The Big O! Have Bigger and Better Orgasms By Not Having Orgasms at all.

Orgasms are these wild things. For a few delicious moments, we sort of crack open and the world around us stills, the body, mind and soul joining into one shimmering fantastic blast of feeling and sensation. Yum. The effect of the orgasm is wide-reaching. From regulating sleep cycles to generating heightened states of performance and well-being to allowing for speechless emotional connection between lovers, exploring the full range of orgasmic potential would be an ideal component of the fictional high school class I wish all of us had called “Self Care 101”.

Everybody has their own unique flavor of orgasm, but there is a lot that we share too. For instance, the effect that time and space has on the body’s natural arousal escalation is profound. In this day and age, we are all so damn efficient! We leave out the subtleties of sexual experience in service of reaching the goal, but along the way we diminish our ROI. By reducing sex to a short and narrow pathway to orgasm, the orgasm itself doesn’t have the fertile ground that it needs to grow roots and become the wild and unbridled experience we are capable of.

This is true of both male and female bodies. Some of us may be challenged by this idea of it being true for all of us but take it from someone who talks about and learns about sex with people in all sorts of bodies and sexual identities : every one can benefit from exploring sex without orgasms.

It’s like mixing an album, if you turn down the vocal track, you might discover it is actually the drummer that is the star of the show. Or maybe it’s like a Chinese buffet : if you know you love General Tso’s and so you b-line for that sticky delight, you may not ever discover how much you love Buddha’s Delight….or how the two compliment and enhance one another. The whole orgasm is greater than the sum of its parts? I’ll take it.

So, here’s the invitation : the next time sex (or masturbation:) is on the table, turn down the volume on orgasms and take them off of the plate for a while and see what else you can fill up on with that extra time and space.