Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm (9 page)

Now, if that’s not three good reasons to put OM on your to-do list, I don’t know what would be. So let’s get started, shall we?

Chapter Three

How to OM

W
henever someone asks me why I OM, the first answer that comes to mind is the simplest: OMing feels
good
. It feels connected and sensuous and nourishing and whole. It soothes, satiates, renews, and energizes. It is simply the most delicious physical experience I have ever had. When I first heard about OM, of course, it didn’t sound like much. A very simple stroke, a limited time period—could it really be that big a deal? Just hearing the instructions, you can’t really understand how deeply it can touch you, how quickly it can activate all of your pleasure centers, how exquisitely, deliciously precise a single stroke can feel—for the stroker and the receiver alike. You simply have to go to the kitchen and feel it yourself. So let’s get cooking. Here is your primer on the steps of the practice of Orgasmic Meditation.

Step One: Asking for an OM

You can feel the whole world in a single stroke of OM. All the pleasure and the pain and the joy and the sadness that are part of our sex lives and our relationships and our lives in general—all of it can be felt in just one stroke. The same could be said of the first step of the practice: asking someone to OM with you. In the act of extending toward another person, expressing your desire, and inviting them to share such an intimate experience, you can taste everything you could ever want from the practice itself: all the enjoyment, all the connection, all the nourishment you are looking for. You let go of expectation and strategy, feel the sensations in your body, and ask for what you desire—the rest takes care of itself.

That doesn’t mean it will be easy, especially at first. Even for couples who have been together for a long time (and perhaps especially for couples who have been together for a long time) it can feel very vulnerable to voice a sexual desire. The thought alone can set off a fireworks display of fears, leaving us raw and edgy in our most tender spots. If we do find the courage to ask, we then have to field the response. There are few moments as saturated with sensation as the moment a request for sex has crossed your lips and is still hanging in the air, waiting for either acceptance or rejection. We can’t seem to help assigning a lot of significance to the outcome. If she says yes, it means you are attractive, acceptable, desirable, sexy. If he says no, it means you are the opposite of all those things. These are, of course, just interpretations; they are not the truth. They complicate matters, as a student of mine recently discovered. He had asked his wife for an OM one morning, and she asked if they could do it after work instead because she had an early meeting.
“That’s what she said,” he told me, “But what I heard was that she isn’t attracted to me anymore, and she wants to postpone sex as long as possible. Since I’ve been OMing, I’m learning to notice where my mind goes. I saw immediately how much interpretation I was adding to what she had actually said.” The key is to remember that we have a choice. We can strip down and be present for whatever answer we get, without making it more complex than it needs to be. The graceful simplicity of a “yes” or a “no” can be enough.

Luckily, there is a law of the universe written somewhere that says the more we do something, the less it has the ability to terrify us. So it is with asking for an OM. One thing that helps is to strip down the request to the bare essentials. Be as simple, direct, and honest as possible when you’re asking. “Would you like to OM?” is all you need to say. You can let go of the song-and-dance routine, the romantic lines, the beating around the bush that normally come with making a sexual request, and simply ask. There is power in the clean, honest, straightforward communication of a desire. At the very least, it begs to be met by a similarly honest response.

Pay attention to the sensations in your body while you ask. We often get a whole lot of sensation when we start asking for OMs. It might begin as a sparkly explosion somewhere in your thoracic zone, contracting briefly before expanding, Big Bang–like, throughout the rest of your body. Perhaps you notice whether it starts directly at the center of your being, or if in truth it starts a little off to the left and kind of farther in back. Whether it seems to travel more up or more down; whether it stops at the tips of your tingly fingers or instead seems to expand beyond the confines of your physical body. There’s something magical about simply agreeing to stay in the experience, come what may,
rather than stepping even a half inch to the left or to the right. When we step out of our experience, what we tend to step into is commentary and/or interpretation. If you really commit to feeling your body, the sensation itself is so fascinating that you have little time to think about much else.

Exercise. How to Ask for an OM

• Use the question to trigger as much sensation as possible in you and your partner. Often we try to limit the amount of sensation we might cause because we’re afraid we can’t handle it. So we’ll play it off with humor, pretend we don’t care one way or the other what response we get, or make the request about need rather than desire. Resist the temptation to deaden sensation. Ask the question in the simplest but most authentic way you possibly can, and then let the sensation spread out to your whole body as you await your partner’s reply.
  
• Feel your vulnerability. By asking for an OM, you are turning on the lights, so to speak, and admitting your own desire to be sexual. This is unfamiliar territory for most of us. Most of the time, our fear of rejection keeps us from asking openly for the connection we crave. Stepping forward with your request becomes an opportunity to feel your own soft spot, your own heart.
  
• Be gentle with yourself and your partner. Your desire is like a tender shoot; treat it with great kindness, as if it were someone else’s precious possession that has been left in your care. Resist the temptation to demonize your partner if he or she says no, or to beat yourself up for asking. It’s the offer they’re turning down, not you. Let them know you honor their response, and don’t be afraid to honor yourself for the courage it took to ask.
  

The OM itself begins the moment the date is actually set. As the anticipation builds, so does the sexual energy. Pay attention to the sensation “in the in-between,” right here, right now. Conventional wisdom says that the most potent sensation can be felt at the culmination of a sensory experience—at the climax, or in this case, once the OM has begun—but you may find that you actually experience more sensation before you lie down to practice. It may come in the form of overt anticipation, turn-on, or excitement. It may also come in the disguise I call “tumescence,” which is when turn-on is building in the body and gets frozen because it has no place to go. The result can be less than sexy: the urge to cry, pick a fight, call off the OM, or zone out by [insert preferred method for zoning out here].

