Orgasmic Hierarchies and Thoughts
When we work with pleasure, we work with and invite in orgasm.
What is orgasm?
I think of orgasm as a wide range of experiences generally typified by an unmistakably pleasurable release. But not always, orgasmic states for example don’t necessarily include release as a part of the experience.
An orgasm often arises between some kind of up-regulation and down-regulation in the body with some kind of genital stimulation. Using down regulation, consciously or intuitively, can allow erotic charge to be extended for different experiences and can prolong the experience of orgasmic pleasure. Down regulation includes things like slowing down the breath, slowing down touch, relaxing the body, and gentle touch. Up regulation would include faster breath, vigorous movement, increased pressure, tensing the body, and is useful in building up erotic energy. Our bodies move between the two as a part of our daily cycles of living and being.
There is a wide range of genital expression in humans and we are all slightly differently innervated, which means we all have our own unique experience of sensation in our genitals (and the whole body). Caffyn Jesse writes that “Just as we can build muscles with dedication to regular workouts, we can build new neural pathways by offering our nerve endings regular touch.” (Jesse, Caffyn. Erotic Massage for Healing and Pleasure: plus Orgasm Coaching, Genital Anatomy, Scar Tissue Healing and more from a Pioneering Somatic Sex Educator (p. 69). Erospirit. Kindle Edition.) Allowing ourselves to feel, and the experience of touch (including self touch), is essential to the health of our nervous system. Numbing ourselves out by not feeling, or not experiencing touch, creates dis-ease in the body. Our nerves can also become less alive when trapped or stuck in different parts of the body. The pudendal nerve, for example, (which innervates the perineum, scrotum, external labia, penis and external and internal clitoris), emerges under the sciatic nerve under the piriformis muscle. (See Jesse, Caffyn.Erotic Massage for Healing and Pleasure (pages 65, 73, and 74)) So if somebody is experiencing entrapment of the sciatic nerve, it is probable that the pudendal nerve is also pinched, and they might also be feeling less in their entire genital region with less access to pleasure or orgasm/orgasmic states from genital touch and expression. Gil Hedley talks about this in Live With Gil ~ Sex Ed, Clitoral Anatomy - with Sue Hitzmann (Listen from 53;42. This is currently a part of his website subscription access.) This is great to be aware of. It is also important to be aware that whatever way our body is in the world, that our body wants to, and can, orient to pleasure.
Added to that are our different life experiences and neurological mapping of our bodies as well as past sensation/experience/trauma and the imprints they have made. Our capacity for experiencing is unique and it also changes depending on where we are in our life cycles and our day to day experiences. This is important to remember when thinking about orgasm and orgasmic states. In this, a hierarchy of what sex is, and what it isn’t, might not be serving us to open up to our own unique experience of, what I call, the bliss body.
Over 20 years ago, I worked as a caregiver with a man who became a friend. S had a C6 injury which resulted in quadriplegia. He was effusive about his sexuality, and loved his body, which I also learned to love during the 2 years I washed, dressed, hugged him, and sometimes slept by his side. He thought of his body as a graciously gnarled, lumpy, bumpy red river gum, and had several lovers in the time I worked with him. I knew he didn’t have sensation in his genitals, because I was washing them daily, giving him enemas, and cleaning his penis for the sticky condoms I rolled on him that attached to his leg bag that I regularly emptied of urine. It’s intimate work.
I was curious and asked him questions about sensation, which he was happy to answer and he also educated me on how little I could feel in some parts of my own body. I was often preparing him for a partner, and sometimes cleaning up sex toys when I’d arrive in the morning to wake him for coffee. One day, I got curious about what kinds of pleasure he could experience erotically (I got lots of awesome answers over our long friendship). That day he looked at me and said, “I have whole body orgasms.” I remember that moment. It changed my world, and I am to this day, grateful for my friend’s trust and patience with me.
What is the Bliss Body?
The bliss body is a state of awareness and presence. I experience it as a state of enhanced sensation, characterized by a rich embodied state with, often the simultaneous sense of everything around. This everything could be the air, water, another person, a tree, the universe, or the felt sense of the tip of a thoracic vertebra resting under my little fingertip. It could be felt as a part of an erotic trance state, or an orgasmic state. I could wake up in the middle of the night alone, my body undulating in an oceanic pulse with a rippling, tingling sensation sweeping through me. We all have access to this in our own unique way.
