I had a nice long session Sunday afternoon. Actually, even before my session I had some very enjoyable chats in the chat room, including one with a guy who was having a nice A-less session. He was kind enough to share what he was experiencing with me, and reading his descriptions created a sort of echo of the sensations in me. I wasn’t able to perpetuate them, but it was still enjoyable. I really enjoy hearing/reading about others’ Aneros/A-less experiences. I think it helps me learn. The human mind is very good at synthesizing little bits of information into something new and wonderful, and I hope the stories and experiences others relate to me will help me reach new and exciting places on this journey.
After some other interesting chatting, and lunch, I decided to start my session. My husband was out of town, so I had plenty of time to enjoy myself and experiment in different ways, and no deadline. One of the challenges I’ve had with my sessions is feeling like there’s an imaginary egg timer ticking away in my head. Is it time to get ready for work? Is my husband going to be home soon? I usually set an actual timer to make sure I don’t go too long, so I should be able to just relax and enjoy the ride while it lasts. But something in my head won’t just let go. I chatted with several people who said they have the same challenge, so at least I know I’m not alone.
But that wasn’t a problem on Sunday. I put the dogs in their crate just after I had some lunch. I had a relaxing shower, extra hot. Then I lubed up and put in my Helix Trident and stretched out on a towel on the floor. I decided to try something different to start my session, and I think it was useful. I have been using a mindfulness meditation app at night (most nights) to help me prepare for sleep. I have always had a really hard time shutting down my brain at night, making it difficult to get to sleep. It sometimes takes hours for me to fall asleep. There are some free guided meditations in this app related to sleep, and listening to one of those just before bed has made a big difference in the quality of my sleep.
As I was looking through this app one day, I found a guided meditation for “Sensory Awareness for Sex.” The idea is that if you can awaken all your senses, your sexual experience will be enhanced. So the meditation guides the listener through a few exercises to try to awaken each of the “five senses.” I thought that this might help sensitize me to the effects of the Aneros, and I think it did.
I would like to find a better guided meditation for this. This one has some bits that bugged me a little. For one thing, the talk about “five” senses was a little distracting to me because we don’t just have five senses. We have many other senses that are less obvious than sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. For example, close your eyes, extend your arm out to the side, and then bring your index finger in to touch the tip of your nose. Were you able to do it? Even without seeing where your hand was in relation to your nose? That’s another sense called proprioception. I guess my nerdy brain objects to the simplistic model of only five senses. But other than that, the tone of he meditation is not as sensual as it could be, and when you’re trying to get “in the mood” it would be helpful if the speaker spoke in a way that lended itself to that.
In any case, it was somewhat helpful. I was more aware of my sensory experiences and less caught up in the left-brained analytical mindset that I spend most of my time in. This helped me notice little things my body was feeling that I might otherwise have overlooked.
After the meditation was finished, I played a really long binaural beats track I found on YouTube. A chat user recommended binaural beats, saying that it helped him get into the right frame of mind for his sessions. I don’t really believe the hype about binaural beats, and the science I’ve seen about them backs my view that it’s not magical the way some people believe (though there is definitely power in the placebo effect, so if it works for you, awesome). But the ethereal/ambient sounds of this track (and others) are very relaxing and it shut out any background noise from the house or dogs or passing traffic.
I laid there on the floor relaxing and just letting my body do its thing. In this session, I decided to try not to focus so much on my prostate/anus/etc. and to broaden my awareness, which was part of the motivation for trying that guided meditation. In my first (and still most “successful” session) I didn’t know what sensations I would feel, so everything was interesting. I think in more recent sessions, I’ve been intent on feeling the really nice pleasure waves, throbbing, tingling, warmth, etc. around my prostate and may have been ignoring other peripheral sensations. This time I tried to pay more attention to my whole body. I began to notice other things, like an involuntary twitch in my leg, or a referred sort of pressure in my head that matched pressure felt on my prostate. Whether it was my actual awareness of those specific things or if it was just being more sensitized in general, I did feel more of the kinds of things I was hoping to feel. So that is a key takeaway from this session for me. Many people have recommended that beginners suspend expectations, avoid being goal-oriented, etc. I have tried to do that, but I seem to still have been too focused on a very narrow part of the experience, and so I may not have been taking in the other information my body was providing that could help me get where we’d all like to go.
