Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm (14 page)

So I always give new students the instruction to try to feel one stroke—just one single stroke—during a session. If you can feel one, the rest will come in time. Even for advanced practitioners, the point of an OM is to really be able to feel one stroke; just one. Everything else is icing on the cake.

In the meantime, try this:

• Focus on what you
  do
  feel.
  As I discovered in my early days, numbness is also a sensation. How would you describe it?
  
• Name one thing—just one thing—you can feel.
  A tickling? A feeling of heat? Some motion? Feeling anything at all is success here, and communicating that feeling only magnifies it.
  
• Pay attention to your genitals.
  If thoughts of failure or performance anxiety enter your mind, keep bringing your attention right back to your clit. That’s the only thing you have to do here: lie back, relax, and keep your attention on the point of contact between his finger and your clit. There is no right or wrong experience in OM.
  
• Ask for more pressure.
  Though we don’t want to become reliant on heavy pressure, it can sometimes help to ask your partner to increase pressure until you
  do
  feel it—then to back off slowly. Notice the point where you go from sensation to numbness again. That’s the edge you’re working with; over time you’ll start to see that edge arriving at lower and lower levels of pressure, I promise.
  
• Talk to your partner.
  It’s possible he’s having a hard time finding just the right spot; help the poor guy! Try the Clitoral Mapping OM (see
  here
  ), and note where around your clit you have the most sensation.
  
• Give yourself a break.
  Every OM, and every OMer, is different. Some sessions you can expect to feel incredible sensation, while during others you won’t feel very much at all. There is no “perfect” here—inconsistency is part of the deal. See if you can find something to enjoy in every OM. Maybe it’s the feeling of being held and taken care of by your partner. Maybe it’s the experience of having your genitals looked at without judgment. Find just one point of pleasure you can name, and you’ll have succeeded.
  

Oh, I felt something. It’s called
pain.
The clit is the most sensitive spot on the female body. Although we’d love to think that its eight thousand nerve endings only pick up on the feeling of pleasure, the fact is in some cases they also pick up on pain.

Oversensitivity is something many women feel at some point during their OMing practice, especially at the beginning. Some of us are simply more sensitive than others. A direct stroke on our clit can be exquisitely pleasurable for some of us; however, for others it can send every nerve in our body jangling like a fire alarm. Women who experience the stroke as painful have equated it to the feeling
of broken glass being stroked into them, or the point of a very sharp knife being driven into the clit—in other words, nothing you’d ever want to feel again. And yet many women who have had pain in their OMing continue to practice. One of our core Slow Sex teachers has had the experience of pain as part of her practice for years. What it taught her was a lesson she needed to learn in life, as well as sex. “I used to think the pain meant there was something wrong with me. I would be afraid to ask my partner to lighten up,” she says. “But the pain was so intense that I finally didn’t have a choice. To my surprise, he was really grateful when I asked him to adjust. I saw that he really wanted to please me, much more than I ever realized.”

While for some people pain is physiological—some of us are just built with more highly sensitive clits than others—I’ve also heard students report pain they later believed was psychological. One student recently related some unexpected pain during practice. “Everything had been going fine for weeks, but then one day during OM it was just like he was rubbing gravel into my clit. I thought, ‘What is going on here?’ I asked him to change his stroke and it got better, but I still wondered. I put my attention back to the stroke, and suddenly this anger started to come up. When I looked at it more closely, I realized I was still mad about something he’d e-mailed me a few days earlier. It really wasn’t a big deal, but I hadn’t communicated to him that his comment had hurt me a little bit. After the OM I asked him if we could talk, and I let him in on what was going on. It was a really intimate moment. When we OMed again, the pain was gone.”

Some students go further and report that pain seems to signal some sort of psychic knot that needs to be worked
out. If they stay with the pain, as a sort of research project, there’s often a breakthrough on the other side. This is not to say that you
should
power through your pain. Take care of yourself; take a break from OMing for a day or two, or ask your partner to change stroke—whatever you need. OMing is about enjoyment, after all. But at the same time, clit pain does not need to be a reason to stop OMing. Here are some common remedies for working with pain:

• Ask your partner to stroke more lightly and/or more slowly, until the pain subsides.
  
• Request that he start off the session by stroking on top of the clitoral hood instead of stroking the clit itself. As the orgasm starts to build, you can ask him to slowly move underneath the hood, if you desire.
  
• If any sort of motion feels too painful, ask your partner to place his finger lightly on the clit and keep it there. Then, once you feel comfortable, you can ask him to start stroking again very slowly. Feel free to ask him to return to stillness at any time, however.
  
• Ask your partner to stroke the lube, rather than stroking your clit itself. This can be a sensational way to practice at any time, but it’s especially helpful if the clit is painful or sensitive. The stroker places a dollop of lube directly on the clit, and then strokes the lube itself gently without making direct contact with your clit.
  
• Inquire internally about the source of the pain. Is there anything unsaid between you and your partner? Is there any reason you might be resisting practice today?
  
• Be gentle with yourself. Pain can be a natural part of the OMing process for some women—
  there is nothing wrong with you
  . Take this as an opportunity to practice asking your partner to give you what you need and desire. Contacting our own desire is one of the primary goals of the practice; see where it wants to take you.
  

