My Day at the Orgasmic Meditation Class

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I was lying on the floor, naked below the waist with my knees apart, next to a stranger with two fingers full of lube. The stranger was planning to stroke my clitoris for 15 minutes, no more, no less. I was in a room full of other women, similarly splayed open like Thanksgiving turkeys next to their lubed-up, fully-dressed partners

Strangely, this was not my most uncomfortable moment last weekend at the One Taste's How to OM class in Los Angeles. 

That would be earlier in the day when our teachers Maya and Eli bounded into the room as Bon Jovi was cranked. They were dancing, doing that thing were you point to the ceiling, signifying that the song, indeed, rocks. We were to stand up and do the same thing, including the pointing part. I was mortified. Not only am I petrified of public dancing and forced group merriment (“I can't heeeear you...!”) but... Bon Jovi. I stood stiffly, not able to bring myself to point, not even just a little. It was a really long song.

So to sum up my personal boundaries thus far, Bon Jovi = no, clit stroking by stranger= totally onboard. You might see the situation differently.

Sometimes a lifetime of societal conditioning can fall away in a matter of hours. It happened to me that day at the OM class. And not in a I-drank-the-Kool-Aid way, but in the kind of way where your ideas are flipped but at the same time enhanced, it blows your fucking mind and you emerge better for it.

OMing, or Orgasmic Meditation, is a practice taught at OneTaste, a company founded by Nicole Daedone, author of Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm. OM is a practice in which clarity, mindfulness, and general in-touchedness with the universe is reached through extremely focused touch. Specifically, the touch of a partner's hand slowly and rhythmically stroking a woman's clitoris in a particular way. Sessions last 15 minutes and the goal is not orgasm, but rather heightened sexual awareness. And, as it turns out, having someone lavish attention on this particular body part for 15 minutes is extremely effective at heightening sexual awareness.  OM practitioners supposedly develop a heightened sensuality that extends into the rest of their lives, and can experience intense, deeper, fuckier fucks.

That sounded pretty good. I was in.

The class was filled with a balance of men and women, most from late 20 to 40s, I'd guess. The practice was all about experiencing sensation, whatever it turned out to be, explained preternaturally upbeat instructors Maya and Eli. Instead of the goal-oriented, orgasm-chasing sexual experience that we generally go for, we were to focus on the ride, letting things go wherever they were going to go. It was about surrender to the experience. According to the OneTaste philosophy, making focused contact with the incredibly nerve-rich clitoris can generate all kinds of electric sexual energy that can take both parties to amazing places. Additionally, the female gets to feel safe, accepted and non-pressured enough to dive into the depths of wherever her desire's gonna take her. The male gets to explore and enjoy the more (traditionally) “feminine” sexuality of goalless sensuality, plus, quite frankly, he can learn his way around a woman's genitalia.

There are rules. The practice is to be distinct from sex. Practitioners set up a “nest,” with pillows, a soft cushion and towels. The stroking can't go on longer than 15 minutes, even if one or more parties are begging for more. There is to be no exchanging of favors, i.e. “I stroked you, now you finish me off.” An OM is not something a man does to a woman, but something they do together. Gloves are worn. Lube is a must. Orgasm is not defined as the few seconds of contractions that we generally think of as orgasm, but rather the entire experience, starting with the first feelings of desire. The contraction part we generally refer to as an orgasm is called climax and may or may not happen.

By mid-morning we were ready to see a live demonstration. A table was wheeled out and a woman named Rachelle hopped up, lifted her dress and spread her legs. As Marcus, a serious looking computer guy-type with large black framed glasses, put his fingers to her pussy (that's what they call it there-- pussy.), my classmates craned their bodies to see. I looked at Rachelle's completely hairless nether regions and regretted my morning grooming decision to go with a landing strip.

In some sort of weirdly personal hierarchy of discomfort, I didn't mind that there was a half-naked woman groaning evocatively as Marcus (apparently quite masterfully!) stroked her through what seemed to be three climaxes. My problem again was with the whole group participation aspect. As a class, we were to participate by calling out the physical--not emotional--sensations we were having as we watched the OM. “I feel a heat in my face,” someone called out. “I feel a heaviness in my arm,” said another. “I feel wetness in my pussy,” several women said. “I feel completely icked out by the rest of you,” I would have said, especially as someone notified us of how their anus was responding, but I wasn't sure how to describe it as a "physical sensation."

At this point, we were sent to lunch after which we would try the practice ourselves. Because we all knew this and most of us had not come with a partner, there was a strange pick-up bar vibe to the day. Instead of just talking with your seatmate, you'd be assessing them, wondering if they should be the one who'd be touching you. For me, there was also a tremendous anxiety. What if it was like that one 7^th grade dance in Atlanta, Georgia, 1977, where all my friends got asked to dance and I didn't? Would I have to get one of the teachers have to OM with me? Would I just sit in my chair trying to act like it was ok while everyone got down to business?

