Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm

Slow Sex

Grand Central Life & Style

Chapter One

The Art of Slow Sex

As I stand in front of my new students on the first day of a Slow Sex workshop, it’s like I’m a captain at the prow of a ship on a foggy night. The mist that hangs in the air between me and the class is so thick I can hardly see their faces.

It’s the mist of abject terror. Holy mother, they’re in a sex class.

Through the fog they’re sizing me up, checking me out. If they’re in a sex class, then I must be the sex teacher. So that’s what a sex teacher looks like. It’s hard not to open my mouth and say something hot, raunchy, and shocking just to see how far they’ll jump out of their seats.

Alas, when I open my mouth the first thing I start talking about is my grandma. Not as titillating as they’re hoping for, I realize, but there’s nothing I can do. Grandma is where it all begins.

I was an only child, raised by my mother and my grandma. Grandma was an amazing cook. She was an old world–style cook, an immigrant from the Ukraine who knew how to make a mean borscht. Cooking for her loved ones—and I was at the top of that list—was her favorite thing to do. She was a force of nature both in and out of the kitchen, and I was half afraid of her, half in love with her. I would watch her move from stove to sink to refrigerator with the precision of a dancer, the fascination of watching her cook outweighing the consequences of getting in her way.

Then, when I was fifteen, Grandma had a heart attack. The whole family was on edge, waiting. When the diagnosis came, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that she would survive; the bad news was that the condition was degenerative, and her heart was deteriorating. They didn’t know how long she would live.

I was in a Home Ec class at the time, and I was cooking up a storm. Since Grandma was always cooking for everyone else, I thought, I will bring her something we make in class to show her how much I love her. So one afternoon after she got home, I brought her a dish we’d prepared that day. I set it on the table with great fanfare, waiting expectantly for her to take her first bite and shower me with praise. What happened was not what I was looking for, to say the least. She took a bite, yes, but she spit it back out before she even chewed it. I was shocked and then asked her what was wrong.

“You killed this food with the recipe,” she said, matter-of-factly, and got up to start dinner.

I was, of course, mortified. But more than that, I was confused. What did she mean, I’d killed the food with the recipe? I made this thing in class, lady. A class I’m getting an A in, thank you very much. The whole point was to follow the recipe. If you don’t follow a recipe, I stewed, how are you supposed to know how to cook the freaking dish?

Once I regained control of my hormone-driven teenage emotions, I entered the kitchen and asked her, as calmly as possible, how one learned to cook without a recipe. She turned her ancient gaze toward me. I remember she looked tired, but wise. After a long pause she said, with what sounded like resignation, “Okay. I will teach you.”

And with that, I started learning what it meant to cook without a recipe. For my first lesson, she said, I would go to the Russian supermarket and buy her favorite cabbage cigarettes. She would stay home and make soup.

There were toilets to clean after that, and other household chores to be done in entirely different parts of the house. All this while she stood in the kitchen and cooked. I tried not to be irritated, but I’ve never been very good at trying not to be something I am. I huffed and puffed, taking great pains to stomp past the kitchen as often as possible so she could get a taste of what I was cooking. But if she sensed my annoyance, she never showed it—she just let me drag the vacuum cleaner up and down the hallway as noisily as I pleased and never said a thing.

A friend asked me if I wanted to go to the mall after school. “No,” I said. “My grandma is teaching me how to cook.”

“Cool,” she said.

“Hrumpf,” I replied.

But then one day I showed up, and as I headed for the vacuum closet, Grandma summoned me to the kitchen.

“Today,” she said, “we will make pierogi.”

Once my disbelief wore off, I started jumping up and down. She shot me a look that told me to check my enthusiasm and put on an apron. (How do old women communicate so much with just one sideways glance?) At the counter, she let me watch as she mixed the flour and eggs and water to make the dough. Then it was my turn. She turned the dough out onto the floury counter, and told me to knead it. I had barely made a turn of the dough before she was behind me, pinching my arm. “Feel that? That’s what you’re doing to the dough! How do you think it feels, being pinched like that?”