I have past sexual trauma. Should I OM?
This is an extremely sensitive, very personal question. And given how many women have experienced sexual trauma or abuse over the course of their lives, it’s also very common—as you can imagine, it comes up a lot during our beginner Slow Sex workshops. My first recommendation to anyone who is working with sexual trauma is to see a licensed therapist or psychologist who has been trained to help in that area specifically. At the same time, many women who find their way to OM have already spent time in traditional therapy and are looking for a more experiential way to heal. For these women, I can only say that many have found peace and rebirth through this practice. Many students report that the structured nature of OM offers a sense of relaxation not usually found in more open-ended, conventional sex. You know exactly what to expect from OM: it’s only fifteen minutes per session, and it’s only a stroke. There is no pressure to climax or please your partner along the way—all you have to do is pay attention to your own sensation. That’s not to say that OMing may not stir up difficult emotions and memories, however. If you find yourself facing painful issues during OM, here are some guidelines to keep in mind:

• Remember that you have the power to end the OM at any time. If uncomfortable feelings or memories of trauma arise during the session, communicate with your partner. Feel free to ask him to slow down or stop altogether.
  
• Allow yourself to feel and express any emotion you are having. As OM thaws out our blocked systems, powerful emotions of all sorts can come through. The practice is slow and deliberate enough that we find we can’t railroad past our emotions the way we are sometimes able to do during sex. For this reason, many women report crying through their first several months of OM, as they allow themselves to feel sensations—both physical and psychological—that they have not felt in a very long time. You are not alone; it’s part of the process and it can be incredibly sweet to let it all out. Let your partner hold the space while you allow the emotion to flow.
  
• Go all the way to your edge, but don’t go over it. Take the time to get to know your own limitations. With each OM, be willing to nestle right up against it—but don’t go past it. There is a sweet spot there, just at the edge. Be willing to taste it.
  
• Stay in communication with your partner throughout the OM. Let him know what sensations you’re feeling, be they emotional or physical. And again, be gentle with yourself. This work requires a certain level of courage from all of us; acknowledge that it isn’t always going to be easy, and take it slow.
  

Won’t it make sex less special if we practice OM every day?
This is a question that comes up at pretty much every Slow Sex workshop—but only from the women. (This thought would literally never cross a man’s mind.) For
women, everything is connected. When a man enters our body, he enters our heart and our head and our spirit at the same time. Because of this, sex has become, to us, a Very Big Thing. The idea of experiencing orgasm just as it is—minus the romance, the eye-gazing, the seriousness that have become prerequisites to our idea of “good sex”—is hard for women to understand at first.

As a result, we keep orgasm hidden away in the cabinet most of the time, because it’s
special
. We think we are doing ourselves a favor, that by withholding the delicious sensation of sex we are somehow intensifying the pleasure received when we
do
have it. This goes back to the conditioning we’ve gotten about keeping our hunger at bay. If we enjoyed orgasm every single day, what might become of us? At the very least, we’ll stop enjoying it so much! The same argument can apply to eating chocolate, or spending a little extra to buy flowers for our desk, or setting aside time to do something we love every day.

The assumption we’re making is that if we trot orgasm out every day, over time its specialness will diminish. But in my experience, this assumption is false. One thing we learn when we start OMing is that the more awareness we place on something, the more beauty we can see in it. What we get into relationship with reveals its secrets to us. Let sex come out to play, get to know it a little more every day, and I promise you: the sensation will increase, not lessen.

“The more we OM, the more I can feel my orgasm opening up. I had no idea how much power was inside of me.”

—Kristie, 28

Troubleshooting for Him

So… when do I get stroked?
Guys, if you’re finding yourselves wondering why you would ever want to spend fifteen minutes stroking your partners and getting nothing in return, then you have, as they say, arrived. Whether he admits it or not, every new stroker has asked himself at some point whether he’s a Grade-A sucker for agreeing to do something so ludicrously one-sided as OM. And it’s not just the guys who notice this inequity. Around hour two of the Slow Sex workshop the question of “what’s in it for him?” starts bubbling up… from the
women
. Yes, the women start to raise hell on the men’s behalf, wondering how they themselves are supposed to enjoy the bounty of OM with the knowledge that you guys are practically wasting away from sexual starvation.

I have never come up with a better answer to this question than this: start stroking, and see what happens. It goes against all of our preconceptions about sex and relationship, but to hear them tell it, the stroker experiences just as much orgasm during OM as the receiver does. Don’t believe me? Take it from one of my students, Jennifer, half of a lesbian couple. When they first started OMing, Jennifer received and her partner stroked. Later on, they decided to switch positions.

“When we first took the workshop and decided she’d be stroking me, I have to admit I thought I was getting the better end of the deal,” Jennifer says. “In the workshop the teacher said the strokers would feel just as much orgasm as the receivers, but I didn’t understand how that could be.

“A few months later I decided I wanted her to have the experience of being stroked, too, so I told her I wanted to switch positions for a while. I was doing it entirely for her. It was basically an altruistic move. But the minute my
finger hit her clit, it was like my finger was a valve and the orgasm just came right through it and filled up my entire body. I felt exactly the same sensation as when I was getting stroked, except it wasn’t just concentrated in my genitals. It was like I was getting hit by a warm wave. I had to really concentrate to keep stroking because all I wanted to do was to feel the orgasm.”

Now if that sounds far-fetched (and it does to many men, right up until they experience it for themselves), then consider some other reasons you might practice. It might be the fact that the attention you develop can be transferred into every aspect of your life and relationship. Maybe it’s the confidence and satisfaction that comes with knowing you’re getting your woman off every time you stroke. Maybe it’s that stroking increases her sexual appetite—which is what most women report—so you’re getting a more turned-on partner in the bedroom. Who knows? All I can say is that the men (and female strokers) seem to keep coming back to this “boring” practice that’s “all about her,” so there must be something more here than meets the eye.

That was harder than I thought it was going to be, and I couldn’t tell if I was doing it right.
Once the guys are on board to start the practice, the first question that comes up is how do they know if they’re doing it right. When it comes to “real” sex, the cues a man uses to know if he’s pleasing his partner are primarily visual (he can see her moving in a sexy way) and audible (he can hear her moaning, breathing heavily, and even telling him how good it feels).