Years ago a Tai Chi teacher whom I was rather taken with told me off for always wanting to be close to him. ‘How can I move toward you,’ he asked, ‘if you are always moving toward me? There are natural laws – action, re-action; pull, push. You will never experience me wanting to come toward you if you don’t give me space and distance.’ And it was true – I always wanted to be right by his side. So I learnt this one. It was fun, now, to explore it with T in a literal way by us moving toward and away from each other in physical space.
You’ll know this one if you’ve ever been in a relationship where the person always wants to be close to you. I remember a brief relationship years ago where I would end up clinging on to the edge of the bed. The phrase, ‘Darling, please will you give me a little space?’ ceased to be metaphorical. It went on all day and all night until, inevitably I suppose, I did push him away.
So T and I are here learning how to avoid this one – I hope. When he moves toward me I want to walk backwards, away from him, to preserve the space but if he stands still then I want to move toward him. This, on this day, is the dynamic between us and everyone around us has a different dynamic. ‘Why do you always do that?’ one partner asks another when the discussion about the exercise happens afterwards.
‘Do what?’
‘Move away when I move toward you?’
‘You move too fast,’ said the woman, daring to be honest.
‘Oh,’ said the man. ‘I get it’
What is sometimes called ‘The Dance of Intimacy’ is clearer when you see it played out literally like this. It’s often easier for us to want someone we don’t have, than someone we do. And how does this obvious fact tip over into the dynamics of longing and desire in sexuality? Discuss? With your beloved one night?
Then we have another simple process, more about relationship than sexuality, in which we are asked to consider three things that we appreciated about each other when we first met and three things that we appreciate now.
It’s good to hear what we are bringing to a relationship and what is most enjoyed. Our power to be a positive influence on ourselves is limitless. This, then, takes all the pressure off your partner. If we concentrate on fixing ourselves then we’ll have no energy left to be critical of the other and, ideally, can just enjoy receiving feedback on how we are doing. It takes two playing fairly though to make this work.
Any lover that gives their partner unsolicited ‘feedback’ on where the other is going wrong deserves a death stare and some kind of punishment that doesn’t involve delight or chocolate.
We ended the night by exploring energy through ‘melting hugs’ – a kind of full body hug (no pelvic thrusting) where you simply enjoy the energy of the other person. Do you ever wonder what exactly people are bathing in when they bathe in your energy? Jill Bolte Taylor (of the best-ever TED talk. Watch it later…4) asks us to be responsible for whatever energy we bring to a space. If only it were as easy to be as aware of our own energy as it is to be of other people’s.
That night T dreams that he saves me from a huge bunch of men. He says to me in the morning in a half-awake state, ‘You came to me but then I let you go. You let me go free.’ Listening to him I smile. He’s not sure whether I let go of him or he let go of me.
• • •
Our Saturday morning exercises and discussions are about saying ‘no’. It’s very important to be able to say this simple word before anyone can really say ‘yes’ to anything.
‘Would you like to watch cheap porn in bed tonight before we have sex?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Would you like to be tied up, denigrated and humiliated?’
‘Er – not on Thursdays, thanks.’
‘Would you like to do something involving faeces?’
‘No, thanks. I don’t indulge before breakfast.’
It’s good for us, the women especially it seems, to establish what they call ‘an authentic “no”’. This is very hard for some women and plays a part in my own journey. My first husband arrived in the relationship with me from a relationship where a previous woman had apparently rejected him for many years. With the wisdom and maturity you would expect from a girl in her early 20s I decided that I would never reject him and, for the seven years that I was with him, I never did. As I had not attended one of these workshops, no older and wiser woman had ever explained to me that if I never said ‘no’ then I could never say ‘yes’.
‘How many of you find it hard to say “no”?’ All the women’s hands go up. The men admit genuine surprise. They don’t seem to understand why women lie to them.
It seems that the younger me isn’t alone. Women don’t like the men that they love to feel rejected. Most women are very good at empathy and know how rejection feels and they want to make the men that they are with feel happy and satisfied. ‘I’ve got a headache’ has become a cliché because the man knows that it’s not necessarily honest. What she actually means is, ‘I don’t want to have sex with you tonight.’ But if she says that, this begs the question, ‘Why not?’ Maybe what she is experiencing is not so pleasurable? But as she may not want to address that her excuses become more numerous.
This is an example of women (and I am certainly guilty of this) being cowardly and not doing what needs to be done for us to create better sex lives for ourselves. This, in turn, is disempowering for men as an honest ‘no’ gives them the compliment of assuming that they can deal with the rejection. And if they can’t, it gives them the opportunity to learn how. In a relationship that is aiming at improving and deepening, it can lead to an honest conversation about why it’s a ‘no’. But we are never taught these things because few people do workshops like this one.
A woman says, ‘Every time he is sexually aroused I feel responsible for him having pleasure from that.’
Women often feel that an erect penis is a ‘job’ for her whether she feels like it or not. I remember a man saying to me, ‘Look at that!’ as if his erection were my issue or his gift. Now I’m braver I’m able to say, ‘I salute you. Please stand down.’