It was all too much for me and when I got back from lunch, instead of mingling, I studied the commerce tables the OneTasters had set up. There were lots of higher level classes, semi-Scientology-style, that people could sign up for. One was a week-long intensive with Daedone. It was $36,000. Holy fuck. There was also a t-shirt that said “Powered by Pussy.” Even among this group, I couldn't imagine that being a big seller.

Finally I went up to Eli, hoping he might let me OM with a teacher. I was wishing that it could it be Marcus, because that dude really looked like he knew what he was doing. He looked like a master playing a rare instrument as he strummed Rachelle. But to my horror, when Eli nixed my idea about OMing with a teacher, I burst into tears.

“Just go ask that guy,” he said pointing to some guy, after comforting my sorry-ass unresolved-issues self. So I asked him. Oddly, the idea of doing so intimate with a complete stranger was way more okay than I thought it would be. When you OM with someone, it doesn't mean you are dating or that you will see them again or that you are even attracted to them. It just exists in this “container” as they call it and is nothing beyond the OM itself. Eli described a woman he had OMed with in Colorado. She was a super-butch, biker-chick lesbian, not someone he was attracted to at all or vice versa, but the electricity they generated together was, well, electric. “It's insane--I go blind from it!” he enthused.  I found this idea to be incredibly freeing.

Thus I found myself pantless and splayed open next to the lubed-up Peter*. I knew his name was Peter because his name tag said so. I found it somewhat amusing that we were like this and wearing name tags, but I didn't say anything.

Peter was to make a C shape with his left hand, lifting the hood of my clitoris with his thumb while stroking the upper left hand quadrant with his index finger. His right-hand thumb was to rest on my introitus, the opening to the vagina. (You can watch a how-to video at the OneTaste web site.) As we got down to it, Peter wasn't actually that close to where he was supposed to be, but instructors came around the room and guided his hand to the proper spots. I felt happy that, if nothing else, Peter was getting an education in finding a woman's clit.

As he rubbed, I could feel myself begin to throb and contract. It wasn't a orgasmic, I mean, climax-reaching kind of thing, but more an aliveness. It felt like maybe Peter's finger wasn't moving over my body, but rather that I was moving his finger. “Behold the glory of the pussy!” I thought to myself, thinking that Peter was—possibly for the first time—seeing the subtlety and great beauty of a woman's body when it is alive, open and free. I felt a bit beneficent about it, if you must know. Like I was schooling him on something really Big and Important.

However about midpoint, I started feeling a shooting pain in my left butt cheek. Sciatica. Crap! I shifted my legs and re-shifted, but every way still hurt. I finished out the session experiencing the sensation of “Ow.”

When it's all over, you're supposed to give each other a “frame,” that is, describe one moment of physical sensation that you had experienced. I was expecting to Peter to say something about how he had been schooled on pussy power but he said, “I didn't think anything was happening for you until the end part when you started moving your legs around.”

So. Yeah.

However, we both experienced something big, I think. It turned out it wasn't the same thing the other had felt, but maybe that doesn't even really matter. It seemed like Peter and I had ended up with a connection, of sorts, and I felt kindly toward him afterward. After, when he was told he had to pay $15 for the lube a OneTaste teacher had handed him, I felt kind of bad I didn't have any cash to pitch in.

In the end, I'm glad I went. It's heartening that there are so many people who want to connect on a deeper level sexually and were willing to explore. And, oddly, I feel empowered that I let a stranger stroke me and that it meant nothing beyond that.

As I drove through the hideous LA evening traffic on the way home, instead of blaring the radio and getting angry as is my usual way, I sat in silence, feeling chill and enjoying the quiet. And I didn't feel like crying anyone.

xoxo
jill

*Not his real name. Which was Ben.

An edited version of this first appeared on Alternet and Salon. I like this one a little better, but maybe I'm like a home seller with the purple walls who refuses to paint over them for the Open House. 

Photo: Rudolf Koppitz

"For purposes of example, this is the best fuck of my life"--Nicole Daedone in "On Fucking"

"Rule number one. You are not going to enter her until her pussy is dripping, until the walls have caved in because they are so swollen and fat. Until you can no longer hold your body away, where it feels like there is this undertow so strong that you cannot resist."

So advises Nicole Daedone in On Fucking, a piece on how, exactly, to enflame a woman's desire. (Note: "pussy is dripping" = you're probably doin' okay.)