I looked at her like she was insane. How does the dough feel? But a few more corrective arm pinches and I was massaging that dough with the same care and attention you’d use to powder a baby’s bottom. Soon, I announced I was done and the dough was ready to be rolled out.

“How do you know it’s done?” Grandma asked.

It was a good question. How did I know it was done? I don’t know. It just was—it was done. Grandma looked at me with an expression at once amused and relieved.

“You are ready now, Nicole,” she said.

That one day in the kitchen changed my life. In Home Ec, we learned to cook by finding a recipe and following its instructions exactly. We were rewarded for this good behavior by getting a meal and a good grade. In my grandma’s world, we were getting into relationship with the food. Feeling it. Getting to know it. Learning how it wanted to be cooked. I wasn’t even allowed to put on the apron until I was in relationship with my grandma—until I knew what cigarettes she liked to smoke and how she wanted her toilet bowl cleaned. Now I was getting into relationship with the dough, discovering how it wanted to be kneaded.

My grandma was teaching me the most important lesson of cooking, but also of living: anything you really get into relationship with will reveal its secrets to you. All you have to do is stand in the kitchen with an open mind and heart, recognizing the honor of cooking food for your family. The recipe will come.

This is a lesson I have never forgotten. It was the lesson of learning the difference between cooking as a science and cooking as an art. In science, we know that you make a cake by mixing together sugar and flour and eggs. You start from a position of knowledge—from a well-tested recipe—and you follow its rules until you have a cake. But for Grandma, the process started with a question: how does this particular cake want to be put together? These approaches come from two entirely different worlds. The first is the world of science—the science of cooking, but also of living. You take these rules, you apply them, and assuming you do it all right, the result is pretty much guaranteed. The second is where you begin to move into the art of living. You don’t know where you’re going and the results aren’t guaranteed. You can give every single thing you have and not achieve the outcome you were hoping for. But what you do achieve is the experience of intimate relationship. You open yourself, and the answers come through you. You find that you know things you never knew before. You discover that a masterpiece doesn’t actually require you to master anything at all. It simply requires you to feel, to listen, and to trust yourself. That’s art.

The Art of Sex

Anything you do can be approached as either science or art—including, perhaps most important, sex. The kind of sex we all wish we were enjoying all the time is the kind we have when we approach sex as an art form rather than a science. The kind of sex that asks us to be open and curious and to follow the experience where it wants to go, rather than forcing it to head in the direction we think it’s “supposed” to go, the direction the recipe says it should go in.

And yet most of the time, we treat sex like a science. We develop very strong expectations, anticipating a replicable outcome every time we add water and mix. We believe that “good” sex means one thing—probably something like mutual orgasms and a feeling of intimate connection to our partner—and that if either of the above is missing, the sex is “unsatisfying” or “truly problematic” or, worse yet, simply “good enough.” We ignore the reality, which is that sex itself is messy and inconsistent. It is a force of nature, like my grandma. It is a reflection of life, which means it includes hot and cold, fast and slow, good and bad. Sometimes we want it, other times we don’t. Sometimes we feel close to our partner, other times we feel like they might be a serial killer, for all we know. Sometimes we think they’re the best lover in the world, other times we wish that someone, at some point during their teen years, had taught them how to kiss, for crying out loud. Some of us can climax from one touch, whereas others go all night and never “get there.” Some of us remember a time when sex used to be great, but we can’t for the life of us remember how to get there again. This is the reality of sex. Sex is not a science; there is no recipe. No matter how many books you read or how many repetitive motions you make, the outcome is not guaranteed. And mere inconsistency is the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario? You kill the sex with the recipe.

But we’ve never learned to cook without a recipe—in the kitchen or the bedroom. So when things don’t turn out the way we expect, we find ourselves trying harder. Rather than opening up and letting our sexuality tell us what it wants in that moment, we try harder to comply with the external recipe we’ve been given. Rather than listening for our own desire and following it whether it makes sense or not, we try ever harder to be the good little recipe-follower we were taught to be. Pretty soon we’ve kneaded the dough into a tough, unappetizing lump.

