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Health

I Spent 4 Hours Trying to Achieve a Full-Body Orgasm

My quest for the transcendent climaxes I hear about from women and the occasional dude.
Juan Moyano / Stocksy

Lately, when female friends and partners describe their orgasms, I’ve been finding it rather difficult to relate. Often, they talk about full body experiences replete with a sensation of tingling extremities that can linger for as much as 30 minutes afterwards. Not only are mine much more localized and fleeting, they also seem to be diminishing in power by the week. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. They just have less and less in common with the transcendent climaxes I hear about from women and the occasional dude. (Invariably, that occasional dude is a serial Burning Man attendee.)

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Low-wattage orgasms once made me think that I could be a candidate for testosterone therapy—it’s one of a long list of symptoms associated with lower levels of the androgen. When my level of “T” was investigated, though, it actually transpired that it was actually on the higher end for a guy my age.

This finding meant that I was going to have to look beyond my doctor’s prescription pad for an orgasmic boost. In my quest, I came across a Manhattan tantra practitioner offering something called a “full body orgasm.” From Michiko’s website I gathered that she employed various methods—including breathing, stretches, soundings, visualizations, and massage—to help clients in a number of ways, achieving “stronger, fuller orgasms” among them. One of these sessions, the website advised, was three hours in duration.

Twenty-five years of experience and 1000 orgasmic clients were enticing credentials but being something of a materialist and a skeptic about all things woo, I was already predisposed to take my line of inquiry elsewhere. But then I saw the music video for “Ma*Star*bation.” Starring a beatific, keytar-wielding Michiko, the song and video were so deliciously silly, so wonderfully wacky, so opposite to the vibe I’d expected from a tantra teacher that I immediately made an appointment in spite of myself. Here. You’re welcome.

I arrive on a particularly tawdry block in midtown Manhattan and ring a bell marked “Michiko.” Minutes later, she appears at the door, offers me a big smile, a curt hug, and ushers me up a rather grimy and depressing stairwell. At her urging, I use the common bathroom in the hallway that “Kiki” warns me is “not so clean.” I come out of the perfectly-described lavatory and follow her into a room that’s just five-by-seven feet, which contains a massage table and a lot of smoke wafting from a smudging stick.

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Kiki invites me to sit facing her, cross-legged on the small strip of unoccupied floor space and asks about any issues I’m experiencing. I tell her that I’m looking to regain orgasmic power and she tells me she can help. She goes on to tell me that she works with people one-on-one and with couples. Before I can ask her how more than two small people would fit in this little box, I’m asked to strip to my underwear and find myself in the midst of a guided relaxation.

Kiki herself strips down to a bikini which, like her hair and dress, is a vibrant blue which makes our surroundings seem all the more drab. She’s so soft spoken that I struggle to fully get her instructions to “relax your shoulders,” and “make a space between your ribs” over the sound of ambient music, her singing bowl, and two bawling drunks on the street below.

She talks me through a series of increasingly challenging leg stretches and breathing techniques then guides me through a procedure in which I’m told to squeeze a series of four energy locks throughout my body to complete a sort of energy circuit. There’s my “root lock,” comprised of the anus, sex organs and belly button, my diaphram, neck, and tongue lock. After several rounds of shutting those locks tight, we move onto the next warm-up exercise.

Kundalini is described by American comparative religions scholar Joseph Campbell as a latent female energy that lies coiled at the base of the spine (see: Kundalini yoga). Kiki guides me into a position that she says will “raise” mine. I had heard of kundalini yoga before. With my arms at my side and my head and legs raised six inches off the floor I’m talked through a few to visualizations that Kiki says will help later on. Another exercise entails gazing into each other’s eyes—an intense experience with anyone, let alone witchy stranger in a bikini—and culminates with each of us placing our palms over the other’s heart and taking turns “shooting energy” into each other.

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It’s difficult to know what to do with an instruction along the lines of “shoot your energy through your hand and into my chest” but I must have it down because whenever I give it a whirl, Kiki convulses, her eyes rolling back in her head and her smile widening. It’s the same sort of reaction that I recall experiencing back when my orgasms were firing on all cylinders. I want that feeling back.

“Now you receive my energy,” she says.

After over an hour of fairly intense preparatory exercises, I hoped and even expected to feel a rush of energy in my chest when she let rip. Unfortunately I didn't—and didn’t think that there was anything to be gained from pretending to. After about five rounds of possibly but unwittingly giving and receiving energy I could see that, as with my adventure in colonic irrigation, I was somehow doing it all wrong.


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“Try and imitate what I do,” Kiki says, and shudders as I fling some magic at her sternum at point blank range. I knew that “fake it ‘til you make it” was an effective strategy for success in numerous areas but hadn’t imagined that tantric sex was one of them. I did my best to mimic her ecstatic shudderings to the best of my meager abilities. Soon after, Kiki asked me to hop up on the table.

What followed was a long, ponderous massage with light, small movements accompanied by remarkable noises that Kiki made with her mouth. A sexual energy did briefly manifest during the hour I was face down, but by the time I turned around, it had gone again.

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Once I was looking at the ceiling, Kiki massaged, then kissed my feet, ankles, skins, and thighs for some time. While the kissing was going on, she placed the fingers of her right hand on my root chakra—an area that roughly corresponds to the perineum—and the fingers of her left on my sacral chakra, which lined up with the waistband of my underwear.

With dogged determination, Kiki vibrated her fingers at these two points for considerable amount of time. I got the sense that she was expecting me to have a reaction that was apparently hard to provoke. While her earnest ministrations continued, she placed my hand back on her chest but I it was becoming increasingly clear that whatever was supposed to happen, wasn’t.

“Do most of your clients have a reaction by now?” I ask after realizing that our session was well into its fourth hour.

She tells me that they did and, in the nicest possible way, confirms that I am indeed a tough customer. Kiki did her homework, and has read about my lascivious exploits in the name of journalism. “I think it’s maybe because you’ve had a lot of sex,” she says, by way of an explanation. “Most other clients can feel what I’m doing more.”

Those clients, it has to be said, forked over a considerable amount of money. I did not. The session I’m getting gratis ordinarily goes for $340. Given that they’d put up some hard-earned cash, I wonder if her paying customers would be more open-minded than I and therefore better attuned to the energy Kiki does or possibly doesn’t proffer. But then, all of a sudden, I feel a tingling, then a sort of buzzing current in my right and then my left arm. I’m stunned by this development I excitedly tell Kiki, who redoubles her efforts. Am I about to be made a believer in subtle energy? Am I about to have a mind-blowing full body orgasm? Am I going to owe my mother and my best friend—who are both reiki practitioners—an apology for gently ribbing them about their practice?

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After another ten minutes, however, the feeling of gripping on to a very low wattage electric fence was as far as it went. I start to make my peace with the fact that I’m basically a Muggle and this has been a long run for a short slide.

“I want to try one more thing,” Kiki says, realizing how late it has gotten.

She invites me to sit criss-cross-applesauce on the floor. She asks for my consent—which I wholeheartedly give—before sitting on my lap facing me. Kamasutra fans will know this as the Lotus Blossom position. The plan was to push my chest against hers. I would then push energy directly from my heart into hers. She would then suck this energy down into her sacral chakra— that’s the one in the groin—and then shoot it directly into my sacral chakra. At that point, I needed to suck it up into my heart chakra and beam it back into hers, thereby creating a circuit.

Kiki was so impossibly kind and lovely toward me that I may have convinced myself to feel something, but in truth, I think I was just psyched to be locking bodies with another nearly naked person.

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