The Orgasm Upgrade: From Multiple Orgasms to Orgasmic States

I had my first orgasm at four, when I was four years old. Spontaneously, I had an orgasm not because I knew what masturbation meant, not because someone was inappropriately touching me; but, simply because I was putting pressure on my pubic bone and holding it there and tensing my body in a specific way.

That led to an orgasm spontaneously. And I was like, oh, what is this experience that I’m having? And I found that if I pressed my pubic bone, I didn’t know clitoris existed. Then if I pressed my pubic bone against other objects, this experience would happen again.

And also that in time, I didn’t actually have to put pressure on the pubic bone. It was something that I could do by contracting my pelvic floor muscles. I didn’t know they were called PF muscles then. And then also that there was a way that I could breathe and there was a way that I could draw that energy through the body.

And when we’re young, we’re actually quite creative and I had a lot of time to myself. Hello. Hello, my loves. Bienvenidos. Welcome to my podcast. I’m Catrina Armendariz and I’m your host. I’m also a somatic therapist, sex and intimacy coach, and I’m the founder of Esencia, an online subscription platform launching this fall with sex education, sensual yoga, and other embodiment practices to support you in feeling fully alive in your body again.

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Let’s dive in. Welcome everyone to today’s episode on orgasm. I’ve been multi-orgasmic for as long as I can remember, but something I want to share with you is an evolution on my understanding and experience of multi-orgasm.

So when I think of multiorgasmic, today, I think of something that’s like punctuated, like a punctuated orgasm followed by another punctuated orgasm with no refractory period in between. And this is reminiscent of a clitoral orgasm for me.

Whereas also now, in my later latter years, with more consciousness and awareness of what it’s like to be in my body, just to have a stronger understanding and awareness of the immense variety and diversity of experiences I can have with my energy.

I recognize now that there is also a sustained state of orgasm, which is really what I would have referred to my multiorgasmic state as. But I’ve also had those very punctuated experiences, which is how my memory remembers. This is what I recall most of my orgasms being at a very young age, and I’m not sure at what point of the podcast this is publishing, but I had my first orgasm at four, when I was four years old.

Spontaneously, I had an orgasm, not because I knew what masturbation meant, not because someone was inappropriately touching me, but simply because I was putting pressure on my pubic bone and holding it there and tensing my body in a specific way that led to an orgasm spontaneously.

And I was like, oh, what is this experience that I’m having? And I found that if I pressed my pubic bone, I didn’t know the clitoris existed then. If I pressed my pubic bone against other objects, this experience would happen again. And also that in time I didn’t actually have to put pressure on the pubic bone.

It was something that I could do by contracting my pelvic floor muscles. I didn’t know they were called PF muscles then. And then also that there was a way that I could breathe and there was a way that I could draw that energy through the body. And when we’re young, we’re actually quite creative and I had a lot of time to myself.

So, what am I getting at here? I just lost my train of thought. So yeah, a lot of what I remember of those experiences were that it was very clitoral and I actually wasn’t stimulating my clitoris with awareness, it was just that that’s what I was pressing against in that general area, and neuronally, that’s what forged my whole pathway to orgasm.

So it’s also something that I prefer in my orgasmic experiences. And then when I started to explore actually touching my clitoris and playing with my clitoris through the hood, it was also a very beautiful sensation. And quicker, much quicker.

And just interesting, just interesting. Much more punctuated. I talk about this quite a bit in terms of the different types of orgasms that we have access to as women or feminine-embodied or vulva-owners, that clitoral orgasms are short, they’re sharp, they don’t last for long.

It’s a very quick ascent into orgasmic climax, followed by very quickly a sharp descent into refractory phase, or just a complete decline of arousal. And so that can happen back to back to back.

Many orgasms that are very sharp in this way, but also because we have different neuronal pathways that are innervating our genitalia as well as our erogenous zones throughout our whole body-mind system, we have access to different experiences of orgasms.

So we get orgasms that are more wave or valley orgasms, wherein which they last for not just seconds, but minutes, hours and even days, where in which rather than getting these sharp punctuations of orgasmic peaks, which can still happen within that, but it kind of short circuits pleasure, you can get a sustained orgasmic experience that is rather than like this really sharp ascent followed by a sharp decline.

