Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm (19 page)

Day Nine Practice

Session 1: Basic OM practice, 15 minutes + sharing frames

Session 2: One-Stroke OM, 15 minutes + sharing frames

Journaling: Write for ten minutes about the One-Stroke OM. What was it like to give or receive such a long, slow stroke? How was it different from the basic OM session? Did it match the expectations you had going in? Would you like to try it again? Why or why not? How might this exercise inform the way you have “regular” sex?

Day Ten: Putting It All Together

So here we are—day ten. If you’ve made it this far, there’s little more I can say. You know how to OM, and you’ve gotten a taste of all sorts of different strokes. So go ahead, you crazy kids: use the skills you’ve been practicing the past nine days and have two back-to-back OMs. Try to notice all the different elements you’ve been playing with during the starter program, from location and sharing sensations to pressure and speed. And don’t forget to make offers and requests along the way. Most of all, stay with the stroke and enjoy it!

Day Ten Practice

Session 1: Basic OM practice, 15 minutes + sharing frames

Session 2: Basic OM practice, 15 minutes + sharing frames

Journaling: Go back and re-read your journal entry from day one. How was today’s practice different from the first day of the Starter Program? Did the techniques and nuances you practiced these past nine days change your experience of OM? If so, how? Do you expect to continue a daily OM practice now that the Starter Program is complete? Why or why not?

The Secrets of Successful OMers

I promised not to give you the hard sell on continuing your OM practice beyond the starter program, and I intend to keep that promise. The good news is that I really don’t have to do very much: most of the couples who make it through the Ten-Day Starter Program do have a desire to continue their OMing practice indefinitely. Whether they actually succeed at getting their practice off the ground is another question. Life has a way of upending even the best-laid plans. But every year, more and more couples are making a daily OMing practice work in their lives. Here are some of the secrets they’ve shared with me—and I’ve discovered in my own life:

• Set a regular time and date to practice.
  The number one most important secret to a successful OMing practice is to set up your OM as a recurring appointment. (Hint: you may not want to use your shared office calendar.) Scheduling every single OM can end up feeling like jumping through a whole lot of hoops—after a certain period of time you’re bound to get tired and go sit on the sidelines. So make a date and stick to it. Some couples OM every morning before they get out of bed; others do it in the evenings, a couple of times a week. The key is to set the time aside and treat it as inviolable. OM no matter what is going on—whether you just got into a fight or your kid is sick or you’d both rather have “regular” sex that night, commit to OMing and watching what transpires.
  
• Keep having “regular” sex—as much as you please.
  I meant it when I said that OM is not a replacement for regular sex. One of the top fears I hear from the male halves of OMing couples is that if they start to OM regularly, their women won’t want to have sex anymore. While my experience is that the opposite is true, I will still underscore it here: OMing does not replace sex, it improves it. I’ll go into the details about just how it can improve your regular sex life in an upcoming chapter. But for now, while you’re scheduling your OMs, why not drop a couple of sex dates in there as well?
  
• Find a Slow Sex coach.
  I remember when I first started trying to meditate at home by myself—it was a disaster. That is, until I found a meditation instructor whom I could call with questions anytime I had them. Slow Sex is the same way: an ounce of support from someone who understands can go a very long way. Couples who come to our courses are assigned Slow Sex coaches, and you can have one, too. We have a team of coaches ready and willing to help you and your partner over the phone or in person. For details on how to find a coach of your very own, visit our website at
  www.onetaste.us
  .
  

Chapter Six

What Men Should Know About Women

S
ome of the rewards of practicing Orgasmic Meditation can be felt immediately. There’s orgasm, of course. There’s connection and communication with our partner, a deeper intimacy, a mutual appreciation. There’s often an increased appetite for sex, as well as a greater capacity to feel—to feel ourselves, and others, too.

Then there are the rewards that are on a slight delay, the ones we may not even know to look for until we see them unexpectedly blooming all around us. One of the most gratifying—and practical—of these rewards is that it becomes harder and harder to keep our desires to ourselves. Clearly, we all have the desire to see and be seen, to understand and be understood. By the time we get to the end of a Slow Sex workshop the men and the women are voicing this desire to one another. I don’t have to plan it; they organically start talking about what they really want from one another, how they are misunderstood, how their needs can be met.

When I first realized this was happening, I decided to make it part of the workshop itself. I separated the men and
the women, and gave each group thirty minutes to distill the most important things they ought to know about one another. Then I brought both groups back and had them teach each other—while I took notes. Over the years of doing this exercise, the cream has risen to the top. The best, sweetest, most nourishing desires have emerged over and over until they’ve become a sort of canon of wisdom about what men and women want. What follows in this chapter and the next are the ten most insightful and surprising discoveries that the men have made about the women, and the ten that the women have made about the men. Some will feel confronting, some controversial. Others will feel like common sense—but the kind that we tend to forget unless reminded. So I hope you will take these suggestions as reminders, conversation starters, and a jumping-off point for your own orgasmic exploration. The collective wisdom gathered here has served me in many ways over the years, and I am honored to be able to share it with you now.

