Physician J. William Lloyd’s The Karezza Method by is a gem: short, eloquent, practical, and charmingly quaint (published in 1931). He eloquently advocates for karezza (a variation of Synergy lovemaking). Here’s a complete, but consolidated (and searchable) PDF of the book, and here’s a scan of the original book. Readers can also purchase an Ebook.
Nourishing another
Lloyd advises the Karezza lover to become a magnetic “battery”.
As you acquire the habit of giving your sexual electricity out in blessing to your partner from your sex-organs, hands, lips, skin, eyes and voice, you will acquire the power to satisfy yourself and her without an orgasm. Soon you will not even think of self-control, because you will have no desire for the orgasm, nor will she.
He notes the ability of Karezza (controlled intercourse) to nourish lovers. He reports a sense:
of sweet satisfaction, fullness of realization, peace, often a physical glow and mental glamour that lasts for days, as if some ethereal stimulant, or rather nutriment, had been received.
…In successful Karezza the sex-organs become quiet, satisfied, demagnetized, as perfectly as by the orgasm, while the rest of the body of each partner glows with a wonderful vigour and conscious joy…tending to irradiate the whole being with romantic love; and always with an after-feeling of health purity and wellbeing. We are most happy and good-humoured as after a full meal.
Not only does focusing on nourishing your lover move you away from hungry grabbing, but this selfless focus also seems to trigger the production of more oxytocin, while apparently sidestepping the insatiable feelings from too much dopamine. Research has shown that oxytocin in ideal quantities correlates with benefits to one’s health, peace of mind, and ability to bond more deeply.
Arousal hangover
Throughout the book, Lloyd describes the hangover that orgasm can produce. Here are some of his observations:
It is the wine of sex that gives love its enchantment and divine dreams. This is easily proven by giving lovers unrestricted license to express their transports. No sooner have they wasted the wine of sex by reckless embraces – often a single orgasm will thus temporarily demagnetize the man – though they love each other just the same, as they will each stoutly assert – the irresistible attraction and radiance and magnetic thrills are gone, and there is a strange drop into cool, critical intellection or indifference, or perhaps dislike….
To have frequent orgasmal embraces, as most married lovers do, is to keep the wine in the sexual beakers low by constant spilling, to thus kill all romance and delight and finally starve and tire out love itself.
…It is the common experience that there is a sense of loss, weakness, and dispelled illusion, following quickly on the first grateful feeling of relief. There has been a momentary joy, but too brief and epileptic to make much impression on consciousness, and now it is gone, leaving no memory. The lights have gone out, the music has stopped.
The weakness is often so severe as to cause pallor, faintness, vertigo [dizziness], dyspepsia [indigestion], disgust, irritability, shame, dislike, or other pathological or unloving symptoms. This especially on the man’s part, but perhaps to some extent on the woman’s part too. Even if no more, there is lassitude, sudden indifference, a wish to sleep. A wet blanket has fallen, for the time at least, on the flame of love. Romance drops and crawls like a winged bird.
Modern neuroscience suggests that these symptoms may be the result of such physiological changes as a precipitous drop in dopamine (the craving neurochemical) levels after orgasm, a rise in prolactin (the sexual satiation neurochemical), and a decrease in testosterone receptors on nerve cells in the brain’s limbic system.
Not only did Lloyd suspect the vital role of the endocrine glands in sex and sexual-arousal hangovers, he also touched on the evolutionary biology of sex.
Nature meant [orgasm] only for propagation and its whole modus operandi is calculated to check love, defeat love, and turn love into indifference or aversion. By contrast, Karezza promotes monogamy from within. It makes marriage more delicious than courtship, more romantic than wooing, and maintains an endless, satisfying honeymoon…..
Nothing else known makes the course of true love run so smooth as Karezza.
Climax and compulsion
Lloyd was aware of the link between orgasmic sex and addictive behaviour. He notes that orgasm’s aftermath can produce a craving for stimulants. He adds that, to indulge in orgasm frequently as a mere pleasure and indulgence creates a vice.
