‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m convinced that only my heart chakra is totally open. Yes, like you, a man opened mine, walked in years ago and then left it open as wide as a barn door. It’s very painful having a heart chakra wide open. I feel everyone, everything. People talk about us all being “One” as if it’s just a concept. But I feel it. It’s very inconvenient. First I couldn’t eat cows, then pigs, then chickens, and then fish. My love extends to rats and snails and slugs – now I have problems killing a mosquito. I apologize before pulling up a lettuce. I feel life in rocks. Thank God that all my other chakras are closed if this is the result of having just this one open.’
‘I think all your chakras are open.’
‘Thank you, Jovanna – that’s very reassuring.’
• • •
Back to the workshop and the use of words. Whoosh. Crosscut from my home to couples sitting in a circle in floppy clothes. We had thought about ‘no’. The next words that we explore are ‘yes’ and ‘wait’. Both are equally difficult words for some of us to express in a sexual context. I remember having a discussion with a woman once when I was giving her a shoulder massage and she was giving me zero feedback. I said to her, ‘Hello? I need feedback – you know, words like, “yes”, “no”, “harder”, “softer”, “up a bit”, “push harder right there”.’
‘I don’t give feedback,’ she said. ‘Can’t you feel what needs to be done?’
‘Well, to an extent I can. But it really helps if you also give me guidance. Don’t you give your husband feedback – on shoulder massage or during sex?’
‘No. I expect him to be able to feel and know.’
She actually said that. Really. Ah, women – the myth of the man who understands us instinctively. Maybe they exist in fiction? Or after a lot of training in sexuality, which very few men get – or, well … how many in a hundred really understand instinctively? Most of us don’t understand ourselves, so I’m not sure we can expect a man to.
‘Let’s practise,’ I ventured radically. ‘Do you prefer it if I press the knots in your shoulder muscles harder or softer?’
I sound confident, don’t I? Well, I’m fine at giving feedback with shoulder massage but curiously quiet with ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘wait’ in bed. Here it was great to practise with games. T hates being tickled. If I touch him anywhere on the sides of his body I know I’m going to get a loud ‘no!’ out of him. So I blew raspberries on his side to make it easy. And as for the word ‘wait’ – well obviously, I could write a chapter about that word. A huge amount of everything that goes wrong in much lovemaking comes from women’s inability to say ‘wait’. So gently, gently, we are here practising. And laughing a lot.
• • •
Jovanna interrupts again. (How am I supposed to get on with the narrative with a guest like this?)
‘Did you do female ejaculation on the course?’
‘No. They do courses for that?’
‘Yes, you should talk to my friend Sabine. She did a workshop in Germany where a group of women learnt to ejaculate. I think they helped each other. Most of the workshops in Germany, as far as I can work out, seem to be groups of women stroking each other’s clitoris and G-spot and having a lot more success than the men do.’
‘But I’m straight.’
‘So’s Sabine.’
Do-it-yourself squirting with the help of other women? This is a workshop I will not be exploring. No publisher could pay me enough. If anyone writes to me and says, ‘I went to Germany and did a women’s “How to Squirt” workshop,’ I’ll buy any reader that does this a coffee on Battersea Park Road.
Back to the couples’ workshop, the kind of work I’m assuming some of you may be open to exploring. We were in the late Saturday afternoon by now and moving into the evening. Many of the processes had been, in one way or another, about giving up control or taking the lead. Take a simple game (and you can play this at home) called ‘One Hour, One Hour’ – you can play with a lover, a mother, a friend or a child. You need a day ideally or just an afternoon.
What you do is that you take turns choosing what you are both going to do for the next hour. It’s that simple. And huge fun. All you need is a willingness to take complete responsibility for the experience that you both have for an hour and then you also need to be flexible enough to do anything the partner chooses. This is very different from the way some couples normally operate by negotiation.
‘Would you like to go to the cinema, dear? Or out for a meal?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. You decide.’
‘Really, whatever you’d like.’
‘I’m easy really – you choose.’
