How to Pleasure Yourself: A Sensual Guide for Beducated Women

How to Pleasure Yourself: A Sensual Guide for Beducated Women
Written by Zara Robinson

If there were a song that could express how the blissful essence of a women’s self-pleasuring should feel like, it would be the 2002 R&B song “Oops (Oh My)” by Tweet.

It’s a song that celebrates a woman completely captivated by her own beauty and by her turn-on. It sings about a woman relishing in the reflection of herself, the beautiful smoothness of her skin and savoring every bit of herself and her essence.

Self-pleasuring can and should be a profound act of self-worship.

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It should be an act of deep self-love, self-nurturing and self-appreciation of the body, heart, mind and spirit. It should be a celebration of a woman’s sexual power and integrity. Not to mention something that is fun and brings so many benefits for a woman.

So let’s dive into the wondrous world of female self-pleasure!

The Benefits of Self-pleasure

Self-pleasuring, or in the more clinical vernacular – masturbation, has been shrouded in shame in most societies for a very long time. Even the word masturbation comes from the Latin word masturbari, which means ‘to defile with the hand’.

Even today if you were to google masturbation, you would hit a formidable number of sites that claim masturbation, particularly for men, causes hair loss, prostate cancer, erectile dysfunction, even blindness!

Luckily, science has evolved beyond these completely fabricated allegations. It has established some very tangible health benefits that come from self-pleasuring (for the source information look here and here).

Common Health Benefits

The most common health benefits sited are:

  • That self-pleasuring helps to improve moods, thanks to the release of endorphins. As an extension regular self-pleasuring helps to relax tensions and leads to better sleep.
  • Self-pleasure releases tension in the pelvic area. As a result research has shown that it can alleviate menstrual cramps and pain.
  • It can increase the muscle tone in the pelvic and anal areas, which in turn reduces the chances of incontinence and uterine prolapse.
  • Self-pleasure helps to flush out bacteria from the cervix, which can relieve those pesky urinary tract infections.
  • Research has also found that for people that suffer from restless leg syndrome symptoms self-pleasuring can help to relieve these symptoms.

Self-pleasure as an Exploration

However, equally important to women, self-pleasuring gives women the space, safety, and freedom to explore their own body and sexuality. By using regular practices, women can explore and expand their orgasmic capacities and experiences. Heck, you could even learn how to squirt!

Self-pleasuring helps women to define their own unique expression of orgasm and pleasure.

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How to Begin

Creating the Time

As with partnered sex, self-pleasure should be treated as something sacred, as often as is possible.

There is nothing wrong with a quickie in the morning shower, enjoying the luscious feeling of spraying jets of water on your delicate inner and outer lips. Or indulging in a delicious clitoral or a Yoni massage before going to sleep. I mean, who doesn’t like to play with their love flower in different ways.

how to pleasure yourself

But in a world where women take so little time for themselves, booking in time for your pleasure and your body should be seen as an absolute necessity. Sexuality is an integral part of the human being and should be nurtured and tended in the same way we tend to our nutrition or our physical and mental fitness.

Even though we are all born with an innate holistic sexuality, sexuality evolves and matures over time, if tended to and allowed the space for expression and discovery.

So for a start, try, occasionally, to find a time and space where you can truly go deep into yourself and discover new avenues of pleasure, ecstasy and open the gateways to more expanded orgasmic potential. It won’t always be possible to do so, but our Yoni deserves the effort to try!

Securing the Space

Start your self-pleasuring practice by setting up space for your self-pleasure.

For women, not surprisingly, safety is often one of the key feelings needed in order to feel sexually aroused and in order to fully experience pleasure. In the words of Sheri Winston, the author of “A Woman’s Anatomy of Arousal”:

Yoni typifies Yin in its ability to open and close. When Yin feels secure, it relaxes open, dilates and receives what is offered. … it surrenders to an opening, but only when it feels safe to do so.

This applies to self-pleasuring practices, as much as it does to partnered sex. So, if needed, ensure that you self-pleasure in a space where you feel protected and safe. If it makes you feel better, lock your room door and lower the blinds.

Feeling safe also entails feeling safe within your own self.

Try to start your self-pleasuring practice with an intention in which you will not judge or pressure yourself and in which whatever experience you witness during your practices you will be grateful for it and welcome it. Whatever is felt and experienced will be what your Yoni and body need at this particular moment in time.

Bringing the Presence and Intention

Also, the best space for self-practicing is the one in which you can be fully immersed and present in the moment. Again, in the words of Sheri Winston:

“Yin is susceptible to diversion and interruption, which is why women are more apt to become distracted during sex and stray from the path of sexual arousal.”

So turn off or mute your phones and minimize the possibilities of interruption and distraction to the largest extent possible.

self pleasure

To be centered in your practice it is also good to have a small ritual around setting up your space for self-pleasuring. Whether that be lighting candles or incense sticks, scattering your space with flower petals or making a small shrine to your favorite goddess.