I appreciate all the advice I’ve gotten from more experienced users and I try to take it and learn from it as much as possible. So in each session I like to try something that someone else has said works for them. The binaural beats was one such suggestion. Laying on the floor instead of the bed is one I called out in my previous post. This time I added a couple of other suggested techniques. One was to lay on the bed with my feet planted on the floor with my rear end hanging off of the bed. My mattress is too thick for me to use my bed for this, so I went downstairs and laid on the ottoman in front of my couch. I did not find this position very comfortable or effective. My hip flexors are very tight (something I am working to improve) and laying this way put strain on my lower back and it became a little painful after a short while. Maybe it will be better in the future when my flexibility has improved. For those wanting to try this, the recommendation I received was to try this for only about 10 minutes and then move on to other techniques if you wish. For the user who recommended this maneuver to me, it has sometimes triggered involuntary contractions of the anus.
Another suggestion was to lay on the floor and suspend my legs on something. Again, my thick mattress prevents me from using my bed for this, so I brought a folding chair to my bedroom and used that. This position was quite comfortable. It eased the tension on my tight hip flexors, which I can feel somewhat even when lying flat. It also gave the Aneros some additional freedom of movement that it doesn’t get when my thighs are on the floor. It was a nice position and I will use it again in the future.
I think I will need more padding when I lay on the floor in the future. My carpet is a very tight weave and not at all cushy. I laid down a towel, mostly for the containment of potential messes, but that wasn’t enough padding, so I got a little sore around my tailbone and shoulders. Eventually I got up and moved to the bed, though in between I also tried cushioning myself with my hands under my lower back, which helped for a time.
All throughout this session, I felt a lot of low-level pleasurable sensations. I had a few moments of faint throbbing around the prostate, a fair amount of tingling or a sort of “itching” sensation. I also felt, as I mentioned, more peripheral sensations. I described a few above, but others included warmth flushing over other areas of the body, hair standing on end, twitching, muscles slowly tensing or relaxing, etc. So this was a more successful one than some of the previous ones in terms of what I felt. There were a couple of times when I nearly fell asleep, or perhaps did briefly. It was a very relaxing and pleasant way to spend my afternoon.
Near the end of my session, when I was beginning to think I ought to get up and end the session, I decided to try being a little more active. I found something that seemed to move me in the direction of a mini-o, though I didn’t quite reach that point before the feelings faded away. What I did was pull the Aneros in fairly deeply and then imagine (mostly, it eventually translated to tiny motions I could feel and replicate consciously) that the Aneros was moving in and out just a little, maybe a few millimeters only. When I got to where I could actually feel myself doing this with muscle contractions, I kept them going. I started to get a sort of itching feeling where the head of the Helix was rubbing, and it felt good to “scratch” the itch with what I was doing. I kept that up and the feeling increased and became more pleasurable for a time, but eventually the feeling peaked and then declined. I tried to reproduce the sensation, but perhaps the nervous network I was activating with that maneuver had saturated and needed time to recover.
That was more or less how I ended the session. All in all, I spent about 3 hours on this session. I did get up at one point for a “potty break.” That reminds me, I also reapplied lube at that time, and just after that I felt more/better sensations. So perhaps I hadn’t had enough lube to begin with and/or some absorbed/dissipated. So I may begin using a little more than I have been. Better to overdo it than under.
Here’s a summary of the new things I learned or tried in this session:
Laid on the floor with feet on a chair. Good position for me.
Laid on the ottoman with feet on the floor. Not so good for me, but might be better in the future.
Mindfulness meditation to increase sensory awareness was very helpful.
Binaural beats music was relaxing and good for shutting out distracting noise without being distracting itself. Whether the beats actually had any real effect or it was just the music/sound it was set to, I can’t say.
Widening my attention so that I’m not narrowly focused on the areas I expect to feel the greatest sensations allows me to feel more, which leads to the sensations I’m looking for in the areas I was focusing on previously. Enjoy everything you feel, anywhere on your body. Let the whole body become awake and aroused and it will help awaken and arouse the specific ares you care most about.
Pulling the Aneros in deep and then imagining (or creating) a fluttering motion worked to create pleasurable sensations that grew for a time and then faded. Worth trying again in the future.
Use more lube. Better to have a some excess and get the motion and sensations you want than to get in your own way by using too little.
That’s all for now. I don’t know when I’ll have another session. Might not be for a while. Or maybe a good opportunity will present itself along with the desire to take it.
Source: https://www.aneros.com/blogs/session-7-2/