And so on until you lose the will to live. Or do what the other person chooses, have a bad evening and then get cross with them for making a bad choice and yourself for not having chosen.
Instead it can work like this. Flip a coin – you win. So you decide you’d like to spend the first hour with your playmate making you both breakfast while you read a book in bed. Your playmate then chooses the next hour, let’s say they choose to go for a bike ride so at the end of the second hour you’re on the other side of the park. Then you might say, ‘OK, I’d like to go around this art gallery.’ Then an hour later the choice may be, ‘OK, now I’d like to cycle to this great pub on the river for lunch.’ And so on. This game is wonderful for children who are not used to being able to choose the activities that ‘grown-ups’ do. And it can also be played with whole families taking turns. On holiday with my daughter we’d play ‘One Day, One Day’. It avoided arguments fantastically. On my days we’d wake up at 5am, take a local bus and go sightseeing and have culture days. On her days we’d lie in and stay on the beach. She was forced to admit that it worked well. On my days I’d say, ‘Let’s walk down this street and explore,’ and if she said, ‘Why?’ I’d say, ‘Because it’s my day and I’m curious.’ And as she had agreed to play, that was the end of it.
I once played this with a child of four and had huge fun doing finger painting and playing ball and taking a bus just for the fun of it. In my hour, I had chalks and we went and drew pictures on the pavement.
And once I played with a boyfriend. It’s particularly fun in bed.
This was the aspect that we were exploring in the couples’ workshop. First there is the element of giving up control and then there is the element of asking for what you want for an hour. Of course there are boundaries and this is perhaps why we started the day with finding ‘an authentic “no.”’ For example, … anal (and please forgive me for speaking so frankly but this is a book about sex after all). Anal sex has never been my thing – so if T had started the evening saying, ‘I’d like an hour’s anal sex please,’ then I’d have said ‘no’. As it was I got lucky and it was my turn to start. I said, ‘I’d like an hour’s massage please – here’s the oil.’ I took off nearly all my clothes and lay face down in our little corner. Everyone else was doing whatever they wanted so no one was paying much attention to anyone else. Now of course T and I enjoy massaging each other normally, as many couples do, but we rarely dedicate an hour to it and if we do it’s usually reciprocated. Here I had asked for an hour after only one day’s practice of asking for what I want and only brief rehearsal of saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’.
‘What did you do on Saturday evening?’ interrupted my houseguest again.
‘Well, we continued that exercise until we went to bed.’
‘And were people, you know, brave in their choices?’
‘Some were. Some weren’t.’
‘And were you allowed to leave the main room?’
‘Yes. Some left, some stayed. It was really beautiful actually. The room kind of felt like a mystical womb of some kind, dark and velvety. Each couple’s nest was made up with beautiful silks and cushions. It felt very honouring with couples learning how to love and please each other.’
‘Do they do this stuff for singles?’
‘Yes. They have workshops just for women and they have mixed
workshops.’
‘You’re not going to tell me about Saturday night then?’
‘No. But I’ll say that T is more OK with asking for what he wants than I am. I enjoyed his choices more than I enjoyed my own.’
Having told you that I’m not allowed to describe the processes that we do in these workshops because then everyone would be too frightened to attend – neither do I want your imaginations to run away with you. So yes, we had a lot of fun taking turns with an ‘ask for what you want’ process. But, well, let’s just say that we were only playing with our own partners and not with anyone else’s – and that the room was dimly lit.
As I write the final sentence about the Saturday – a voice comes from the corner of my lounge.
‘Can I tell you more about jade eggs now then?’
‘No. I’m going to bed.’
• • •
‘Good morning, Jovanna.’ I say the following morning, rubbing my eyes and pouring tea.
‘So you’ve never tried a jade egg, Isabel? You haven’t?’
‘No, I once bought what they call “love eggs” from Ann Summers and they were so painful after I’d – what was the phrase you used – “launched them into the abyss” that I gave them exactly two chances before deciding that “the yoni said ‘no’”. In fact, my yoni said “no thank you” really very clearly. Let me show you.’ I found my ‘love eggs.’
