I’m sitting at home, slightly hungover on a Wednesday, spooning leftover daal straight from the container into my mouth — but I’ve managed to carve out 10 minutes to try some mindfulness. I search for a way to put the 11-minute session on 1.7x speed, like I do with audible books. This should be the first indicator that I’m not a naturally mindful person. I’m trying a mindfulness session called Befriending our Bodies, which aims to help you reach heightened pleasure. I’m soothingly told to treat myself as if I ‘were attending to a friend in need’ as I focus my attention on the feelings in specific parts of my body, starting with my left foot. Six minutes in I hear a ding from my phone and can’t help but watch a TikTok a friend send me of a lamp that looks like it has a foreskin — my attention span has a long way to go.
So why do people practice mindfulness? It might be to decompress, or to centre their thoughts but rarely do we expect the answer ‘to have better sex’. But if you’ve never thought about the relationship between mindfulness and sex it might be time to start. Problems in the bedroom are common with studies estimating that sexual dysfunctions affect 43 per cent of women and 31 per cent of men. Recent events have not helped these numbers, with long Covid being reported to decrease sexual libido and cause problems with erectile dysfunction. And many more people are simply having unfulfilled sex lives, with the orgasm gap larger than the pay gap, as women ‘finish’ far less frequently than their male partners in heterosexual relationships.
