The Orgasmic Edge: A Sex Tip of Exquisite Pleasure and Torment

I was introduced to what is known as "Edging", "Peaking, Surfing, or even "Orgasm Control" in my training as a sex educator.  And I have to admit that it is one of my favorite pleasures. I love to introduce sexual technique to women at Back to the Body: Sensuous Retreats for Women couples in private retreats, workshops and coaching sessions.  Frankly, I personally enjoy surfing it's pleasures and exquisite torment.  It is my favorite dish! Extended Orgasm is a sexual technique which may be practiced either alone or with a partner and involves the keeping the recipient of the pleasure in a high level of erotic arousal for an extended period of time while not letting them climax or orgasm. This can go on for a period of minutes or hours or even days!

When the choice is made to allow the recipient to climax or orgasm the physical sensations may be much more explosive, expanded and frankly more pleasurable than if the orgasm were experienced with it's usually build up and release. But there is much pleasure in the play!

Some people have described the experience of being kept in heightened states of arousal for long periods of time as producing euphoric states and altered streams of consciousness like "Erotic Trance".  Orgasm control prolongs our pleasure and heightens the experience of sexual sensations  that occur during the final build-up to orgasm. It's a powerful experience for both the giver and the receiver whether you are "in control" of your partners climax or if you are the one delaying your own release.

Orgasm Edging Tips:

1.  If you are going to share this with a partner, I would start with full body touch, almost like giving a massage. "The Giver"  gradually move towards the genitals and would stimulate "The Receiver" with hands, fingers, sex toys, gradually bringing them up to the point high in the plateau phase of sexual response where an orgasm is actually building. Then "The Giver" would gradually move away from the genitals and move the energy to other parts of the body or simply  reduce the level of stimulation to just below that needed to set off the climax or orgasm.

2. Another way of playing with this is to give control of the orgasm to "The Giver" and play with something called "Orgasm Denial". With this lovely game,  orgasm is not allowed for even longer periods of time in order to develop an increased level of sexual tension. Remember that "Orgasm Games" can take some practice. Both the giver and the receiver have to really get to know each others responses. But by carefully varying the intensity, depth, techniques and speed of stimulation and lots of practice a "receiver" can be held in the highly aroused state near orgasm for an extraordinarily long time.  When the orgasm or climax is "allowed" it can be described as "earth shaking" or even "overwhelming".

3. You can even bring in elements of "Fifty Shades of Grey" if you choose to experiment that way. Some people enjoy creating an additional layer of power elements into this game and the person who is receiving the extended pleasure, or denial is called the "Submissive" can be even be put into restraints and or blindfolds for an added rush of not being in control.  The technical term for this game is "Tie and Tease" or "Tie and Deny".

4. You can play alone! Orgasm control is a way to be more creative with solo touch practices and can also be a great training ground for our own personal orgasmic responses. Masturbation or "Self Pleasuring" allows each of us to learn our own orgasmic response and practice having control over timing, the kind of touch we enjoy, speed of stimulation and our feelings in getting close to orgasm and then backing off and starting again. The term "edging" has been more closely associated with the solo practice where we experiment with stimulation until we reach that place right before climax happens (the plateau phase) and then we just stop or back off the stimulation just before orgasm occurs.

Self Pleasuring is a great training ground for people who want to play this game with a partner because you are in control of  your own intensity and don't have to rely on a partner to "guess" where you are in the game.  Playing alone is also a wonderful way not only to vary self pleasuring but it's also an easy way to learn your own capacity and limits in edging.

Playing with Orgasm Control or Extended Orgasm or any of the variations of these games are all about making every stroke count. This is all about heightening pleasure. When we play with our arousal we are not just trying to "get off". We are turning orgasm into a feast instead of something to get done. Arousal can become an unexplored lands of moans, groans, giggles, laughter, power play, and ecstatic trance states. It's a beautiful way to build communication and a sense of playfulness between partners and interesting enough when "The Giver" learns to spread the arousal and sensation all over "The Receivers" body there is a learning that our erotic response is not just held in our genitals. It can be found in all the parts of our bodies like soles of feet, nipples. lips, and arm pits in equal parts! My invitation to you is to explore your orgasm! It can be more than something to get done. It can be a surf board to ride!

