flying toward ecstasy What the science gives us is this: To have more and better orgasms, turn off all the offs and slow down how you turn on the ons. Let your whole brain get on the orgasm train.
But what science can’t give you is permission to experience ecstatic pleasure. In the end, that’s the key to spectacular orgasms. And only you can give you that. Science can’t tell you how to feel about your orgasms.
Science can tell you only that how you feel about your orgasms changes your orgasms. Science can tell you that feeling shame, judgment, frustration, and fear about orgasm will diminish your orgasmic experience, while acceptance, welcoming, confidence, and joy will expand your orgasmic experience. Science can tell you that your brain is like a collective of desires, and the more the collective collaborates, the more of you can move toward ecstasy.
But not one word of that science makes you more or less entitled to the pleasure of your own skin and mind and heart. Your orgasms belong to you, and all the science in the world can’t make you more delighted with them or more afraid of them or more curious about them. The science can’t do that.
Only you can do that.
You were born entitled to all the pleasure your body can feel. You were born entitled to pleasure in whatever way your body receives it, in whatever contexts afford it, and in whatever quantities you want it. Your pleasure belongs to you, to share or keep as you choose, to explore or not as you choose, to embrace or avoid as you choose.
So, if you wanted to, how would you find your way to ecstasy? How would you get all the birds flying together in the same direction?
Patience, practice, and a sex-positive context.
You already know how to go about creating a sex-positive context—the worksheets from chapters 3, 4, and 7 helped you with that. And you understand how to build patience—by training your little monitor to make sure you’ve got the right goal, the right kind and quantity of effort, and the right criterion velocity.
Which leaves us with the “practice” part.
Practice what?
Practice turning off the offs. Here’s how: The brain states that are dragging parts of your flock away from orgasm —stress, worry, spectatoring, chronically wondering if your kid is going to
knock on the door, or even just literal cold feet or other physical discomfort —need to be taken seriously and have their needs met. They need to be respected and treated like the sleepy hedgehog from chapter 4.
Be kind and gentle with each of the offs, listen to what they need in order to feel satisfied, and then satisfy them. Go back to your context worksheets: What hits your brakes? Consider the things in your environment and also your own thoughts and feelings. What context do you need in order to turn off those offs?
Most of the offs women experience have nothing to do with sex, and many of them have straightforward, pragmatic solutions.
Chronically stressed? Complete the cycle with a good cry, a brisk walk, a primal scream, or other physical release, as described in chapter 4. Give yourself a solid twenty to sixty minutes to allow the stress of the day to wind down with whatever rituals or practices help. Baths, walks, exercise, cooking, meditation, yoga, a glass of wine, whatever works.
Constantly monitoring for footsteps in the hallway? Arrange for a time when no one else is home.
Tired? Take a nap, or even just rest for twenty minutes. Squicked out by grit on the sheets? Change them! Cold feet? Put on socks! Sometimes it really is this simple.
Other offs are more complex and require longer-term solutions, such as those I addressed earlier: self-critical thoughts or other body image challenges, lack of trust in your relationship, trauma history, sexual disgust.
It took decades of planting and cultivation to create the garden you currently have. It won’t change overnight. Give yourself permission to make progress gradually, and celebrate all the incremental steps between where you are now and where you’d like to be.
And the most important turnoff the offs practice of all: self-kindness.
Too often women get stuck in their sexual growth because they can’t get past their belief that something “shouldn’t” hit their brakes. It shouldn’t turn them off to have the lights on, they shouldn’t be so hung up about their bodies. “Should” is all about what you’re “doing wrong.”
Pop quiz: Does a belief that you’re Doing Something Wrong with sex
hit the accelerator . . . or the brake?
Yeah.
So when something hits the brake, what do you do? You take it seriously. Listen to it. Be gentle with it, like a sleepy hedgehog. Even if you
wish something like having the lights on didn’t hit your brakes, the fact is it might, and that’s okay. It’s also okay to wish it didn’t. But believing it shouldn’t only hits the brakes more. Recognizing that frees you up to do something about it—something like having sex with unlit candles in the room for a week or two, then with one lit tea light candle, then two, then three . . .
You see, sex is not context dependent—sex can happen more or less anywhere. Pleasure is context dependent. Create a context where you can experience pleasure, and sexual ecstasy will follow, given time, practice, and genuine solutions to turn off the offs.
Appendix 2 offers instructions for achieving ecstasy. Try it! Remember: Each member of the flock has its own needs and motivations. Turn off all the offs, and turn on all the ons.
Merritt had believed all her life that orgasm was supposed to be easy, and that her struggle with it made her a freak. She believed that it was supposed to feel a certain way and have a certain effect. But she wanted to learn to trust herself, so that she could open the door wide to pleasure. So she stopped comparing her experience with her expectations and simply allowed her experience to be what it is. She just enjoyed the sex she was having instead of worrying about whether it was the sex she “should” be having. She created an environment of acceptance, where the parts of her mind that needed to worry, that needed to avoid something bad happening, could instead move toward something good. It took time. And practice. And positive meta-
emotions (that’s chapter 9).
Did it work? For her, it did.
Merritt is a writer and she was raised religious, which might explain the email she sent me near the end of her don’t-have-an- orgasm-with-Carol experience. Or it might not. Lots of people start talking about God and spiritual experiences when they find their way to ecstasy. The language of mundane human experience, anatomy, physiology, even relationship doesn’t feel large enough to contain it.
Anyway, this is what she wrote:
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that rock I’m clinging.
Since Love is lord of heaven and Earth, How can I keep from singing?
It’s from a hymn called “How Can I Keep from Singing?” Pete Seeger and Enya and many others have recorded it. It’s about what happens when you make contact with the peace at the center and core of yourself, which is the same peace at the center and core of the universe, and it resonates through you, like you’re a bell that’s ringing.
That is what happens when you turn off all the offs and allow all the ons to focus on one shared goal: pleasure. tl;dr
• Orgasms happen in your brain, not your genitals. • Thirty percent of women are reliably orgasmic from vaginal penetration alone. The remaining 70 percent are sometimes, rarely, or never orgasmic from penetration alone. The most common way for women to orgasm is from clitoral stimulation. • Orgasm is not an evolutionary adaptation, necessary for survival. It’s a fantastic bonus! • To have bigger, better orgasms, turn off more of the offs, and turn on the ons more gradually.