Experience Spiritual and Sensual Sex

Your bedroom helps set your mood. It's the first thing you see when you awake every morning, and it's your last sense of place at night when you go to sleep. By combining the sensual with the spiritual in this special room, you can birth a fresh essence in your relationship.

Luckily, it's easy to create a sense of the spirit in the bedroom. Here's where to start:

• To help create your best set and setting, design a space that's sensual, cozy and restful. Throughout most high cultures of the past, the art of decoration and placement was an important aspect of how life was conducted. And, with a little interior design, your bedroom can be a sanctuary and a hideaway where you start and end your day.
• Use the principles of Feng Shui. Defined as the Chinese art and science of placement, Feng Shui is used for arranging objects and space to achieve the most harmonious balance of energy in a given environment.
• Create a bedroom temple together. The environment in your bedroom might include extra pillows, statues and draped scarves to remind and invite you to spend more time there. Lighting placed just right so that you can read, write or make love will draw the two of you to the space more often.
• Design an altar with your partner. Please don't judge this as too New Age-y. It doesn't have to be like that. The idea is to have a special place where both of you feel you can put meaningful items found, collected, gifted or purchased. Candles, a Tarot deck, a piece of jewelry, a baseball card, a rock from the seashore, a feather your partner found on a walk in the forest -- all of these things are spiritual, and reminders to you of the preciousness of life together.
• Perform little rituals to help feel gratitude for your partner and your life. When you put the items on your altar, say something about why they're important to you and imbibe them with an essential oil. Every time you make love, anoint your lover with the oil at his or her heart center, then reveal three things that you appreciate about him or her. Or, create a simple ritual of your own.
• Use color to enhance the sensual spirit in your bedroom. Create a dramatic room simply by draping a red scarf over the lamp next to your bed. (Remember to put it over a safe shade that will keep it from coming into contact with the lightbulb.) For an even more dramatic effect, put a few drops of essential oil on the scarf.
• Use music to set a soft, spiritual mood. Make sure that you know the kinds of music that send chills up your lover's spine. If the two of you like different types of music, take turns creating a mix of both kinds in any lovemaking evening, so you'll both feel aroused and connected.
• Bathe each other with loving presence. The highest offering Jesus' disciples could give him was to bathe his feet. Do this for your partner with focused attention. Afterward, massage his or her feet with aromatic oil.
• Before you make love, sit on the bed facing each other and eye-gaze. Simply soften your eyes and look into your partner's eyes without doing anything else. After a minute or two, place your right hand between your partner's breasts and put your left hand over your partner's hand on your chest. Hold this way as you take a few minutes to breathe and look into each other's eyes.
• When experience an orgasm, say a prayer. See if you can remember to say a prayer of thanks to the universe for the abundance that you have. When you imbibe the physical with the meta-physical, the two fuse and become one. If you do this, both realms will seem more expansive.

It's been too long that humans have tried to separate the sensual from the spiritual. Stay intuitive about what would make you and your partner feel more deeply connected both on the sensual/sexual plane and in the spiritual realm. Talk about what spirit means to you and have your partner do the same. When you begin to do some of these little things, you'll feel more connected to each other and to your spirit.