Sue and Martin tell the women very clearly that what’s important is that she is ‘in choice’. Many women are not choosing ‘no’ because they want the man’s approval.
I wonder just how common this is so the next friend that phones me – I ask her.
‘I’m terrible at saying “no”. And I’m always aware of the repercussions. That isn’t to say I don’t from time to time, but it’s a judgement call.’
‘What are the repercussions?’
‘Lots actually. He may be less willing to make the effort for me if he is tired and I am not. I’ll have to live with him not having relieved his stress. He’s less likely to sleep well and I don’t want to reject because I don’t like feeling rejected.’
She has four children. Oh, please! Men, it’s really important to realize that if you had a body that has energetic rhythms and cycles that are not constant but go up and down and then you have children making demands on you from the moment you wake up until the moment you collapse into bed you may find that you desire nothing more than sleep.
A woman lying next to a man with an erection can experience it as a desirable offering of love and pleasure or as yet another demand or need. This is why it is so important for a woman to be able to say ‘no’ when she wants to. So that the man knows that when she says ‘yes’, it’s a real, ‘Yes, please.’
You may all have one possible solution to this dynamic: ‘Just take yourself in hand, man.’ But I’m just relaying all this so that you know that it’s not always as simple as the dynamic that one friend describes within his marriage:
Him: ‘Yeah?’
Her: ‘Nah.’
Him: ‘Kay.’
This husband says he’s fine with this because on other occasions she’ll say, ‘Yeah.’ One girlfriend writes, ‘I find that fake snoring and dribbling usually does the trick.’ When I posed this question online, a man writes to me saying that no woman has ever said
‘no’ to him. I worry about him. Doesn’t he realize that this isn’t something he should be boasting about?
Can we aim at something better and more honest than the fake dribbling? Can we have relationships where neither approaches the other as a beggar? Where we can each ask for what we’d like clearly, confidently and without feeling as if we are begging?
Sue and Martin speak to us about being kings and queens in our relationships.
‘If you are a queen, you do not beg from a king. If you are a king, you do not beg from the queen. It is possible to feel, both of you, as if you have everything that you need for you both to feel bountiful. An experience of bountiful abundance is what we are aiming at.’
Isn’t ‘abundance’ a wonderful word?
How unexpected that to become a queen, we women need to start with ‘an authentic “no”’. So simple for some and so hard for others.
• • •
They teach us a little about breathing. There are classic exercises that are described in Margo Anand’s book The Art of Sexual Ecstasy that I have never made time to explore. I start to study this book when I get home and instantly go into overwhelm. In theory I should know about all the chakras and the role that they play in sexuality and I should know how, using breathing, to open my inner flute. At this point I go and make a coffee and complain to my houseguest, Jovanna, who is wiser than I am. Being American and from the West Coast, she has done everything. Naturally.
‘What on earth is an inner flute? I’m sure mine is closed and should be open. How do I open it? There must be lots of people out there having great sex that have never even heard of an inner flute?’
She smiled sagely. ‘Actually Isabel, I’m not sure that there are so many people out there having great sex. Don’t worry about the inner flute … but you have tried the jade egg, haven’t you?’
I drank my coffee.
‘No, Jovanna. What’s a jade egg?’
‘It’s a sacred practice that I experienced in South Africa.’
‘Yeeesssss.’
‘To increase the orgasm.’
I waited.
‘I have a jade egg.’
‘How big is this egg?’
‘It’s the size of an egg.’
‘Thanks for that.’
‘A well-fed chicken’s egg.’
‘You put the tip on your yoni. The yoni says “yes” or “no.”’
I sipped my coffee. Does everyone have guests like this?
‘If the yoni says “no” you stop. If the yoni says “yes” the yoni eats the egg and it gets sucked into the abyss.’ She laughed. ‘I’ve actually done this.’
‘And the point of this is what?’
‘To strengthen the pelvic floor muscles which are the muscles that you have to use to hold the egg in place.’
‘Yes ...’
‘But then you are moving it inside and you are very focused and it moves around and, I think, stimulates the G-spot, and after about 20 minutes I had the best orgasm I’ve ever experienced.’
‘You had an orgasm from your yoni eating a jade egg?’
‘I did. In a workshop. A bit like the workshops you’ve been doing. Only different. Anyway, the problem came when I went home and tried to re-create the experience. I bought the book to practise at home.5 In the book she has you boil the egg first to avoid infection, but the egg can’t touch the bottom of the pan because it will crack. I had to take dental floss and tie it to the egg to stop it touching the bottom. There is a frustratingly tiny hole through the middle of the egg that’s almost impossible to get the floss through – especially as I was getting very worked up. Then I boiled the egg and then of course it has to cool to the right temperature to avoid major yoni scarring. But my excitement was peaking to re-create my African experience. I decided to follow the instructions and start the first exercise standing.’
‘And your yoni liked having a jade egg pushed into it?’
