Your body's mechanisms for sexual arousal demonstrate a beautifully complex relationship among hormones, nerves, blood vessels, and muscles. Yet all you have to do is simply relax and tune in to your God-given erogenous zones and responses. The sexual parts of your mind and body may be repressed or lying dormant, but they are there. Making love and stimulating erogenous zones is the essence of simplicity, but it is important to first understand your sexual reflexes and how arousal occurs. This is the foundation for enjoying erogenous zones. Many couples short-circuit their lovemaking by sometimes worrying too much about sexual arousal and not enjoying their reflexive sexual reactions enough.
Hormones and the Autonomic Nervous System
Why do we experience a sexual touch and begin to get an erection or vaginal lubrication? God has designed our bodies so that our hormones, nerve endings, and minds can create sexual arousal. It is a cooperative process of hormones and the nervous system. The hormones activate the process in our bodies and bloodstreams, and then our nerves relay sexual information from our senses to our brains and back to our genitals to create physical arousal. Without getting too technical, the autonomic, or involuntary, nervous system is involved in the sexual arousal cycle. I was referring to it when I said that both Jim and Susan in the opening example were worrying too much and getting upset and, in the process, sabotaging their natural, reflexive sexual responses. They needed to get out of the way of God's automatic arousal patterns and enjoy their bodies and eroge-nous zones more.
The autonomic nervous system has two branches, one called the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the other called the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). The PNS and the SNS operate in opposite manners. The parasympa-theticis operative when we are relaxed, and it has a creative, building effect on the body. The sympathetic springs into action when we are intensely aroused (to trigger orgasm) or when we are threatened (to shut down the PNS). Both arousal and orgasm are involuntary, reflexive actions. You simply have to relax and enjoy erogenous zones.
Sabotaging Arousal and Erogenous Zones
So Jim, and in some ways Susan too, were short-circuiting God’s design of relaxing with their erogenous zones and allowing pleasurable sensations (PNS) to build. He was anxious about not getting enough attention from his wife. Anxity, anger, boredom, and resentment trigger SNS reactions and are great saboteurs of having stimulating times making love. Jim was not going with his automatic parasympathetic system to allow arousal to mount. He was too worried about having his body caressed, while wondering whether they were having fun yet. Susan was not that much different because she built some resentment about the way he stim-ulated her clitoris. Both could experience some sabotaging results from blocking their PNS unless they begin to relax and enjoy.
This couple was blocking their enjoyment of erogenous zones with resentment and worry and lack of variety. Other peoplehave never allowed their erogenous zones to be sen-sitized and create sexual arousal. They are inexperienced at tuning in to sexual feelings and identifying how sexual arousal happens. All of us have nerve endings that can pro-duce sexual feelings, but they do have to be activated by allowing our hormones to create sexual arousal and our minds to interpret these sensations as sexual.
Because of a conservative Christian background, natural shyness, or discomfort with their bodies, some mates have never explored their physical sexual responses. The hormones and nervous system are obviously in place, so they enjoy some types of arousal. But the parasympathetic system needs to be turned loose, tuning in to sexual feelings without intense exertion.
Too many couples are guilty of sabotaging their erogenotis zones and sexual enjoymerit with ignorance, anxiety, sheer effort. Intimate mari tal companions have usually never developed their sexual awareness to include even half of the erogenous zones on their bodies, and they often short-circuit their sexual reflexes. But the encouraging thing is that mates who have fallen into a rut still can break their patterns and make many fun sexual discoveries in their erogenous zones.
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