“Meditation gave me better orgasms.” It feels like a clickbait article when I actually write it down.
Meditating for 10 minutes a day gave me mind-blowing orgasms! You can do it too!
But like… that’s what happened. I mean, maybe not “mind-blowing”, but meditating regularly has certainly made it easier, more relaxing, and a heck of a lot more fun to come.
For a long time, masturbating was a means to an end. I knew orgasms meant 15 seconds of feeling good. So a lot of the time, I would just break out my Magic Wand and rush to the finish line. And for a while, that was fine. I attributed it to identifying as asexual. I didn’t have a sex drive to speak of, I’m not attracted to people, so why would I take my time and actually enjoy masturbating?
But when I started meditating regularly in January 2016, I slowed down. I concentrated on my breathing, I felt the smallest movements in my body. Even when I wasn’t sitting down to meditate, I was more conscious of my body and my breath. My focus increased at work. I slept better.
Eventually, I noticed a shift in my masturbation practices around the second half of that year. I started taking my time and actually making time in my schedule to find new porn, read my favorite erotica, or just relax into the sensations. And all of a sudden, my orgasms were exponentially more enjoyable, and a whole lot easier to achieve, which was something to be celebrated with my SSRI prescription.
Apparently I’m not the only one to experience this. A 2014 study found that mindfulness, a key tenet in meditation, increased sexual desire and response in women. A 2013 study found similar results, though it was a self-reported study with a very small sample size. Even so, mindfulness does a lot of things; it helps reduce stress, improve focus, and reduce what these studies call “depressive symptoms”. If that means mindfulness leads to better sexual responses, that works for me.
Of course, meditating regularly has helped me in other areas as well. I’m more grateful for things in my life, less likely to fall into a pit of irritation, and better able to deal with stress. This was also combined with antidepressants, which I started in 2015 and really helped on their own. But meditation augmented those positive effects.
It has nothing to do with the fact that I identify as asexual. It comes down to having better focus and awareness of my body. Meditating made me more receptive to good feelings. I suppose I have Headspace to thank for my mindfulness— and orgasms!