Sensation

by Isabel Losada

  Critical acclaim for Isabel Losada

  The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment

  ‘A total delight. Isabel Losada navigates her way through the eccentric highways and byways of the new age and human potential movement with scepticism, humour and interrogative openmindedness. Candid, thought-provoking, sassy and very very funny.’

  Mick Brown, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Full of a crazy joy ... made me laugh out loud.’

  Impact Cultural Magazine

  ‘Humorous and refreshing.’

  Canberra Times

  For Tibet, With Love: A Beginner’s Guide to Changing the World

  ‘The world must be changed ... Isabel’s story brings this truism to life in a vivid, funny, heart-warming, delightful way. It is a great read, a live teaching! I enjoyed it, laughed and learned a lot!’

  Professor Robert Thurman, Tibetologist and Buddhist Scholar, Columbia University, New York

  ‘Isabel Losada is a 21st-century hero...someone who is changing the world for the better and will make you want to, too.’

  Harpers and Queen

  ‘This remarkable tale of one woman’s dedicated personal journey captures the spirit of compassion in action.’

  Lama Surya Das

  ‘Fast, funny and inspiring too. Isabel Losada is a writer that changes lives.’

  Joanna Lumley

  Men! (Where the **** are they?)

  ‘Where are all the single men? Finally, everything we couldn’t work out is explained. Brilliant, honest research and funny too.’

  Elle

  ‘Think Bridget Jones meets Michael Moore meets Men are from Mars – only a lot funnier.’

  Glamour

  ‘Isabel Losada has achieved the perfect combination of humour, poignancy and intellectual rigour.’

  New Statesman

  The Battersea Park Road to Paradise: Five Adventures in Being and Doing

  ‘Engaging, lyrical and courageous, Isabel Losada is an intrepid explorer of human development and spirituality. She dives into weird and fantastic situations like a freefall parachutist and gives us valuable and inspiring insights. Her journey and her honesty will make you laugh and touch your heart. This is rock’n’roll of the soul. I love this book.’

  William Bloom

  ‘A funny, well written, warm and intelligent book which made this reader smile broadly. Leading us through the labyrinth of new age spirituality, mad-cap Feng Shui consultants, gung-ho American motivation gurus, the wonderful contemporary teacher Mooji, and a brave hallucinogenic excursion to South America, Isabel Losada proves herself a fantastic prose-stylist and the most eloquent of guides. It’s a book which grapples with the big questions.’

  Piers Moore Ede, author of All Kinds of Magic and Honey and Dust

  Sensation

  Adventures in Sex,

  Love and Laughter

  Isabel Losada

  Isabel Losada is the bestselling author of five previous books including Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment, which has sold over 100,000 copies in the UK. Isabel has worked as an actress, singer, dancer, researcher, TV producer, broadcaster, public speaker, comedian and author. She remains firmly committed to narrative non-fiction and swimming against the tide.

  By the Same Author

  The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment

  For Tibet, With Love

  New Habits

  Men!

  The Battersea Park Road to Paradise

  www.isabellosada.com

  For P.C. without whom I would never have had the courage

  for J.N. always

  & for P.B. in appreciation

  ‘An intellectual is a person who has found one thing more interesting than sex.’

  Aldous Huxley

  ‘Write what you are not willing to speak about.’

  Natalie Goldberg

  Foreplay

  Surprisingly Short Spring

  Let’s Talk about Sex

  The State We’re In

  Tantric Sex Workshops for Women Only?

  Tantric Sex Workshop for Couples

  Long Hot Summer

  Stroking the Clitoris

  An Interview with the Clit Whisperer

  Taking Lessons: How to Stroke and be Stroked

  Orgasmic Meditation Training Day – with Live Demonstration

  Late Summer Adventure

  The First International Conference of Clitoris Stroking

  Living in a San Francisco Clitoris Stroking Community

  Why Would You Be Afraid of Pleasure?

  Autumn in Shades of Red

  Yoni Healing Anyone?