Let’s take the example of orgasm. While men’s orgasms are also an art form, I think we can all agree that they tend to have more of that consistent scientific quality to them than women’s orgasms do. If you’ll pardon me for being blunt, “penis” plus “naked woman” in more cases than not does in fact equal “ejaculation.” But what, then, happens when the recipe doesn’t lead to the desired outcome? When no matter how hard he tries, the recipe—ahem—no longer stands on its own?

And then you’ve got women’s orgasm, which for most of us follows a path much more like The Artist’s Way than the scientific method. When observed objectively, women’s orgasm looks very different from men’s orgasm, and it may or may not include a climax. So what happens when we’re following the recipe for “good sex,” and (per usual) it calls for “two climaxes,” and two climaxes are not available?

What happens in either of these cases—and in so many more and different ways where the truth of “no recipe” is revealed—is that sex starts looking like a problem. Because we’re human and we exist in a paradigm of wrong (more on this later), we are trigger-happy when it comes to identifying problems. We are always on the lookout for someone or something to blame. We think there’s something wrong with us, or with our relationship, or with our partner. The artsy-ness of sex, its frustrating refusal to abide by the laws of mechanics, puts us into the difficult position of wondering why things aren’t going the way they’re “supposed” to be going. Each of us tends to respond in a different way.

Men approach the problem of sex like they’re trying to fix a TV that’s on the fritz. They scratch their heads and try to figure it out. They ask investigative questions, tinker with this and that, and when the screen is still blank, they’ll either become frustrated or zone out altogether.

For women, on the other hand, the tendency is to try to make her sex—and especially her orgasm—look a particular way, the way it’s “supposed” to look. We try to live up to the expectations set by Hollywood, and Cosmo, and our best friend, Katie (who seems to always be having amazing sex, all the freaking time, and who never really gets that we don’t necessarily want to hear about it). We put ourselves into the shape of the sex we think we’re supposed to be having, which is modeled on the example of a man’s experience. We spend a lot of time in our heads, wondering if we’re doing it right, concentrating very hard on “getting somewhere”—“somewhere” being synonymous with “climax.” We think about what sounds we should be making while we’re getting there, whether they’re “right” or not. We wonder what our partner will think if we’re not communicating via the aforementioned sounds that we’re having a mind-blowingly rocking time. And what if the elusive climax never happens? In moments of desperation, or sheer exhaustion, we’re sometimes tempted to fake it. Why not? Some of us feel like we’re faking the whole thing anyway, starting with our interest in having sex in the first place. The result is that we distance ourselves from our desires, from our direct experience of sex, and in the end, from our orgasm. Some women have gotten so far away from their own authentic orgasm that they don’t even think they have one. Which is a major concern, since for women especially, frequent access to the pleasure of orgasm is the key to finding joy, nourishment, and sustainable happiness. (How’s that for a statement you don’t hear every day?)

“I’ve always been a sexual person, but for a long time I didn’t feel like it was appropriate for me as a woman to have a really intense sexual appetite. So I ended up focusing on the guy’s experience instead of my own. I got really good at performing. I would think, ‘Oh, we’re fucking. Does he like it? Should I do this or that?’ But Slow Sex has changed that. It’s helped me feel each sensation, to notice where I get scared, or when I start to pull away.”

—Margaret

So what’s the solution to the problem of sex? While I was lucky enough to have Grandma teaching me in the kitchen, we don’t have many artistic role models to look to in the bedroom. We are taught sex-as-science from the time we first stumble, fatally embarrassed, through sex ed. It continues right up through adulthood, where we can buy a sex manual for every problem (cementing the notion of sex-as-TV-repair) and fancy accoutrements to dress our little problem child up in. But there are very few sexual mentors floating around, slowly reteaching the Art of Sex to world-weary scientists.

