Sensation

by Isabel Losada

  I had to go to the dentist for a check-up today. This is the third time I have met this new woman dentist.

  I arrived. They are always friendly. ‘Good morning Isabel. How are you? You’re looking well.’

  ‘Good morning, Katherine. Thank you. Yes, I’m good.

  You’re looking amazing, as usual. I always have the impression that you glow somehow. Is dentistry, the way you do it, a particularly relaxing job?’

  ‘As you ask …’ she says, showing me to my chair and pressing a button to make me horizontal, ‘I’ve just had a mouth massage.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘It’s a massage on the inside of the mouth. Put these glasses on please. It’s very relaxing having the inside of the mouth massaged. Strangely so. It’s not something I’d had before. The inside of the mouth is very sensitive.’

  ‘Ah, but have you had your yoni massaged?’ I asked, attracting a surprised reaction from the dental nurse.

  I suppose I expected her to say ‘What’s a yoni?’ as most people don’t even know the word. I explain that although ‘phallic’ meaning ‘in the shape of a phallus’ is a word we all know, ‘yonic’ meaning ‘in the shape of yoni’ isn’t a word many people know. But she was way ahead of me. She said,

  ‘Oh yes, and worshipped too. And open your mouth wide please.’

  ‘Waaaat?’ I tried to say while she peered attentively into my mouth.

  ‘My yoni has been not only massaged, but worshipped. On an altar, with rose petals. … Upper left 8 watch occlusal,’ She instructed her dental nurse.

  ‘Ahhhhhh?’

  ‘And with women chanting, praying and meditating … Upper 7 OK. Upper 6 OK … And then they came forward and knelt down in front of my yoni while I was lying naked on a stage with my legs apart … Upper left 5 porcelain crown.’

  ‘Oan a haaaage?’

  ‘Yes, on a stage. The women come forward and offer rose petals … Upper left 3 to upper right 3, OK … To be fair I was one of five women on the stage having their yonis worshipped.’

  You probably think I’m making this up, don’t you? But no! My dentist has had her yoni worshipped.

  ‘Upper right 4 watch occlusal.’

  ‘Oere oas ’is?’ I asked.

  ‘The place was perfect actually. It was at the Inns of Court with all the old judges staring down at us from the walls … 5 –7 OK. Upper right 8 missing.’

  She took a brief break, allowing me to speak.

  ‘I don’t understand. How have I not heard about this? I mean has everyone heard about this? Have you had your yoni worshipped too?’ I turned to the dental nurse who just giggled behind her face-mask. ‘I’ll take that as a “yes” then? Who hires out the Inns of Court for yoni worship?’

  ‘And open please. It’s part of the London Tantra Festival. It happens every year. Surely you must have been? … Lower left 7 needs composite filling.’

  ‘Oww hid uuu heeeee ahou ’is?’ I asked.

  ‘Watch lower left 6. Lower left 5 to lower right 5 OK … I hooked up with this random guy for a one-night stand and he was a tantric practitioner … Do you floss daily? You must floss daily … He was inside me with an erection for four or five hours after spending about 2 hours preparing me. I had about six orgasms. It was the most remarkable night of my life. So that interested me in tantra … Lower right 6 watch occlusal.’

  ‘Yeh – I han hee aaa aaa ould oo iat.’

  ‘You’ll have to make an appointment for a filling.’ She pressed a button restoring me to a sitting position.

  ‘Did you take his number?’

  ‘We could have had a relationship but I said “no” – the sex was amazing but he wasn’t right for me. But that’s what interested me in tantra, which led to the yoni worship.’

  ‘Really great to see you, Isabel.’

  ‘Hello, how are you?’ She said turning to her next patient.

  I wonder does she has conversations like this with all her patients? I had to go and have a coffee to recover from this conversation. I emailed her and asked her if I could include this story in a book I was writing. And whether I could use her real name. ‘Oh yes, that’s fine.’ So there it is. You can look up Tantra Festivals near you if you don’t believe me.

  But where was I? Ah yes, the yoni. As a person familiar with various kinds of spiritual and ‘New Age’ thought (I am making this assumption about you – forgive me) you may be familiar with the idea that the body holds memories as well as the brain. You may even have heard the theory that cells store memories. I don’t mean genetic information, I mean a kind of ‘memory’ of trauma. This is known as pseudoscience; although many people believe it there is no known way of measuring whether this is so or not. The evidence is anecdotal. The problem with anecdotal evidence is that there are sometimes thousands of people who share the same beliefs and the same experiences. So what is ‘true’ and what is not? This is the current situation with what they call ‘yoni massage’.

  I am told (and I have no reason to believe or disbelieve) that the walls of the vagina store trauma. So, just as people who feel, or have felt, they have the world on their shoulders often become stooped … so those that have had bad sexual experiences can later experience pain or numbness instead of pleasure when the inside of the vagina is touched, even with a loving and sensitive partner. Assuming that she may have had therapy and done the work needed to bring her consciousness in line with her present circumstances as well as she can – we are told that memory is still stored in the vaginal walls. Furthermore, we’re assured that a form of pressure massage can release these memories. Which is why there are women massaging each other internally. They claim this yoni massage is a source not only of pleasure but also of healing.