  Tantric Massage and Light Beams

  The Love, Sex and Intimacy Weekend Fair

  Your ‘Sex Muscles’ – Kegels and the NHS

  What’s Love Got to Do with It?

  Winter by the Fire

  Take a Deep Breath

  The Big Squeeze: Pelvic Floor II

  Ecstasy on East 30th Street

  Come Then Go

  Happy Endings

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Sensation

  Foreplay

  My favourite joke:

  ‘What’s the difference between a golf ball and a clitoris?’

  [Pause while the perplexed listener wonders how to answer.]

  ‘A man’s prepared to spend ten minutes looking for a golf ball.’

  I entertain taxi drivers with this one and it always goes down well. Once the punchline was greeted with deadly silence and then the driver said, ‘What’s a clitoris?’ He was winding me up. No, worse … he wasn’t. He really didn’t know.

  ‘You’re having me on, aren’t you?’

  ‘No. Never heard that word.’

  ‘Is English your mother tongue?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re how old?’

  ‘53.’

  ‘How is the sex with your wife?’

  ‘We don’t have any. It’s terrible when we do. As you ask. Why am I telling you this? This is different from most of the conversations in the cab.’

  ‘I’m going to give you a word.’

  I wrote the word CLITORIS, like that, in block capitals on a piece of paper.

  ‘Here it is.’

  I handed it to him with the payment as I got out of the taxi. ‘Ask your wife if she knows this word. And if she doesn’t please look it up and find out what it is. And what it does.’

  This is all true. London. The 21st century.

  • • •

  Surprisingly Short Spring

  Let’s Talk about Sex

  I am blessed with wanton curiosity. My favourite subject is happiness. I’m passionately inquisitive about it. I’m fascinated by what makes people enjoy their lives wholeheartedly – a job they love, service to a great cause, or even, yes, successful relationships. How many people do we know that have truly great relationships? Count the ones you know. You have to know them well to count them. I so hope you can use the fingers of two hands. Most people get stuck at two and a half. And why? Well, one of the reasons seems to be that at the centre of every relationship is a bedroom in which, often, hopes don’t match libidos.

  I’ve been writing about happiness for ten years and have never had the courage to write about sex. It’s a bit of a glaring omission, don’t you think? Many single people have a relationship with their own body that is based primarily on food and exercise. Many couples are completely sexually estranged. It’s a tragedy of epic proportions when you consider the levels of pleasure that are potentially available and the levels of happiness, simple human kindness and connection possible. We are failing, sometimes, even to consider the de
light of touch as an expression of affection. So, this year, I’m going to find out every single thing I can about sexuality and what makes it work and you can just sit back, read and hopefully pick up lots of glorious ideas. And before you decide I have the best job in all known universes … I’m not sure this will be easy. Not for me, anyway.

  I was one of those single people who had forgotten that the body is designed for pleasure. I’ve been celibate for five years, apart from the occasional glorious stupidity. I had broken my heart over a man and I just couldn’t find another one I wanted to get horizontal with. There is an expression, ‘No one sleeps alone who goes to bed with a book.’ And it’s true. I travelled to strange worlds with Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro and Italo Calvino. I laughed with Bryson, was educated by Oliver Sacks and fell in love with Rumi and Hafiz. I missed sex, but somehow these men were so enriching for my mind and my soul that I didn’t care about neglecting my body. Contrary to popular beliefs I didn’t become a wrinkled prune. I slept soundly and my days were full of other joys.

  But then a new man came into my life, put the past in the past and brought even my sentences into the present. It’s a shock. He is kind and patient, bides his time, makes me laugh and has a penis. Suddenly sex is back on the agenda. To have a man with a healthy sex drive in my bed again is challenging because, of course, like everyone I know, I’d like my sex life to be fabulous and I feel, frankly, that I have a lot to learn. I ask about the experiences of my friends and my readers, and I find that everyone seems to have a lot to learn. So, this is not a book about a relationship. This is a book, unashamedly and joyfully, about sex.

