Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm (7 page)

The second reason we don’t pay attention to our sex is that we aren’t that good at it. Life in our time is a noisy place to be. We’ve got advertising screaming at us all day long; we’ve got TV and hard rock and the roar of traffic. With all this ruckus, how are we supposed to hear the subtle cues, the fine-tuned messages, that want to come through—especially during sex? Many of my students don’t even believe there
is
such a thing. I talk about listening to the space, listening to our sex, and my students are ready to pack up their things and go. They didn’t sign up for any New Age claptrap and here I go, asking them to listen to things that—let’s see, how can I put this gently?—
don’t talk
.

I don’t get offended. In our loud and frantic world, such attention is in limited supply. And yet attention is required if you’re going to become an artist, of sex or anything else. It is the fairy dust that turns straw into gold, the way you turn up the volume so you can hear your world talking to you. But unless you were raised by Buddhist monks and left in a cave to contemplate the tip of your nose for the first couple decades of your life, you probably don’t have much practice cultivating attention. I demonstrate this fact in class by conducting a simple exercise. I give each student a beautiful flower and tell them to pay attention to it for ninety seconds. No need to think anything particular about it—they’re not going to be asked to describe it later, there will be no quiz. They’re only to observe the flower.

When the exercise is over, I ask the students whether the flower was more vibrant at the beginning of the exercise or at the end. Every single hand goes up for “at the beginning.” I don’t think I’ve ever had a student answer differently. Over time—even just over the course of a minute and a half—our attention wanes. This seems normal, doesn’t it? It happens all the time. The day you hang a new painting on the wall, it’s all you see when you walk into the room. By day three, you barely notice it anymore. Same thing happens in relationship: at the beginning of a relationship you are euphoric, and your new love is literally all you can think about. Check back three years later, and the situation is likely to have settled. You’re used to having her around, and as much as you may still love her, your attention has moved on to other things. It’s inevitable.

Or is it? I am going to make a big statement in saying that it is
not
inevitable. Attention is a skill we can develop as much or as little as we choose. Should you choose to develop yours—say, through the practice of OM, just as an example—you will see that there is no limit to its possibility. Attention makes everything around us better. Relationships can become more and more enjoyable day by day. Sexual interest can grow, rather than wane, over time. And OM is the best way I know to develop sustainable attention. I’m going to take a big position here: you can’t have great sex without sustainable attention. Not just because you won’t be there to know whether you’re having great sex or not, which you won’t. But actually because attention is the special sauce. Attention makes sex exponentially better. It’s like salting your food. Ever wonder why a bland meal magically comes to life with just a pinch of salt? Me,
too. How does salt
do
it? Attention does the same thing. Think of it as salt for sex. For reasons that do not make themselves immediately clear, a pinch of attention can turn previously tasteless sex into a gourmet meal. It can get you into relationship with your partner and yourself and what you’re doing right now.

“When you said I needed to be listening to my sex, I thought I was in big trouble,” more than one student has explained. “I have been told I can’t even listen to my wife.”

Not to worry. OM itself is an excellent way to learn the art of listening. The upside is that you’re going to be able to unlock the secrets of the universe. The downside is that once you have more attention to spare, there will be no more excuses for not taking out the garbage.

The Power of Sensation

So you’re game to give this old attention-cultivation thing a try. But what is it, exactly, that you’re going to be paying attention to? You want to learn how to listen, but what are you supposed to be listening to? The answer is
sensation
. Sensation is the star of the show, both in sex and in life. In fact, I would argue that it’s our primary motivation for just about everything. We want money so we can buy the sensations of luxury, security, status, and even the ability to help others. We want relationship because we desire the sensations of sex, and companionship, as well as being seen and understood. We usually think of these desires as external circumstances or internal emotions, but
in fact, all of them correspond to feelings in the body—sensations.

“Why do I OM? The one word that comes up is ‘
desire
.’ I have always had a desire to get more out of sex. And that’s what I got when I started OMing, when I learned how to connect to my sensation at the most basic level. I just feel
more
when I OM.”

—Tom, 56

Sensations are perceived using one or more of our five senses. The smell of a beautiful flower is a sensation, as is the taste of a decadent piece of chocolate. With a few exceptions, when we’re talking about sensation in the context of sex we’re talking about our sense of touch. Touch goes deeper than feeling something with our fingers—anything you feel in your body is coming through your sense of touch. You know you’re hungry because you feel the sensation of hunger in your belly; you know you just stepped on a thorn because you feel the sensation of pain in your foot. And of course, you know you are attracted to someone when you feel the sensations of arousal. The sensations of arousal are different for everyone, but they might include a feeling of heat centralized in the genitals, a feeling of pleasure expanding throughout your body, and more. These are all experienced through your sense of touch.

What you may not understand yet is how tricky this territory actually is. Sensation sounds easy enough, but you’d be surprised how difficult it is for most of my new students to name even one sensation they are feeling in their bodies right this very moment. There’s a tendency to
cross-reference sensation with our “feelings”—to name an emotion rather than a sensation. What I’m looking for is something like “A heavy, flattened feeling under my thighs as I sit in this chair.” What I often hear instead is something like “happiness” or “anxiety” or “annoyance.” The former is sensation—something felt with the sense of touch. The latter is emotion—an interpretation of what sensation
means
.

It’s not as if most of us have much experience naming our sensations. Even if we can identify one—say, that dense, dark, fluttery sensation that’s kind of below the heart but toward the back, maybe near the left kidney—we don’t necessarily have the words to express it. After all, we grow up trying to push away a lot of our sensations, particularly those we’ve categorized as “negative.” From the first day of school when we announce the feeling of butterflies in our stomachs and are immediately told that we’re “just feeling nervous,” we are taught to reframe sensation as emotion. While the two are obviously related—nerves often do result in a fluttery feeling in the stomach—the message we’re getting is that when we feel sensation, the next step is interpretation. The sensation itself is not really worth discussing. Instead, when we feel something in the body, we either ignore it or retreat to the mind to reason ourselves back to comfort.