Also, it is good to start your self-practice with an intention. Your intention can be to fully immerse yourself with pleasure; to let go of any issues of shame, trauma or guilt; to find new avenues of orgasmic joy; or just to feel delighted and fun! Set your intention to whatever is relevant to you at that moment.

How to Pleasure Yourself

Foreplay for Your Senses

As with sex with a partner, self-pleasure should start with foreplay. And the best foreplay is the one that engages all of your senses! Pleasure should be a whole-body experience in which all the senses should be activated and that’s where Tantric foreplay comes in hand.

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In the hectic world of today, it is shocking how very little awareness we have in our body and within our senses. We spend most of our waking day in our heads and the constructs of the material world around us that we often ignore or do not register the sensations that come through each of our senses.

So self-pleasure practices should be seen as a good opportunity to bring to life our senses and put them in the function of our pleasure.

Engage your sense of smell by dabbing your skin with essential oils or take a luscious bath before your self-practice and inhale the deep aroma of your fresh and clean skin or the smell of your skin scented with essential oils. Prepare some fresh fruit and revel in the delicious scent of it. Really make a feast for your nose!

While you are indulging your sense of smell, start to tantalize your taste buds.  Prepare yourself some delicious food – delicious sex smoothie, strawberries dipped in cream, succulent mangos or oranges, warm and melting chocolates – and really feel the texture and taste of the food rolling in your mouth and palate. Indulge your taste buds, they have feelings too! Fruits are also a great way to make your vagina taste good!

Next focus on your sense of hearing. Fill your space with sensual and flowing sounds or music. And just focus on the sounds and the emotions that they stir within you.

Move then to your sense of touch. For instance, you can find some luscious bed covers that feel soft and sensual to the skin or put cool and smooth satin sheets on your bed. Start touching your body and erogenous zones (but not yet the Yoni). Bring your hands through your hair, caress your face, touch you lips, and massage yourself with coconut or almond oil. But really take time to feel the sensations that come from your sense of touch.

And finally, feast your eyes on the magnificence that is your wondrous, beautiful body! Treat yourself with exquisite lingerie, or ornament yourself with beads and feathers, paint yourself or just be naked. Observe yourself, every inch of yourself. Watch yourself dance or move sensually in front of a mirror. Maybe use a small mirror and take time to observe the beautiful temple of your Yoni. Tell yourself out loud how beautiful you are, how wonderful your Yoni is and how grateful you are for both.

Spend some time engaging each of your five senses separately and then all five together. Feel your senses come alive and notice the sensations that they create in your body.

Generate Pleasure From Your Clitoris

By now you have set up your sacred space for self-pleasuring, set your intention and have engaged and activated all of your senses. Ideally, at this stage women should feel at least a mild turn-on and a mild state of arousal.

But it is also ok if that hasn’t happened.

Throughout your self-pleasuring practice, keep dropping into your body and identify the sensations that are coming up. If you still feel tense and constricted, find the place in your body where you feel this and breath into it, or better yet ask this part of yourself what it needs. Continue to caress yourself and with every caress send yourself love and acceptance.

You can use your imagination or visual cues to heighten your arousal. Feel free to fantasize or use pornography to heighten arousal. But try not to use either every time and try to avoid them becoming the only route for sexual arousal.

As explained most expertly in the book “Come as You Are”, by Emily Nagoski, the brain is a very efficient mechanism and if it learns that a particular type of stimulation, in this case, pornography, produces the desired result, in this case, arousal, it will develop a very exact neuronal pathway: porn – arousal. But, as the saying goes, we become our habits and after some time this risks becoming the only learned way to experience arousal.

This limits the possibilities of experiencing arousal and turn-on and, as an extension, limits a woman’s capacity to expand and discover her orgasmic possibilities.

how to pleasure yourself

So if you find yourself overly dependent on fantasies and/or pornography to experience arousal, use your self-pleasuring practices to discover new ways to feel arousal and turn-on. Plus, if you are already choosing porn, make sure to watch the right pornography.

As you start exploring your Yoni, it very important to start slowly from the outer parts of the Yoni and move gradually deeper and deeper. As Sheri Winston explains:

“This pathway, from outer to inner, recapitulates how feminine or yin sexual energy moves, and therefore is usually the pattern you’ll want to use in the progression of your play.”

Using oil or lube, start by caressing your outer lips and then move gently towards your inner lips and your clitoris. The website OMGYes is part of a research project in which scores of women were interviewed to reveal the techniques that they use in their self-pleasuring practices or with their partners.

Not surprisingly they differ greatly from one woman to the next, which is why self-pleasuring should be used as an opportunity to find what works best for you and to experiment with new types of techniques.

Some of the techniques women have found to best deliver clitoral orgasm include:

Edging

This is basically allowing yourself to come close to clitoral climax but then slowing down or stopping completely just before reaching climax and then coming back to arousing yourself. In essence, this is a way of delaying orgasm by stop touching the clitoris or touching other parts of your vulva or body and then returning to the clitoris, doing so several times or when your feel orgasm finally comes.