It’s more like this growing, shimmering expansion of energy that has peaks and waves within. It’s like literally like the ocean. But we can actually decide consciously how we want to experience the pleasure, if we want it to go into a sharp peak, or if we want it to edge up to that, or if we want it to be a slow growth.

And even surrendering to that immensity is beautiful. So, yeah, as a young girl, many of my orgasms were multiple orgasms, because why would I just stop at one? Why would I stop at one beautiful pelvic? Why would I stop at one?

Why would I stop at one set of pelvic rhythmic contractions, rather than reinstigating it and reigniting it and letting it continue and going into another peak state of arousal. It was fun. I had a lot of time on my hands. I grew up with my extended family.

I didn’t grow up with my mom or dad. And so I didn’t have anyone in my house vigilantly with their eyes on me. But also at the same time, I lived in a neighborhood that was predominantly immigrant and it was low-income and it wasn’t a safe neighborhood for me to go out and play. Again, because my family wasn’t vigilantly making connections to people and making sure that they could trust and feel safe with me being out there alone.

So I was at home a lot. I had a lot of time to myself to just kind of explore meditation, different ways of being in different states of consciousness and exploring orgasm. And so with all of that being said, yes, multi-orgasms and then multiple orgasms.

And then also like orgasmic states, orgasmic states, which is just so much more powerful because if orgasm is our opportunity to experience ourselves beyond our mind body mechanism, like that ego attachment that we have when we get to experience our boundless nature and that becomes a state of being, it’s how we’re living, it’s how we’re interacting in our daily activity — that is pretty transformative and incredible and f*** yes.

So this experience of being multi orgasmic and in orgasmic states, in my younger years, when I lived in New York City, it was very much an attachment to sensationalism, still. Even though I had more variety from just peak orgasmic states. I have the ability, by the way, just to cultivate energetic orgasms, like without touching myself and just through intention, through maybe even just contractions of the pelvic floor muscles or different ways of breathing and visualizing, I can experience orgasmic states as well as peak orgasms, which can look like I’m having convulsions in the body if I want to surrender into that experience.

Or it can be very subtle and you won’t even notice I’m having it. But in its earlier stages, when I lived in New York City, it was very much an attachment to sensational, like sensationalism. And when I say that, I mean sensations. It was like my way of escaping any sort of experience that felt uncomfortable for me and moving into pleasure.

And pleasure is beautiful, pleasure is healing. But at that moment, for me, pleasure was a crutch. And I see that a lot. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not shaming it. I’m absolutely not shaming it. It’s just nice to be able to discern and to recognize that we can use this energy for our healing in so many different ways.

In one way it can resource us, right? As a coping mechanism. When life is just too much, too fast for us to be present with and to be able to process. It might be a nice way to just kind of default into, “I know, pleasure mode in my body right now and this is it, and I’m just going to go into that and experience it.” But the integration of being in pleasure mode and orgasmic state and being present in your life and knowing very viscerally the experience, having the strong awareness of what’s happening external to your own individuality, this is what came with deeper emotional release practices and just deeper work of self-discovery and self-realization.

But I kind of digress. When I initially popped on this podcast to record, I really just wanted to talk about multiple orgasms, but I really can’t. I would be missing a whole spectrum of the experience if I didn’t touch upon the expansion of what we can experience in our mind and body mechanism as it relates to orgasmic energy beyond perhaps the initial stages of what I experience as multiple orgasm and what’s implied by multiple orgasm, which is like many punctuated orgasms back to back to back to back to back, vs. orgasmic states of being, and punctuated orgasms back to back to back, assuming that this is like clitoral, they’re not going to last for as long, as many, many hours or many days.

And now going back to our genitalia as female or vulva bodied, vulva owners. Our genitalia is innervated by four predominant nerve pathways.

We have the clitoris, the glans clitoris (the head of the clitoris that we touch externally on the vulva) is innervated by the pudendal nerve. And then we have three nerves that we access internally in the vagina, and that’s the hypogastric nerve, the pelvic nerve, and the vagal nerve.