Portal into the Feminine: A One Day Retreat in Seattle

Attention Gorgeous Women of Seattle or Those Willing To Travel! Mark Your Calendars and Get Your Tickets! I am super excited about a unique and brand new offering that I have created with the support of the amazing Sophia Sky and Foundation for Sex Positive Culture! "Portal Into The Feminine: A One Day Retreat For Women". We will begin with a reception on the evening of November 21st and melt into our full day together on November 22nd. Lunch is included.

Perhaps you have never heard the term "Erotic Intelligence", Erotic Guides" or even "Uses of the Erotic". Most women live outside ourselves, and rely on external forces, input and directives to guide our lives rather than from our internal knowledge and needs. When we tune out our own internal erotic guides we limit our capacity for creativity, sexual expression, pleasure, and our own ability to be powerful in our careers. This workshop will introduce you to your own internal guide perhaps for the first time, or take you deeper of the power of the erotic within ourselves.

The retreat will begin the moment you register with homework assignments and the opportunity to participate in a special Facebook Group created just for the women attending this experience. We will join together the evening before our retreat to know each other, share some light food and wine, create the intentions for our retreat and begin to explore this concept of the erotic as an internal guide for women.

On Saturday we will begin the process of exploring, reclaiming or getting to know our personal erotic internal guides.

Our process will include:

1. Guided meditation into listening to our own internal erotic guide. 2. Exploring our full female expression and how we hold those emotions in our bodies. 3. Examine why we keep ourselves small erotically and practice opening ourselves up to our greatness 4. Delve deeper in our sexual desire and learn to honor, access and express it. 5. Understanding menstruation, Peri-menopause and menopause: How do these stages of female biology affect our sexuality, creativity and desire. How does the voices of our internal guide shift with each life change. 6. Confront our hunger in every form from sexuality, to food, to money. 7.Tell the stories of our bodies. 8. Learn to access and work with our Arousal and Orgasm as a holistic tool for healing and transformation in our lives.

Women will have access to the Facebook group group after the retreat is over for further support. Advance Registration Only. Investment: $150.00.  Date Reminder: November 21st and melt into our full day together on November 22nd. Lunch is included.

I can't wait to share all of this with you.

Register Here:

Here is My "Naked" Truth

There is a lot of attention being given to an article in HuffPo After 50  entitled  My "Naked" Truth by Robin Korth. In this blog, Robin bravely speaks about her experience being rejected by a lover for her aging body.  She rejects him right back.  But in the middle of sharing with us, she actually defends the physical attractiveness of her body by societal standards, by letting us know that she is thin and fit. A size 6.  Robin wants us to know that even though she is aging, she had gotten it "right":  So what's wrong with him? More importantly, what's up with us? Is the message that if we are aging and not a size 6 we are going to be in for some real trouble? Or what if we had some kind of body changing surgery through the years? Robin is still on a very deep level  (even in her outrage)  buying into the party line about what is sexy and what is not -  when it comes to the female form. Robin is not alone. Everyday I have to fight off those messages. So do countless other women. It is a shared pain.

We face pain around our bodies and our sexuality when we are aging, and we face it when we are young. I felt it the first time when I was a chubby five year old and my mother told me that handsome men didn't like chubby girls. Now I am being told they don't like aging girls either.

And it's by these not so subtle and subtle messages that women begin to distrust the power of their own erotic body and their own beauty. We tamp it down and we give our sexual power away. Most women never come near accessing the power that their bodies have erotically. We are trained and conditioned not to go there.

A part of that conditioning, comes from the messages that women have grown up with around the j"superficially erotic" by current standards of beauty. Women can't really win. We have been made to suffer and feel contemptible both when we meet those standards, and when we do not.

We have learned to suppress our sexuality and in doing so, we have suppressed our creative life force energy.  How many of us have been in the presence of really attractive looking women who fit the script and have felt no sexual energy coming from them at all? That's because they don't feel it either. These beauties have been successfully condition; and it's an epidemic.

