You Don't Need Orgasms for Soul-Shattering Sex

how our fixation on the climax actually makes us less connected

Dearest reader,

(and I really do mean that… my god, you are the only space on the internet that actually does read these days)…

I’m trying something new. Lately, I’ve been struggling with social media, noticing that instagram really is where long thoughts go to die, what with its bajillions of users with hefty .0000001 second attention spans.

I started wondering if I was sharing with the wrong circle. I don’t know the answer, and sure, I’ll still show up there (for now) but I wanna show up here, more. 

It brings me joy to share my inquiries into the depths of life. And my guess, if you’re here, is that it might bring you the same.

So I thought… maybe I’ll just take everything I would otherwise throw into the abyss that is instasuck, and put it here, in a sort of dailyish blog/love letter. Because let’s be honest. I’m (currently) not organized enough to collect all the ideas I’ve contemplated in a week, then come back and tie them up in a nice little newsletter with a single theme. But maybe, just maybe, If I collect everything here for us in delicious little morsels, we’ll start to see the themes emerge. 

You in? 

Cool. 

Me too.

So here’s what I’m learning lately…

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“Sometimes I forget I don’t have to make myself come.” I said to Luke last night after some deep emotional connection and subsequent self pleasure.

“But isn’t that the point of sex?” some may wonder. 

Many of us think it is because that’s all we’ve ever known and experienced. There’s this weird thing we do with sex, culturally, where the goal becomes the orgasm. Finishing. Getting it over with. Taking care of the obligation….

Wait, what?
Why?

Isn’t it strange that we’d want to get our pleasure “over with?” Or that we view erotic pleasure as an “obligation” at all?

Isn’t it strange that we’d rather indulge in the shallow pleasures of junk food and trash tv than connect deeply with our partners?

Isn’t it strange that we actively make excuses to avoid fucking wildly -  enjoying the ride -  experiencing the pleasure and pain and everything in between as it comes through us?

Oh wait… the pain. Well surely, that’s part of it. The mystery of our bodies and all the sensations that arise when we let ourselves just feel. Which is really what transformative, transcendent, deeply connected sex is all about. It’s not, as we’ve been taught to believe, about just experiencing pleasure and orgasms.

As Marquis de Sade said, “It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.”

Now, I don’t mean that you always have to get spanked and choked and bitten to feel pleasure (though I mean… ya might like it), but that there is, as I spoke about in my last post, a constant ache when it comes to love and connection. An ache for more. To come closer to our beloved. To reach out. There is a pain in our desire. In our experience of wanting. We feel a space. We want to bridge it. 

But often… we deny ourselves the experience. 

Why? We learn denial in the most foundational and therefore the most insidious of ways. We learn to deny our hunger, our creative urges, our desire to sexually express ourselves. These patterns of denial - of tension and contraction around our bodies’ & souls’ desires - then permeate our lives. 

We need to find balance. Contraction is part of the equation, but so is expansion. And that’s the part most of us miss. Breathing into the moment. Pressing into our partners hearts, bellies. Penetrating each other with our tongues, piercing glances, resounding moans. 

We want connection. We want expression. We want to be seen and heard and felt and loved, and it fucking hurts to deny ourselves. And as you may know, at a certain point… it can become too much to handle. We shut down. We leave our bodies. We refuse to feel anything because it’s just too excruciating.

Usually that’s when we start questioning things - embarking on the journey of self-transformation. Which, yay! sex can be a vessel of. 

So why aren’t more of us open to the vessel that is mind-blowing transformative sex? 

I have a theory: we are open to it, until it doesn't go the way we expect (newsflash - sex really doesn’t alchemize anything when it’s bound to expectations). 

The problem we face is, we want to do it perfectly, and we want the change to happen instantaneously.

So, here is perhaps the biggest and most important lesson to remember if you decide to embark on a journey of sexual alchemy:

We can only do it breath by breath. Moment by moment. One tender kiss, one wet juicy mess, one powerful thrust at a time. 