“Very few indeed,” I tell my now-wide-eyed students on that first day of class. “But lucky for you, you just found one.”

A Note on the Exercises in This Book

The exercises throughout this book will ask you to let your sex come out and play—in full view of your partner, with the lights on. My students often look at me like I’m crazy when I tell them to turn toward their partners and simply begin talking about their sexual desire, right here, in the room with a whole bunch of other couples. Am I mad?

Maybe, maybe not. What I am doing is trying to unfreeze this idea we have that sex is a Very Serious Matter. To drop the recipe we usually use, one that calls for speed, diligence, and the lights being decidedly off. At its heart, you might say that’s what Slow Sex is all about: turning the lights back on so we can all see what we’re doing. There’s no doubt it requires some students to step a bit outside of their comfort zones at first. Not a problem. Over the years I’ve watched in wonder as nervous, embarrassed students give themselves permission to let their sexual selves come out and play. Within a matter of seconds, wallflowers come into full bloom as wild, sexy beings they themselves have never seen before. It can happen for you, too. Just have fun with it! In my workshops I invite each student to approach the exercises I give them, and even the practice of Orgasmic Meditation itself, with the spirit of experimentation and play. You’re researching your own experience of sex. What do you like? What could you do without? What did you feel in your body? What were you thinking about? Something about approaching sex as research lightens up the experience and makes it less capital “S” serious. It opens you up to play, to checking out this experience or that one, just because you’re curious.

At the start of each exercise I’ve included the supplies you will need, including whether you’ll need your partner for the exercise, and about how long it will take to complete. There are three exceptions, however. In addition to Orgasmic Meditation itself and other exercises that allow you to practice different aspects of Slow Sex, I have also included three exercises designed to help you translate the philosophy of Slow Sex into your “regular” sex life. These exercises—Slow Oral for Her, Slow Oral for Him, and Slow Intercourse, all found in chapter 8—are less about step-by-step instruction than inspiration. The exercises are intended to ignite a feeling inside of you, a feeling of what Slow Sex is really about. Sink deeply into the sensation they generate when you read them, and use the feeling—rather than the form—to guide you.

Exercise. Sex as a Science, Sex as an Art

This first exercise is a great place to start playing. You and your partner are going to test-drive sex as a science, and then sex as an art. It’s meant to be fun and even a little bit saucy. How far you go is entirely up to you; you can change your mind or ask for something different at any moment. So give yourself permission to explore the unexplored and express whatever comes up with as little censorship as possible.

You’ll need three pillows, your partner, and a journal(s) for this exercise.

Place the pillows in a triangle on top of the bed or on the floor. Choose one pillow to be the “science” seat, one to be the “art” seat, and one pillow just for “listening.” Park your partner on the listening pillow. His job is simply to listen as you let your sex speak, and not get too hot and bothered to stay seated. Don’t feel self-conscious making him do all the listening—he’ll have his turn to talk soon enough!

Start by getting comfy on the science pillow, taking a minute to settle into your body and gather your attention. Then set your intention to research sex as science. Think linear, rational, goal-oriented, detailed, and even mathematical.

Now open your mouth and, using the most scientifically precise language you can muster, give your partner a quantitative recipe for fulfilling your sexual desire. Lay out exact instructions for how you want him to fuck you, with as much specificity as possible. What exactly do you want? Where? How often? For how long?

An example might be, “I want you to find me in the kitchen as I’m preparing dinner on Tuesday night. I want you to push me against the counter, lift up my skirt, and go down on me, alternating between sucking and licking my clit, while tugging firmly on my right nipple.”

Maybe you have a fantasy you’ve always wanted him to fulfill—great, narrate it for him. Maybe you have never really thought about anything like this before—no problem, just start talking and see what comes out. Don’t worry if you start laughing (humor is good!) or get embarrassed (remember, he’s going next!). Keep talking as long as you have something to say.

As your flow of ideas winds down, move over to the “art” pillow. Once again, take a deep breath and gather your attention. You’re in the world of art now—nonlinear, intuitive, emotional, and sensational.