  I bet some of you think I’m making this up. But in Germany, I am reliably informed, ‘all the women seem to be working on each other’. But that may be a slight exaggeration.

  I have to confess that I experienced this – such is my commitment to experiential research but it did not provide any healing nor memories that I cherish.

  A while later I attended a workshop with a group of women and we were paired at random by drawing names out of a hat. The process was called ‘yoni healing’. Immediately my hackles were raised. ‘Yoni massage’ would have been less irritating to me, but to claim that this process is a form of healing … well, as far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out. You could give me a great shoulder massage or an allover body massage and I’m going to enjoy it very much. But even the most experienced body masseur isn’t going to call it a ‘body healing’. Why, just because it’s the yoni being massaged, has it become ‘healing’?

  As some of you will observe, these thoughts will not have put me in a very receptive mood for the experience. I had been partnered, by the random draw, with a woman who was in her 60s and it was her first ever experience either of being touched or of touching another woman in this way. I suppose neither of us were ideal students. We followed the instructions – massaging first the stomach then the muscles at the top of the legs, the inside of the legs, the outer labia, the inner labia and finally internally.

  Various women in the room at the time had different experiences. Some cried, some shouted out in pain, some gave groans of pleasure. Those massaging were very caring – it was impossible not to notice that. And what did I experience? Well, I’m pretty sure I can sum it up without too much fear of exaggeration – nothing. And what did she experience when I was massaging her? Nothing. And why would this have been so? I think it’s because my main intention was not to ‘release trauma’. I have no belief that I’m able to do that, but my aim was simply to make sure that her experience was gentle and not to hurt her. She similarly was very gentle and obviously didn’t want to hurt me.

  I don’t want to put you off doing workshops in Europe, the US or Asia. There are many kinds of workshops that explore sexuality where this will not be on the agenda. But if you study sexuality with a group of women to a reasonably high level you a
re expected to leave your inhibitions behind and get in touch with your body– so sooner or later this will show up as it is considered, by many, to be a necessary part of women’s sexual healing. The presumption is that women are in need of healing. I have never heard of any woman being told, ‘Oh, you don’t need this. You’re fine.’ To be fair though, some women I’ve spoken to that have done different kinds of workshops in various countries have had experiences that they describe as ‘transformative’.

  ‘It depends who does it,’ says one of my German friends on the telephone. ‘I’ve done this five times. With an osteopath, my experience was that the first time my cervix felt fixed and he seemed to be able to make it less rigid. The second time he released tension, and the third time he did a kind of trauma work and that seemed to release something too. But I’ve also done this with less experienced people and it’s done nothing.’

  ‘And were these treatments from men or women?’

  ‘I’ve had yoni massage from men and women. That doesn’t really matter. It’s the experience of the practitioner that counts.’

  With some women – in Germany, the UK and the US – this is so popular that there are regular groups where women meet for yoni massage. If you are a man reading this – before you ask – no, men are not allowed to go and watch.

  I went up to the person running the workshop and asked, ‘So – everyone else seemed to be having a far more profound experience than I had. Does that mean that I’m less fucked up than the other women as I certainly felt no need to cry, sob, shout out, swear or any of the other reactions that we saw? Or does it mean that I’m more fucked up?’

  ‘Oh, you are more armoured.’ I was told. That’s ‘New Age’ speak for more fucked up. Well, to be a little more specific – the idea is one that originally came from Wilhelm Reich, who died in 1957, that as bad things happen to you physically you form body armour. So you are less able to feel. It makes a certain amount of sense. My problems with this theory are: firstly, why is it that some people who have had the most reasons to create heavy armour, for example those who may have suffered sexual abuse, will still have sensitivity? Women who have been in bad, loveless marriages for years can remarry and discover a whole new experience of pleasure that they didn’t know was possible for them. I know some women who admit to being very messed up emotionally and yet they have very good sex lives. Surely if this tendency to ‘armour’ the inside of our vaginas was universal it would be more widely known? Women would be talking about it at the pub, ‘I have this terrible knot in my fanny armour.’ And if releasing inner knots were a simple path to better orgasms – then surely more people would be making money providing this service and it would be written about on the cover of Cosmopolitan with predictable regularity?

  But – to be fair, I must put my scepticism aside, realizing that I know nothing about this subject. To be as open as possible – if this yoni healing had been offered to me by someone who had trained for many years, and had massaged as many yonis as Nicole has stroked clitorises (I so wish that the plural was clitori), then I would be listening more carefully. But, should I believe a diagnosis from a woman running a workshop who was at the other end of the room at the time and is basing her statement on the fact that I had very little feeling when a totally untrained woman was touching me very gently trying not to hurt me? I’ll pass.

  I am not in the business of going to workshops to collect new limiting beliefs. When I got back from the workshop I rang my old friend William Bloom (author of about a million books on all things alternative – founder in the 1980s of ‘Alternatives’ in London and general knower of all things) and he said, ‘You should sue them.’ He didn’t mean it, as everyone in the alternative world is aware that what we do and what we believe is our responsibility – but he made me feel better.

