Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm (26 page)

Both are valid concerns, and both clear up with a bit of recalibration—recalibration that comes naturally as a part of Orgasmic Meditation. First, the stroke is designed to bring hidden desire to the surface. It coaxes the truth out, little by little, until it becomes impossible not to see that what you actually want is to kiss your stroker, or to find a new job, or to spend more time with your children. During the practice you’re building the habit of watching the sensations in your body, in effect honing your desire-detection
instrument. In the same way, asking for the stroke you want during OM increases your capacity to be more open and vulnerable when it comes to putting your desires out into the world. After OMing for a while, most people discover they are much more comfortable asking for what they want in their lives at large.

You are not alone in your fear that if you use your desire as a compass your life will devolve into barbaric hedonism. Most of us have created deep patterns of denying ourselves what we want because we believe that our desire is a bottomless pit. If we dare begin to feed our hunger, to approve of it, we’ll be letting a wild animal out of a cage. Soon, this animal will be terrorizing the whole village, burning and pillaging and, in its spare time, having a whole lot of sex.

In truth, the reawakening of desire is usually a lot quieter. I remember when I first really allowed myself to use desire as my compass. I was living in a community of OM practitioners, where we were encouraged to OM as often as we liked. When I was getting ready to move in, my desire for OM was so great that the thought crossed my mind: what if moving in cost me my job? How would I make it to work when all I’d want to be doing was OMing? Sure enough, as soon as I moved in and gave my desire permission to roam, I went through an extended period where OM was the only thing I wanted to do. But somehow, I still managed to show up for work every day. Turns out that in addition to my desire for OM, I had a desire to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly. Go figure.

And as insatiable as my desire for OM felt at the beginning, there was a moment where things changed. After several months of a whole lot of OM, I remember my partner asking me if I wanted to practice. I checked in with
my internal compass, and to my surprise, I didn’t have the desire to OM. My first response was fear.

“I think I lost my desire!” I said in panic to my teacher.

“Did it ever occur to you,” she asked, “that you might have just gotten full?”

The thought had never crossed my mind. My hunger had been an insatiable beast yearning to be fed for as long as I could remember. Like a good girl, I had denied it everything it was asking for, secretly hoping it would starve to death. Now, through OM, I had started to feed it a little each day. Voracious at first, over time and with a consistent diet, the desire became less and less needy, less and less hungry. Then one day, just like that, it was full. Deliciously, powerfully, incredibly full.

That fullness is the key to lifelong orgasm. It paves the way for extending out to others, others who desperately need to see that fullness is possible in order to begin looking for it themselves. But we only get full when we are willing to follow our desire and feed the hunger within, consistently and over a long period of time. Feeding our desire, paying attention to it, is why we OM. When we OM, we drop down into the ocean of desire in a way we rarely take the time to do otherwise. We marinate in our own sensations for fifteen minutes, letting our desire rise up and then seep back down into our deepest places. Desire is sweetness; it is the elixir of life. It inspires, lubricates, satisfies, and satiates. Desire is the artist’s muse. When my students start to spend time in her company, they are inspired.

Desire is also our native wisdom, our true north. It points us in the direction we are meant to go—the place where the most sensation will be found. The more sensation, the
more enjoyment. The more enjoyment, the happier we are. Do a little bit of arithmetic, and desire begins to look like the road to happiness.

This shouldn’t be a surprise when you take the time to look at the world we live in. A brief investigation reveals that our universe is entirely desire-based. Desire keeps our world running; it’s the fuel of life. It’s what draws the bee toward the flower, what keeps the planet populated with flora, fauna, and—well, human beings. Desire is the natural order of things, the evolutionary driver. It’s how traits that will serve the species get integrated into the fabric of the whole. It’s what compels us to up our game as a species. Every living thing follows its implicit impulse and becomes a better and better version of itself in the process.

Except us.

Somewhere along the way, we humans took a different road. We veered off from the evolutionary path. By contrast to all the other species with whom we share our world, we developed the capacity for self-reflection; we saw that it is even
possible
to curb desire. The bee can’t ponder whether it has “too much” desire for nectar and then set New Year’s resolutions, after all. We humans are the only ones who have the capacity for discernment, for choosing which desires to follow and which to repress.

Which, from the point of view of society, may not seem like such a bad thing. If everyone followed their individual desires, we assume, the world would be bedlam. There would be no rules, no right and wrong. We’d each be chasing every impulse we had, regardless of how it might affect others. This assumption, I can now say from experience, is a fallacy of the hungry. When we are repressing our desires, telling them to go to bed without dinner, they start to get
a little cranky. We have all assumed that if we let these cranky little beasts run wild, they’d soon run us straight into the ground. And maybe there would be a period of mayhem (maybe not), but what I can say from my own experience is that one day, equilibrium would be reached. If we committed to following our desires, hunger would no longer be a problem. Just look at the way the natural world works; when each species follows its desires, you don’t get a war zone—you get an
ecosystem
. Each does its part within the greater whole, and the result is cooperation, co-evolution, and harmony. Soon, what you have is a mature, deep-rooted forest.

Killing our desire out of fear keeps us hungry, irritable, and rooted in shallow soil. We may feel a sense of security, of staying in society’s good graces, but we don’t experience aliveness. We don’t get nourishment, we don’t get hydration. We don’t get great sex, great art, or great poetry. “Great” can only come through when we stop setting our compass toward “good.” Figure that piece out, and you’ll start to see turn-on everywhere you look.