Here is my "naked" truth:

When I release my erotic self from societies constrained container of how I am "suppose to be", my life flows with color and a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all of my experiences.  When I am able to find this place within myself and release all of the myths around my erotic desirability - I am able to show up in the body that I am in - with incredible hotness that I feel first and then I share with my partner. Erotic life force energy (sexiness) flows from the inside out.

Try not to roll your eyes.

If "others" are stuck in what they I should look like; then they don't get to have me. I much prefer this idea of inviting "others" to meet me in my own unique expression of my sexuality and my physical beauty.  I'm a gift.  And it took me some time to really heal the wounds of society and really own that place inside myself. This place of erotic confidence did not come easily.

Most of us come from a similar perspective when it comes to sexuality and self image.

The experience of our bodies, our self image and our sexuality often gets lost in translation. Instead of saying that all sexuality and all bodies is about this or that - let's recognize that the even the word "sexuality" and "self image" has layers of meaning built into it.  We are an amalgamation of desire, life experience, bodies, gender, subconscious urges, shame, sensations, and behaviors. Parts of our sexuality spring up from us organically, and some parts are shaped by our culture, religion, and even our language.

"Sex Appeal" is not one thing or one way. Our sexuality is a holistic and whole body experience that is unique in it's expression from human to human. It would be a huge relief if we could all stop pretending that we have sexuality all figured out and that we have all the answers. Sexuality is not geometry; it's a living container.  And it is found in all of our bodies at every age, shape and size.

So if we don't have sexuality and body image "all figured out", how do support women who are an amalgamation of all of this grow, explore, feel safe, and heal their relationship Eros?

How do we present to ourselves naked?

I have come to believe that the women themselves have all of the information that they need deeply held inside of them,  they just need the space and the space holders to help them unlock it. We need to be able to heal the wounds and strip away the stories that keep being told to us even in the stories that are meant to heal us! Sometimes, that calls for women to be naked together. And I am not talking about women engaging in some kind of group sex orgy. Even spending time in a Korean Spa can be very healing for women. We need to see each others real bodies so we can open to the beauty of our own.

Recently, at one of the sexuality healing retreats that I co-facilitate, "Back to the Body: Sensuous Retreats" for Women",  one of the women wrote publicly about her experience watching me demo a live "Sexological Bodywork" session with two practitioners, Ron Stewart and Neal Wecker.

This is one of the bravest things that I do. It involves me getting naked, climbing on a massage table and receiving sensuous body work in front of our six women.  I am publicly in an erotic experience for the sole purpose of permissioning and teaching other women about what is possible in their own bodies.

We teach all kinds of skills through this demonstration, and it prepares the women for their own sessions.  This is what this woman wrote about watching the session and my fifty year old Rubenesque body. I get to confront every possible myth I have about my aging, changing, full body every time I do this. And trust me, it was pretty edgy for me reading the account through her eyes, just as it is for me to re-publish it.

From journal of Ali Shanti published on Facebook while she was at the retreat:

"This is the end of day 1. We have 4 more days here together. Each day, each woman has a private session with one of the men. On the last day, we each have a 4-hand session with both men.

But first, today, we got to watch Pamela get on the table with both men working on her.

I feel nervous to share the details with you. Let me just start by passing on one of the first things that Pamela shared with us about why she does this work ...

"Women rarely get to experience what it's like to be in the alchemy of their own pleasure."

Why is that? What keeps that from happening?

Pamela says that, for the most part, it's because the whole arousal part of our eroticism is skipped over to get to climax. We are trained to match our men, who are locked into an immature masculine pattern of orgasm. The 10-minute, quiet and quick, in and out, get em up and get em off reality of sex in our culture.

Neal says it's because women are conditioned to believe we have to choose between our pleasure and our heart and so we choose heart and turn off the pleasure.

Which one of these, if either, resonates with you?

When we have sex just to "get off", how can there be time or room for alchemy?

Today, there was time and room and space and welcoming of the pleasure that creates alchemy. It began with Pamela and her demo.