Daedone, author of Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm, is a proponent, instigator and teacher of OM, or Orgasmic Meditation. Here's the Wikipedia entry, but basically, OM is a practice in which clarity, mindfulness, in-touchness with the universe and all that is reached through extremely focused touch. Specifically, the touch of a partner's hand slowly and rhythmically stroking a woman's clitoris in a particular way. Sessions last 15 minutes and the goal is not orgasm, but rather heightened sexual awareness. And, as it turns out, having someone lavish attention on this particular body part for 15 minutes is extremely effective at heightening sexual awareness.

Daedone seeks to whip up the kind of desire that's not just "Sure, a quickie sounds good," but rather, "I want you so bad I can't see straight and if you don't fuck me this very instant I might possibly die."

OM practitioners can experience intense, deeper, more fuckier fucks, with fat, swollen body parts (see above) coupled with equally fat, swollen desire, a finely tuned awareness of...oh...god...how damn good it all is, plus your general transcendence and whatnot.

"I can fuck and have it feel like not only is his cock moving inside of me, but something deeper, like this magnetic cock is fucking me. Ultimately that is what I am looking for. Anything less is disappointing," writes Daedone.

Magnetic cock, eh? That sounds pretty good....I think. If nothing else, it would certainly come in handy were I to be vacuuming in the nude, trip and accidentally lose something metal up the wang.

But perhaps we should hear some more. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ms. Nicole Daedone and this excerpt from "On Fucking":

I am going to tell you a story about a perfect storm of sex.

Remember I am a crazy immersive kind of person, you do not need to try this at home, but my teachers suggested that I just om. No sucking, fucking or stroking cock.

There grew to be this attraction with this guy that was like iron shards to a magnet. When he entered a room my body just moved to him. It had reached the level where it was chemical. He was actually fairly what at the time I considered cruel. He would do things like sit down to stroke my genitals and then say, nope you aren’t turned on enough. What? Yep. Just not feeling it. First I wanted to kill him. Then I wanted to eat him.

At the same time when I really was turned on he would walk up to me and say now, lie down.  And he would stroke me into the deepest places I had ever been in my life.

He had this kind of attention that was so attuned that – whereas I normally would be yelling at a guy, no a little to the left, to the right! – with him I would think it and he would move there, or exceed my expectations and go to a place I hadn’t even realized existed. And all he did were these little strokes and I was like a ducking, are you my boyfriend.

For two and a half of those three and a half years I was dying for it. I needed to have sex.  He’d say, I am sure we will…but only when you have made it irresistible. Irresistable? Irresistable? So I would beg and plead and demand and cry and every time he would say…almost. I’d threaten to have sex with someone else and he would say I wish you the best.

I hated him. I wanted him.

At the same time, it was funny, there was this background chatter. It’s embarrassing to admit. He was not the right guy. I was totally ambivalent when I would be rational.

And so my mind screamed no, my head screamed yes.

And there was this element of power. I was always accustomed to being in control. I would put out the “sex is in” sign and they would line up. Not him. I felt oddly at his mercy. I would find myself actually begging him.

I would lie in bed and yearn for him.

And then one day, something overtook me. It overthrew my rational mind. I didn’t care how tall he was, I didn’t care that I would be breaking the rules, I didn’t fear that it might not be as good as I dreamed, I didn’t care that I felt like a desperate animal.

This thing inside me was going to fuck him and that was that.

At the moment I realized it he entered the room. I simply said “now” and he took off his pants.

My body was a live wire. His hand brushed my stomach it I felt like 10,000 nerve endings fired. When he kissed me, it felt like the end of two wires came together and sparked. Everything was heightened. I could smell the detergent on the sheets, the Casablanca lilies, his saliva had this sweet salty taste, the sound of his breath sounded like an ocean.

And then he entered me and it was like he was entering every single cell of my body. I could feel him in the tips of my fingers, in my hair follicles there was no part of me that was not being penetrated by him.

Prior to oming, to having all this blood rush down to my pussy, my pussy had been sort of concave. It was like this. But having this much blood pushing down on the walls made it convex. The walls were rubbing up against themselves. Where it had felt quite honestly like a man was kind of batting around in there beating up against this cave it now felt like my pussy had become this velvet glove that wrapped around his cock. My clit had also dropped down from the weight, so that however he stroked, wherever he stroked with his cock, my clit rubbed up against it. It felt like there was no part of me that was not being fucked. And because of this, this feeling of what I can only call orgasm wrapped around both of us like we were in this honey blanket. Like I could lick this feeling off his face like nectar. It was that thick.

That was my first totally surrendered fuck. After that there was a line permanently drawn in the sand between what I had thought fucking was and what I  discovered what sex really is.

