual aspects of growth level. Otherwise it will be a negative application and may stunt growth. 

So far, as the present subjective parenting/mentoring of human development system is set up, we all destined to make our own share of costly mistakes to grow and understand objectively.
Yoga , undeniably makes one aware of his/her mind/body senses and methods to deeply connect to others, thus improves and enhances sexual sensuality.

But Brahmacharaya  (mind /body sexual avoidance), rewards one who chooses to practice celibacy to gain plenty of bliss. 

Bliss in Yoga is the equity, the cosmic smile, the ultimate reward for going the most difficult of paths.
Some believe that Karmic yoga path can deliver the same bliss as Brahmacharaya does, even if plenty of sexual activities are involved. But the sexuality practiced with Karma Yoga must also be a 'Karmic sexuality'. Meaning, honesty, balance of action/reaction and adherance to agreed principles in mind and body is essential. This path, presently with all the external factors involved,  is a tight rope act and failures may have universal and drastic consequences in a person's life.

We all have seen what a failed or erroneous love can do to a person's body and mind.

How can we betray principles of love and expect love to be kind to us ? Love has survived from begining of time by adhering to strict universal principles. Aphroditis had the key to Diana's most feared weapons collection by permission of Zeus. Maybe Zeus assumed life will not endure  without existance of love so gave permission to Aphroditis to use the most devastating weapons to protect it.

In 'Beauty and Beast', beast certainly is a product of careless treatment of love and reverts into his human form by finding love again.

 In reality, the principles of sexuality is not all that uniform. Since sexual ethics varies amongst cultures and individuals, we may not know a complete set of rules for Karmic sexuality between two or more different cultures. It would be interesting to investigate Karmic sexuality in fast mixing US culture today.

What is acceptable, what is conceived to be not. 
Nevertheless, we all have seen the undeniable glow of Karmic love in some faces, frames and reflections. I guess then, 'love is the answer'.  masso 

A. Masso; Here is an interesting article sent by Anna. I have no idea about its origins but seems interesting.

Adventures of Sperm and Ovum.

Lets remind the big guy of the central verity of paternity — that it’s a lot more fun to become a father than to be one. “I won’t lie to you,” said the great Homer Simpson. “Fatherhood isn’t easy like motherhood.” Yet in our insistence that men are more than elaborately engineered gamete vectors, we neglect the marvels of their elaborately engineered gametes. As the scientists who study male germ cells will readily attest, sperm are some of the most extraordinary cells of the body, a triumph of efficient packaging, sleek design and superspecialization. Human sperm are extremely compact, and they’ve been stripped of a normal cell’s protein-making machinery; but when cast into the forbidding environment of the female reproductive tract, they will learn on the job and change their search strategies and swim strokes as needed.

Sperm are also fast and as cute as tadpoles. They have chubby teardrop heads and stylish, tapering tails, and they glide, slither, bumble and do figure-eights. So while a father may not be entitled to take the same pride in his sperm as he does in his kids, it’s fair to celebrate the single-minded cellular commas that helped give those children their start.

Sperm are pretty much the tiniest cells in the human body. The head of a mature, semen-ready sperm cell spans about 5 microns, or two-thousandths of an inch, less than half the width of a white blood cell or a skin cell. And a sperm cell is absurdly dwarfed by its female counterpart, the egg, which, fittingly or not, is among the biggest cells in the body. At 30 times the width of a sperm, the egg is massive enough to be seen with the naked eye.

But men have the overwhelming quantitative edge in the gamete games. Whereas current evidence suggests that a human female is born with all the eggs she will have, and that only about 500 of her natal stock of one million will ever ripen and have a shot at fertilization, a male from puberty onward is pretty much a nonstop sperm bakery. Each testicle generates more than 4 million new sperm per hour, for a lifetime total of maybe 12 trillion sperm per man (although the numbers vary with the day and generally slope downward with age).

The average ejaculation consists mostly of a teaspoon’s worth of nonspermic seminal fluid, a viscous mix of sugars, citric acid and other ingredients designed to pamper and power the sperm cells and prepare them for difficult times ahead; the sperm proper account for only about 1 percent of the semen mass. Yet in that 1 percent may be found 150 million sperm, 150 million human aspirants yearning to meet their mammoth other halves.

To which one can crack, dream on. Not only are there far too few eggs to go around, but also the majority of sperm couldn’t fertilize an ovum if it were plunked down in front of them. “Only a perfectly normal sperm can penetrate an egg,” said Dr. Harry Fisch, a urologist at Columbia University Medical Center, “and the majority of sperm are abnormally shaped.” Some may have pinheads, others have two heads, some lack tails, a third don’t move at all. As a rule, Dr. Fisch said, a man is lucky if 15 percent of his sperm are serviceable. “One guy I saw had 22 percent,” he said, “but that’s rare.”

Creating sperm is a complex, multistep operation in which immature cells spend one or two months wending through a labyrinth of tubules coiled in the testes, at each stage losing a bit more of the blobby contours and yolky contents of standard cells and assuming the streamlined profile of sperm cells. The operation is a delicate one that must be performed at temperatures some 2 degrees below that of the body, which is why the testicles hang outside the body, where breezes can keep them cool; why a man hoping to become a father is advised to skip the hot baths and saunas; and why a bout of high fever can disrupt fertility for months.

The model sperm that emerges at tubule’s end has, like an insect, three basic body segments. Of crowning importance is the head, which is taken up largely by a supercondensed tangle of 23 chromosomes, half the complement of DNA found in a normal body cell and thus the right number to merge with an egg’s 23 chromosomes and begin tapping out a whole new body. At the tip of the sperm head is the acrosome, a specialized sack of enzymes that help the sperm penetrate through what Joseph S. Tash, a male fertility expert at the University of Kansas Medical Center, calls the “forest” of ancillary cells and connective tissue that surrounds the ripe, ready egg.

Below the head is the midpiece, which is packed with the tiny engines called mitochondria that lend the sperm its motility, and below the midpiece is the tail, a bundle of 11 entwined filaments that thrashes and propels a sperm forward at the estimable pace of one-twelfth of an inch per minute, the equivalent of a human striding at four miles an hour.

Sperm do not really hit their stride until they are deposited in the female reproductive tract, at which point chemical signals from the vaginal and cervical mucus seem to spark them to life. Released from the buffering folds of their seminal delivery blanket, they at first swim straight ahead, torpedo-style, “with very little back and forth of the head,” Dr. Tash said. They may linger in the cervical mucus for a couple of days, or cross the cervix and enter the uterus.

If an egg has burst from its ovarian follicle and been plucked by a fallopian tube, sperm can sense its signature, a telltale shift in calcium ions. The sperm become “hyperactivated,” said Moira O’Bryan, a sperm expert at Monash University in Australia, switching to “a crazed figure-eight motion” ideal for boring through barriers. The ovum eggs them on, signaling some to play the sacrificial kamikaze and explode their enzyme sacks prematurely, loosening the corridor for other, shapelier sperm to pass through intact. A few dozen fine-figured sperm find their way to the final barrier, the egg’s plasma membrane, where they waggle with all their crazy-eight might and beg to be chosen — but only one will be taken, will fuse with the egg and be absorbed into its rich inner sanctum.

In a fraction of a second, an electrical, ionic jolt dramatically changes the egg’s outer coat, to forestall the lethal intrusion of additional sperm.

Wow .. I had no idea .. masso