A Practitioner’s Perspective on the Art & Intention of Yoni Massage
Firstly, it seems appropriate to acknowledge that I am writing this from the perspective of the giver, not the receiver. I can share some second-hand experiences anonymously from women I have worked with, but this article focuses on my experience and intention in giving yoni massage.
I should also point out that the training I’ve received is in giving yoni massage as a healing practice. We use ‘yoni’ to describe the entire genital area – vulva and vagina. This means that while the receiver may feel pleasure, this is not always the case, and just as with prostate and lingam massage for a man, orgasm is not the goal of the session.
What is the goal if orgasm is not?
I prefer not to think in terms of goals. Rather, the aim of the session is whatever the receiver wants it to be, within the boundaries we agree on. Therefore, there may be many aims, but in simple terms, we could say moving from tension to relaxation; from hardness to softness; and from negative to positive associations.
The teacher I have done my principal training with, Mal Weeraratne, presents the following theory: The natural state for the yoni is pleasure. If a woman is born with, say, one hundred receptive buttons in her yoni, they are all tuned to pleasure at birth. Over time, with social and cultural conditioning and perhaps sexual experiences, those buttons may switch from pleasure to pain. They then become numb to avoid the pain. Consequently, a woman may feel disconnected from her yoni, and intercourse may be painful or at least unenjoyable.
Our role in giving yoni massage is to try to help reverse this pattern and switch the ‘buttons’ back to pleasure. As a healing art, we do not rush to the ‘main attraction’. A typical session could well be 6 to 7 hours, beginning with a consultation – sharing of relevant history, goals and fears for the session, and boundaries for both giver and receiver. The setting for the session is very important, both to honour the sacred nature of the massage and to create as safe an environment as possible. As well as the session being a gift of unconditional love with no expectations from the giver, one of the guiding principles is that ‘everything is welcome’, meaning that the receiver is free to move or vocalise however she needs to, or indeed not to, without fear of judgement.
Following principles of Taoism as well as Tantra, we start with massaging the back (yang side) of the body. In the beginning, the receiver is naked but covered with a sarong for the initial part of the bodywork, which is mostly aimed at opening the gateways at the top and bottom of the spine and encouraging the free movement of energy along the length of the spine.
We massage the whole of the back body and, in this first half of the bodywork, there may be some pain as we try to release areas of tension that may represent blockages. There is also an intention to direct a lot of blood flow to the groin area. In the training I’ve received, we finish this part of the session with some deep massage of a number of points around the groin area without making contact with the yoni.
We then work on the yin side, starting at the head and working gradually down the body, including breast massage and abdominal massage before returning to the feet and working back up to the groin. So it is only after perhaps four hours of bodywork that we would ask whether or not the receiver would like to have her yoni massaged. It is essential for the receiver to be relaxed and the reason for all of the bodywork is to build trust between receiver and giver, and for her to be able to relax fully into the session. Without this relaxation and trust, it may be very difficult for her yoni to open, and any attempt to go inside the yoni would be likely to reinforce painful associations and numbness.
The yoni massage itself starts with gentle stimulation of the outer part of the yoni, though not of the clitoris, which may come as a surprise. This is important for a few reasons – for one, it may be too exciting too quickly, so not an aid to relaxation and surrender, and related to this, it may be reinforcing a pattern of arousal and release that actually serves to harden the yoni when ideally it would be softening. For a long time, I believed, as I suspect many men do, that clitoral stimulation was the best way to ensure that your partner would feel sexually satisfied. I now recognise this as potentially denying a woman the opportunity to fully explore her sexuality and imposing a masculine mindset and tempo on arousal and sex.
The massage of the outer yoni will hopefully serve to make the yoni more ready to open, and encourage some natural lubrication. We will also usually use plenty of additional lubricant, and usually will use a specific finger, related to the 2nd chakra, of our non-dominant hand. Entering inside the yoni may well be a very slow process. As well as seeking verbal consent for this, we also wait for the yoni herself to feel fully receptive – ideally it feels as though the yoni is drawing our finger inside rather than pushing in. Slowness and stillness are most important, and it’s likely that we will spend much more time holding our finger still than moving it.
The movements that we do make are to massage any areas of tension that we may feel and to gently stretch the inside of the yoni – it may take more than one session to feel like this but ideally the inside will feel soft and spacious. During heterosexual love-making, the more spacious the woman feels, the more her partner can feel his lingam expanding within her, which is a magical sensation for both.
Experiences I’ve had while giving yoni massage include sensing areas that are painful – somehow it is possible through my finger to feel a spot where the receiver feels some pain. In this instance, it may be best to remain still at that spot, or to gently move until perhaps the pain subsides. We are always guided by what the receiver feels she wants or needs rather than keeping to a prescribed sequence. On one occasion, I felt an electric charge, as if I had stuck my finger into an electrical socket, that was very painful for both of us. In this instance, I had the sense that I could serve as the conductor to draw this negative charge out of the receiver’s body, like an earring rod. There have also been times when the receiver has felt almost nothing, and times when after a relatively short time I can feel the yoni gradually closing up as if saying that she’s had enough. If the yoni keeps saying “Yes”, then it’s not unusual for the yoni massage alone to last for more than an hour.
Common outcomes are:
- The receiver feeling reconnected to a part of herself that she had disconnected from.
- After a recent session, the recipient described a feeling of coherence between her yoni and the rest of her body, that she did not feel before the massage.
- If receiving the massage from a male practitioner, it could also mean discovering that it is possible to feel safe.
- Feeling a reinforcement of the sacredness of her yoni.
- And, of course, feelings of pleasure and arousal that may lead to orgasm and ejaculation. In my training, we consider ejaculation to be a form of emotional release. Mal refers to this as the yoni crying, releasing pain and sadness in the same way that crying with our eyes might.
A final thought on the gender dynamics of giver & receiver…
…very often the opposite poles of male and female mean that it can be very valuable to receive from a male practitioner, particularly if, for example, feeling safe with, and feeling love from a man without expectation from him is a goal. That said, there may be some instances when it is best to receive yoni massage, at least the first time, from a female practitioner. If a woman has suffered sexual abuse in the past, receiving from a male practitioner could be very healing, but it would be wise to tread carefully – even though consent can be withdrawn at any point during the massage, there might be less chance of reinforcing the trauma if the first experience is with a woman.
For more information about yoni massage in South Wales, please visit www.tantrahealing.uk/treatments-for-women.
Main – Photo by Ekaterina Krusanova on Unsplash
