The First Time

On surrender, shaking, and the body that was waiting for me to come home.

I want to tell you about the first time I had an orgasm.

I am thirty-something years old as I write this. I have been sexually active since I was a teenager. I have had partners, men, mostly, a few women, one person who defied the category entirely and taught me something important about my own rigidity just by existing. I have had sex in beds and backseats and once memorably on a kitchen counter that was the wrong height for everyone involved. I have been in long relationships and short ones. I have faked it. God, have I faked it. Not always but enough that I had developed a kind of internal shorthand for it, a muscle memory of performance so practiced it barely registered as performance anymore. Just as the thing that happens at the end. Just as how this goes.

And through all of it through every partner, every encounter, every morning after I had never once had an orgasm.

Not really. Not the real thing. Not the thing I am going to try to describe to you now, inadequately, with the limited and embarrassed vocabulary that English gives us for what bodies do when they are finally, fully, allowed to be themselves.

I want to be precise about this because I think the imprecision is part of the problem. We live in a culture that is simultaneously obsessed with orgasm and profoundly confused about what it is. We have reduced it to a performance metric, a checkbox, a proof of someone’s competence as a lover or your own desirability as a person being loved. We have made it the goal the whole point and in doing so we have, I think, made it nearly impossible to actually have. You cannot chase surrender. You cannot optimize your way into letting go. The very act of trying to get there keeps you from arriving.

I knew this, theoretically. I had read the books. I had done the work, or some version of the work. I had breathed into my pelvis in yoga classes and journaled about my relationship with my own body and sat in circles with women talking about reclamation. I had the vocabulary. I had the framework. I had, as I said, the word surrender practically tattooed on the inside of my wrist from how often I’d reached for it.

What I did not have, until earlier this year, was the actual experience of my own body coming undone.

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The Table

The session was tantric bodywork. I want to be careful here about what I say and what I don’t say, partly out of respect for the practitioner and partly because the specifics aren’t really the point. What matters is the container what it was built from, and why that container was the one that finally held me.

Tantric bodywork, for those unfamiliar, is not what most people imagine when they hear the word tantra. It is not a couples’ retreat. It is not a synonym for extended foreplay. At its root, tantra is a spiritual technology a set of practices concerned with energy, with presence, with the dissolution of the boundaries between self and something larger. In a body session, that means working with the physical body as a site of consciousness, of stored experience, of capacity that has often been locked away by trauma, by shame, by the accumulated weight of a life spent being told that your body is not quite yours.

I had come to this work through my own circuitous path through somatic healing, through the tantric community I had found in San Diego after my move from Indiana, through a growing conviction that whatever it was I had been looking for in all those years of therapy and journaling and talking about my feelings, I was not going to find it in my head. My head had been very thoroughly examined. My head had been picked apart and put back together and examined again. My head was full of insight and self-knowledge and articulate trauma narratives that explained everything and changed nothing.

My body, meanwhile, had been mostly waiting.

I had dissociated from my body at a young age. I won’t go deep into the reasons here that’s its own essay, several of them but the short version is that inhabiting my physical self had never felt entirely safe, and so I had developed the very sophisticated and very costly strategy of mostly not doing it. I lived above the neck. I was very good at thinking. I was charming and verbal and intellectually present in ways that people found engaging, and I moved through the world in this body that I wore like a coat I hadn’t quite chosen.

Bodywork had been slowly, painstakingly returning me to myself. Session by session, breath by breath, I had been learning to drop down out of my skull and into the animal fact of having a nervous system, limbs, sensation. It was uncomfortable in the way that thawing is uncomfortable that particular ache of blood returning to somewhere that has been numb for a long time.

By the time I got onto the table for this particular session, I had done enough of that work that something in me was, without my full conscious knowledge, ready.

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What It Is To Brace

I want to talk about bracing, because I think it is the central issue and I don’t think we talk about it enough.

Bracing is what you do when you don’t feel safe enough to fully arrive. It is the body’s very intelligent, very exhausting strategy for staying protected. You tighten somewhere your jaw, your belly, the deep muscles of your pelvic floor, the place between your shoulder blades and you hold. You manage. You monitor. Some part of your attention stays perpetually on watch, scanning the environment for threat, preparing to respond, never fully at rest.

For survivors of trauma and I would argue, for most women who grew up in this culture bracing is simply the default. It is so habitual that it no longer feels like a choice. It feels like your body. It feels like you. You forget there is another option.

I had spent years bracing during sex. I didn’t know that was what I was doing. I thought I was present, thought I was engaged, thought I was into it and in some ways I was. But there was always a part of me that stayed back, stayed watchful, stayed slightly above the proceedings. A part that was tracking my partner’s responses. A part that was aware of how I looked, what sounds I was making, whether I was taking too long, whether I was enough, whether I was too much. A part that was, at all times, managing the experience rather than having it.

When you are managing an experience you are not having it. This seems obvious when I say it. It was not obvious to me for a very long time.

