Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm (3 page)

Make this discovery, and suddenly all of our expectations about sex, orgasm, women and men, relationships, and life get reset. Now, isn’t it about time?

About This Book

This book is an introduction to the philosophy of Slow Sex and the practice of Orgasmic Meditation. It’s modeled on my Slow Sex workshops and is meant as a beginner’s guide—an instruction manual that will allow you to begin practicing the principles of Slow Sex right away (or by the end of chapter 3, at any rate). I have set it up in much the same way you would learn the content if you were with me in class. First, we’ll talk about what Slow Sex is and why you’d want to practice it in the first place. Then I’ll walk you step by step through the practice of Orgasmic Meditation, including our “Ten Day Starter Program,” which will help you and your partner build a sustainable—and don’t forget enjoyable—practice. Once we’ve got you OMing, I’ll tell you all sorts of other secrets: what OM teaches us about women, men, and sex, right up to and including instructions for how to have a four-month orgasm. (Try not to skip ahead. Just try.)

In addition to the OM practice, I’ve included a variety of experiential exercises guaranteed to bring the Slow Sex revolution right to the comfort of your very own home. The core practice of OM and most of the other sexuality practices in the book require a partner. If you don’t currently have a partner or friend-with-benefits to practice with, don’t worry; there’s still a lot to learn. The ultimate outcome of OM is to
return the center of our sexual universe to our very own bodies. We’ve come to believe that our sexuality depends upon the right
external
circumstances—a partner who wants to have sex with us, say, or a body we’re willing to let see the light of day. But in reality, sexuality arises from the inside out. So the work I’m teaching in this book begins with you. My OM workshops are open to individual practitioners as well as couples, and there is wisdom here for those who ultimately take up the practice and for those who do not. So don’t worry if you don’t have a partner right now: either you will be intrigued enough by the end of the book to find one, or you can keep your focus—well, more focus––on reviving your own sexuality and the way you relate to your world.

Speaking of individual experience, please take this book at your own pace. Looking deeply at your own sexuality isn’t always easy. We have so much negative conditioning around sex, it’s really a wonder anyone decides to dive into Slow Sex at all. I remember when I first realized that sexuality was my vocation. I went to tell my mother that her only child, who’d been wandering for so long, had finally discovered her life’s calling. She was thrilled to hear I’d landed on something—until she heard
what
I’d landed on. Mom practically crumpled into a heap on the floor when I told her it was sex. I had to poke at her with a finger to make sure she was still breathing. Of course I felt bad. Not so much because she was disappointed in me (which she clearly was) or because she was going to beat herself up for whatever mistakes she’d made that had led her only daughter to
this
(which she did—for a while), but because I saw, through her response, the way all of us feel about sexuality, to some degree or another. Sex was so bad that my mere participation in it had my mother trading in her
minidress for a black shroud. I made a promise then and there that I would devote myself to making the place I was going—the world of sexuality—less painful for everyone, Mom included.

So don’t worry if you start to get the heebie-jeebies as you read this book. (If so, feel free to jump to chapter 4, Troubleshooting, where you’ll discover that you’re far from alone.) Freak-outs come with the territory. Take things slowly, and work within your right range. You may feel like you’ve found the practice you’ve been looking for your whole life, or you may think OM is completely insane. You may run to your computer to sign up for a Slow Sex teleclass or workshop,
¹
or you may decide you will heretofore avoid San Francisco entirely and forever for fear of running into yours truly. You may read the whole book in one sitting, or you may put it down and come back to it in a week or a month or a year. Whatever your response, go with it. The process of reconnecting with your sexuality looks different for everyone. It happens only as fast as it is supposed to happen. My request is that you simply follow your own desire. Feel for the sweet spot. What do you want? If you want to keep reading, do. If you want to do the practices, do. If not, don’t. Whatever you do, make sure you’re doing it out of desire. It’s the only compass you’ve been given in this world, and you
can
trust it. It may not lead you where you thought you were going, but it will never lead you astray.

Nicole Daedone

San Francisco, CA

May 2010

Chapter One

The Art of Slow Sex

A
s I stand in front of my new students on the first day of a Slow Sex workshop, it’s like I’m a captain at the prow of a ship on a foggy night. The mist that hangs in the air between me and the class is so thick I can hardly see their faces.

It’s the mist of abject terror. Holy mother, they’re in a
sex class
.

Through the fog they’re sizing me up, checking me out. If they’re in a sex class, then I must be the sex teacher.
So that’s what a sex teacher looks like.
It’s hard not to open my mouth and say something hot, raunchy, and shocking just to see how far they’ll jump out of their seats.

Alas, when I open my mouth the first thing I start talking about is my grandma. Not as titillating as they’re hoping for, I realize, but there’s nothing I can do. Grandma is where it all begins.

I was an only child, raised by my mother and my grandma. Grandma was an amazing cook. She was an old world–style cook, an immigrant from the Ukraine who knew how to make a mean borscht. Cooking for her loved ones—and
I was at the top of that list—was her favorite thing to do. She was a force of nature both in and out of the kitchen, and I was half afraid of her, half in love with her. I would watch her move from stove to sink to refrigerator with the precision of a dancer, the fascination of watching her cook outweighing the consequences of getting in her way.

