It’s not rocket science, but learning how to orgasm regularly, makes all the difference.

Some of my most vivid memories of sex, especially early in my erotic life, are not of the satisfying post-coitus elated release, but their opposite. Rather, it was the myriad times when I was still learning how my body worked, what kinds of touch triggered what response, how much time it took for arousal to take over, what positions reached deep enough inside–basically the whole ball of wax, which made orgasm work (or not). The times when I was so close but couldn’t quite get over the top before my partner was finished, sent me into a fury almost as intense as what I imagine the orgasm might have been like. So did the years after, when I thought I finally figured out how to achieve orgasm and I only wanted to do the exact same moves in the exact same order, believing it would work every time, except it  didn’t. And it quickly became a sexual rut that didn’t help my marriage much either.

For a significant period of my early marriage, orgasm misses were more frequent than the  orgasmic explosions I so longed for. My frustration turned easily to blame and it didn’t take long for my conflict-avoidant spouse to choose avoiding the whole scene, rather than risk the wrath of not getting it right with me. We spent at least a decade of our sex life among the ranks of millions who approach/avoid sex and keep score on who says no more often.  The truth is that whether they admit it or not, everyone wants to experience the seismic shift and profound emotional and energetic releases associated with orgasm.  And yet, this most intimate transformation remains elusive for many and for some, learning how to orgasm seems totally out of reach.    

In part, this is because of some fundamental misunderstandings of the workings of orgasm and the understandable yet completely unhelpful anxiety that so often accompanies our attempts to create the experience. The most important thing to get clear about orgasm is that you can’t make yourself, or more importantly, anyone else have an orgasm. And in fact, the efforts to cajole and force, only make our orgasmic potential more elusive. Prompting the all too common and vicious cycle where orgasm is set as the finish line and the entire sexual encounter gets tripped up in anticipated performance anxiety and our attention, which is what makes the present moment sexy, is completely preoccupied with whether or not you will find the end.   

The other unintended result is the creation of the sex rut, which happens when we become rigid in our sexual encounters and fixated on trying to replicate some memorable orgasm that happened before, is totally losing the fluidity of the moment you are in.

Orgasmic potential responds more readily to one’s capacity to surrender than it does to willfully trying to elicit it.  Surrender is an interesting state that emerges; it’s where curiosity and openness can lead. These emotional states, by definition, bring us fully present to what is happening in and around us. They allow the body freedom to experiment and feel while giving the mind freedom to roam. The human brain cannot simultaneously process anxiety and sexual arousal. So giving up the mind space of bad body images, worries over genital size, or the most common: being able to achieve orgasm, needs to go away for the body to surrender to finding its way.

The good news is that the more orgasms you have, the more orgasms you’re likely to have in the future. So learning how to orgasm comes with learning how to surrender to and trust your sexual response will not only help develop your orgasmic potential, but will also give you practice of letting go of anxiety. Not surprisingly,  many people have more success achieving orgasm alone than with their partner, but this is worthy practice, because the better you get at honing your own personal turn-on skills, the easier it gets sharing them with someone you love. Think of developing your capacity for orgasm as a  potent form of meditation- even when you don’t achieve bliss, the practice of harnessing our attention is where orgasmic potential starts.

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When it comes to sexual satisfaction, are you being honest about what you really want? 

Ask most any sex therapist what the first question is that comes out of the mouth of a new client and it is most always this- “Am I normal? Is my partner normal? Is this desire, behavior, longing….normal?” These normal questions weigh heavily on our sexuality, partly because we mistake the endless fictional depictions of sex in pornography as a true point of reference, but even more so because we often suffer with our sexual doubts and fears in isolation, even within couples. It’s a weird question to associate with our sexuality because the idea of normal, which generally refers to the average or middle of the bell curve, is antithetical to the extreme responses that passionate orgasmic sex generates.

Questioning our normalcy about what we desire or what we experience in the unique space of sexual satisfaction is less about the behaviors we engage with than it is the trouble we have reconciling our rational everyday mindset with the free-fall abandon that our sexual impulses demand if we are going to achieve the passionate release and connection they offer. The truth is, as the Kinsey study so clearly demonstrated, that there is no normal in our sexual preferences and behaviors. If the idea of normal applies anywhere, it is in the context of how we relate to ourselves as erotic sexual beings, whether we are open to exploring and understanding our desire or repressing and judging ourselves and others for their sexual impulses.

