Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm (16 page)

The second difference between masturbation and OM has to do with the resonance that grows between the partners who are OMing. While it defies logic, when we connect deeply with another person, we create an entirely new experience between us. Our partner draws out our sexual energy, and we draw out theirs. Together, the two of us create a third thing between us—the orgasm—and
we explore it together. So while you can certainly generate pleasurable sensation by stroking yourself, you are not practicing Orgasmic Meditation until you are plugged into the experience with another person.

So what to do if you find yourself sans partner and wanting to practice? As hard as it may be to believe, this is a good, juicy place to be. Like any obstacle that might be getting in the way of your practice, not having a partner gives you the chance to really experience your desire to OM. It also gives you the opportunity to extend beyond your comfort zone, beyond your fear of rejection or shame about wanting to do a sexuality practice—and to just ask someone.

Yes, just ask.

The thought can send shivers of terror, I realize.
Ask
someone? Who, a friend? Your ex-boyfriend? The barista you flirt with every morning while she makes your latte? I get it. A lot comes up when you consider asking someone to OM. First, the fact that they will likely have no idea what you’re talking about, and you’ll have to explain this unusual practice in detail, on the spot. Second, that they might reject the offer—and you, yourself, will feel rejected in the process. Third, there’s the shame factor that comes with asking for what we desire sexually. The good news is that, as discussed in the previous chapter, asking gets exponentially easier the more you do it. Ladies, I have never met a straight man who wouldn’t be thrilled beyond recognition for you to ask him to stroke your pussy. He might not be free to do so, for a variety of reasons (including fears of his own), but you can guarantee you’re going to make his day just by asking. If he declines, consider it a charitable contribution (alas, no tax deduction available) and move on.

Guys, your situation is trickier. To be blunt, thanks to a lot of social conditioning there is a distinct possibility that you will look like a perv for asking a woman to OM. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do so—you just need to do it very cleanly. Make the request specific; explain that it’s a meditative practice rather than straightforward sex and that the goal is simply to give her a safe place to have an orgasmic experience. Emphasize that no reciprocation will be expected, nor will any such offers be accepted. (And then make sure you maintain that boundary. I suggest a forty-eight-hour hold on any offers for reciprocation she might make, to be certain her offer is coming from true desire and not because she thinks she “should” give you something in return.)

Still sound unapproachably edgy to ask someone who is not your partner to engage in a sex practice? No worries. If OMing is something you truly want to do, the obstacle of finding a partner will take care of itself. Go your own pace. Keep reading, keep thinking about it, and if you have the desire, a partner will come.

Sex isn’t a problem for me—I’m not even sure why my partner dragged me here.
As I said at the beginning, most students come to our Slow Sex workshops to improve their sex lives. The guys want to know how to please their women. They want to learn more about her anatomy, what brings her pleasure and what doesn’t, and they want a foolproof way to get her off. The women come primarily because they want to
enjoy
sex in a deeper, more real way. They want to feel their own sexual desire, to stop feeling like they have to perform in bed, and to have a genuinely pleasurable experience of sex.

But maybe that’s not you. Maybe you’ve already got the Grade A super-octane sex life of your dreams. No worries, if so. I’m not in the business of convincing anybody to practice Slow Sex; the choice is truly yours. That said, if your partner dragged you here, that alone may be a sign worth paying attention to! Either way, if you do decide to give it a whirl, try to be open to what happens. You might be surprised. OM is not about going from a “bad” sex life to a “good” one. It’s about going from wherever you are to someplace even better. OM can become just one more delightful item on the sexual menu, or it can become a gateway to an even deeper possibility of sexual fulfillment. Either way, I would encourage you to keep an open mind. You never know what you might discover.

Yeah, no. This definitely isn’t for me.
It happens all the time—people will literally research OneTaste for months, call and have long talks with our coaches, decide they want to learn how to OM, fly across the country, lie down for their first session, and before the stroking even begins decide, “Nope, this isn’t for me.” The same thing happened to me when I started to OM. I took a few classes and was in and out of the practice for about nine months. Then, one day, without warning, I ran. I ran as far away as I could, burning everything in my wake. I mean, it was
bad
.

It took about six months for me to have my “a-ha” moment about OM.
Oh
.
It’s not the practice I have a problem with. It’s that OM is going to change me in ways I’m not sure I’m ready to change.

I guess I don’t have to tell you the end of that story, except to say that my friends and teachers were very kind when I came crawling back on hands and knees, asking for forgiveness and more instruction.

I could tell you this story a hundred times. Yoga, meditation—you name it, I’ve come up with a reason to avoid it. Just about everything that has changed my life for the better came to me tied up in a big red ribbon of aversion. What I’ve discovered over the years is that I’m not alone; we humans seem to have a tendency to loathe the very things that have the power to transform us. It’s perfectly natural, and even expected.

So you don’t want to do the practice—then don’t. It’s really up to you. But as the saying goes, the opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. If your response to the idea of OMing is without any sort of charge whatsoever—a true “I could take it or leave it” response—then there might not be anything here for you. If, however, your response is, “No way am I doing something as stupid/ridiculous/outrageous as
that
,” then I’d just suggest you take a little peek under the hood and see what’s driving your resistance. If I am any example, you might be surprised by what you find.

