Sensation

by Isabel Losada

  As I said, the muscles form loops around our various openings so by doing this exercise you are also drawing your awareness to the muscles between the anus and the vulva, perineum, the uterus and even the clitoris. Getting a little extra blood to these parts is very good for us.

  • • •

  Women – I keep hearing again and again, from a wide range of sources, that if you have a vibrator it’s a good idea not to switch it on. Really. Everyone I’ve met and spoken to in the positive sexuality world agrees on this. This may strike you as odd as I’ve said that stimulating the nerves can be good if you are doing it yourself but artificially overstimulating the nerves makes them go dead. After a while, women simply can’t feel anything. Please don’t write and tell me this is nonsense – I’m just telling you what I’ve heard from everyone that works in this discipline. Even a woman who sells vibes told me this.

  One day T and I went to visit a well-known independent sex shop and while we were there we struck up a conversation with the woman that ran the shop. We asked her about this. ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘That’s why women are always coming in here and asking for something stronger. They want them stronger and stronger. I never use them myself.’ Should we be concerned about the vibe sales in the increasing number of sex shops across the country? They may be numbing our pleasure rather than increasing it. They are certainly not designed to help you listen for the subtle.

  There is one exception. The vibe is fine as long as you take the batteries out – recycle them – and use it for strengthening your Kegel muscles. But you’d better only do this exercise if you’ve put the batteries a long way away. You can have fun without them. Really. So in order to strengthen the vaginal muscles we need to widen them first. In order to constrict a sphincter you have to widen it first. So, carefully lubricate and insert the vibe, grasp as firmly as you can and hold for a few seconds, then relax the muscle fully. This is a good one for listening to as many sensations as you can, however subtle. If you place your awareness there you will increasingly become aware of more subtle sensations. You can breathe in – do the lifting – and breathe out. There are lots of variations. If you really want to become an expert, see if you can make circular motions with the vibe. The possibilities are endless.

  Another exercise much praised by the tantric masters is the ability to contract the muscle at the opening and work the muscles upwards all the way to the cervix and then down again. To learn this – I’m told – you first constrict the entire vagina and then learn to relax them one bit at a time until it becomes easy and produces a wave-like motion inside the vagina. A real tantric mistress would know how to mimic the spontaneous undulating motions that occur during an orgasm for her partner’s pleasure. I look forward to your letters on this section.

  And it’s like learning to play any other instrument – daily, short practice sessions are better than twice a week longer ones. It’s less fun without a vibe but of course you can practise these on the bus or the tube. If you spot a woman reading this book on a bus with a strangely ecstatic look on her face you know what she’s doing.

  And about dance classes. I’m always telling women that if you want to meet men, don’t go to ‘hips, bums and tums’, yoga or any dance class that is 98% female. Go climbing, go learn how to row, learn scuba diving – anything that will have at least a 50% male attendance. But – if you must go to an all-female dance class – why not try belly dancing? Pelvic mobility is the way to go. Tilt the sex organs up and down and this way and that way. Thrust the pelvis, rotate the pelvis, twirl the pelvis in a sexually provocative way … yes, yes, it’s yet one more way of exercising that all-important area of your body.

  • • •

  So, a week later I find myself being examined by a specialist pelvic floor physiotherapist at my local hospital. They have a team and they see women of all ages. It’s important to have these muscles healthy before childbirth, after childbirth and, well, for anyone that has a bladder – before you even consider your sex life.

  My nurse, Clare, is very matter of a fact about it all. But, there’s no machine. I’m disappointed. ‘I thought you had a machine to tell women how good or bad their pelvic floor strength is.’

  ‘No, we prefer a trained specialist to a machine. It’s possible to cheat with a machine because, for example, you can get a reading using your abs or your inner thigh muscles – whereas I can tell which muscles you are using much better with my fingers.’

  More women’s fingers up my vagina. Sigh. I’m almost getting used to it.

