Orgasmic meditation could help you break a sex drought – here’s what you need to know

“I’m not expected to climax,” says Ansari. “I’m not expected to perform. I’m not even expected to be sexy. I’m just expected to feel. And that nourishment is something that nourishes your whole life. It is an ingredient that is completely missing in most relationships, and in most people’s lives because everything is always done for a reason. Here there is no other reason than to share the experience.”

It can help with an emotional block.

Says Ansari, “I introduced the practice with my husband, and it was very frightening for him at first. For him, the idea of doing it was just out of this world. But he wanted to save the marriage and save the relationship.”

The initial result was unexpected: OM brought up unspoken issues between them. “It comes up in the practice because everything that you withhold—and everything that you’re hiding and keeping in the cells of your body—comes out,” she says. “It’s like the stroking of the clitoris becomes like a cajoling of trauma and unspoken desires, fears, hopes and dreams.”

It can put the intimacy back in your relationship.

These days, Ansari and her husband turn to the practice after time apart to help rebuild their connection: “My husband is an actor, and he’s gone a lot of the time. Sometimes when he comes back, it’s very hard to find that immediate rapport. So [I’ll say], ‘Let’s have an OM. Let’s just get down to it, have the 15 minutes where we can find that connection on the physical level without any expectation.’ And that then opens the floodgates—and opens up the pussy, opens up the heart, opens up the desire for more connection, for more nourishment.”

It can help you push past insecurities.

Fuller’s OM practice began as a way for her to quiet her mind and feel more grounded in her body. Gradually, the mental health benefits of OM helped her learn to push aside “all the thoughts and the anxieties and the self-analysis and obsession with am I skinny enough, and all the appearance things.” But Fuller continued the practice because it helped her feel more herself around other people, and more at ease with connection in general.

“I spent a lot of time in my head, and I just wanted to feel my body more and feel more connected,” she says. “And then after a very short time of doing it, it started to boost my confidence quite a bit… Over the years, it’s just deepened into this experience where it’s a guaranteed 15 minutes that I can basically enter the mystical state.”

It can improve sex.

The same principles that guide OM—like slowing down, focusing on the connection, and forgetting about goals—can also improve sex. For example, while the impulse during sex may be to go harder and faster to produce more sensation, pausing in the middle, a practice taught in OM workshops, can produce the same enhanced sensitivity and make you feel more connected to your partner. Even if you’re not ready to OM, you can still apply some of its basic guiding principles to your sex and love life. Connected slow sex can be even more powerful than going harder and faster.

It can enhance other areas of your life, too.

The benefits of OM “deepen and expand” over time beyond your sex life, according to Fuller. “It affects how they approach their job,” Fuller says of the impact she’s seen orgasmic meditation have on clients. “It has you start to consider, ‘What’s my calling? What’s my purpose? What do I want to do with my life?’ It totally transforms your relationships, and it changes how you relate with touch and sexuality and all forms of connection with people. We’ve had parents say that it totally transforms how they parent their children and their communication. Because it goes to the very root of the root of who we are and restores us from there, it has this ability to impact every single aspect of life.”

How to try orgasmic meditation

Learn your way around. You don’t need to be an expert to partake in the practice of orgasmic meditation, of course, but there are some crucial guidelines to familiarise yourself with before trying this kind of meditation for the first time. “There’s a really specific container, and there’s kind of nothing extra that happens outside of that container,” Fuller says.