‘No. I experienced huge disappointment as my yoni said a clear “no” and the egg went clattering to the ground onto the wooden floor. Rolling on the floor rather defeated the purpose of the boiling but by this time I didn’t care and just rinsed it as I was in such a hurry to try again. After several attempts, the egg banging on the floor and an increasing fear that the neighbours would think I was knocking, I decided to lie down. I was quite excited that the yoni now said “yes” and once again sucked the, now fortunately cooled-off, egg into the abyss.’
My yoni was relieved to hear that her egg had cooled.
‘Sadly I had not cut the floss long enough and found myself fishing in the abyss for the floss.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yes, really. You’re supposed to cut the floss long. So after what seemed like hours of no orgasmic experience whatever – and instead, me getting increasingly agitated at not being able to find the floss or remove the egg – I gave up.’
‘But surely if you had just stood up, gravity would have helped you lay the egg?’
‘No. Once it’s in, it’s in. You’d better make sure that you have a string long enough to fish it out.’
‘So, what did you do?’
‘I drank a few glasses of wine, went back to fishing and eventually located it.’
‘Thank God. I thought you were going to say that you had to take yourself to hospital to find a long-fingered gynaecologist. So was that the end of the jade egg?’
‘No. You’ll be reassured, no doubt, to know that I’ve since then had several further more successful egg sessions. With longer floss.’
‘And orgasm?’
‘Oh, yes. But the egg is really for exercising the pelvic floor muscles. They recommend other exercises to strengthen the G-spot muscle.’
‘The G-spot is a muscle?’
‘I think so. Isn’t it?’
‘No – it’s erectile tissue, surely? Or just an area where a lot of women have a collection of nerve endings? The same collection of nerve endings as the clitoris.’
‘I think you’re right. Hold on.’
She consulted the world wide web of sexual knowledge.
‘On netdoctor.com they seem confused about whether the G-spot exists or not. They quote research here that says that in 1981 one woman experienced a stronger orgasm when the frontal wall of her vagina was stimulated and they called it the G-spot in honour of Gräfenberg, the author of a study in 1944. In 2001 scientists declared it a myth. In January 2010 a team from King’s College London also declared that it didn’t exist but their research was later found to be weak. The next year a group of French scientists declared that 56% of women have a G-spot.’
‘Oh great. So we may not have one at all then? And there is my poor boyfriend trying to stimulate a spot I may not have or may not be important. No wonder I’m confused.’
‘But can you feel it?’
‘Well, I can feel more sensation from some areas than others but whether it’s the G-spot I’m feeling or not I really don’t know.’
‘It says here that some women say that they definitely have one. Some say they definitely don’t. Some say that stimulating it is wonderful, some say it just feels uncomfortable and some say only that it makes them want to pee.’
This is absurd. We can put men on the moon but we don’t know even this much about pleasure in our own bodies? I may have to have another coffee.
‘It also says here that a woman would have a hard time finding her own G-spot unless she has very long fingers. It also says that it can only be stimulated with the penis if you are sitting astride him and then leaning right back.’
I stopped to check all this. Enough theory and academic debate. There is a woman who has a career teaching about G-spots. I’m not going to do one of her seminars. But if you want to explore she’s called Deborah Sundahl.6
‘OK, Jovanna – I’ll try all the weird positions in the Kama Sutra that I’m flexible enough to get into. Now stop talking to me about jade eggs. I’m telling the story of my weekend workshop with T and how w
onderful it was.’
‘But you can’t write much specifically about what you actually did right?’
‘It is a problem. I have to leave out some of the best bits.’
She laughed. ‘OK, well you do that and I’m going to read about penises. It says here that self-measurement of the penis is notoriously unreliable.’
‘Stop Jovanna. I’m trying to write here.’
‘And results tend to be skewed by men who falsely claim to be 10 or 11 inches long.’
‘I’m writing about my workshop. I was just saying that we had introductions to the chakras and the inner flute and that, as introductions, they served me well to teach me just how little I know. Do you think your chakras are open?’
She laughed. ‘Forget my chakras – I’d like to get my legs open.’
‘I was attempting a serious question. Which of your chakras do you think are open and which are closed?’
‘What’s a chakra anyway?’
‘According to The Art of Sexual Ecstasy, the chakras are “symbolic representations of the energy fields created by the body’s endocrine system”.’
I have a picture of them on my Pinterest page, of the body with all these points in different colours …7
‘So, if you believe that you have them, which of your chakras are open – do you think?’
‘Jovanna?’
‘My root chakra is definitely open, I cracked it open with a jade egg. The next one up my son kicked open trying to bust out. My heart chakra was busted open by a few bastards. My throat chakra – let’s see ...’
‘Jovanna, your throat chakra is open. You have no problem with communication.’
‘My crown chakra is now shut down. It used to be open but then I started thinking more about sexuality and it got completely confused and shut down.’
‘You’ve missed one.’
‘I have?’
‘The third eye. Intuition.’
‘Ah yes – I forgot it. That’s shut down too. I’ve read too much.’
Sensation Page 5