  ‘I see.’ Is this going to be better or worse than the colonic examination I told you about in The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment?

  ‘We have a simple way of describing the muscles that you need to use. For the back muscles you imagine that you have a fart that you don’t want to release. So I say, “hold wind”. Then for the front muscles you imagine that your bladder is full but you can’t get to a toilet. That is, lift the pube rectalis, or “hold wee”.

  ‘The pube erectalis?’

  ‘No, rectalis. The levitor ani.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Then I’m going to ask you to hold the muscle for a count of ten not using any of your other muscles to hold the contraction. It’s important to relax the muscle fully after that.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘So I’m going to put my finger inside you now, OK?’

  Sigh. I’ve said this before – thank God this isn’t television.

  ‘OK, so now, “hold wind”. And, “hold wee”. And firmer.

  Think of pulling the anus up and the squeezing my fingers forward … 5, 6, 7, 8 …’

  Honestly, my dedication knows no limits. And people worry about having their ‘personal details’ on Facebook?

  ‘… and 10. Very good. That was a good relaxation. So if you do that exercise where you draw the muscles up and hold for a count of ten – ten times, five times a day. Here is the second exercise. Just pull the muscles right up and then release, as firmly as you can … let’s see how many you can do, OK?’

  I’m determined to impress her and go past ten strong squeezes.

  ‘OK, so let’s see if you can get to 20?’

  ‘Shouldn’t I be able to keep going indefinitely?’ I asked, attempting not to screw my face up to help.

  ‘Not really. You see they are getting weaker. And keep going … 18, 19 and … 20.’

  ‘Very good. So practise that exercise five times a day too. We’ll see you in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘In your experience, is there evidence that these exercises improve the amount of sensation during penetrative sex?’

  ‘Yes, these exercises are good for the health of the bladder, to avoid rectal prolapse, they prevent incontinence when women get older and, yes, it definitely improves the sex life too.’

  The nerve endings are in the muscles, you see.

  ‘I’ll work hard at these exercises.’

  ‘But no breaking the flow of urine on the loo. We don’t recommend that.’

  ‘My GP told me that that’s how you find out if your PC (pubococcygeus) muscle is strong or not.’

  I saw Clare shudder slightly. ‘No, there is a little more to it than that.’

  ‘What about all the toys that are available out there to help?’

  ‘We don’t recommend the beads of various kinds because they encourage women to lift up rather than bringing the muscles forward toward the pelvic bone.’

  She pulls a model out of a drawer that shows the muscles in two layers. ‘You want this band of muscle to pull up and forwards.’

  ‘Up and forward? OK. I’ve also seen, online, women discussing that if you are doing lots of pelvic floor exercises then it’s good to squat too. They recommend peeing in the shower as it makes women squat right down fully the way a child does and this apparently stretches the muscles the other way.’

  ‘We also recommend Pilates as a general training for all the core muscles of that part of the body. It all helps. It cha
nged the shape of the bottom half of my boss’s body, she is fond of saying. So many women worry about having saggy tummies but it’s not as if we can’t do anything about these muscles.’

  ‘I’ll start with my pube rectalis then.’ It would be wrong not to.

  • • •

  I have been open with my friends on Facebook about the fact that I’m working on a book about sexuality. So I receive all kinds of weird invitations.

  Take this one. ‘Isabel, would you like to join me on a three-day training with the incredible Dossie Easton, author of The Ethical Slut, and general matriarch of the modern tantric/BDSM25 hybrid movement. Almost 70 and still tying up, flogging and circular breathing with the best?’

  Me: ‘Why do we need to tie up and flog people that we love?’

  ‘It’s about creating polarity, like the electrical charge on a battery. Lightning moves between polarites. We don’t do anything we don’t want to do with people we love. This is about learning how to create an intense energetic exchange between people and building energetic capacity.’