Well, gentle reader, have you have lickable honey blanket sex like this? Whole mind/body fuckery, magnetic cocks and so forth? Any other general thoughts? (And for further learnin', you can check out Daedone's TED video, Orgasm, the Cure for Hunger in the Western Woman.)

xoxoxo
jill

* p.s. It gives me undue pleasure that my computer has a file labeled "On Fucking."

~~yeah, it's a rerun. just cuz. 

Dr. Andrea and the Mystery of the Possibly Missing Clit*

Ahoy.

Welcome, troubled friends, to the third installment of Ask Doctor Andrea. Dr. Andrea is our groovy IBWMW Doctor-at-Large with specialties in women's/sexual health, nutrition, and Ayurveda. If you have an entertainingly embarrassing problem, or hell, just a regular old boring one, man up and email it on in. (Note: This is not a substitute for individual medical advice or care. So if Dr. Andrea tells you to stick a rusty tin can up your butt or something, check with your doctor first.)

*******
I have been married for 35 years and I have seen my wife have four orgasms in that time. The first one was on our 25th anniversary vacation. She says she has very little desire for sex. But we make love once or twice a week and she says she enjoys it to a degree (the touching, skin-on-skin, closeness, cuddling, etc.). 

We have had ups and downs in the relationship but overall do pretty well together.  We have seen counselors to keep the relationship healthy and we have talked about her lack of desire and lack of orgasms.  The conclusion is that she just has a low libido and is “wired” with a low sex drive.  That’s just how she is, physically and personality-wise, so I am trying to accept that (as one might accept a physical disability in a partner). 

Still, there are some paths we have not explored thoroughly.  To get to the point, what is a "normal" clitoris? I know where it is supposed to be, but will an aroused woman have a little button or bump or something external that a man can feel there (with finger or tongue or whatever)? Because I have never felt anything more than a slight swelling at the top of my wife's genitals. I suspect that may a contributor to her lack of responsiveness.

I have only been intimate with my wife, so I have nothing to use as a comparison.  But when I read erotica: “He rolled my swollen clit between his fingers” or self help books (Satisfaction, K. Cattrall & M. Levinson): “The clitoris responds quickly when his tongue draws circles on its surface.”

Surface?  Circles?  Swollen?  Sounds like their should be a little button or nub or something.  In all my years of going down there, there is nothing “sticking out” or swollen or anything but concave cleft between her labia minor. My wife says she can feel her clit, but I certainly cannot. I have heard there are medical conditions where the clit never "descends" or stays under the clitoral hood. She could have a general sensation there but nothing I can detect externally.  How common is that?

She is also very sensitive in that area.  When I rub it to try to stimulate her, after a minute or so, she pushes me away, complaining I am “rubbing her raw,” even if we are using a lot of lubricant.  I have talked to her about this over the years, and although I try to be very gentle about it, it's a difficult subject to discuss, as she takes it as me criticizing her, or saying something is wrong with her. Well, four orgasms in 35 years, it sounds like something is not right. But she says she has asked her OBGYN and she says she's "normal" physically.

I just wonder if this could be related to her difficulty in enjoying sex.

******

Dr. Andrea: First of all, thank you for asking! It shows you are willing to find new information to be more aware of what's going on and try to change a situation that isn't as fulfilling as it could be. Kudos.

I have to say I have several questions before I answer as best I can with limited information- it's odd to do it over the internet and not in person so I can see the expressions/body language/energy of both people.

That said, here is my response:

It's probably not her anatomy. Everyone's clitoris is different- and the thing is, it's a tiny area with a fantastically dense amount of nerve endings, and since she's 'super sensitive in that area,' you have noticed 'swelling,' and there's no history of female circumcision (RIGHT?!?), she's likely perfect. Most don't actually 'pop out.' It's not a penis, and there's a reason it was so 'mysterious' for much of western medical history (cultural patriarchal issues aside for the moment). When did you start trying to find her clitoris? Atrophy does occur in women as they age, and the entire area can flatten and thin out, especially if sex is infrequent (or unsatisfying- the positive hormonal and anatomical response is important in keeping the tissue functioning), so the anatomy may have changed slightly since you married. Is she peri- during- or post-menopausal? Changing hormonal balance could also affect her perception, lubrication, enjoyment, and communication, depending on how it's going for her.

Point two about anatomy- the female body has about a billion potential erogenous zones. Let that sink in. Think about a billion. Yes, the clitoris is a magical thing. But imagine this: take all the nerve endings in your penis, all of them, and shrink the physical size of skin area down to smaller than your pinky finger tip, then poke/prod/itch/tap/lick only that tiny area for more than a second or two = overwhelm and irritation = forget it. Especially if it's never been successful before. Not fun so much.