  Because of course I did wonder whether she’s right. Maybe this is the reason why I’m one of the many women who doesn’t experience orgasm during penetration. Maybe I’m more than averagely numb? Another sign, apparently, that I’m messed up is that I don’t want my yoni massaged by a woman anyway. According to the women I’ve met who practise this – most women feel safer when they know that their genitals are not being touched with any sexual intent but purely for the purpose of healing.

  ‘But I like men.’ I reply pathetically. The women look at me with pity. It’s just sensation after all. And I did experience this when, despite not really having any desire to do so, I agreed to have an OM with Rachael. It felt just the same. I didn’t like it as much though.

  I’ve just read a book called Yoni Massage: Awakening Female Sexual Energy. Unsurprisingly, it’s translated from the German. I’m not sure how many books on yoni healing you could sell in the UK. I don’t think many mainstream publishers would be competing. The author, Michaela Riedl15,, runs one-to-one sessions where women go to her and, for between three and three-and-a-half hours, receive massage first of themselves, then of their external genitals, then internally. Michaela is straight and so are the women that go to her. Am I more than usually inhibited, do you think? Is this idea of exploring your sexuality and your body sensation away from the presence of men appealing to you? Or not?

  If you hate the idea there are some people who might jump to the conclusion that you have issues that you need to overcome. And to be fair you may have. On the other hand, if you are heterosexual and hate the idea of any kind of exploration of your sexuality in a mixed group they may be concerned for you for that reason. The ideal, apparently, is that we become sexually comfortable enough that we are open to either option. After all, we are not talking about having sex here – we are talking about massage of a part of the body for the purpose of understanding and healing.

  Women are wonderful, beautiful, sexy, intelligent creatures and they understand how other women’s bodies work. I have had some experience of the beauty of women’s work in the workshops that I did with Shakti Tantra. There is a feeling of being safe – of vulnerability – a beautiful way of being sexually that maybe can only be found when no one has any sexual needs or expectations of anyone else. So I would say that if the idea of being in a group of women scares you – go immediately and find out why.

  But everyone has limits and when I had a woman’s fingers up my fanny I felt I’d reached them. And if I’m going to explore this any further – it has to be with an experienced practitioner – so I know I can trust what they say. And, for my preference, male.

  • • •

  Looking for ‘yoni healing’, other than through personal recommendation, is not a piece of research for the fainthearted. Before beginning a search, the computer should flag up a liability warning and you should have to declare that you are over 18, and a fully responsible adult. You have to be able to tell the sheep from the goats in a country where they all look very much the same.

  Putting ‘yoni massage’ into Google is likely to draw up a number of sites that look as if they are run by some kind of tantric practitioners. This is where you should take a pinch of salt, become as sceptical as possible and use every ounce of common sense that you have available to you. Ignore anything that says ‘free sensual yoni massage for ladies.’ Ha ha.

  The first site that I find is using lots of words like ‘kundalini’ and ‘yonic’, but on a quick browse you soon realize that the main service on offer is visits to a hotel room, the man’s face is not pictured, he will light candles to ‘warmify’ the atmosphere and that a ‘wine ritual’ is part of the erotic massage. He further promises that ‘erotic yoni massage’ is a ‘spiritual stimulation’ and promises that he will ‘take you out of this universe with joyful pleasure’. He adds not to ring the number directly but only contact him by text. Ha ha ha.

  I searched ‘yoni massage Glasgow’, ‘yoni massage Belfast’, ‘yoni massage Edinburgh’ and finally ‘yoni massage London’. It didn’t take me long to work out who was offering genuine therapeutic work and who was offering a ‘service for the frustrated lady’. This is why I would say, do
n’t start the journey here and don’t go to see any alternative sexual health practitioner other than through personal recommendation.

  But I am about to break this rule myself. Following a couple of hours on the Internet I finally find a practitioner that I like the sound of. His site contains the question, ‘What is tantric massage?’ And he replies, ‘Many things go under this name these days. Some people offer a full body massage including stroking the genitals, other people present it as chakra balancing, sometimes it’s even a euphemism for sex for sale.’ He goes on, ‘My tantric massage for women is serious and professional expert bodywork which guides you toward expanded, healthy, profound and wholesome sexuality in your daily life.’

  His site contains a full head and shoulders picture of him, statements from many women and the offer to speak with any of them on the telephone. I didn’t, but the fact that I could have rung him and said, ‘I’d like to speak to three women that you have worked with,’ is reassuring.16

  But now – here is the controversial bit where I’m going to make myself unpopular with some people that work in this profession – this man has a whole page on why it makes more sense for a heterosexual woman to go to a heterosexual male practitioner. He writes, to paraphrase, that it’s sexual energy that you are learning to understand. He states that many people believe that a man offering this kind of bodywork has his own agenda. But I don’t think that’s necessarily so. It’s not a question of him wanting anything from the women that go to him – and he’s very careful to point out that he has a loving partner – but simply that a heterosexual male has a certain energy.

  This matches my feelings and experience. I don’t feel as comfortable having my vagina touched or massaged by women. His site says,