Pamela is a voluptuous woman. She has had two c-sections and bears the scars and the belly and the full breasts, wide hips, thighs and arms to match. She is what you would call Rubenesque.

And, she may just be the hottest woman I've ever seen naked.

How does she do it?

She says "I stay alive in my body all the time. I have body shame and I'm still hot." She takes fully 100% responsibility for her sexuality, and her experience.

As she was on the table today demo'ing the experience of being worked on by sexological bodyworkers, we saw the alchemy in action as she rose to her knees like the Priestess she is, fully aroused and visible, pulsing with sensation, courageously letting us see all of her. Beyond courageous, really.

At the end of her journey, during the height of her orgasm, came moments of deep prayer, calling in the support of the Universe for her loved ones, for us, for life itself.

Pleasure as a path to alchemy. Yes, thank you, more please.

Through the experience of watching Pamela, I received the transmission of courage for my own alchemical, orgasmic experience.

What I found most interesting is that my mind would swear up and down I am as self-expressed, courageous and sexually comfortable as Pamela. But my body told another story completely. I was scared. Contracted. Uncertain. Worried. Would I be able to relax and receive?

Yes. Yes. Yes. I could. I did. I allowed it all and as I broke through my own pleasure ceiling, at the height of my arousal, I could feel the alchemy happening. And today was just day one. More tomorrow ..."

So why share this? Because this woman was able to FEEL my hotness even if her eyes told her initially this story about my body that didn't fit the script about how "Hot and Sexy" should look.  In my own willingness to move past the script about my body - I can become the "hottest woman in the room".  I allow it.   Yes, my body has a story to tell. And it's my story.

It's time to take back our own "Naked" truth. As women we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and non rational knowledge.   Yes! This is about the body! This is "Non-Rational Knowledge". We have to let go of the stories that we have been told and allow ourselves to connect back to our bodies.

We have been warned against this our entire lives by a world based on masculine power, perceptions and desires - which somehow women have taken into our bodies as our own reality.  We are taught to fear our depth, and women are shut down to examine the possibilities of it within themselves.

But our bodies at every age and presentation is filled with our erotic energy. This offers a well of replenishment and a proactive force to the women do not fear what it can hold for them.

Do not  succumb to the belief that your reflection of me, is who I am.

When women reveal themselves to themselves as hot, sexy, raw and wild it is a provocative and radical act filled with power.

Let's do it a lot

PS. That picture is of my real life 50 year old fat ass.  And I love it.

The Two Of You

My mentor recently told me that I lead a very examined life. She does too. She reminded that leading such a life is not everybody's cup of tea.  Mostly, because it's not always so easy - all of this self examination. But let me assure you, that there is a lot of pleasure and curiosity and love in there too! And in my self examinations, I think I find nuggets that may resonate with you. Here is a big one! Currently, I am working with my third chakra. You can find it in the area of your solar plexus. Energetically, it's the place of bridges. The connector place for me and perhaps you in your body. It's where we hold our sense of self.

Going deep inside my bridge, I am able to see that there is one part of Pamela that knows she is beautiful, sexy, loving and desirable. I worked really hard to reclaim that part of myself.  Countless hours on the tables of Sexological Body Workers, taking workshops, looking in the mirror (you name it, I probably did it on my road to reclaiming myself).

And there is this other part of Pamela that is younger and has been breed in our society, reinforced by media, and negative messages. That Pamela fears rejection and believes on some level that I am not enough on any level.

Both of these women are me, and they are both real.  Do you ever feel that?

Sometimes the Ice between those two places is really thin and can crack. I think that I am not alone in this place of wanting to bridge and weave these two parts of myself together in a deeper and stronger way.  I want stronger ice!

I think it's the path of so many of the women that I work with. We have been shamed in our sense of self, and we are or have reclaimed this place where we know that we are loved and accepted by our own selves and by the world.

It can be a fragile system. We can in one minute totally know we are sexy and then then we can become triggered by who knows what and the system can collapse.

I am paying attention to my third chakra and I invite you to do the same. This internal place of the bridge. It's where we need to sit in a women's circle and knit together these aspects of ourselves. .

We are all the entire package.