A powerful cure for moving beyond the normal issue starts by developing the curiosity and willingness to learn how to express our sexual desires out loud. It is empowering to claim our erotic self with our words.  I remember a man who shared with me despairingly that he couldn’t even say the word “masturbation” out loud to his wife. When we give up our own expression to appease anyone, not only does the relationship get frozen in the narrow window of the permissible, but we betray ourselves in a way that makes us doubt ourselves and our desire.  Not expressing creates the dynamic of continuously wondering if we are normal. It is tricky at first, emerging from our self-imposed silence.

I remember the initial awkwardness and discomfort I felt when I began to speak out loud during sex. For a very long time, I believed that my voice would somehow break a spell or interrupt some natural flow.  But in fact, as I started using words to say what I liked or wanted,  it wasn’t a distraction at all.  The more that I trusted myself  to really engage and communicate in intimate encounters, the more exciting it got.  It took a while, but this became particularly true about finding the freedom to share bits of the strange fantasy life that I had silenced for so long with my fears of being abnormal; it turned out to be rocket fuel for passionate intimacy.

If you are breaking a long term sexual silence, words might feel like too big a leap, so start small with allowing yourself  to make the sounds that are held in the erotic spaces. Moans, laughter, screams, and sighs are a hearty soundtrack that will expand the texture of lovemaking in surprising ways.  For one thing, it is through sound of any kind that we communicate our intimate intentions and experience. Even shared guttural noises diminishes our sense of isolation to our sexual selves and our partner. Getting over the inhibition of making noise and the imposed silence of our early days of making out in our parent’s den is a powerfully liberating step to get beyond the normal.

Wendy Strgar is the founder of GoodCleanLove – a website that sells organic and natural sexual intimacy products, and also a source of medical research for women and men’s sexual health. She is the author of “Love that Works: A Guide to Enduring Intimacy“.  Her blog  www.makinglovesustainable.com  was named as the best sex/relationship blog by Intent.com for 2011 and has been listed many times as one of the best 100 relationship blogs on the web.

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Sex sells. And Sprout Pharmaceuticals just scored the diamond ring with the FDA approval of its previously rejected female Viagra drug Flibanserin. But is it just selling us the image of desire or can it authentically fix our female libido problems? 

This libido issue has been recognized as a “medical” problem, initially termed hypoactive sexual desire (H.S.D.D. ) with its own diagnostic code until 2013 when it was renamed female sexual interest/arousal disorder (F.S.I.A.D.).  The name change, as silly as it sounds, is important because it indicates a new and more accurate understanding of a more realistic sexual response cycle for women. The idea that this new pink Viagra treats a disorder that isn’t even still in the books only adds insult to injury when you consider both the significant side effects, including fainting and low blood pressure from Flibasnserin (a failed antidepressant), and the almost non-existent increase in sexual response.   

Only two days after the approval of Flibanserin, Sprout Pharmaceuticals, a company of less than 40 employees, was sold for $1 billion, easily covering the $100 million dollar initial investment, spent mostly on an elaborate social media campaign equating a dubious drug approval to equal rights for women. The one good thing that has come from the FDA drug approval and even the bogus PR movement “Even the Score” developed to persuade the FDA to cave on the drug, is that now we can speak freely and honestly about female libido- and the fact that most women want more of it, but often have no idea how to get it. 

How about we begin instead with some basic sex education and dispel a few persistent myths about how libido works as well as how it changes. The persistent and harmful belief that sexual desire is or should be spontaneous is where the trouble starts. We all remember those initial early stirrings of sexual hunger, when it was some odd animal unleashed in us, just by being near the crush of the month, or even the frenzied, rip-your-clothes off feelings in the biologically driven stage of falling in love. Who doesn’t love that kind of spontaneous eruption of desire? It’s like surfing a giant wave, or dancing around a bonfire. So yes, there are times- rare and beautiful as they are- when our libido spontaneously takes us on a fantastic ride, sometimes resulting in an over the top orgasm.   