Here is how Gil Hedley talks about it:
“Ramakrishna when he would go into ecstasy he would stand there and he would say: “Every pore is yoni and every hair on my body is lingam.” And then he would kind of suffer that ecstasy, because if you are only accustomed to your 10 second genital orgasm, what could it mean to be locked in ecstasy for an hour? I can tell you from my own life experience, that there was about two and a half years where I was in a physical ecstasy… my hands, my feet, my spinal column from the base of my skull to my sacrum, were just giving me the sensation of being right at the edge of an orgasm, but it was 2 and a half years long ...
I can tell you for a fact that the sensations that we think of as sex sensations are actually like an initial expression of a human potential that exists throughout our form as we come into a deeper relationship with our form, and as we walk ourselves back from that separating culture that we adopt in ourselves, in our families, in our churches and our ideas of spirituality.”
- From: Live With Gil ~ Sex Ed, Clitoral Anatomy - with Sue Hitzmann
A friend of mine described something similar she experienced for three days that she called a three day orgasm. I have spontaneously experienced this state driving, walking, sitting on a train, when I wake up, or sharing eros with another person or people. The more we build our capacity for sensation and pleasure, the more pathways we can find into it. Chungpa Rinpoche was once asked :
"What does Bliss feel like?" His response: "To you, it would feel like pain."
I have noticed that the more I accept sensation as it is in the moment, and the less I experience sensation as a reaction against, that I am able to accept pleasure, pain, discomfort, as simply sensation without story, without reaction. This builds my capacity to enter into this state through more pathways than I previously had access to, as well as my ability to stay present with it for longer periods of time. Having a pleasure practice is a great way to build our capacity for this state.
What I call the bliss body might not be what you consider sexual or erotic. I can experience it as an orgasmic state, although I often don’t feel it as originating from my genitals or even with them as a loud part of the experience. They are present as a part of the whole. It is a state that releases tension and allows for ease - and yet, you don’t have to look a certain way, eat certain foods, or have a lack of disease or injury to be in this place. The bliss body embraces all of the ways that our bodies and consciousness are expressed.
Orgasmic Potential
I think that all parts of our body have orgasmic potential:
Clitoris (internal and external), vaginal opening, cervix, urethral sponge, anus, prostate, perineum, ears, nose, nipples, heart, feet, under the knees.
I also find that the pleasure I feel is widened when I use information from all of my body. People talk about mixed orgasms, often referring to, for example, clitoral stimulation mixed with cervical or anal stimlulation. I think of it in broader terms and include hands pressing on my palms, mixed with body weight on my torso, the inner feeling of my own genitals becoming engorged and erect, the smell of me, another person/people, breath on my ear, the delicious feeling in my throat as I moan, the excitement of hearing another person’s voice, and the sun streaming through a window, or a forest canopy, caressing skin and lighting up gently closed eyes. That’s mixed.
Here are some ideas and words around experiences that I think of as orgasms or orgasmic states:
Singular - from hardly noticeable to a leaning into and growing expansion of a drawn out orgasm that reaches into every part of the body and beyond. It’s all orgasm, even the tiny, tiny ones that come to me as a small “oh, hi, oh, bye”. Sometimes I wonder if we have very small discrete orgams like this throughout the day or night, but don’t really notice that this is what they are. And that’s a part of the range.
Multiple: over discrete periods of time, or multiple in rapid succession.
Whole body, orgasmic states, unity consciousness.
Orgasm mixed with squirting or without. Squirting doesn’t necessarily mean that you are having an orgasm, and it can also be a part of an orgasm or orgasmic state. All of these experiences have a different flavor.
Orgasm mixed with sperm ejaculate or without.
Emotional: cry-gasm, laugh-gasm, anger-gasm.
Energetic, breath-gasm, head-gasm.
Collective joy experiences - communal erotic self practice, Pride, communal erotic space.
Climax ecosystems.
And more. You can add some to the list. Orgasmic potential and experience is way larger than the narrative that many of us have experienced. We are gorgeous, warm, undulating mammalian creatures, exquisitely attuned and innervated to sensation and pleasure.
