It’s In Your Head: Mindgasms

When we talk about getting more present in your sex life, we usually emphasize getting out of your head and into your body.  Increasing bodily presence is essential for feeling more pleasure and safety in your sex life. After you’ve set the foundation of understanding how to become more present in your body, it makes sense to move back to the mind and integrate it into your sex life.

Mind and body are one, there’s no way to separate them, so how can you use your mind to create stronger feelings of connection and bliss? How can you use your mind to have more powerful orgasms? Is it possible to have an orgasm that starts and ends in the mind without ever touching other erogenous zones? Let’s find out.

What’s a Mindgasm?

A mindgasm is an orgasm that is indeed all in your head. It’s a way of inducing orgasm without ever touching other erogenous zones like the vulva, clitoris, nipples, or rectum. It’s basically an orgasm without physical stimulation.  One study in the 1990s observed ten women that claimed to be able to have mental orgasms.

Researchers asked these women to pleasure themselves using only their minds, and the results were pretty astounding.  During their hand-free self-pleasure sessions, researchers found that the women in the study had virtually the same physiological changes when they self-pleasured with their minds versus when they actually touched their genitals. They measured this by looking at their pupil diameter, blood pressure, heart rate, and pain threshold.  While you don’t need a scientist to validate what you feel in your own body, for these women their mental orgasm experiences were confirmed through actual physical markers – that’s pretty astounding!

You Might Have Had a Mental Orgasm Before

While mental orgasms are typically thought of as something that happens while you’re awake, you might have experienced one before without even realizing it – while you were sleeping. About 8% of people’s dreams are sex dreams, no matter their gender. You’ve most likely experienced one at one point in your life. If you’ve ever had an orgasm in a sex dream, that my friend, is a kind of mental orgasm.  It might not be the same as being able to will and move your energy to orgasm while you’re awake, but it does show you that you’re capable of having an orgasm without touching your genitals. 

How Do You Have a Mindgasm?

This might all seem really cool in theory, but how do you actually have a mental orgasm? Let’s find out. 

• Approach with Curiosity: This is a practice in experimentation and staying curious. This is your body and your sexual practice, so have fun with it! While this can be done with a partner, it’s helpful to try this practice by yourself at first. This doesn’t have to look or be a certain way, if you feel intuitively led to find your own technique, then go right ahead!

• Tap Into Your Body: It might seem counterintuitive, but you need to tap into your body in order to move your sexual energy in your head. There are so many ways to do this. Ask yourself when you feel the most present in your body. Is it when you take a shower or bath? When you’re walking, dancing, or moving your body in another way? Is it when you’re making art or creating something? Use your practices to tap into your body.

• Connect with Your Breath: Breathwork practices and mindful breathing are another way to tap into your body and calm your nervous system so that you can tune into your sense of pleasure. Try inhaling deeply through your nose and imagine your breath moving through your heart, into your belly, and imagine filling up your pelvis with your breath. You can imagine that your breath is moving over your most sensitive zones, waking them up.

• Kegels: While this still involves engaging your vagina and vulva, you’re not exactly touching it. Kegels, a form of pelvic floor exercise get your blood flow moving and can help you connect to your genitals while you engage your mind. 

• Use Your Imagination: Now use your mind to move your sexual energy and become more aroused. Think about what turns you on. You can imagine a certain kink, fantasy, or think of a hot sexual experience you’ve had. You may even think of things that aren’t typically thought of as sexual like time in nature or eating foods.

• Let it Happen: There’s no one set way to have a mental orgasm. You have so much more power over your mind and your sexual sensations than you may realize. 

There’s No Holy Grail of Orgasms

As humans, we tend to want to rank and categorize things. To say that one way of doing things is better than another, especially if it seems more coveted or difficult to “achieve.” That’s not true when it comes to orgasms. 

Having a mindgasm might feel like some sort of holy grail of orgasms, or that people who have had one are more evolved, but that’s not the case. Sure it’s really cool to be able to explore your body and your capacity for pleasure in new and novel ways, but it doesn’t make you any better at sex or life if you can’t or don’t want to have a mental orgasm.  Sex is a place for experimentation and fun, without putting pressure on yourself to achieve or have it look a certain way. This is your sex life, you get to decide how you want to navigate it.