When you’re ready, start describing the qualitative feel of the sex you desire. Use motion, emotion, and even sound. Give him all the sensual details. You might say, “I want to feel you all the way inside of me, opening me up from the darkest, deepest corners. I want to feel the heaviness of your body pinning me down, slow and unwavering, fucking the places I’ve never been touched before.”

Whew—I’m getting hot just thinking about it!

Once the flow of ideas slows down, move back to the science perspective and continue speaking your desire, once again using quantitative language. Make sure all the details are on the table. When you feel complete, make one last stop on the art pillow and continue to paint him a portrait of what your desire looks, feels, tastes, and sounds like. Don’t stop until you’ve said everything your desire wants to say.

Let your partner know when you are finished; then, take another moment to breathe and let everything you just said settle in the room. Ask your partner to mirror back to you what he heard you saying. He will then write down your desires from both the scientific perspective and the artistic perspective. (Feel free to help jog his memory if required.)

Once he is finished taking notes, switch positions. Take the listening seat, and have your partner complete the same exercise, starting with sex as science and moving on to sex as art.

When he is finished, be sure to record what you heard him say for future use.

Then have sex. You know you want to.

Advanced Practice

Plan four dates with your partner where you reenact the desires that arose during the exercise. (You have the notes: don’t forget to study!) The dates may be as short as fifteen minutes or as long as a day or night. At the first date, your partner will enact your scientific desires; at the second, you will enact his. Take note of how much sensation, turn-on, and attention you have when you are engaging in “sex as science.” Did everything turn out the way you expected? Did you feel as satisfied as you hoped when it was over? Take time to write in your journal about what you felt and how your expectations were or were not met.

Dedicate the next two dates to your artistic desires; first yours, then his. Invite the sensory details you described to come alive between you. Again, write down your experience in your journal. What did you feel? What turned you on? What had you feeling connected to your partner? Make time to share your thoughts and feelings with your partner. Remember to have fun—it’s just sex, after all!

Sex Problems? No Such Thing

So now my students are becoming more relaxed and comfortable. They’re on board that the way they’ve been handling the problem of sex is not working. Sex should be an art, not a science. Check. So now they’re ready for me to start talking about how the “sex artist” solves the problem of sex.

Which is the first problem. It can’t be done, I tell them. Simply put, there is no solving the problem of sex.

And with that, the relaxation gets sucked right back out of the room again. If there’s no solving the problem of sex, then why on earth are they here? They want solutions. They were promised a technique. They want to know how any woman can be orgasmic in fifteen minutes—did I not read my own marketing materials? Throats begin to tighten; I think I see the guy in the corner turning blue. Life-saving measures are needed, stat.

“Problems are for scientists!” I blurt out. “Sex is an art, remember? Therefore…?” I look around expectantly, waiting for someone to make the connection.

I’m getting crickets.

“Therefore,” I fill in, “sex is not a problem.”

We’ve been living with the paradigm of “wrong” for so long—with the mind-set that what is not flowing quote-unquote “smoothly,” what is not unfolding as it “should” be, is wrong, a problem. But if I may say so, the paradigm of wrong is itself wrong! All you need to do in order to see that things don’t always go the way you expect is to look at the world around you. Life is an all-inclusive package. You might think you paid only for joy/success/perfection, but like it or not, sadness/failure/inconsistency comes with the purchase price. “Wrong” is sometimes just part of the deal. Until we accept that fact—which holds up in the bedroom as well as everywhere else in life, BTW—we’ll be running around like chickens with our heads cut off, chasing the good experiences and trying to avoid the bad ones. (A futile effort if I’ve ever seen one.) The irony is that the more we try to hang on to our best-ever sexual experiences for dear life, the more the not-so-good ones stick out. And the more we resist our sex problems, the more irritating/frustrating/painful they become. They start to take up a lot of energy—energy we might otherwise be putting toward other things.

Like, say, more orgasmic, more connected, more pleasurable sex. Yes?