  I’m not going to explore much of the alternative sex that I know goes on out there in our cities. I have no interest in having sex with animals, plastic or groups of people. I have no interest in being tied up for hours by a complicated series of Japanese knots, being suspended upside-down, or whipping men who are crying out, ‘Please punish me!’ I know that women, somewhere not far from us, are being turned on by attaching cords to piercings in impressive places. I wish all consenting adults joy, but I won’t be doing any of that. Call me old-fashioned.

  I’m delighted by the idea of finding lots of ways to make sex wonderful. I hope that most of what I learn will also be useful to you whatever your situation. I’m writing about sex between one man and one woman because that’s where I’m at myself. This kind of sex is what is known in the sexuality world as ‘vanilla’. I assume it’s called that coz it’s uncomplicated and – as with ice cream – the best.

  After all the ‘spiritual work’ I’ve done (see previous books for more information than is necessary for anyone) there is no way that I can settle for a bad sex life. The new man is offering me the possibility of a good sex life but I find that five years of celibacy and lots of bad sex in previous years has left me as lost and confused as most women I talk to.

  In my spiritual life and in relation to others I know how to be – kindness and compassion as a philosophy serve me well. Now the spiritual has to join the sexual in a whole new way. They are not to be housed in different parts of my body and soul. Everyone that has a sex life wants a good sex life so … I’m going to make pleasure a priority and I’ll be encouraging you to do the same. There will be ideas in these pages that you can contemplate, consider and create – joyfully I hope – in your own bedroom.

  And we’ll have fun. Sex isn’t a subject to be taken too seriously. We have a huge capacity for pleasure, as well as for love and the ability to make babies. So, please read with a pencil. Underline things, cross things out and find me on Facebook. Write to me, as I’m sure that I’ll be learning about all this for the rest of my life.

  We are calling my boyfriend ‘T’. Not because he wouldn’t have been perfectly happy for me to use his name but because we don’t want to be the cause of anyone getting their knickers in a twist.

  There is nothing so shocking, it seems, as having sex with a consenting adult with whom you are in a relationship. If we just open the bedroom door and look inside.

  The State We’re In

  In The Art of Sexual Ecstasy, which Margo Anand published in 1989, she writes that a survey taken at that time questioned 90,000 women about their sex lives and asked whether they would rather be ‘cuddled and held tenderly’ or have sexual intercourse. Sixty-four thousand said they would rather be held tenderly and not have intercourse at all. Do you think the figure would be higher now or lower?

  Somehow the subject of pleasure for women still isn’t discussed. The clitoris for example … If you take even a quick look at Wikipedia you’ll be told that the clitoris is ‘the primary anatomical source of human female sexual pleasure’ (we’ll be exploring that one later) and offered several scholarly articles to back up this statement. Press the link to the most recent of the articles and you’ll be told ‘the clitoral glans is very hard to find’. The article also informs us that ‘more education about the clitoris’ is widely necessary and would alleviate the ‘social stigma’ that still surrounds the subject of women’s pleasure. There is a stigma, still, around the subject of pleasure for women? OK, so let’s focus on that then.

  The information revolution has made many matters worse rather than better as misinformation spreads fast, especially when someone has a product to sell. Men are now being convinced by online nonsense that their penis can never be long enough, wide enough or hard enough. And from the letters that I receive it seems to me that women are STILL worried that if they are not having multiple orgasms and screaming with pleasure then they are somehow failing. Heaven help young girls in their teens and 20s when their new boyfriends have watched Internet porn and expect women to respond the way the porn models do. And we have to feel very sorry for the boys who feel that they have to produce a performance – without ever knowing that what they are watching online is absurdly unrealistic. Apparently, in the US only 13 states require that sex education is medically accurate. (What on earth are they teaching if it’s not medically accurate?) According to Peggy Orenstein’s book Girls and Sex (2016), a recent US study found that after a ‘hook-up’ (which is defined as a one-night stand which can involve intercourse, oral or anal sex, but is usually only the woman going down on the man and not the other way around) 82% of men are glad they hooked up whereas only 57% of women are similarly happy. It seems that when mothers talk to their children about sex they concentrate on the risks and the dangers, while many fathers just joke and avoid the subject completely. Girls and young women lack even simple assertiveness skills in the area of sex.