Turning On

If there’s anything I’ve learned over many years of practicing Slow Sex, it’s that fighting against desire gets you nowhere. Long ago, I agreed to go wherever desire took me, and the reward I’ve gotten in return is the opportunity to live a turned-on life. When we decide to fuel our life with desire rather than fear, it’s like switching tanks. It’s the difference between running on fossil fuel versus solar power. When we choose solar, we are no longer forced to mine
our own resources in order to get where we’re going. What fuels us now is the endless resource of turn-on. We move from the “action” channel to the “receiving” channel—from a place of accomplishing things by
doing
to a place of accomplishing things simply by
receiving
. This is the glory of the desire-based life: things become easy; synchronicities abound; and everything you desire comes your way almost effortlessly.

Turn-on is available everywhere, at all times—you need only tune in to your desire to access it. When you pay attention to your desire, you learn what brings you enjoyment. And the natural outcome of enjoyment is turn-on. When you follow where your desire takes you, you can’t help but be carried away by turn-on. That’s why we come back to activities we love again and again. We feel nourished by our own enjoyment, by the opportunity to sink our roots deeply into something and receive turn-on in return.

When we start living with desire as our compass, everything begins to change. We start to see all the ways in which our habits are getting in the way of actually living. All the rules we’ve been taught—fake it till you make it, win at any cost, suck it up, never give up—are effective if you want to get ahead in the world at the cost of any chance at true happiness. But the world of enjoyment has an entirely different set of rules: Increase attention rather than pressure. Fill up before you extend outward. Follow your desire until turn-on flows. If it feels like work, change the stroke. When in doubt, play.

Such a switch requires nothing less than a reworking of your entire relationship to your own desire. Taking desire from the cranky passenger in the backseat and inviting it to take the wheel. And—this is important—
to drive wherever it wants to go
. And by “wherever,” I mean anywhere, anytime. With the promise that you will hang on for the ride, regardless of where your desire takes you.

It’s a big leap, to voluntarily surrender control and let your desire forge the path instead of your “appropriate” mind. It’s the leap of a lifetime, in fact. But until you’re willing to take this leap, you are not truly living. For this is the leap
into life
, into your own life, your little life, the one you were handed on your way in and asked to take care of for seventy or ninety years. And where has it been all this time? Hidden in a closet? Stuffed in the trunk? The time has come to bring that golden gift out into the world. To set it on a green grassy hillside and give it the space to relearn how to play. I say “relearn,” because it already knows. Our desire comes fully equipped with all the information it needs to do its part, we only have to stop trying to control it so very much.

Orgasmic Meditation is about finding our way back toward our desire, the piece that truly knows, so we can start to lead with it. The good news is that once we agree to let desire be our primary orientation, turn-on does the rest. It’s as if life carries us along, opening all the right doors and directing us toward our true purpose. That’s not to say that every stroke is guaranteed to be pleasurable from there on out—it won’t be. Life is full of both upstrokes and downstrokes, strokes that are pleasurable and strokes that are not. What we learn instead is that contrary to our previous belief, there is turn-on available regardless of the stroke. We can get off on the downs just as well as the ups, sometimes even more so. And when we stop holding a preference for one stroke over another, we have access to the greatest commodity available in life: freedom.

Getting Off on Any Stroke

When we begin to OM, we explore all the different strokes that are possible—up, down, light, heavy, and more. Inevitably, we end up developing certain preferences: “I like upstrokes best.” “I like to start softly and build to firmer pressure.” We learn to feel our own desire and start getting comfortable asking for what we want from our partner, and this is an important stage in our practice. There comes a time, however, when we have gotten comfortable asking for the stroke we crave, and we never want anything
but
that stroke. Sooner or later, we feel like we can’t get off without that particular stroke, like it is the only stroke that will ever make us happy.

In OM that may be fine; we can theoretically always ask for our stroker to shift and give us what we want. Life at large is a different story. In our world, we are presented with all sorts of different strokes, and we don’t always get to choose which one is coming our way. One day it seems we’re getting everything we want. We feel like we’re golden and can do no wrong. Other days we feel like the whole world is against us and nothing is going right. We tend to have a preference for the good day, the “upstroke.” We do everything we can to protect ourselves from the downstroke of the bad day. Which would be an okay idea, except that it never works. The downstroke comes, whether we resist it or not. In the process of trying to protect ourselves from the strokes we object to, we end up expending a lot of energy and not getting very far.

One of the most incredible opportunities in OM is the fact that it is a microcosm of this dynamic. Some days our partner is a master stroker and is getting us just right, and
other days he’s an ape-man who we never should have married in the first place. One day we love the stroke he’s giving us, and the next we wish the OM was over before it even begins. Rather than being a problem, the latter can be an opportunity, that is, an opportunity to play with the possibility of getting off on any stroke at all, whether it’s the one you prefer or not. The stakes are lower during an OM than they are in life. Once you know that you
could
ask your partner to shift stroke and give you something more pleasurable, you have the freedom to wait a few strokes before asking. Discover what it feels like to hold in a stroke that may not be your favorite, and see whether you could get off on it anyway. This knowledge—that no matter which stroke is coming your way, you can draw enjoyment from it—is the equivalent of learning how to say “yes” to life.

Exercise. Feeling the Sensation of “Yes”

Just saying the word “yes” has a physical impact. This short exercise is meant to help you familiarize yourself with the feeling of “yes” in your own body.

You will need a quiet spot, about ten minutes, and your journal for this exercise.

Step One. Sit comfortably, take a few deep breaths, and feel for the sensations in your body until you are sure you’ve set down your anchor. This exercise requires you to feel what is going on in your body, so take as long as you need to in order to get in touch with your sensations.

Step Two. Once you are anchored in sensation, repeat the word “yes” out loud several times. Say “yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” Notice what sensations it brings up for you. Where do you feel it in your body? Describe what it feels like—its texture, motion, speed, color, and pressure. Say “yes, yes, yes” a few more times if necessary until you have locked the sensations of that word into your memory.