No wonder we start to think that there’s such a thing as “sex problems.”

So the question is not how can we solve the problems that come along with sex, but instead, how can we extend and increase the pleasurable experiences we love, while coming to terms with all the other stuff, too? How do we at least make a truce with things like disappointment and failure and a sense of disconnection, so we can spend our time enjoying orgasmic bliss and deep connection and everything else that sex has to offer us?

The answer is Slow Sex, and the practice of Orgasmic Meditation. OM does offer a solution, and technically it is a technique. But what it’s not is a recipe. It makes no promises about solving so-called sex problems, because in OM, there are no such things as problems, no such thing as hiding from the difficulties or clinging to the good times like a life preserver. By stripping away any expectations we have about what sex should or shouldn’t be, teaching us how to pay attention to our own sensation, and encouraging honest and frequent communication with our partner, OM teaches us how to enjoy all the facets of our sexuality.

Unlike a science, when you decide to OM you’re not getting any guarantees about the outcome. The only thing guaranteed is that, if you follow the instructions and really approach it with an open mind, you will end up an artist. You will become reacquainted with your own personal muse: your own genuine orgasm. Your tools will be your partner, your own body, and your desire. Your only job is to pay attention. There, in that moment of listening, of using your desire as a compass, you go from experiencing sex as a science to sex as an art. That is the switch that turns the lights on. It’s what your sex life is asking for.

The result—the reward you will get for this radical act of relaxation—is freedom. Freedom from all the pressure that usually accompanies sex. Men, especially, are freed from the constant pressure that sex, and particularly their partner’s orgasm, needs to be “figured out.” The sheer simplicity of the OM practice, and the fact that no particular outcome is expected, relegates their fixing mind to the back burner. Women, for our part, are freed from the narrow definition of “orgasmic” that we’ve been confined to ever since we learned what sex was about. Instead of forging ahead toward a climax as it is traditionally defined, our every experience, our every sensation, becomes part of our orgasm. This last point cannot be overstated. For re-envisioning our definition of “orgasm”—modeling it on the nuance of female orgasm, rather than the goal orientation of male orgasm—allows all of us, men and women alike, to draw more complete nourishment from our sex.

After starting to practice OM, you can’t help but have a completely different definition of orgasm. Whereas once we thought of orgasm as an “intensely pleasurable moment in time, which, if done right, provides satisfaction and release,” suddenly it can also be an “intensely pleasurable period of time, which, regardless of outcome, offers the opportunity for revolutionary connection and transformational enjoyment.” (Catchy, no?) The former definition is the more straightforward male model of orgasm—which we still love. But when we OM, we also get to know the more female model. It may not look as glamorous at first, but it gives us a whole lot of something else—something we’ve been looking for.

A Note to My Same-Sex Friends

My Slow Sex workshops are full of students from all walks of life, including—and perhaps especially—all sexual orientations. Regardless of whether you sleep with men, women, or some combination of both, the principles of Slow Sex are the same. For reasons that I will discuss later, however, beginning OM practice focuses primarily on a man stroking a woman. For this reason, the language in this book will be primarily hetero-focused. That said, for my gay male readers, there is a male stroking practice, which you’ll start hearing about in chapter 3. For my lesbian friends, the traditional OM practice is still perfectly applicable, though contrary to my instruction for hetero couples, you may consider trading off stroking duties. That way you both receive the benefits of being stroked, which, as women, is the key to uncovering our own unique orgasm.

The transition from traditional sex toward Slow Sex is similar to other transformations that are happening all around us. Take exercise, for example. You might say that OM is to “conventional sex” what yoga is to more conventional exercise, like aerobics. With aerobics—or running, or most other forms of exercise—there is often (but not always) some sort of quantitative goal involved. You might work out to build strength and stamina, lose weight, or just clear your head. The stated goal of yoga, however, is simply to stay with your breath. The practice itself is to let go of any expectations about outcome. Falling out of the posture is just as much a part of the experience as nailing an arm balance for the first time. That’s what makes yoga an art form. It’s different every time you try it. And every time you learn something new, get a new appreciation for who you are and what you’re capable of.