And these are nerve systems. It’s not like one specific little nerve traveling through the whole body, but a branching of nerves that are working together in different ways to give us different sensations. Some sensations are stronger and quicker, like the pudendal, whereas others are more diffuse and not necessarily specific to one little localized region or area that we can identify.

But it starts to just kind of like, spread very effusely through a network of pathways throughout the body in different areas. And this is where we get the difference between a localized genital orgasm, oftentimes we get through the clitoris, versus a full-bodied orgasm, which we can access through our internal, through the vagina.

Couple that with pelvic floor contractions, which are going to start to apply pressure on these different nerve systems, as well as with our sensory experience. Because orgasm is a sensory experience, we’re getting sensory input to our brain, and our brain is interpreting it in a certain way, and we’re experiencing it somatically in a certain way internally in our body, right?

So oftentimes when we think of orgasm, we’re thinking, oh, well, it’s physically stimulated, right? You stimulate in a certain way, and after some sort of time, you reach, like, heightened arousal, and then it gets so pleasurable that the body just releases into a cascade of bliss.

Not all orgasms are pleasurable. As I mentioned in one of my other episodes, sometimes we have compliant sex with our partners because we love them and we want to offer them an experience where they can feel like their needs are being met. And we’re not abandoning ourselves to do it either, because there’s a difference between, I’m going to do this for you, I really don’t want to do it, versus I’m not really turned on, but I can get into this.

I love you so much, and I love seeing you happy. Two different things. I digress again. I always lose my train of thought. Oh, yeah, right.

So we can access orgasm through that physical touch. We can also access orgasm through the other senses, through smell, through taste, through sound. I’m very auditory. I can get very orgasmic experiences listening to someone’s voice.

And there’s ojas in Ayurveda, Ojas, it’s like an essence that is communicated through the quality of someone’s voice. And I can pick up on that and I can resonate with it so beautifully that it starts to tingle through my spine.

And so we can get that even through visual. So all of our different senses coming together to really enhance our experience, potential for pleasure in the body and orgasmic states of consciousness being experiences. Also, what’s interesting is that in our body, the nerves are not all traveling through the spine.

So the vagus nerve doesn’t travel through the spine. So we know this because there are studies that have been performed on those with spinal cord injuries where they map out the different orgasmic and ejaculatory experiences men and women have when they’re recovering from spinal cord injury and the different areas of the spine that were injured and the different types of orgasmic experiences they can have.

So we know that the vagus nerve, so we know that there are orgasmic experiences that are going to be quite different in the nerve systems that are traveling through the spine versus nerve systems, the vagus nerve, for example, which doesn’t travel through the spine. And furthermore, we have the hormonal pathways.

And oxytocin is not just a hormone, it’s also a neurotransmitter. But oxytocin is something that is also very much involved in our pleasure cycle and our arousal cycle and our orgasmic experiences. And this neurotransmitter can be activated.

This hormone can be released. We can experience our cascade of hormonal flush moving us into this beautiful arousal state through the ways that we engage in our lives with someone, the ways that we’re relating to the person in the ways that someone’s touching us in the different parts of our body that they’re touching us.

I speak on one of my YouTube videos that if you stimulate the nipples, it causes uterine contractions, which are part of our cervical orgasmic experiences. And we can also get that through blended orgasm. So, yeah, so all of this to say, like, multiple orgasms are very much possible in male and female bodies.

I don’t know personally, because I’m not in a male body, and I know through reports of males that this is possible over many generations, but I also know in my own body as a female how possible it is. And we know neurologically or just anatomically, that the capacity is there as well.

And it’s a matter of being open and exploring these different pathways, playing and touching yourself and experiencing the areas of your body and your genitalia, all of it. Not necessarily just going straight for the clitoris and not feeling like you always have to go for the clitoris, or not feeling like you have to avoid it either. Right?

