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This organ…
What is it? Tune in to find out!
This episode features fascinating facts from Job’s Body.
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This episode features a passage from The Art of Sexual Ecstasy by Margot Anand
It is very common for both men and women to tense up while experiencing sexual pleasure. Whether solo or with a lover, many people tense their whole body while being stimulated and heading towards climax.
This pattern of muscular tension is often left over from being a teenager living at home and rushing towards having a quiet orgasm as quickly as possible before getting found out. This habit often stays with us even when we have grown up and moved out. Many of us continue to have solo sex in exactly the same way as we did as teenagers for years. However as adults who are embracing the gift of experiencing pleasure we can choose to start having different habits and experiences of orgasm.
The problem with full body tension during arousal is it limits the amount of pleasure you can feel in your body. The more tension, the less blood flow, the less sensation. By tensing up the whole body you keep arousal localized in just the genitals and don’t experience full body arousal.
A key to changing your sexual response and experiencing more expanded kinds of orgasms is to unlearn this pattern of full body tension during arousal, and instead train yourself to relax deeply as you are try experiencing more sexual pleasure.
One of my teachers, Joseph Kramer, calls traditional kinds of orgasm a ”genital sneeze”. This speaks to traditional orgasms being more of a reflex rather than an expression of your full sexual potential. Training yourself to relax as your pleasure builds allows orgasmic energy to start moving from just the genital area to being spread around the whole body. This is one very important step towards learning how to experience full body, expanded orgasms.
Often people don’t want to relax as they near orgasm as they worry they may lose their orgasm, and this may well happen as you start exploring this skill. But if you do, it is possible that as you build up again towards orgasm that the climax you eventually have may be more powerful than the one you would have had, as you have had more time to build stronger arousal all over your body.
I reckon it is worth experimenting with exploring this even if you do lose your orgasm, so that you can eventually train your body to be able to experience more pleasure during orgasms. If we don’t think about sexual pleasure as something that is so scarce and hard to access but as a renewable resource that we can access and play with again and again we can begin to relax and explore expanding it beyond what you may have experienced before.
Your challenge this week is to experiment with this. Start exploring sexual pleasure either solo or with your lover (you can tell your lover what you are doing or not!) and as you reach increased levels of pleasure, take deep breaths and then consciously relax the muscles of your whole body, and if you can, the muscles in and around your pelvis and genitals too. And notice what you feel.
Your orgasm may slip away a little but keep going with experiencing pleasure and see if you feel your sexual energy raise a little. Keep relaxing as you continue with your sexual stimulation, notice if you experience getting higher each time you approach your climax.
This kind of calm, peaceful, slow and steady increase in pleasure can be one element in allowing you to fall into more pleasurable orgasms, again and again.
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Ever wondered about the origins of sex-negative culture?
Were there really guys sitting around room making up laws that punished sexual deviance?
What was the involvement of the church in sexual oppression?
If you’ve ever asked these kinds of questions, you too are curious about the history of sex.
We are fascinated by tracking the history of sex culture. Just when did these intergenerational patterns of sexual shame and fear begin?
We love finding books like Sex and Punishment, and the only thing we love more is sharing them with you!
On this podcast, Chris discusses one of the first recorded histories of sex-negative law. Is this where our thousands of years of sexual shaming originated? Tune in to find out just how extreme sex negative law was in 2000 B.C.
“All ancient civilizations were intent on controlling people’s sex lives. THe oldest extant written law, which hails from the early Sumerian kingdom of Ur-Nammu (circa 2100 BC), devoted quite a bit of attention to sexual matters. One of the earliest capital punishment laws on record anywhere concerned adultery.”
“Ancient societies influenced each other, and the laws of one group often were adopted by its enemies and then developed further. AS centuries passed, for example, the elementary sexual prohibitions of Sumerian kingdoms like Ur-Nammu evolved into the obsessively detailed rules of the Hebrews, which in turn became the foundation for the sex laws of the church and every Christian state.”
Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years Of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz
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Amanda Palmer shares the crucial difference between Looking and Seeing, and offers wisdom on the importance of being truly seen as a full human being.
Excerpt from her book, The Art of Asking or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Let People Help.
Get the audiobook of Amanda’s book FREE with your completely free Audible.com trial membership!
I wanted to be seen.
That was absolutely true. All performers -all humans- want to be seen; it’s a basic need. Even the shy ones who don’t want to be looked at.
But I also wanted, very much, to see.
I didn’t quite grasp this until I had been up on the box for a while. What I loved as much as, possibly even more than, being seen was sharing the gaze. Feeling connected.
I needed the two-way street, the exchange, the relationship, and the invitation to true intimacy that I got every so often from the eyes of a random street patron. It didn’t always happen. But it happened enough to keep me up on the box.
And that’s why stripping, even though it often paid way better, when I tried my hand at it a few years later, just didn’t do it for me. I was being looked at. But I never felt seen. The strip joint was like Teflon to real emotional connection. – page 46, The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer
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Asking for what you want in bed and talking to your lover during sex can feel scary and overwhelming. What if it was part of the turn-on instead? What if learning to effectively communicate your erotic needs was a key to your sexual fulfillment.
In this episode, we share an awesome food analogy from the brilliant Dr. Mary Klein. He reminds us that to cook a meal together, or embark on any creative collaboration, you need a common language. The same is true for sex: to create the erotic life you really want, you need an erotic vocabulary. Tune in to find out how to develop it, in and out of the bedroom!
Because erotic communication is one of the most important skills for sexual fulfillment and healthy relationships, we have put together an interactive resource guide on erotic communication – available here or as part of a Pleasure Pod membership. Membership includes our resource pod on Erotic Communication as just one of the many curated resources for Pleasure Pod Members!