  I’m unusually silent. He goes on,

  ‘I’ve done a fair bit of yoga, meditation and solo spiritual practice in my life, and polarity work (tantric BDSM, Taoist sexuality practice) is by far the most powerful I’ve ever experienced. Tying up and flogging is one of a thousand ways we create a charge. The other part to it is to learn the dance of hormones and neuro-transmitters. If played just right the crescendo of dopamine and oxytocin is exquisite, transcendental and, coincidentally, very similar in brain wave and endocrine profile to what happens when experienced meditators report “enlightenment” experiences.’

  Maybe I’m deeply dull. I said, ‘No, thank you.’ I saw the lash marks on this man’s back after the workshop. But you can find Dossie if this sounds like an area you’d like to explore.26

  There seem to be organizations teaching sexuality of one kind or another popping up like mushrooms. One night I get invited to an event where I sit and get told about 11 different types of orgasm – ten of which I haven’t had. Let me run this information by you and I hope your score is higher than mine.

  Firstly, there is the famous ‘clitoral’ orgasm. Even these aren’t easy for many women but most sexuality schools will teach that this is definitely not what it’s all about. They are often quick and not satisfying we get told. I wonder at these evenings how many women sit feeling guilty. Sheesh. Then I sit listening again to hear that vaginal orgasms may be a little better but not if they are created by ‘friction’. But I’ve heard this from more than one school (I’m not allowed to name names here, sadly, as I know this is very interesting). ‘Friction-based vaginal orgasms’ are also not encouraged as they are over too quickly and don’t help us reach our orgasmic potential. And of course others encourage us not to think about our orgasmic potential at all and just – once again – to think about sensation.

  My dentist (she of the worshipped yoni) went to an evening with tantric teacher Saby Harmony in London in a basement at Neal’s Yard. Most Londoners think this is just a place for good organic food and herbs but you just never know who is hiring out the basement. She tells me that she went to a night there that started with people choosing partners, enjoying extensive eye contact, establishing boundaries and expressing where they were happy to be touched. This she confides over a coffee when she’s finished drilling my teeth one week. She told her partner he could touch her anywhere he wanted as long as it was external. Her exercise was just to give him feedback. If I’d had the courage I wish I’d spent evenings like this when I was 19. It would have changed my life. As it is I wouldn’t have the courage to do this even now. Anyway – to speed up the story the massage was about two hours (apparently they took a long time to get to the intimate bits) but it did end up including extensive genital pleasure while she simply gave him feedback. She was completely safe of course because she was in a room with a facilitator to instruct, observe and make sure that established boundaries were maintained. And there is a group of other people doing the same. Does everyone else know that these kind of events are happening in London?

  But back to the different types of orgasm that I haven’t had.

  There is the ‘squirting orgasm’ – that’s the one with female ejaculation. Some women describe this as a different type of orgasm. But maybe we shouldn’t count this one as, strictly speaking, it’s just an orgasm where a woman ‘ejaculates’ at the same time. This is said to be very good for women’s health and is all the rage in Germany – as you’ll remember.

  Then there is the curious ‘G-spot orgasm’. Controversy be gone. One tantra school I visited was very sure – we have one, they say. It feels like a walnut and it’s two inches inside women on the front wall. You can find it as the skin has a different texture from the skin around it. I desperately want to argue and say, ‘But surely all women’s bodies are different?’ But when you attend tantric events that allow you to keep your clothes on it’s really best to limit the questions to nine or ten as the organizers do have a certain amount of material to get through.

  Did you ever see a film called Deep Throat? I didn’t – I was probably watching something far more innocent when other more liberated people were watching this. Apparently it features the ‘mouth or throat orgasm’. I’m reliably informed that if women can learn to overcome the gagging reflex and can insert the ‘cock’ (no fancy yoni/lingam language at the evening I went to when they talked about this one) far enough down her throat, this will make a woman orgasm in her throat. Any takers?