Consistency

When a particular motion or rhythm applied consistently and without alteration leads to orgasm.

Hinting

This can include touching the outer lips of the vulva and only occasionally grazing the clitoris and repeatedly doing this to allow for the build-up of turn-on and prolonging the sense of pleasure.

Orbiting

Which is, in fact, figure-8-ing directly on the clitoris or the hood of the clitoris or a combination of rhythmic circular motions.

Stimulating the clitoris is a good way to build-up pleasure and arousal, but try to use your self-pleasuring practices as a way to gradually awake as many orgasmic centers as possible. This means withholding from a clitoral orgasm and awakening other parts of your yoni and body.

Expand Your Orgasmic Potential

It is common for many women to not feel orgasmic either at all or only in certain parts of the body, most commonly just the clitoris. Self-pleasuring is a good way to open up sensations in other parts of the body.

how to pleasure yourself

As mentioned in the previous section, once you move to your Yoni for further turn-on and pleasure, start with your clitoris and your outer and inner vaginal lips. Always use lube (water-based are the best) or some natural oil (such as coconut or almond) to massage your clitoris in whatever way feels pleasurable for you.

Once you feel sufficiently turned-on and your Yoni feels more opened and relaxed, while still caressing your clitoris, use your other hand to find and touch your G-spot. The G-spot feels like rubbed skin close to the front end of the entrance to the vaginal canal. Once you have found it, touch it and stimulate it gently with your fingers. You’re creating a blended type of pleasure – blending in the pleasure from your clitoris with the pleasure being created in your G-spot. At one moment stop touching your clitoris and just focus on your G-spot on its own.

Take this same approach to touch and stimulate your cervix, using a dildo. Then try to use the sensation of your pleasure to feel your womb or the energy of your womb focusing on all the sensations that your pleasure causes in this part of your body.

Move then to your breasts or the energy of your breasts; stimulating your clitoris while touching or massaging your breasts. Finally, using your fingers or a sex toy, use first blended pleasure to feel your anus and then focus just on the anus.

It’s not necessary to do all of your self-pleasuring practices this way, but it is a good way to start opening up pleasure and sensations in other parts of your body. The point is not necessarily to climax but to drop into your body and into the sensations in the various parts of your body thus awakening them and bringing your awareness to them.

Allow your body to guide you of its own accord whether it orgasms or doesn’t and honor whatever sensations and feeling arises when you place your attention and focus to the various parts of your body during self-pleasuring.

Going Beyond Orgasm = Climax

And with this, we come to what is often considered a key aspect of sex, or in this case self-pleasuring, which is an orgasm. Often, orgasm is equated with the sense of climax, the very strong release that is felt once peak pleasure is reached.

But orgasm is, in fact, a very individual experience and it can differ not only from one woman to the other, but the same woman can experience different types of orgasms.

The key to orgasm is, in fact, to forget about orgasm.

Focus and attention should not be on performance or appearance or on trying to achieve an “ideal” sexual experience that someone else has prescribed. Focus and attention should only be on the sensations that are going through your body in the here and now.

It is key to learn not only to feel within our body in the present moment but in time learn to move these sensations and pleasure through the body. The best way to do this is through breath – for instance deep and connected breaths, as well as through movement and sound. But movement and sound that comes organically from the body. If the body desires stillness, this needs to be respected.

Through breath and movement, we can focus on the pleasure and, in our mind’s eye, move this pleasure through our body. This can be done through circular movements from the pelvis up the back to the crown of the head and then down the front, or the other way around. Or pleasure can be moved through each of the chakras, or expanded in any way that feels natural at that moment.

By moving pleasure this way, we start to harness the flow of our sexual energy, which allows for different types of orgasmic experiences. It also allows us to see which parts of our bodies block the flow of energy, which in turn allows us to access those sensations and feelings that are blocking us and work towards integrating and healing them.

The end result should be orgasm, but not in a classical sense of climax. The end result through the creation and movement of pleasure and turn-on should be a mind-shift. A moment where the rational mind is suspended of all thinking and the body surrenders to the pulsating moving sensation of pleasure unique to that particular moment in time.

A moment in time where we are suspended in the present; staring captivated at the beauty and divinity looking back at us when we look over to the mirror across.

Make sure to check out Beducated's Online Courses on Solo Practices for Vulva Owners
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Discover Our Tantric Massage
Online Course

Tantric Massage

Shout goodbye to boring, mediocre sex & revolutionize your lovemaking with our Lingam and Yoni Massage Online Courses. Discover 50+ penis & vagina massage techniques (including self-massage).

About the author

Zara Robinson

Zara Robinson is a US-based sex educator and an avid enthusiast of all things related to sexual knowledge. Known as the "sexual Wikipedia," she has memorized countless positions and is passionate about sharing her expertise. Zara is also a self-proclaimed sex toy geek, boasting an extensive collection of toys which she enjoys testing and comparing. Her engaging writing style and comprehensive knowledge make her a go-to resource for readers seeking to deepen their understanding of sexuality. Learn more about us and our editorial guidelines.