  Even older women still feel inadequate unless they are orgasmic during penetration and so lots of girls and women are still pretending. Somehow news that only a small minority of women are able to achieve orgasm easily through penetration alone seems to have been hidden in the small print. So the cry ‘something is wrong with me’ still echoes off the agony columns, one of the only places women go for sexual advice despite the fact that the columnist may have less than 400 words to answer. I’ve written a sex advice column myself and I can tell you that there is not much room for subtlety. The success of Fifty Shades of Grey illustrates how huge the need and the interest in sexuality is, while that series of books made the situation worse rather than better. It’s all up to the man is it? The woman’s pleasure? I don’t think so.

  For men, the result of the absurd performance pressure brought about by the porn industry is more impotence. Penises are staying down as divorce graphs are still going up. A Viagra pill doesn’t make it all better. And while men are prescribed Viagra – often a woman’s lack of interest in sex is considered normal. For some couples the bedroom may be the happiest place in their lives but I think it’s fair to guess that they probably don’t make up the majority of the population.

  You’d think we just need more hippies, but in alternative cultures the situation in bedrooms isn’t much better. The famous separation of spirituality and sexuality permeates every aspect of our society, and sexuality is often seen as e
ither an obsession or feared and perceived as an enemy.

  Historically, some would argue that there was no division in Christianity until St Augustine came along and ruined it all. The monotheistic God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition had created sex after all and, like everything in His/Her creation, had presumably created pleasure for the sake of – well – pleasure. Just as we can enjoy food and drink, we can enjoy sex. But the two fell out suggesting that if you wanted to explore the spiritual you needed to leave the sexual alone or keep it for the creation of babies. The position of sexuality in the Islamic world is also … well, how would we put this? Often not a happy one?

  In India, the situation is slightly better. Not a lot. There are three major traditions. The first is Vedanta, which teaches us that the external universe is unreal and the only reality is the absolute uncaused Cause/Consciousness/Source (pick your own noun, but use ‘God’ with care). The mind is the creator of reality and the body is part of the great illusion. For this reason, many of the great masters of this tradition, like Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi, show such a total disregard for looking after their bodies that they end up being carried off by cancer at an unnecessarily young age. This tradition is alive and well today in the form of Advaita, one of the branches of Vedanta, and experienced through teachers including Mooji and Eckhart Tolle. Tolle’s books, which are basically a clear teaching of ancient Vedanta beliefs, were so phenomenally successful in America that Tolle was given his own TV channel – which I heard was a gift from Oprah Winfrey. But Advaita does not have, at the core of the teachings, any celebration of sexuality. The body is, at worst, linked to pain and, at best, considered irrelevant since it will age and then we will be parted from the temporary meat package that we walk around in.

  Then there is Buddhism. In the way most Buddhist traditions are understood and taught today, sexuality is most often linked with craving which is one of the hindrances to enlightenment. Anyone mindful should at least avoid any form of sexual misconduct and the desire for sex. Full-time disciples of Buddha were required to be strictly celibate and our two best-known Buddhist teachers, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Thích Nhat Hanh, are both celibate. Any serious student of Buddhism should neither desire nor be attached to sexual pleasure. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said that the highly mystical practices of sexual yoga in the Gelug School of Tibetan Buddhism should be practised purely as visualizations. Thích Nhat Hanh has made famous the teaching that when we are drinking tea we must be aware that we are drinking tea. But, although I know he would say that the same principles apply whatever you are doing – as a celibate, understandably, he never taught about sex. All those profoundly spiritual nuns, monks and spiritual teachers from many traditions that I have met – are celibate. Some whom I’ve not met – other well-known spiritual teachers who are not celibate – rarely, if ever, speak about sexuality. They are very quiet on the subject. In short, there is not a lot of naked dancing, ululating and making love under the moon going on in most current spiritual practice.