What is Mindful Masturbation?

How to Experience More Pleasure During Solo Sex

What is Mindfulness?

"Mindfulness is a type of meditation in which you focus on being intensely aware of what you're sensing and feeling in the moment, without interpretation or judgment." - Mayo Clinic

Mindfulness is about being fully present in the moment, being more aware of how you feel, and how your body is responding to your environment. It sounds simple, but our minds are constantly busy with millions of thoughts, worries and plans, so it can be very difficult to make time to simply check in on ourselves and give ourselves a moment of peace.

Practicing mindfulness has many benefits than can lead to lower overall levels of stress and anxiety and has even been linked to decreased pain. It can also help you feel more gratitude and give you a sense of peace in your life, especially if you tend to feel overwhelmed. Everyone has different experiences and outcomes, but it's a simple practice everyone can introduce into their life by spending a short amount of time, on a regular basis.

What is Mindful Masturbation?

Mindful masturbation is another branch of mindfulness and is about being more present and aware of what you're doing and feeling during masturbation. It's a change in mindset from using masturbation as a sexual release, to a purposeful period of time where you connect and listen to what your body needs and how it responds to your touch. A sexual release can still be part of it, but it's about focusing on the journey, instead of just the destination.

Mindful masturbation usually requires you to spend more time than a normal masturbation session, upwards of 10-15 minutes, and it can take even longer when you feel more comfortable practicing it. There's no set rules, and it's personal to everyone, as long as you're giving yourself time and space to really immerse yourself in the experience.

...we are all prone to falling into a rut of doing the same thing during sex and masturbation, and it's so easy to focus entirely on the climax and forget all about the moments of pleasure and discovery you had during the process.

Why is Mindful Masturbation Beneficial?

Does this sound familiar to you? When you masturbate, you get into bed, bring out a toy or use the same 2-3 techniques, watch some porn, or close your eyes and imagine something, and you're done. Your main focus is on the orgasm and don't really pay attention to how your body feels during the process.

There's nothing wrong with masturbating for release or just doing it when we have a spare 5 minutes in the day, it's still an amazing thing to practice, but we are all prone to falling into a rut of doing the same thing during sex and masturbation, and it's so easy to focus entirely on the climax and forget all about the moments of pleasure and discovery you had during the process.

Mindful masturbation is about creating a healthier mindset towards sex and pleasure. Taking the judgement away from what our body and mind desires, removing the pressure to orgasm and encouraging us to connect more deeply with our body. It also helps to unlearn the shame and guilt most of us have around touching ourselves, and helps us redefine the meaning of it as a beautiful, healthy way to connect deeply to our body.

How Can Mindful Masturbation Help us?

Mindful masturbation can help us experience more pleasure, less shame and develop more understanding of ourselves. It is an act of self-care and self-love, that we can practice alone and with a partner. Each person will have a different experience and set of outcomes from practising it, but there are some major benefits that we can all take from mindful masturbation:

More Pleasure and Less Pressure to Orgasm

Many people struggle to orgasm, from partnered and solo sex and mindful masturbation can help remove the pressure to climax and refocus the meaning of sex as pleasure and connection to your body.

This is an important shift in mindset, as sex is so much more than just an orgasm, and although we might spend a long time touching, kissing and caressing our partner during sex, we often don't spend much time developing intimacy with our own body during masturbation.

Mindful masturbation encourages us to slow down, be present and conscious in what we are doing and feeling from our touch and it challenges us to push our boundaries and knowledge of what our body likes and needs. If we purposefully spend more time communicating and caressing our body and mind, we can discover so many more things about ourselves and our capacity for pleasure.

By shifting your reason for having a solo or partnered sex from having an orgasm, to being present in the pleasure and connection your body is feeling, not only will you feel more sexually and emotionally satisfied, you can increase your chance to orgasm.

Identifying triggers and areas of growth

When you spend time focusing on how your body and mind feels, you may also uncover triggers. You may notice that parts of your body make you feel uneasy, or you may notice that your body needs more of something than you are getting in your normal sex life. This can bring up memories of trauma and it's important to have someone you trust and who can support you if you have experienced trauma. This practice is about uncovering yourself and your body and getting to know it more deeply and that is both an overwhelming and incredibly exciting process, but it's important to be aware that it may bring up strong emotions.

By reflecting on your experiences of mindful masturbation, you can begin to identify areas of personal and sexual growth, and it can be beneficial to start a diary where you can take notes of what you felt and discovered in your session.

Letting Go of Body Shame and Performance Anxiety

Touching yourself without judgement and the need to be 'sexy' is incredibly liberating. We all grow up with the idea that sex and pleasure is something you experience with a partner, and in order to have sex, you need to be 'sexy' and act like the performers in porn.

We have preconceived ideas of what sex is, what it feels like and what our body should look like, and those ideas stop us from experiencing the kind of pleasure that we could have. Mindful masturbation asks us to consciously forget those ideas, and to begin touching ourselves without any goal in mind.

Through this practice, we begin to see that our body doesn't need to look a certain way to feel pleasure and we start listening to our body instead of talking down to it because we think it doesn't look right.

Mindful masturbation asks us to be completely selfish. Stop worrying about what other people think about you, stop worrying about how your partner feels and think only about how you feel.

Learn What Your Body Likes and Dislikes

We often don't really know what we really enjoy or find pleasurable during sex, we just do something and hope it feels good. Mindful masturbation can include practices like pleasure mapping, which builds our understanding and knowledge of how to experience pleasure. Check out our course on pleasure mapping to learn more.

More Acceptance and Peace in Yourself

Spending 15+ minutes a week, showing love and kindness to our body, listening to needs and desires and feeling a greater sense of connection to ourselves is such a beautiful practice to have in our life. It can be used as a form of meditation and for anyone who struggles to sit still and focus on one thing, this practice may be more suited to them.

The more time you spend really getting to know your body, the more you begin to accept it. It's a relationship and this is the time you spend loving it and learning about it.

How to Practice Mindful Masturbation?

There are many ways to practice mindful masturbation, and everyone will have their own preferred and unique ways to do so. Simply put, it's about focusing on the moment and exploring yourself without judgement, and you can do that in whatever way feels right.

If you'd like to learn more about practising mindful masturbation, join our 1 month of Mindful Masturbation course or download our Pleasure Workshop Video.