The wine of sex may sometimes go to the head and lead to a preoccupation with sex bordering on satyriasis or nymphomania, just as any other passion may become an emotional intoxication.
He notes that love and the thrill of sex are delightful,
but if continued too long the inevitable result is that the nerves become powerless to appreciate or respond….and finally may end by devitalizing love and sex themselves.
Here he correctly describes the way dopamine behaves in the course of any addictive behaviour. An intense rise in dopamine levels is succeeded by lows, setting up an unsatisfying, and ultimately potentially addictive cycle. He points out that
Those who practice Karezza are less liable to excess, because spared the waste of the orgasm. In contrast, those who do not use Karezza are vastly more liable to excess, and this usually from too frequent and intense orgasms….
His observation is borne out by Chinese sexual texts. Their ancient authors taught that orgasm, although depleting physical reserves, has the opposite effect on sexual desire. “After an immediate postcoital letdown, there is a rapid psychological rebound and an intensification of erotic interest [and wet dreams]”. Solution? “When the ching is full one is free of lustful thoughts”. Karezza is a practice that conserves ching, or life force energy.
Lloyd goes so far as to theorise that excessive action of the endocrine glands can lead to the sexual insanity behind rape and pathological jealousy.
Heals and beautifies
As a physician, Lloyd seemed especially intrigued by the health benefits he saw in Karezza lovers. This approach to lovemaking bestows glow and vigour on the sexual parts, and wine-like inspiration upon the spirit of the partners…without producing a reaction [hangover]. It is one of the best agencies for the benefit and cure of ordinary sexual weaknesses and ailments, including urethritis [urinary tract infection] and prostatitis [enlargement of the prostate gland].
In addition, he knew it to act like magic in painful menstruation. Lloyd also mentions that Karezza acts as a remarkable nerve sedative, even curing nervous headache. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it can also improve sleep and ease depression and addiction.
Lloyd advises directing currents of energy to any ailing part of one’s partner with the conscious thought of healing. According to Lloyd, Karezza increases general physical health and mental vigour, maintains youth, and is one of the best health exercises.
Love
Lloyd himself seems to have been a Karezza lover himself. He certainly understands the gifts of love. Karezza is the greatest beautifier because it increases and makes enduring the heart love.
The faces of those who practice it tend to become exceedingly beautiful…a serene, sweet light in the eye, a delicacy and refinement of line, a radiance and play of feature, a glad timbre in the voice, that vibrates an inexpressible magnetism…and makes even the plainest personality fascinating.
He emphasises the importance of maintaining a heart focus during this approach to lovemaking. Karezza, Lloyd assures us,
is easy and successful just in proportion to the abundance of mutual love – [and] hard and difficult just in proportion as mere sex-craving dominates love.
Lloyd also addresses the spiritual aspects of this practice. Sex he says, is very close to soul.
[It only satisfies] when it unites souls, not merely copulates bodies for a thrill.
Indeed, he advises that if you would increase your sexual control,
keep the spiritual on top, dominant – loving is the first thing, and at-one-ment…of your souls, your real end.
Is he hinting that this prized oneness recreates the divine androgyne? The full magnetic rapport of Karezza occurs when
two souls and bodies seem as one, floating on some divine stream in Paradise….This is the real ideal and end of Karezza. You will finally enter into such unity that in your fullest embrace you can hardly tell yourselves apart and can read each other’s thoughts. You will feel a physical unity as if her blood flowed in your veins, her flesh were yours. For this is the Soul-Blending Embrace.
From Lloyd’s title page:
The Lover is the Artist in Touch
Karezza in its perfect form is natural marriage – that clinging, satisfied
union of body and soul which true love ever craves and in which ideal marriage consists – and
with every repetition of the act the lovers are remarried, their unity renewed, deepened, intensified.