1. For women, everything is connected.
Her body and her heart and her sex. Her work and her relationships and her journey. Her world looks like a spiderweb, with everything intimately tied to everything else. Your world looks sleek and organized and flawlessly direct; even your sexual organs are elegantly packaged and compartmentalized on the exterior. Hers are inside of her, literally sharing space with her stomach and her guts and her heart. Take note of that difference, and you may understand how to share a bed, and a life, with her. You may suddenly understand why sex can never be merely sex: it’s right there in the middle of the full catastrophe. For a woman, there is no such thing as separate. Sex is food is love is spirit. It’s why sex makes her cry. It’s why, when something
goes wrong in some other very different area of her life, it can feel like something has gone wrong in her sex life, too. She is interwoven and lovely and sometimes messy and often complex. She is like a kaleidoscope, and her body works the same way. Touch her in one place and she’ll feel it in ten others. Circumambulate her most sensitive parts, exploring the outer reaches before going in for the treasure. And go slowly, slower than you ever thought imaginable. You can’t help but draw out her orgasm, a whisper at a time.

2. Women want to have sex just as much as men—just not the sex that’s on the menu.
Perhaps that’s overstating it. She likes the sex on the menu, she’s just not hungry for steak every single day. Women crave variety and surprise and spontaneity; we want a seasonal menu, a specialty menu. We want items that arouse and nourish and satisfy every part of us, because every part of us is connected to every other part. We want hot sex and we also want smooth, silky sex; we want climactic sex and we want slow, undulating sex. We want range. We want gradients. We want sex to move from slow to fast, from hard to exquisitely soft. We want to be surprised by nuance and subtlety. We want the chance to go up and then come back down, not just once but over and over. We want to communicate our sensations and hear about yours.

Do not believe us if we say we do not want sex; we want sex more than you guys could possibly fathom. We are, quite literally, starved for the feeling of orgasm in our bodies. But we haven’t been given permission to discover the unique sensations of our own orgasm, so we don’t know how to order what we desire. In this, we need your help. We need you to help get us turned on, to unfreeze us and
get our waters flowing again. Give us the time, space, and permission to taste a bite of every possible sensation and to communicate which ones we like and which ones we could do without. Show us—telling us is not enough—that you are not bored by the kind of sex that warms us from the inside out. OM with us. Touch us slowly. Ban the rule of reciprocity for a night or two, so we don’t have the excuse of worrying about your orgasm to keep from dropping down into our own. In exchange, you will gain access to a whole world of turn-on—ours. You will be matched, finally, by a woman who can truly feel what she wants. Who can get off on hard-fast-hot and guide you toward nourishing-hydrating-expanding all in one delicious evening.

3. Women will short-order their desires.
For many reasons, and with many painful results, women have been conditioned not to eat, even when we are hungry. Hungry for food, hungry for love, and—most devastatingly for you—hungry for sex. We have been taught that good women tame their desires, don’t even feel them; that pushing through our hunger is good and giving into it is bad. As a result, your woman will tend to short-order her desires, be they for connection or food or sex. She will order what she thinks she’s supposed to want, divided by half. She won’t even explore her options because she already knows what she’s allowed to order and what she’s not. And she’ll always leave a few bites on her plate.

In other words, your woman will be running on empty. And running on empty is not what you want your woman to be, unless you like irritability, impatience, hypersensitivity, and for everything to be your fault. Because in the space between what she asks for and what she really wants,
resentment will begin to fester. And you, sir, will be the one she blames.

Find out what she is hungry for, and give it to her. Never accept her first answer. Ask again. And again. Make it part of your game plan to prod and push until she releases what she is withholding and her desire comes flying out. At first, her desire might sound like anger. She may need to blow off steam. Don’t take it personally, even if she says hurtful things.

Keep asking until you feel her true desire release. You will feel it in your body when she finally lets go. Regardless of how much resistance she has, don’t stop asking until you feel it. You are helping her unravel a lifetime of conditioning—old beliefs and habits and rules that are suffocating the bright, lovely, sexy woman within.
That’s
the woman you want to be with. So if you have to ask all night, ask all night. You’ll know it when she finally speaks her desire because you will be able to feel it, landing with a satisfying
thunk
in your body.

Then give it to her, and you’ll be giving her the thing she never thought she could get: not just the desire, but approval for having the desire at all.

“I was surprised to find that other people noticed changes in me after we started OMing. I hadn’t told anyone I worked with that we were doing a sex practice, of course. People just saw me change. I heard comments like ‘You look great!’ ‘You’re smiling more,’ and ‘You look more at ease and happier than I’ve seen you before.’ I was amused but of course I didn’t dare say what was different. I just noted how this kind of comment kept coming up over and over.”

—Donna, 49

4. Women have as much sexual energy as men, it just freezes more easily.
Sexual energy is life energy; we all have it. Women don’t have less of it than men; it’s just that ours gets frozen more often. Body image, previous relationships, something her dad said to her when she was eleven—by the time you meet her she may be so iced over that only a trickle of desire is getting through. Without regular access to the warm heat of orgasm, the freeze gets deeper and deeper until she has no more access to her desire at all.

The problem is that when her desire is frozen, everything else starts to feel frozen, too. Her body. Her heart. Her pussy. Everything is connected, remember? So the sexual energy builds and builds, and there is no place for it to go except deeper within.

The pinch is that the solution—sex—looks like the enemy. It looks like a hard workout on cold muscles, a preamble to a sore and tender everything. Sex is so potent, and she is so frozen, she fears it will shatter her on impact. So instead of moving closer to the heater, she huddles farther and farther away, off-gassing the energy in a thousand little ways: picking fights, throwing barbs, casting blame.