‘This looks like a dog toy.’
‘Forget what it looks like – surely it serves the same purpose? But when I put these strange objects inside me, unsurprisingly they just hurt.’
‘We have pleasure, pain or paralysis. So pain is good.’
‘Why?’
‘Paralysis is bad. Would you rather have a sore leg or a numb leg? Believe me – pain is good. But don’t put those inside you because they look like a dog toy. At this stage in my life nothing is going in my yoni unless it looks good. The jade eggs are the Fabergé eggs of the sex world. But listen – I’m single. I’ve got to get creative.’
Commercial Break. ‘Single? Forget looking out for a man to be your playmate, lover and friend – get yourself an exquisite jade egg! Simpler to operate than a man with none of those unexpected extra expenses. Jade eggs come in varying sizes so you can find the perfect egg for you.’8
No, I’m not on commission. Now where was I? Sunday morning of the workshop. The breakfast was great.
‘There was a process we did on touching,’ I told Jovanna.
‘It was wonderful. My arms haven’t been touched or kissed as well since.’
‘Did you do touching with a feather?’
‘We might have done.’
‘Oh, I love that. I did a process like that once in South Africa and we took hours just touching very lightly. It was sheer heaven.’
I can reveal that since the couples’ workshop T and I have been and purchased, from a posh sex shop, a very long black feather on a stick. It’s a genuine thing of beauty. And I do enjoy asking to be stroked with it, ever so gently, for extended periods of time. And so does he. It’s lovely if you are really tired and have time but no energy.
‘Isn’t it weird that slow, light touch has to be taught?’ Jovanna said, sipping her tea.
‘I guess it goes against our “more, stronger, harder, faster” culture. There was a point I remember when T was moving his finger down my arm so slowly that it was barely perceptible – and even then it felt too fast.’
‘Yes, and with a feather you can barely feel it and yet it brings all your senses alive.’
Please make sure you are visualizing a peacock feather. Long, wispy and beautiful.
We all discussed what we had learnt from the previous day. Especially from the Saturday evening. I admitted that I had enjoyed T’s choices more than my own. I love the fact that although in some areas of our lives I am much more confident than T is – around sexuality it is always T who takes the greater risks. Yet he’s also patient with me.
We had one more technical exercise. Breathing is another subject, like the chakras, which seems to be key to everything. On Sunday there was an introduction to ‘The Mirror Breath’ and how this can be linked with pelvic rocking. I guess that eventually this exercise can be done naked and plugged in, so to speak … but today I was having trouble even getting the breathing right.
‘There was no obligatory nakedness?’ Jovanna asked again.
‘No, Jovanna. The whole course is an invitation so you can do just as little or as much as you want. But, just as with a body massage, it’s difficult to do some things with your clothes on. Anyway, what’s wrong with nakedness?’
‘God, I really wouldn’t want to take off my clothes even in front of women … let alone if there were men in the room.’
‘We were working with our own partners and concentrating on them. We were not ogling other people’s partners. It was really a very safe and loving space that they created, and even the older man who came who was unaccustomed to any work of this kind was comfortable with the work we did. The women’s work is much harder.’
‘I find working with women easier.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Something genetic in me, Jovanna.’
‘OK … Anyway … I’ve got to go now. I’ll leave you to your writing. Do you like writing?’
‘I do, yes. I’m talking to two people now about all this, you and the one reading. I try and hide nothing from the one reading. So it’s hard for me that I’m not allowed to talk about everything that happens in these workshops … and I try to imagine the questions. Anyway let me get on with my story.’
• • •
So, where was I? Sunday, last process. At the end of the weekend the processes moved away from sex and came back to love. It’s amazing what we can be for each other in a relationship if we know how. A good woman can be playmate, mother (in a good way), child, lover, friend, goddess (in a good way), whore (in a good way), teacher, pupil, soulmate, guide and loving companion. A good man can be a woman’s best friend, playmate, lover, teacher, pupil, father (in a good way), son (in a good way), protector and loving companion. And these are only some of the roles that we can play for each other.