Instead, try and stay alert. Notice what’s happening inside of you. And, if you can remember, feel for your desire. It’s the moments just prior to getting what we want that offer the richest experience of longing, of yearning. Don’t believe me? Think back to what you felt like just before your first kiss. All that wanting, about to be realized. Try to stay that present as you move closer and closer to your OM.

“We OM a couple of times a week, at night. I started to notice I would get a little excited and aroused at work in the late afternoons. It’s like I would start wanting to bounce off the walls. Then I realized it was always on the days we OMed, like something was already building. It was kind of cool when I noticed that.”

—Gretchen, 28

Step Two: Setting Up the Nest and Getting into Position

There is a beautiful coffee shop near where I write, where they make each cup of coffee using an individual drip filter. Each cup is brewed to order, and you get to watch them dampen the filter, grind the beans, and then pour the hot water over the grounds using a copper kettle. There is something infinitely richer about the coffee that results because you have watched them carefully tend to your particular cup. Their slow attention somehow adds a special, magical quality. It’s the same magical quality that comes from carefully setting up the space where you will OM. While the OMing space or “nest” is simple, even practical, take the time to create it intentionally. Lay down blankets, place the pillows, make sure the timer is set, and then position yourselves. This slow approach is very different from the way we usually operate, especially when it comes to sex. In sex, we tend to react to a feeling of hunger by trying to feed it as quickly as possible. In the process, we miss out on feeling the sensation of our own desire. We keep our eyes on the prize of climax, never slowing down long enough to savor, appreciate, and be nourished by all the sensation that is available in the plateau that comes just prior to “going over.” If we were to take this same finish-line approach in OM, we would miss out on the sensation of sexual energy, building as the space is being prepared. As we carefully retrieve everything we will need, we get to feel our own anticipation for the OM that is to come—some sweet sensation, indeed.

A different reason to take care in preparing the space is that the nest we’re creating needs to feel comfortable, safe, and secure enough so that both partners can truly relax. We
know that the pillows will support us and that the supplies will be within reach, so there’s no fear that the experience will be interrupted in the middle. We have everything we need right there. As I mentioned earlier, women especially have a physiological need to feel safe and held during sex, or we have a hard time relaxing into orgasm. Taking the time to set up a warm, cozy nest is the best way to help her ease effortlessly into the OM.

When I mention to my students that the primary responsibility for creating the nest falls to the stroker, the revelation usually results in a few raised eyebrows. From a conventional perspective OMing might already look like it is out of balance—the man almost always strokes, and the woman almost always receives. This division of labor is intentional. One of the most revolutionary benefits of OM is that it gives us the rare opportunity to reset our systems, stripping away all the ideas we have about how things are “supposed” to go, so we can sink down and experience what
is
actually happening, right now. We begin by reversing all our norms and test-driving something new in their place. This reversal may look like it caters unfairly to the women, but many men discover that there is something deep within them that gets touched—and feels inexplicably good—when they are called into service in this way.

Male Stroking

“What about the men?”

This is one of my favorite questions. Which is a good thing, since I get it all the time. The first question most people have about OM is what the practice entails; the second is, “What about the men?”

The question they’re asking is whether a man ever gets the chance to be stroked—if there’s any reciprocity in this picture. The answer is that yes, it is possible to stroke a man. In fact, I’ve included instructions in the appendix. If you’re wondering why female stroking gets its own chapter while male stroking is relegated to the appendix, you’re probably not alone. The fact that the practice is mostly about stroking the women goes against our sense of give-and-take, our standard sexual accounting. But unless the practice is happening between two men, I always have couples begin with female stroking exclusively. I introduce male stroking only after the couple has been practicing OM for six months or more. There are two reasons why we begin this way. First, before we can really make Slow Sex our default, we have a lot of unlearning to do. Though individual cases may vary, on the whole women tend to have a lot (and I’m talking
a lot
) of negative conditioning regarding sex. Much more than men do, in fact. Until we thaw out the iceberg of fear and shame that encases a lot of female sexuality in our culture—a thawing out that happens naturally when she is stroked—there is a tendency for her to return to her old habits of pleasing and trying to make sex look a certain way. For some women this melting happens quickly; for others it can take months or even years. Regardless of how long it takes, it’s worth it in the long run to clear her system first. Once she is truly turned on, she can be a much more potent force in helping him melt his personal icebergs.

The second reason we start by stroking the women is to allow the men to explore the territory of orgasm in a new way. The orgasmic experience of OM is not the exclusive territory of the person being stroked. As the man becomes more attuned to his partner’s body, he begins to feel a lot of sensation himself. This is a revelation to most of us, because we’ve always thought that orgasm could be felt only within the physical confines of the person “having” it. But that’s just because we haven’t honed our sensory equipment. Once we strip sex down and really pay attention to our sensations, we discover that we are able to feel the orgasm happening in other people’s bodies as well as our own. Women, who have a natural capacity for connection, tend to get this intuitively. Men tend to need more practice in order to feel it—practice that comes, conveniently, through stroking. So as tempting as it may be to make OM a give-and-take experience, my advice is to leave the rule of reciprocity aside for now and focus exclusively on stroking her for the time being.