We are stopped in our tracks when we overwhelm ourselves with an attachment to the desire to be finished - to reach that proverbial pinnacle (hence, perhaps, the race to orgasm?) We need to slow down and indulge in a bit of romance. You know, like… the pleasure of getting to know someone and seducing them closer and closer to you, day by day? 

Our greatest pain comes from our tension against that romance - our resistance to feeling what’s happening right here, right now. Which may be joy or pain, or pleasure, or numbness, or confusion or bewilderment… it can be anything. It’s a freakin’ mystery, just like love is. 

Most of us don’t get to feel the depth and richness of that flow of Eros - of transformative, erotic love - because it requires that we open ourselves, really. It requires that we give ourselves the sort of  freedom to feel that can be terrifying, especially when we are used to sex by expectation. Sex that avoids pain. Sex that gets us safely and swiftly to our predetermined destination. It’s like a color by number painting… not so exciting when you already know what the picture is gonna look like. Maybe you can’t “mess up,” but you also can’t discover anything new. 

In sex, discovering something new - which is necessary to transformation - often involves touching a bit of pain because probably, we’ve all been sexually wounded. And the pain of those wounds, if we resist feeling them, just stays in our bodies.

Knowing that body, mind, and spirit are inextricably linked, that means there is physical, psychic and spiritual pain involved in sex. Damn. 

But the thing is… pain isn’t bad. We just think it is. We judge the pain as something we shouldn't experience, Then we contract around that thought, and physically and psychically resist it. As a result of our contraction, our spirits are forced back out of our bodies. And it hurts. And we don’t let ourselves feel it. And the cycle repeats. 

We have to learn to feel the hurt so we can release it from our bodies and break the cycle. It’s just part of being human. I can’t imagine that along this journey of life there are any of us who haven’t fucked up in our fucking and hurt ourselves or someone else. I can’t imagine that in this world we live in, there are any of us who haven’t been exposed to and taken in some distorted beliefs about pleasure and connection and sexuality. And if you raise your hand and say, “no, not me!” you’re probably lying. Just sayin’. 

If we can learn to better relate with our pain, we can

1. create enough safety within ourselves to be able to process the pain through a practice of self pleasure, and 

2. share our practice with a partner, who can help us go to the places we just can’t go alone.

Which brings me back to the idea that I - nor you - have to make yourself come. Nor does your partner have to make you come. We can just. enjoy. the ride. 

What’s interesting is, when Luke and I are together, it’s easy to ride him all night. To roll around in the sheets feeding each other chocolate and licking me off his fingers and delighting in every little moment of connection.

When we’re apart though… I become attached to my strong urge to get “there.”

Get where? Back onto the bridge we create with our bodies. I want to feel the intensity of connection I feel with him inside me. I want those sensations. I want to be in that flow of love with him cause it just feel so. damn. wonderful.

I forget that I can build a bridge back to myself. That I can connect with myself in the space between us (which in turn, creates a stronger foundation for our shared bridge).

So… in my moments of forgetting that there is a joy to be felt in connecting with myself, and in not wanting to feel the inherent pain of my yearning for my beloved - I contract around the thought. “Get there! Get there!” my mind sometimes screams.

If I’m not breathing and making a conscious effort to be here, present to the truth of my body right now, my body follows orders. It makes it all the more obvious why it is important to cultivate the mind as a witness, rather than a judge and commander.. 

I want Luke. Of course I do. There’s nothing wrong with wanting. Some days, I can just observe that. Other days, I judge the feelings it brings. And that’s where the suffering happens. Though it may be suffering in the form of the struggle for an orgasm, which is confusing because it eventually feels good, it points back to the bigger picture, wherein, as a culture, we place so much value on the climax (in sex, and in life) that we force and control our bodies into experiences they’re really not there for. 

Pleasure can be a marvelous, transformative thing, but cultivating a habit of pleasure by way of force… well, that can be just as damaging as our original wounding sexual or otherwise. 

So, here’s wishing you transcendent pleasure and soul shattering orgasms… but with the caveat that it come to you, rather than you forcing it upon yourself. 

All my love,

xx

Faye