And then there is life: children, bills, figuring out the Feng Shui of correct furniture placement, dealing with in-laws, trying to progress in careers, cars breaking down, and you know… getting to an exercise class. Somehow, spontaneous sexual desire doesn’t usually mix in this list. This is where we have to start working for a new and more reliable form of libido. As adults, this is the moment when we have to both want and learn how to generate our capacity for desire. And this is where the libido story falls apart for most women. Study participants stated, “Once I started, it wasn’t an issue. It was getting me started.” And “I hate having to ‘wind myself up’ to do it,” said another participant. “It makes me feel broken.”  These comments reflect the real problem with female libido, that most women don’t understand: what makes desire work over the long-term is being willing to own and cultivate our erotic selves.   

It is a big leap to take responsibility for our own erotic impulses. It is much easier to let them lie dormant under a giant stack of old guilt or wounds of  being sexual, emotional disconnection from our partner, silent shame about our body image, or just having no idea about how to access a fantasy life. It is grown-up business that requires both curiosity and commitment to our erotic soul for it to flourish. And most women equate that work with being broken. We know now that desire is not usually the leader- just waking up our capacity to be aroused is enough to kick desire awake. And arousal is available through any of our senses if we go looking for it.

Giving up the longing for spontaneous desire to take you over and leaning towards getting good at cultivating responsive desire is the only pill you need to take.  Not only will you avoid the pain and embarrassment of frequent fainting spells, which will not help your libido, but you will invent exciting new pathways in your brain to actually get to the passion we all truly want.

Stay tuned in the next weeks for real ideas on how to make your own desire cure.

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Can sex be a tool for deeper emotional healing?

Sex is at the beginning and end of who we are. Indeed, we are each the most profound products of the sexual act, and the more we learn about our fragile, erotic selves, the more obvious it is that this is the center around which our lives orbit, whether we are conscious of it or not. I often say “After we eat, drink and sleep, the next thing we are is sexual.” Peering through our cultural lens, we see this in the multi-billion dollar advertising industry, which continuously employs blatant over-sexualized messages to sell everything. At the same time, we have become a technology-driven culture that has all but divorced sexuality from intimacy while still insisting that sexual education has no place in our schools.

Sexual confusion and ignorance is amplified into terror as we look around the globe. Not uncommonly, young women are sold, bartered, raped, cut, silenced, covered from head to toe, and even murdered in the name of sexual ignorance, shame and fear. The tragedy of our collective human sexual pain is something we bear together as a race. None of us escapes unscathed by the trauma that is too often synonymous with our sexual souls.

Telling a true story about this mysterious part of ourselves may just be the open door to healing what I believe is most broken about living on earth. Rectifying our relationship to our core erotic identity and protecting it from shame can only happen from the inside out. Protecting ourselves without simultaneously nurturing ourselves just hardens us, making the wounded places impenetrable. This is an all too familiar result of naming but not healing our injuries. Nurturing and comforting ourselves sexually resembles a childlike curiosity. All of the wonder and amazement we had when we first discovered pleasurable sensations is still alive in us.

Reawakening to our capacity to feel happens when we stop paying attention with our thinking minds and focus instead on our sensory capacity. Besides the most obvious reasons to invite and cultivate a pleasure response of how good it feels, there are hundreds of medical studies that reinforce the multi-layered impact of a healthy sexual response to every other aspect of our wellbeing. Everything from reduced risk of disease to stronger immune response to higher self-esteem comes through our capacity to give and receive pleasure.

But even more compelling, is that as each one of us breaks the chains of sexual trauma, our intention and freedom shakes the archaic structures that have bound our humanity for way too long. Individual sexual healing is magnified in ways that are hard to explain, except to note that it so completely changes your relationship to life and that life itself changes.

So dare yourself, for the good of all of us, to begin your healing journey here- where your work carries the miraculous capacity to heal us all.

Wendy Strgar is the founder of GoodCleanLove – a website that sells organic and natural sexual intimacy products, and also a source of medical research for women and men’s sexual health. She is the author of “Love that Works: A Guide to Enduring Intimacy“.  Her blog  www.makinglovesustainable.com  was named as the best sex/relationship blog by Intent.com for 2011 and has been listed many times as one of the best 100 relationship blogs on the web.

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