Tantric bodywork, good tantric bodywork, is specifically designed to dismantle this. The container is built through intention, through consent practices, through the particular quality of presence a skilled practitioner brings to be genuinely safe in a way that the body, not just the mind, can recognize. The safety isn’t just stated. It’s established. And when the body actually believes it is safe, when the nervous system registers that the threat has passed and the watch can end something starts to open.

This is not a metaphor. This is physiology. The pelvic floor, the diaphragm, the iliopsoas, the muscles around the jaw and throat these are all places where we hold chronic tension when we are braced. When the system begins to regulate, when safety is registered at the level of the nervous system rather than just the thinking mind, these muscles start to release. Sometimes that release is subtle. Sometimes it is not.

Mine was not subtle.

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The Session

I won’t detail everything. Partly out of reverence for the practitioner and the space. Partly because there are things that happen in those rooms that live in the body and resist language, and trying to force them into words does them a disservice. But I want to give you enough that you can feel the shape of it.

I remember settling onto the table and noticing that I wasn’t performing settling. Usually there is a version of me that is very busy arranging myself getting comfortable, indicating with my body language that I am relaxed, that I am good at this, that I have been in bodywork before and know how it goes. A kind of pre-emptive competence, a way of managing even the entry point.

That day, I was just tired. Tired of managing. Tired of monitoring. I lay down and I breathed and for once in my life I did not try to do it correctly.

The practitioner worked slowly. That matters the slowness. We live in a speed culture that has colonized our intimacy, and we have learned to expect stimulation that comes faster and harder and more intense in a constant escalation. Genuine tantric work moves in the opposite direction. It meets you where you are. It waits. There is a quality of attention in it that is unlike almost any other attention I have experienced not instrumental, not aimed at an outcome, just fully, quietly, curiously present with whatever is happening right now.

I felt myself start to drop. If you’ve ever been in deep somatic work, you know this feeling the sense of descending through layers, the thinking mind going quiet, something more animal and more honest rising to the surface. It is not unconsciousness. It is a different quality of consciousness. More spacious. Less narrated.

Somewhere in the middle of that descent, the shaking started.

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The Shaking

My legs began to tremble first. Not violently more like a vibration, a fine-grained trembling that moved through the muscles of my thighs and calves. I had experienced this before, in trauma release work the body discharging stored tension in the way that animals do naturally after a threatening event, shaking it through and out. But this was different. This wasn’t discharge exactly. It was more like activation. Like something waking up.

I didn’t try to stop it. That itself was new. My instinct for years, when my body did something unexpected or uncontrolled, had been to manage it. To smooth it back down, to normalize, to stay within the known range. The shaking felt like something that needed to be apologized for, explained, brought under control.

Instead I let it happen.

And it grew.

The trembling moved from my legs upward, into my hips, into my belly. There is a kind of energy in the body I don’t have better language for this than the tantric language of prana or the somatic language of activation that when it is allowed to move, really move, feels like electricity. Warm, humming, insistent electricity. It had been pooled in me, held in the lower body by years of bracing and guarding and never quite letting myself be touched. And now it was moving.

I want to be careful about how I describe what happened next because I think we have a poverty of language for female embodied experience that is not organized around male pleasure or male gaze or the performance of femininity. What I experienced was not the orgasm of pornography, which is to say it was not performed, it was not linear, it was not a tidy peak and resolution. It was messier than that and realer than that and so much more than that.

It was my whole body. It was my legs shaking so hard the table vibrated. It was my hips moving without my permission, without my direction, following some instruction that was coming from a level of my nervous system that had nothing to do with my thinking mind. It was breath, enormous breath, breath that I had been holding in small increments for thirty-something years releasing all at once. It was heat, everywhere, the particular radiating heat of a body that has stopped rationing itself.

And then the sound came.

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The Sound

I was loud.

I want to sit with that for a moment because the loudness surprised me more than almost anything else. I am, in ordinary life, a person who modulates. I am aware of walls and neighbors and the comfort of other people. I have a highly calibrated sense of how much space I am allowed to take up, acoustically and otherwise. I have spent years making myself smaller, quieter, more manageable, more palatable. Being a woman in the world teaches you this so early and so thoroughly that it stops feeling like a teaching and starts feeling like your personality.

In that room, I was not quiet.

The sounds that came out of me were not performative. This is something I want to be very clear about, because I know the difference now between the sounds I used to make calibrated sounds, attractive sounds, sounds designed to give someone else information about how well they were doing and what happened in that room. There was no audience for what happened in that room. There was no self-consciousness in it. The sounds came because the body makes sound when it is fully alive and fully moving through something, just as it makes sound when it sobs, just as it makes sound when it laughs hard enough that it forgets itself.

I was making sound because I was alive. Because something in me that had been very still for a very long time was no longer still.

I couldn’t tell you how long it lasted. Time does something strange in those states expands, collapses, becomes irrelevant. I know that at some point the peak passed and I lay there trembling with tears running sideways across my face into my hair and a quality of interior silence that I had never experienced. Not the silence of suppression. Not the silence of successfully managed emotion. The silence after weather.