This is not to say that you can’t still enjoy a good, hard workout on its own merit. Exercise for the benefit of exercise will always have its place. But through yoga, a different possibility has entered the mix—the possibility of strengthening body and mind while also contacting something deeper inside of ourselves.

In the same way, OM is not intended to be a replacement for sex. On the contrary, most people practice Slow Sex because of how much it improves their “regular” sex lives. But like yoga, OM shows us a whole different world is available. A world where there are no such things as “sex problems.” Where what matters is not the outcome, but the pleasure you receive along the way. The best news? The skills we develop through Slow Sex act like rocket fuel when we apply them to traditional sex.

The benefits of OM only make themselves known, however, when we approach the practice like art instead of science. Anyone who has unrolled her yoga mat with the idea that she’s going to nail a particular posture knows that approaching your yoga practice with a goal in mind is just asking for a piece of humble pie. Demand of yourself that you’re going to nail side plank and watch yourself fall out of position before you even get there. In fact, in yoga they say that success is just getting to the mat in the first place. OM is the same way. Deciding you want to practice is the practice. Feeling the first stroke is the practice. Everything else is like icing on the cake. Like any art form, the path will be different every time. Sometimes it’s boring, frustrating, irritating. Other times it’s mind-blowing, heart-opening, and hot. The former is just as much a victory as the latter. What you will learn is how to stay open for both.

This is not to say you can’t spend time investigating the possibility of sex as a science. Hey, if that’s what you want to do, I say go for it. There are plenty of sex manuals out there that will teach you positioning, technique, etiquette, and how to have and give a conventional climax every time. But these books are like the recipes I learned in Home Ec class. They explain sex from the outside in, rather than teaching you how to experience sex from the inside out. This book, and the practice of OM, is about the art. You’ll get a core technique, but in this world, technique will only take you so far. I’ll let you in on a bunch of sex secrets I’ve learned over the years, but after that the ball is in your court. It’s what you put into it that counts.

The good news is that Slow Sex simplifies things. It throws out all expectation about what her orgasm should look like and how he is going to give it to her. It takes the pressure off, for both men and women. It makes room for everyone and every possibility. Whether you’ve ever had a traditional climax or not, orgasm awaits you.

One more confession, which you’ve probably already surmised. This book is about sex, sure. But on a different level, this book is actually about your life. It’s about learning a new way of operating in the world, which in turn allows for new ways of relating to other people and your life as a whole. It’s about putting down roots. Learning how to feel your own body. Learning how to connect with other people. And it’s about letting go of expectations and instead making room for every possibility. In a nutshell, this book is about turning your life into a work of art. It just so happens that the medium we’re going to be using—the magic potion that will get you there—is sex. Because if there’s one thing I’ve discovered on my own journey, it’s that sex is like New York: if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

“With the OMing practice I’m able to really feel what’s inside of me. I love what’s inside of me, and I want to feel more and more and more. My orgasm really comes out during OM. Then, when I’m having sex, I’m feeling more all the time. Which is a relief, because my biggest fear was that I wouldn’t ever be able to feel sex again.”

—Annika, 37

Now, don’t get me wrong. If straight-up better sex is what you’re looking for, Slow Sex offers that, too. It’s one of the side effects of coming back into your body and into relationship with your world. When you strip sex down, pay attention to sensation, and ask for what you desire, you can expect richer, more satisfying orgasms; a deeper, more nourishing connection with your partner; and improved relationships with everyone in your life. In just a few minutes a day, you can learn how to live—how to make the most of your one and precious life! How you can get inside it, be a part of it, feel intimate with the world in a whole new way. It’s a promise I’ve seen come to fruition in the lives of too many students to count. I know the same is available here for you, too, no matter who you are or why you’re here.

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Excerpted from Slow Sex by Daedone, Nicole Copyright © 2011 by Daedone, Nicole. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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