Then, when I was fifteen, Grandma had a heart attack. The whole family was on edge, waiting. When the diagnosis came, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that she would survive; the bad news was that the condition was degenerative, and her heart was deteriorating. They didn’t know how long she would live.

I was in a Home Ec class at the time, and I was cooking up a storm. Since Grandma was always cooking for everyone else, I thought, I will bring her something we make in class to show her how much I love her. So one afternoon after she got home, I brought her a dish we’d prepared that day. I set it on the table with great fanfare, waiting expectantly for her to take her first bite and shower me with praise. What happened was not what I was looking for, to say the least. She took a bite, yes, but she spit it back out before she even chewed it. I was shocked and then asked her what was wrong.

“You killed this food with the recipe,” she said, matter-of-factly, and got up to start dinner.

I was, of course, mortified. But more than that, I was confused. What did she mean, I’d killed the food with the recipe? I made this thing in
class
, lady. A class I’m getting an A in, thank you very much. The whole point was to follow the recipe. If you don’t follow a recipe, I stewed, how are you supposed to know how to cook the freaking dish?

Once I regained control of my hormone-driven teenage
emotions, I entered the kitchen and asked her, as calmly as possible, how one learned to cook without a recipe. She turned her ancient gaze toward me. I remember she looked tired, but wise. After a long pause she said, with what sounded like resignation, “Okay. I will teach you.”

And with that, I started learning what it meant to cook without a recipe. For my first lesson, she said, I would go to the Russian supermarket and buy her favorite cabbage cigarettes. She would stay home and make soup.

There were toilets to clean after that, and other household chores to be done in entirely different parts of the house. All this while she stood in the kitchen and cooked. I tried not to be irritated, but I’ve never been very good at trying not to be something I am. I huffed and puffed, taking great pains to stomp past the kitchen as often as possible so she could get a taste of what
I
was cooking. But if she sensed my annoyance, she never showed it—she just let me drag the vacuum cleaner up and down the hallway as noisily as I pleased and never said a thing.

A friend asked me if I wanted to go to the mall after school. “No,” I said. “My grandma is teaching me how to cook.”

“Cool,” she said.

“Hrumpf,” I replied.

But then one day I showed up, and as I headed for the vacuum closet, Grandma summoned me to the kitchen.

“Today,” she said, “we will make pierogi.”

Once my disbelief wore off, I started jumping up and down. She shot me a look that told me to check my enthusiasm and put on an apron. (How do old women communicate so much with just one sideways glance?) At the counter, she let me watch as she mixed the flour and eggs
and water to make the dough. Then it was my turn. She turned the dough out onto the floury counter, and told me to knead it. I had barely made a turn of the dough before she was behind me, pinching my arm. “Feel that? That’s what you’re doing to the dough! How do you think it feels, being pinched like that?”

I looked at her like she was insane. How does the
dough
feel? But a few more corrective arm pinches and I was massaging that dough with the same care and attention you’d use to powder a baby’s bottom. Soon, I announced I was done and the dough was ready to be rolled out.

“How do you know it’s done?” Grandma asked.

It was a good question. How
did
I know it was done? I don’t know. It just was—it was done. Grandma looked at me with an expression at once amused and relieved.

“You are ready now, Nicole,” she said.

That one day in the kitchen changed my life. In Home Ec, we learned to cook by finding a recipe and following its instructions exactly. We were rewarded for this good behavior by getting a meal and a good grade. In my grandma’s world, we were getting into relationship with the food. Feeling it. Getting to know it. Learning how it wanted to be cooked. I wasn’t even allowed to put on the apron until I was in relationship with my grandma—until I knew what cigarettes she liked to smoke and how she wanted her toilet bowl cleaned. Now I was getting into relationship with the dough, discovering how it wanted to be kneaded.

My grandma was teaching me the most important lesson of cooking, but also of living: anything you really get into relationship with will reveal its secrets to you. All you have to do is stand in the kitchen with an open mind and heart,
recognizing the honor of cooking food for your family. The recipe will come.

This is a lesson I have never forgotten. It was the lesson of learning the difference between cooking as a science and cooking as an art. In science, we know that you make a cake by mixing together sugar and flour and eggs. You start from a position of knowledge—from a well-tested recipe—and you follow its rules until you have a cake. But for Grandma, the process started with a question: how does this particular cake
want
to be put together? These approaches come from two entirely different worlds. The first is the world of science—the science of cooking, but also of living. You take these rules, you apply them, and assuming you do it all right, the result is pretty much guaranteed. The second is where you begin to move into the
art
of living. You don’t know where you’re going and the results aren’t guaranteed. You can give every single thing you have and not achieve the outcome you were hoping for. But what you do achieve is the experience of intimate relationship. You open yourself, and the answers come through you. You find that you know things you never knew before. You discover that a masterpiece doesn’t actually require you to master anything at all. It simply requires you to feel, to listen, and to trust yourself. That’s art.