I was laughing too, a little. At nothing. At everything. At the absurdity and the miracle of having a body, of being a body, of having carried this capacity around for decades without knowing it.

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What Had Been Waiting

Here is what I have come to understand in the months since.

My body had always been capable of this. That capacity was not something that was given to me in that session, not something the practitioner created in me. It was there all along, present and waiting, like water waiting behind a dam. What the session did what the years of somatic work leading up to it had been slowly doing was remove the obstruction. Not forcibly, not by breakthrough, but by the patient and respectful process of teaching my nervous system that the threat was over. That it was safe to lay down the guard.

Orgasm, I now believe, is fundamentally about safety. Not comfort because safety and comfort are different things. Not the absence of intensity or challenge. But the deep, nervous-system-level recognition that you are not in danger. That you will not be punished for losing control. That the person or space you are in can be trusted with your unmanaged, unperformed, uncontrolled self.

Most of us have never experienced this. Most of us have been having sex our entire adult lives in a context of low-grade unsafety not always danger, not always trauma, but the ambient unsafety of a culture that does not respect female embodiment, that has made women’s pleasure simultaneously mandatory and illegible, that has taught us to perform rather than feel. We have been bringing our braced, monitored, managed selves to bed for years and wondering why we can’t let go.

You cannot let go while you are bracing. The letting go and the bracing are mutually exclusive. This is not a character flaw. This is how nervous systems work.

What tantric bodywork gave me what this session gave me, specifically was a container so carefully constructed, so genuinely trustworthy, that my body finally, after decades, believed it was safe to stop holding. And what was held there, what released when the holding stopped that was not something small. That was not a minor physiological event. That was a homecoming.

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The Aftermath

I drove home that day in a particular state that I don’t have a single word for. Soft is part of it. Open. Also fragile, in the way that things are fragile right after they’ve cracked open not broken, but newly permeable, the old shell not yet replaced by anything harder. I cried in the car. Not from sadness, though sadness was in it grief, maybe, for the years of not having this, for all the times I had lain in the dark beside someone and performed completion and felt nothing close to complete. But also something more than grief. Something that felt like relief so vast it had no edge.

I called no one. I didn’t post about it. I sat with it for days before I could begin to find words for it, and even then the words felt insufficient.

What I kept returning to was the shaking. The way my legs had shaken without my permission, without my control, just this pure animal response to energy moving through a body that had stopped trying to manage the energy. There is something about that image that keeps teaching me. The shaking is not a metaphor. The shaking is what the body does when it is alive. When it has been allowed to be alive.

I spent so many years living above my own neck. So many years in the very sophisticated prison of being very articulate about my experience while not actually having it. I could discuss embodiment at length in the very dissociated comfort of my head. I could use the language of somatic healing while staying safely distant from my soma. I was fluent in the theory of surrender and a stranger to the practice of it.

My legs shaking on that table was the practice. My voice filling that room without my permission was the practice. The tears running into my hair without a single thought of whether this was attractive or appropriate or too much that was the practice.

The practice is not graceful. That is another thing I want to say clearly, for everyone who has read enough about embodiment and healing that you have developed an aesthetic of it a vision of what your own becoming would look like, probably something serene and powerful and visually coherent. My becoming, on that table, looked like a woman coming apart. It looked like shaking legs and tears and sounds that would embarrass me to transcribe. It was not graceful. It was true.

And truth, in the body, is not graceful. Truth in the body is trembling and loud and wet and it does not care at all how it looks.

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What I Want You To Know

I write about sex work because I believe in the radical project of telling the truth about what it is to inhabit a female body in this world what it costs, what it teaches, what it carries, and occasionally, what it gives. I believe that honesty about experience is a form of resistance, maybe the most fundamental one. That the stories we tell about our bodies are inseparable from the stories we tell about our freedom.

This is a story about freedom. Specifically, it is a story about a woman who had never had an orgasm having one, finally, in a room built from intention and care and the patient work of years, and what it felt like to be that woman.

It felt like coming back to somewhere I had never been.

It felt like my body saying: I was here the whole time. I have been waiting. Where have you been?

It felt like shaking legs and a loud voice and tears I didn’t plan and laughter I couldn’t explain and the particular silence after weather when the air is changed and everything is quiet and clean and you understand for a moment what all that noise was for.

It was worth the wait.

It was worth all of it.

And I want you to know whoever you are reading this, whatever your relationship is to your own body, whatever years of managing and bracing and performing you are carrying that your body is also waiting. Patiently. Without judgment. With what I can only call a kind of loyalty that your mind has not always returned.

It is still there. Underneath everything. Underneath all the years of too much and not enough and making yourself smaller and quieter and more manageable. Underneath all the sex you performed and the pleasure you pretended and the desire you swallowed before it could inconvenience anyone.

Your body is still there, and it knows what it’s capable of, and it has not given up on you.

When you are ready to shake, it will shake.

When you are ready to be loud, it will be loud.

All it needs is for you to stop bracing long enough to find out.

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I write from the intersection of sex work, somatic healing, and the honest mess of being a person with a body. If this found you, it probably needed to.

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