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For my husband Bodhi and I, that inspires the spark between us to ignite. It fills us from the inside out and connects us so we can face life as a team.
But this doesn't always mean it's been easy.
Bodhi and I met at high school; it was one of those love-at-first-sight connections.
We quickly had children, married, got a mortgage and began our careers. It was a very high-energy, high-stress time in our lives together.
During those first few years we had lots of ups and downs as we navigated our way through our relationship, both in and out of the bedroom.
With the logistics of life coming between us, we often struggled to connect and sex was often a contentious issue.
in the first 20 years or so of our relationship, we were forced to weather the ebbs and flows of my cyclic rhythm. It was something we had to discuss and make some big choices around.
Amala (right) says sex with her husband Bodhi has become "much slower and more gentle" as they have aged. Source: Supplied
During any challenge, we always made the time to get support through counselling or couples retreats, which helped us both enormously.
'Sex at your age?'
Our biggest hurdle came when things began to change for me as a woman through my 40s and early 50s. It was a very difficult time personally. Intense physical symptoms left me drained and mistrusting of my body. Besides the usual hot flushing and night sweats, there were changes to the tissue of my vagina that caused it to bleed, and sex became very painful and distressing.
I found myself really desiring to go on a more inward journey for a few years, and we had to have some hard conversations about what that meant for us as a couple. And what that meant for our sex life.
We both knew deep down that this was an important exploration that I needed to honour, and that if I navigated this well in my own time, it would support and nurture our relationship and sex life, which would be blessed by the wisdom I was embracing and embodying.
Sex was such a lifeline to our deeper connection.Amala Rose
When I noticed a vaginal prolapse, I sought medical help and initially found doctors very dismissive of me and my experience.
In fact, several asked me, “why are you still having sex at your age?”
I was 54 at the time!
I left in tears and felt let down and alone. I was grieving my former self.
Regaining my power
I reached out to other women and discovered that they were having similar experiences. I sat in wisdom circles, which helped me regain my power and set me on a path of healing and reconnection with this glorious body of mine.
It's a body that has birthed four babies, that now cuddles 10 grandchildren. It's a body that I love to make love with.
Amala and her husband Bodhi say they plan to have sex well into old age. Source: Supplied
Our sex life now is much slower and more gentle, enriching and deeply connecting.
I feel that even though we have both aged more than 40 years since we first started to make love, there is still so much more that we can offer ourselves and each other through this time.
We plan to keep making love well into our dotage, keeping that spark alive and that passion coursing through us.
