Receiving a Yoni Massage

[part 5 in a series that starts here]

This post is for the women: you will soon be working hard on your meditation and on controlling your attention and your level of arousal during your massage, but as your partner is learning how to do a yoni massage you also have to communicate with him and learn some habits that will help him please you and keep you on track.

To repeat what I said to the men: Try to find words that will communicate without creating tension. Just saying, “Mmmm…” when something feels good provides a lot of feedback and encouragement and, if you are consistent about it, it lets your silence tell him that something isn’t working for you.

“A little softer” is much better than, “Too hard!” “That’s nice, but can you be a bit firmer?” is better than, “That’s too soft!” And when you’re giving feedback afterward, try to be specific as well as positive “I like a lot of pressure when you stroke upward on the perineum with your thumbs!”

On the other hand, “Ow!” is always in order. When something hurts, speed is vital in letting him know exactly what he did wrong, so it’s better to be fast than to lose time trying to find a way to be tactful.  Try not to yell or startle him, but don't delay!

One of the most important things you need to do as a recipient is to let your man know in unmistakable terms when you are ready to have an orgasm and when you are actually having one. If you have decided you're ready, or you just can’t hold it off any longer, say something, or figure out an unmistakable signal. I asked the couples what their signals were, and they were all over the place. Here are a few of the phrases the women said they used:

“Oh, yeah!” “Ready…” “Harder!” “Getting there…” "Coming!" “Now!” “Here we go!” “Okay!” “Soon!” “More!” and “Don’t stop!”

I also asked the men, and they mentioned some additional non-verbal prompts that their partners often used, like grabbing the edges of the table, tensing their legs or squeezing them together, lifting their hips, bringing their knees up toward the shoulders, tossing their head, grabbing parts of their male partner in a death grip, and that all time favorite, starting to breathe/gasp/moan much louder and faster.

Letting Go

As for orgasms, some of you may wonder why anyone would need to say or do anything. Isn’t it obvious? And for some of us it is. Our bodies get rigid, we get really flushed, our faces contort in an “orgasmic mask,” the tendons in our necks stand out, our breathing gets much faster and louder, our vaginal opening contracts rapidly, and we tend to grunt, squeak, hoot, yelp, moan, or even laugh at the end!

But almost half of the men I talked to say that they initially had real trouble telling when their partners reached climax. Many women have “cryptic orgasms” that are barely detectable from the outside, with no more than a slight clenching of the jaw, toes, or hands, some furrowing of the brow, and tension in the mid-section or legs. If that’s you, there are two problems with this. One is that your guy really needs to know what’s going on, so you have to learn to be more demonstrative than this. The other is that by being so restrained, you are actually reducing the intensity of your own orgasms.

One of the consistent lessons of psychology is that the relationship between the mind and the body goes both ways. In particular, the mind is influenced by the body much more than most people realize. That’s especially true about emotions. For example, lab studies have shown that people who look at cartoons while holding a pencil in their mouths sideways, forcing a crude kind of smile, will perceive the cartoons as being funnier than people who hold the pencil by the end, with their lips pursed, suppressing a smile, who will see the cartoons as being much less funny.

Similarly, if you suppress and hold in the external expression of your orgasm, your brain will perceive that your body is being unreactive, and will conclude that, oh, that wasn’t such a big deal. Your mind and particularly your emotions are affected a lot by the outward signs of your emotional reactions. If you are more audibly and visibly responsive, you will also feel the orgasm as being more intense and pleasurable!

Giving Yourself Permission to be Lusty

We get back here to some of the self-image problems that women have to deal with. A lot of us have unconsciously been playing the socially approved role of the slightly prim, restrained, self-controlled “good girl” (or the even more rigidly self-possessed “professional woman”) for so long that we don’t even realize that we’re taking it to bed with us. In the back of our minds is this weird Victorian shadow figure whispering to us that good girls don’t enjoy sex, or at least that only bad, slutty girls enjoy it “too much”!

For some of us this shows up as silent cryptic orgasms. For others, it doesn’t show up until we are confronted for the first time with the question of whether to continue after the first orgasm. Some of the women I interviewed said it took them months, or in a few cases more than a year, to give themselves permission to have a multiple orgasm. It turns out that we all have different unconscious definitions of enjoying it “too much.”

If you run into yours, you’re hearing the voice of that inner “nice girl,” and all of the moralizing and conditioning most of us had to put up with while we were growing up. I’m not suggesting that all moral conditioning is wrong, but in this case it clearly is.

I and many of the women I interviewed had to learn to shed that persona like a dead skin. In each of our cases, it took having a relationship with a man we genuinely trusted not to judge us when we let our lusty selves show. If you have the kind of loving and trusting relationship I hope you have, and which you are going to need to have for Tantra to work for you, you should feel safe letting your inner bad girl out. So let go! Be lusty! Learn to be loud! Don’t be afraid to share what’s going on inside!

Most important, stop spectating and thinking about what's happening. Let yourself live in the present moment and give yourself permission to feel, as intensely a possible, everything that is going on with your body. Trust your partner to care for you and love you, and just surrender to the tidal wave as each orgasm sweeps over you. It’s worth it!