  Some women have more luck. I recently spoke to a girlfriend who tells me that she has spontaneous orgasms during meditation. During meditation?! I spent over ten days doing Vipassana meditation for ten hours a day with Goenka’s teaching and all I got for it was pain. Lots and lots of pain. And some women are having spontaneous orgasms during meditation? Have I been doing the wrong courses? If you are a course that teaches how to achieve this, please write to me and I’ll do another book and tell you all how I learnt.

  The anal orgasm – easier for some women than others apparently. I’ve heard that it only leads to orgasm if your kundalini is opened. And how do you open your kundalini? I’ve no idea.

  I asked a friend who is a yoga teacher.

  ‘Is your kundalini open?’

  ‘Open is one term. Awakened is another. “Kunda Lini” means the coiled serpent.’

  ‘OK, so is your serpent uncoiled?’

  ‘We’ve all had these experiences.’

  ‘No. I’m quite sure my serpent is coiled. So is yours uncoiled?’

  ‘It’s a higher state of consciousness. I’ve read yogic texts ...’ (Hasn’t everyone? No?) She goes on.

  ‘… that describe experiences you have as the serpent awakens and spirals up the Sushumna …’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘The central energy motorway of the body that crisscrosses at the chakras. You know that Rod of Asclepius that doctors have?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A snake wrapped around a central staff?’

  ‘No.’

  She looks at me surprised.

  ‘But anyway,’ I ask, ‘is your kundalini open or awakened or what?’

  ‘Yes. Why are you asking?’

  ‘I heard that people can only have anal orgasms if their kundalini are open.’

  ‘I think that’s bollocks.’

  I think I’ll leave that conversation there and not crossexamine her any further about the connection between higher states of consciousness and anal penetration.

  ‘So, er, seen any good films recently?’

  So back to the 11 different forms of orgasm. An all-women’s event spoke about a ‘Valley Orgasm’. To learn what a Valley orgasm is they recommended reading Tantric Orgasm for Women. So if any of you want to understand this one I’ll put this book in the appendix with the other books. There is certainly a lot of pleasure available to us isn’t there?

  There is also the ‘A-spot orgasm’. I’m way behin
d. I’m still looking for the G-spot. Apparently the A-spot is 3–4 inches deep on the front wall of the vagina. And there is the ‘Cervix’ or ‘Womb’ orgasm. This is apparently achieved by hitting the back of the vagina on the cervix. At an introduction evening for a tantra course that I went to in Brighton (this one was mixed) I saw a woman do a When Harry met Sally demo of her experience during a Cervical orgasm and it certainly didn’t resemble anything I’ve ever experienced.

  Later a friend reminds me, after reading this, that she once had a ‘Breast Orgasm’. Apparently women can learn to orgasm just having our breasts rubbed? Men, don’t you want to learn this? And then one of my German friends who is training as a sexual body worker with Mike Lousada (no relation) tells me she knows how to have what she called a ‘Mental Orgasm’ just by thinking and exercising her pelvic floor muscles. Apparently she imagines that the Hindu god, Shiva, is making love to her. Sheesh, my dreams are dull.

  And not only my dreams. Sometimes exploring all this makes me think that I’m just wildly normal. Thinking that maybe we had got a bit diverted by the more esoteric pathways, T and I decided to visit the London ‘Sexpo’ exhibition at Olympia. ‘Sexpo’ is a health, sexuality and lifestyle exhibition and is ‘the world’s longest running adult exhibition and is designed to provide a fun, vibrant and safe environment for open-minded adults.’ But this is certainly the other extreme. It was mainly stalls selling sex toys and dressing-up clothes of all kinds. Women made of rubber lay on the floor in interesting positions.

  ‘I’ve never seen so many dildos in one building,’ T said, as we wandered down exhibition-style rows of stalls seemingly with every sex shop in Europe represented. There were dressing-up clothes of all kinds and for all sexes, scantilyclothed women dancing around poles, and scantily-clothed men strutting on stage.