Take a deep breath. Send your breath deep down until you can feel it tickle your genitals from the inside.

Exhale slowly.

Take a full breath. Let your breath expand your rib cage. Let your belly fill with air. Let breath fill the spaces under your shoulder blades.

Exhale slowly.

Now take a deep, full breath. Take in as much air as you can and let it expand you laterally and vertically.

Exhale with a big sound.

It may be hard to believe, but you just took the single most important step you may ever take toward great sex. Breath is your greatest source of energy and aliveness. It can produce so much pleasure, it will amaze you. Once you become familiar with moving erotic energy around with and on your breath, you'll find all your erotic encounters to be much more fulfilling. Your orgasms will be longer and deeper. You will share a more authentically intimate connection with your partner. You'll even find yourself using breath techniques in non-erotic situations to bring erotic energy to more and more areas of your life.

There are three things you need to know about breath and sex:

1. Changing the way you breathe changes the way you feel.
2. Sexual energy travels on the breath.
3. The more you breathe the more you feel.

Most of us breathe just enough to stay alive, but not enough to really feel our aliveness. Think of a physical activity you really enjoy. It might be skiing or running, dancing or walking on the beach. If you're not fond of physical activity, think of someone on television who has just completed a race or any act of physical endurance. What is the most obvious physical response happening in the body of someone who has just participated in a physical activity they enjoy? They are taking big deep breaths. They may be breathing so hard that they can barely talk. They may seem completely drained, but they don't care. There is an aura of extra aliveness around them. They are enjoying a peak experience—the combination of physical activity and conscious breathing has produced euphoria.

The exact same thing happens in sex. Intense physical activity plus conscious breathing equals euphoria. Of course we get an enormous amount of pleasure from our genitals and most of us have had orgasms while clenching, bearing down, and holding our breath. But the orgasms that result from those compressed quickies are short and localized to the genital area. When you want to stay in the excitement phase of lovemaking for as long as possible and enjoy extended orgasmic states, it is your breath, not your genitals that will hold you in the totality of ever-increasing sensation.