So in our last process we explored this and ended up holding each other like children, each couple in our own little nest. Sue and Martin played beautiful music and looked at us all. And cried.
I know many celibates – I have more than an average number of nuns and monks of different traditions in my address book – who live and thrive without sex. When there is a choice to live without sex in order to pursue an exclusively spiritual life within a tradition, the nuns and monks live very well. Their lives are still full of love and, as they would say, when freed from the obligation to love mainly one person, their love extends equally to all. The response is that they are deeply loved by many souls in return.
But find me someone who has regular sex without love and is truly happy. Could we find such a person? So it felt very beautiful and very appropriate to end our weekend with a process that wasn’t about sex at all but about emotional connection. It would be sad, I guess, to have a couples’ workshop and not send the couples home as friends. If you’d like to take your partner to this workshop, the link is in the Notes at the end.9
We finished our thank yous and goodbyes and piled our stuff in a cab to get the train back to London. T had done something that no man has ever done for me before. Not much more expensive but a sweet surprise: after a weekend about sex, an appreciative boyfriend had booked us first class seats home.
‘And I’m happy to do it again,’ he said.
‘Really?’
‘Whenever we spend the weekend away exploring sex, I’ll pay and we can travel home first class. I appreciate a woman who thinks a good sex life is important.’
I think many men would say this if they experienced this work.
Long Hot Summer
Stroking the Clitoris
I have been reading a book
called The Multi-Orgasmic Couple by Mantak Chia. As you may imagine, it’s seriously annoying. How many multi-orgasmic couples do you think you know? What is most annoying is that, for the man, there are exercises about how to separate the orgasm from the ejaculation so that he can then orgasm as often as he’d like to. That process, although difficult for the man to achieve, is a physical one. The advice for women starts with asking the woman to go back to her childhood and examine how she feels about every formative sexual experience. I have become somewhat weary of this approach. It seems to be such a frequent assumption that if a woman isn’t orgasmic she is messed up and needs to work through her ‘issues’ in an exhaustive and detailed way. And often, historically, with a male therapist.
The Multi-Orgasmic Couple is yet another book with a male analysis of female sexuality. As we know, a woman, when examined by a man, is often just too complex. If she’s not responsive in the same way he is, men often declare us broken. It’s all Freud’s fault. And Jung didn’t really help either.
I call Hilly and complain. ‘Don’t read that book,’ she says with admirable clarity, ‘it does have a very male perspective.
Read Slow Sex by Nicole Daedone.’
I go to my local bookshop and order this (great title) and, when it arrives, I’m not in the least annoyed. There is no suggestion here that if you want a good sex life you need to turn your psyche inside out or consider the first time you saw a penis. It’s cleverly and empathetically written. Nicole’s writing on ‘what a woman wants from a man’ and ‘what a man wants from a woman’ is so compassionate that both T and I fall a little in love with Nicole when we read it. But the most amazing thing about the book is one simple exercise that it describes … now, pay attention.
The key process in Nicole’s book is what she calls ‘Orgasmic Meditation’. They call it OMing. As OM is the most sacred sound in Hinduism and is also found in Jainism, Sikhism and Buddhism, I’m not sure whether to cringe when they call it ‘The OM practice’ or admire their marketing. Anyway, this is what they do. The man carefully makes a ‘nest’ on the floor with blankets and cushions. The woman removes her clothing from the waist down and lies on the floor with her legs butterflied to reveal her ‘pussy’ (change of vocabulary here – she doesn’t use the word ‘yoni’). The cushions support her left leg. He sits down beside her on her right. He is fully clothed. His body supports her right leg. His left leg is over her tummy. The position is complicated to describe but is easy to get into.10 Then, get this! He is to spend the next 15 minutes stroking the upper left-hand quadrant of her clitoris with a stroke no firmer than that which you would use to stroke your own eyelid. That’s it. I remember feeling slightly faint when I first read this.
Sensation Page 6