Not feeling like you have to avoid your internal cavities, but exploring those for pleasure as well, but being slow and mindful about it. So you can see how they all kind of individually give you pleasure or sensation or no sensation, and how together, when they’re mixed in different ways, maybe a little bit of clitoris and a little bit of pressing against the walls that are in the entry, like at the very entrance of your vagina, how that feels or when you’re holding.

This is my favorite. When you’re holding a dildo against your cervix, very softly, like that pressure and what it feels like to then start to, like that, for me, already just activates the sensitivity through my body and my nervous system to touch.

Touch, for me at that point, feels different. Same thing for many of us as women. We know this when our clitoris is stimulated. Sometimes we actually lose our ability to feel. And this is what I am referring to when I say we want to be careful not to short-circuit and overstimulate the clitoris.

These nerve pathways are so unique. We want to be mindful of how we’re curating our experiences through touch. Because if we’re looking for longevity, we don’t want to overstimulate. We want to spread that arousal through the different erogenous zones in such a way that we’re in the wave and riding those waves in the valleys vs. peak crash, peak crash.

Because the crash eventually leads to refractory period, which we don’t have to experience a refractory period as women. But refractory periods are not bad. And what is a refractory period? Well, they’re one of two types. It’s when our neurons need time or a stronger stimulus in order to be activated again in order to reach arousal.

So if we’re overstimulating and we’re crashing to a point where we need a refractory period, then there goes your multi-orgasmic experience. Right. In the sense of pleasure, because, yeah, we can jump right into another orgasm as women — it’s very complex, like the body can experience orgasm.

But is your mind and heart, are your emotions all aligned with that? Are you truly, deeply desiring that? Because when we hit that crash, energy flows out. There’s an energetic difference that we’re feeling in the body versus when we have an implosive orgasmic experience from internal stimulation or slower stimulation or more mindful, intuitive touch, wherein now, like, oh, yeah, being in this longer state of arousal feels good.

It’s not depleting. Not depleting. Okay. And I think that’s a really important distinction to be made between multiorgasmic experiences and sustained states of arousal. Or sustained, specifically orgasmic states.

Yeah. Just science has a lot of studies left to do to catch up with all of this. A lot of controlled experiments and studies on this that have yet to be performed. Masters and Johnson, a couple, eventually they became a couple. Two scientists, male and female, who pioneered sexology in the late 50s through the 90s — they performed a lot of experiments on what were prostitutes initially that they hired, predominantly female, and eventually became the subjects of their study were demographically like higher class, I think middle to higher class, educated couples.

I think caucasian as well. If I’m not forgetting, if I’m not remembering incorrectly, like of the white race. And even in these studies and in their reports of orgasm, they indicated that there was no difference between cervical orgasm and clitoral orgasm.

Because I think it was Freud, if I’m correct, who made a claim that one orgasm was superior to the other. Certainly, yeah. In my experience, yes. Did he have a different intent with what he said? Possibly. Do I care?

Not so much because I have no idea. I wasn’t sitting there with him. But we can postulate and make all sorts of fun arguments around it. So all of that being said, because they weren’t able to delineate and discern the distinction between cervical bliss and clitoral stimulation in terms of orgasm, that says a lot to me because my body tells me something else.

And that’s the biggest study that we’ve had on human sexuality. So there’s still a lot more science that has yet to catch up with all of this, and especially with the female experience of orgasm. A lot of what we know about orgasm is based on a male body, and our bodies — I can speak for our bodies alone — are way more expansive than the experiences that are being reported based on male orgasm alone or a male bodied orgasm.

And I hope this was helpful for you. I hope it was something that maybe validated some of your experiences, gave you some insights into your own experiences, or maybe sparked some further inquiry or some further awareness around possibilities that you could be exploring in your mind body spirit mechanism as it relates to your erotic energy and your arousal states and your orgasmic states of being.

Thanks so much for joining me and tune in for the next episode. Big hugs. I love you all. Thank you my loves for joining me on this journey. I hope that this episode was fruitful for you. To access any resources referenced, please visit the episode page at catrinax.com where you’ll find the podcast archive.

If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube, like and leave a review or comment and share with your friends and loves. Espero que hayas disfrutado este episodio. Gracias por darte este espacio conmigo.