This understanding of orgasm as many different pathways and experiences breaks open the question of what is sex? What is erotic energy? And while we are here: what is love? What kinds of containers do we need to hold us in these possibilities of deep transpersonal consciousness and bliss?
I love this definition of sex from The Art of Giving and Receiving, by Betty Martin with Robyn Dalzen:
“By sex I mean the presence of your own arousal and the decision to follow it. If it involves another person, they are also following their arousal.”
There is also a lot of nuance in habitual patterns around orgasm that can include: power dynamics, performative habits, dissociative states, and moving away from vulnerability and connection. Central is actually what we believe orgasm/orgasmic states actually are, or should-be. An understanding and real embodied sense of orgasmic states kind of breaks it all open. And that breaking open reveals how little I know what love is, and that we can't know unless it extends to all of our relationships, human and beyond. It’s a lot of untangling.
Idea:
Ecstatic practices can expand our embodied experiences of pleasure, orgsam, and orgasmic states. What are some ecstatic practices that can be, or already are, integrated into your life? Do any of these enlarge your capacity for sensation and presence?
Ecstatic practices might include:
Making sound: singing, drumming, playing in a group
Dancing
Group breathwork
BDSM practises
Psychedelics/Entheogens/Substances/Drugs
Emotional release
Collective rites of passage: death, birth, becoming an adult, aging, menopause
Sweats
Fasting
Shaking
Intuitive movement
You will think of more and have different ones already in your life.
A Story: Nose Orgasm
It is July 2020. I am in Montreal. I‘d quarantined alone – jobless, isolated, naked in so many ways, with all the time in the world to explore my body. Today, naked again, limbs askew on a couch, with the noise of three delicious vibrators. All turned on. I begin at the crown of my head until I feel an opening to the sky. I gently tease out the delicacy of my skull, embracing unacceptable tension hiding under my occipital ridge, which I release over and over again as it ever so slowly opens to the healing of pleasure. Above, below, the headache and depth of eyebrows, delicacy crinkling under my eyes, and a toothy thrum through my cheekbones.
I arrive at my nose. The world stops.
Layers and layers of pleasure and pain are entwined.
Smell: the mistress of memory and immediate pheremonal rush through the brainstem and limbic system. Sexual attraction at heady first whiff. I breathe in the correlations of the juice of genital sensation. My neurons connect and I wonder, “Is it possible? What in the holy fuck could a nose orgasm be? “
Curiosity gets this cat. And now I want to seduce and fuck that virgin nose. She tingles in anticipation. My delicious, rainbow gendered, olfactory cock centred right in the middle of my face, yearning: “Take me. Take me. Take me. In all the ways that you can.”
I am giving head to my head, centred at the clitoral flower opening up between my eyes. My small lelo lily vibe delicately humming and thrumming up and down the bridge of her, echoing into the delicious hollowness of my very own corpus cavernosum.
There is an intensity with a touch of fear and sting that tightly binds my being into it. An image releases through my body: I am shackled to a pillory, and a hooded medieval torturer is delicately placing nails through the flesh of my skull and removing my beauteous, maidenly muzzle. I feel this ancestral upsurge of medieval Europe wrapped tightly into my dna, and embrace this ecstatic dance on the edges of death itself. Time has spiraled into a non-linear delirium. My body spasms and circulates energy deeply rooted in the core of my cunt, an intimate embrace of stiffly hot erectile tissue being tugged and pulled by the pulsating dance of breath and pelvic contraction.
I have no idea where the fuck this is going, I’m diving so deeply into the pleasure that it doesn’t matter anymore. Sensation is growing and growing until…. Without thought I pull the vibrator from my tumescent schlong of a nose, my entire body clenching and releasing over and over again in an extended haze of strange delicious. I begin to feel an excruciating, tickling tingle throughout my engorged member of a throbbing conk, “….. oh fuck me …”. An enormous sneeze in slow motion is ejaculating spent droplets meters away in a wet haze of fear inducing and potential disease spreading particulates. Sheer and utter pleasure, erotically charged with pandemic, death, social unrest, violence, and a burning, virulently erect desire for change. My very own unrelenting, body wracking, long awaited sneezegasm for this fucking pandemic and all the fucking unknown of existence and the void. It comes to claim me as its own.
Bless-you.