I hate to be rude, but if it’s not about climaxing, then what’s the point?
It’s true: by comparison to our experience of “regular sex,” the idea of OM seems strangely anti-climactic. We’re not trying to get our rocks off, and we’re not trying to wow our partner with our mad sexual talent. We’re not doing it as quid pro quo—that is, “I’ll have sex with you if you promise to fix the patio door”—and there is no guarantee that you’re going to get anything out of the process other than a few moments of (hopefully) enjoyable sensation. Is that all it’s about?

It’s not. It’s about that, but so much more. Because what those few moments of (hopefully) enjoyable sensation show us is a world of possibility beyond. What would it mean to
be as in tune with every sensation in our lives as we are with the point of contact between the finger and the clit during an OM? What would it look like if we were able to
feel
our world rather than merely think about it? If we were to be intimate with our partner in a way that put us inside of their experience, instead of trying to understand it from the outside? If our desires were our guiding light, our beacon, our compass? All this begins with connection—connection that we can taste, often for the first time, when we slow down long enough to OM. If we experience that much sensation from just one stroke, what could happen if we put even more effort into connecting with our partners, our friends, and our lives?

This is the question I leave my students with at the end of the Slow Sex workshop. That, and the Ten-Day OM Starter Program in the chapter that follows. It’s the best I can do for these sexual artists: sending them into the kitchen with a few ingredients—and then crossing my fingers that I’ve taught them well enough that the recipe will reveal itself.

Chapter Five

The Ten-Day OM Starter Program

I
designed the Ten-Day OM Starter Program with two hopes in mind. First, I wanted to set specific, easy-to-reach goals that would help new students begin and maintain an OMing practice on their own at home. While students who live near our centers in San Francisco and New York have access to face-to-face coaching and a number of different OMing courses, many of our students are learning from afar. I’ve found that a day-by-day program is the best way to encourage regular practice, eventually leading them to make OM a part of their everyday lives. The same can happen for you.

The second reason I designed this program is to help you explore some of the more nuanced aspects of OMing—things like communication, stroke direction, pressure, and speed—in an experiential way. I can talk all day about how much pressure a stroker may or may not want to use, but the best teaching is to actually start stroking and asking for feedback.

So you can think of this program as a ten-day
prescription for OMing. I can’t promise it will cure all your ills, but at the very least I can assure you that if you follow it faithfully, you’ll know how to OM on the other end. At most, you’ll have found the key to sustainable happiness in your relationship and beyond. Not a bad risk/reward ratio, is it?

For your part, the commitment is just forty-five minutes a day. When I say
just
forty-five minutes in class, the students start to look a bit grumpy and discouraged. Do I not have children? Have I not heard of the sixty-hour workweek? Do I not realize how much time it takes to make breakfast, pack lunches, go to work, make dinner, watch
Mad Men
, squeegee the shower door, floss teeth, apply lip balm? Can I please help them see how they’re supposed to be able to cram forty-five minutes of OM practice into their already crazy routine, because they’re having a hard time on their own. I used to get a little grumpy and discouraged myself at their resistance. Here I was, offering them the opportunity to try OM, a practice that had genuinely transformed my own life and my relationship to my sexuality, and they were trading it for
Mad Men
?!

Then I started Netflixing
Mad Men
, and I understood the dilemma.

I also remembered something one of my first OM teachers told me. At the time, I myself had been avoiding my own OMing practice. That teacher told me that we
human beings have a universal tendency to loathe what is in our best interest.
In other words, the things that are most potentially transformative, that can heal us in the ways we most desperately desire to be healed; these are the things we most often have to wrestle ourselves to the ground over. Lifestyle changes like yoga, meditating, eating right, and setting aside time to pursue our creative purpose. The
things that seem so hard to squeeze into our busy schedules, even though we know we’ll feel
so much better
if we do.

Things like—I’ll go ahead and volunteer—OMing.

So when I suggest that they simply look at how they’re spending their time now—that I’m sure they’ll be able to find the forty-five minutes in there, somewhere—they start to see me as a drill sergeant at Sexual Bootcamp. What I’ve discovered, however, is that there are worse things than taking my students firmly in hand and forcing them to do something that deep down they actually really want to do: make time for sex; return to their bodies and this moment; dive into a sea of sensation; offer and receive pleasure. Breathe. Feel. Connect.

Not that getting my students to agree to try the program means my work is done; I also want them to
complete
the program. And I speak from personal experience when I say we all know what it’s like to enthusiastically jump into a new diet, exercise regime, or creative endeavor—and then watch the commitment fade on day two, when parent-teacher conferences and flu bugs and last-minute meetings start to creep back into the mix. The only thing I can do is remind the students that the OM Starter Program is only a ten-day commitment, with nothing more required or expected. Though my secret hope is that they’ll come out on the other side with a burning desire to set up a daily OM practice, that part is really up to them. It’s not a requirement or even an expectation. All I ask is ten little days, forty-five minutes a day. Perhaps you can borrow that time from something that you know is not furthering any sort of goal in your life. May I suggest TV watching? Imagine me putting my hands on your shoulders and firmly
sitting you down as I say the following sentence:
Anything worth watching on TV can be DVR’d or downloaded on Netflix or Hulu. You don’t have to watch it today.

Ten days. Ten days is all I’m asking.

We good? Good. Let’s get down to business.

The Ten-Day OM Starter Program