Like any other skill, if we don’t use our feeling sense, we lose it. What we ignore tends to fade away. So most of us arrive in the world of Slow Sex and discover that our sensory detection system is out of order. And we wonder why we’re not getting the sensation we desire from our sex lives! We’re so out of practice that oftentimes neither the stroker nor the receiver feels very much when he or she is
first starting to OM. The stroke is so fine—like the lightest of feathers—that it seems like “nothing is happening.” I get a lot of cranky practitioners coming back after trying OM for the first time, saying that they just can’t do it. This practice is not going to work for them—they’re not getting anywhere.

My response is—fantastic! You’ve just made one of the biggest discoveries of your life, one that most people will never take the time to learn. You’re recognizing that your sensory system has been underused, neglected, and even repressed. The very system that is motivating your life is completely out of order. It’s why men have a hard time feeling their way when they’re pleasuring a woman, why they can’t access their own gut instinct about how to make her feel good every single time. And of course, it’s why women have a hard time really sinking down into the experience of sex—without access to their own sensations, how are they supposed to feel sex and know their own orgasm? Not to mention to extract the enjoyment and nourishment they crave from it, that they know is available but can’t seem to access.

But don’t lose heart—now that you know what’s gone awry, there’s hope! It’s like people who say they can’t do yoga because they aren’t flexible enough, or people who say they can’t meditate because their mind keeps wandering. The whole point of yoga is to develop flexibility. The whole point of meditation is to develop your attention skills. And the whole point of OM—or one of them, anyway—is to cultivate the ability to feel. To feel your sexuality, your sensations, and your world, starting with what’s happening in your body right now.

“I had gotten to the point where I didn’t think I was a sexual person anymore. I hadn’t felt any sort of sex drive for years. At first I couldn’t feel his stroke at all when we OMed, but over the course of the first few weeks I started to feel a little more and then a little more. And then that same feeling started to translate to regular sex. I found myself actually looking forward to sex for the first time in as long as I can remember.”

—Shari, 51

It’s easy to see why we’re so addicted to addition. What we want in life is more and more sensation, right? But since so few of us have working sensation detection systems, the natural tendency is to want to add more and more until we
can
feel something. It’s like someone who is losing their hearing and starts turning up the volume on the TV. Pretty soon you’ve got the thing on so loud that the windowpanes are vibrating and the dog is hiding under the bed. Rather than increasing attention, most of us opt to increase the noise. We don’t have enough attention to keep sensation vibrant (remember the flower exercise?) so we keep adding more and more and more sensation in hopes of recapturing the experience of seeing the flower for the first time. We’ve grown used to roses so we breed ever bigger varieties, with ever more enormous blooms, in ever more fantastic colors. We’ve grown used to our partners so we add new sex positions and eye-gazing practices and toys and porn to help get ourselves in the mood again. The problem is that this strategy never works. No matter how outlandish our sex becomes, without cultivating our attention and our ability to feel sensation, we’ll eventually be
numb to even the most radical sexual practices. Instead, we need to get back to basics. Get our attention burning brighter and then use it to experience the pure sensations available in our bodies all the time. It’s the only way to make sex sustainable—not to mention that it’s a whole lot less traumatic for the dog.

Exercise. Listening to Your Body During Sex

Sex is one of the most fun, most exciting, and most satisfying activities available on planet Earth—so why do so many of us check out completely while it’s going on? We’re in our heads, or thinking about what we’ll cook for dinner, or caught up in a fantasy that has little to nothing to do with what’s going on in our bodies in the present moment. Whatever our particular brand of zoning out, for most of us the experience is the same. We’re not observing—and thus not enjoying—the fireworks display of pure physical sensation that is happening in our very own bodies.

So here’s your assignment: the next time you are engaged in a sexual encounter (whether with another person or flying solo), set the intention to simply
feel the sensation in your genitals
. This may sound remedial—isn’t that what we do when we have sex, we feel our genitals? But if you’re like most of us, you’ll discover the surprising truth that you have been spending most of your sex life thinking about everything
but
the feeling in your genitals. You’ve been thinking about your partner’s experience, or how long an orgasm is taking, or about the celebrity you always think about when you’re having sex. Instead, this one time, pay attention to the sensation in your genitals.

Try to name at least one sensation you can feel. If you’re practicing as a couple, describe the sensation to your partner. Use color, texture, motion, and location. Otherwise simply name the sensation you are feeling to yourself. Try to stay aware of your genitals for the rest of the encounter.

Practicing Orgasmic Meditation may not be the
only
way to retrain ourselves to feel sensation, but it’s surely the most fun. It’s also the most effective: there really isn’t any more intense, more potent, more electric source of physical sensation we can access than our own sexuality. So why not start there? OM gets right to the heart of the matter, putting our most sensitive body parts to their very best use. There are a lot of other meditation practices out there, from basic breathing meditation to more embodied visualization practices, all of which can work very well for cultivating your attention. (For some recommendations, see Further Resources at the back of the book.) I should know, because I’ve tried them all. Before I found OM, I was about to throw in the towel on sex altogether and join a Zen monastery. But there was a little voice that kept nagging at the back of my mind. It said that for me, leaving my sexuality behind was never going to bring me the sensations I craved. The sensations of deep satisfaction, enjoyment, and aliveness. I knew the voice was right: for me, the skill of drawing enjoyment from every experience, in every moment of my life, could be learned only through sex. Maybe the same goes for you.