Katrin with Love

There is a moment, when a woman is being touched well inside her own body, when something behind her eyes lets go.

Not the eyes themselves — those stay closed, or half-closed, fluttering against the lamplight — but something further back. A held breath she didn’t know she was holding. A muscle she didn’t know was a muscle. The whole architecture of her pelvis softening by a degree she couldn’t have asked for, because she didn’t know it could be asked for.

That moment is what internal yoni massage is for.

Not orgasm, though orgasm can happen.

Not arousal, though arousal often arrives uninvited and then leaves again, replaced by something stranger.

Not therapy, though therapy is what it does. It is, at its simplest and its most radical, a slow, deliberate, gloved or ungloved hand introduced into the vagina with the express purpose of listening — and a woman, lying back on a sheet that smells like clean cotton and a little bit of rose, agreeing to be heard there.

What It Actually Is

Yoni is a Sanskrit word, and like most Sanskrit words it carries more than it translates. “Vagina” is the clinical term, but vagina is a tube — a passage, a function. Yoni is the whole landscape. Outer lips, inner lips, the soft hood and the pearl beneath it, the opening, the canal, the cervix at the back like a small closed mouth. It also means source — the place things come from. Womb, origin, sacred space. The temple, in the old texts. The gate.

Internal yoni massage, then, is bodywork that enters the gate.

A practitioner — and the practitioner matters, more than I can possibly stress — sits or kneels at the side of a low table or a mat on the floor. The woman receiving is undressed, usually draped at the chest, with a pillow under her knees so her hips can fall open without effort.

There is oil. There is, usually, a long preamble: external work, slow effleurage of the belly and inner thighs, a hand resting flat on the pubic bone for what feels like hours and is probably four minutes. There is breath, deliberately matched. There is permission, asked aloud and given aloud, every step of the way:

And then, when the body says yes — not the mouth, the body, the slow exhale and the involuntary opening of the knees — a single finger is introduced, slick and unhurried, and the inside work begins.

The practitioner is not trying to make her come. Sometimes she will. The practitioner is mapping. Pressing slowly into the muscle walls of the vaginal canal, the pubococcygeus, the iliococcygeus, the deep pelvic floor — and finding where the tissue is soft and where it is gripped, where it yields and where it holds something back.

There are clock positions, in the literature. Twelve o’clock toward the belly, six o’clock toward the spine, the corners at four and eight where so many women carry an ache they have never named. The practitioner finds a place that holds, rests a fingertip there, and waits.

That is most of it. Pressure and waiting.

What the Body Does

The first time a woman receives this work, she usually expects it to feel like sex. It does not feel like sex.

Sometimes it feels like nothing — a vague pressure, the dim awareness of being touched somewhere the nerves do not, at first, want to report from. This is information. The body has, somewhere along the line, decided that certain rooms in the house are better kept dark.

The practitioner does not flip the lights on. She lights a candle. She waits.

Sometimes it feels like ache. A dull, surprising ache, like a bruise that was always there. Women cry, here. Not delicately. Not pretty single-tear-down-the-cheek crying — the other kind, the kind that comes up from underneath, that doesn’t know what it’s about, that arrives with snot and shaking and a sound the woman has never heard herself make.

The practitioner does not stop. She does not soothe, either, not exactly. She holds the pressure, breathes audibly, and says yes. yes. let it come.

Sometimes — and this is the one nobody warns you about — it feels like rage. A clean, hot, almost erotic fury that has no object and no story and no name. Women kick the table. Women curse men they haven’t thought about in fifteen years. Women laugh, sometimes, mid-rage, because their body is doing something they did not authorize and it is, in some buried way, delicious to be that out of control on a table where someone has promised to keep them safe.

And sometimes — not always, not even most of the time, but sometimes — it feels like pleasure. Not the sharp clitoral pleasure of a hand between her legs in the back of a car. Something deeper, slower, more like warmth spreading from the inside of her hipbones outward, through her thighs, into her chest, up the back of her throat. A pleasure that has no urgency to it. A pleasure that is not going anywhere. The pleasure of being met.

This is the pleasure most women have never had.

Why It Works

I want to be careful here, because I have spent enough years around bodywork to know that the language of trauma stored in tissue can be both true and overstated. But there is something to it, and the something is this:

The pelvic floor is one of the most enervated, most reflexively guarded regions of the female body. It is also the region most consistently subjected, across a lifetime, to medical entry without erotic consent, to erotic entry without medical care, to childbirth, to invasive examination, to the small accumulating armor of every time a woman tightened against a touch she didn’t want and couldn’t refuse. The muscles learn. The muscles, eventually, stop letting go even when there’s no one there.

Internal yoni massage is the practice of finding those muscles, with patience and oil and time, and offering them an entirely different proposition: a touch that does not want anything from them. A touch that is not en route to anywhere. A touch that has no destination, no climax it is steering toward, no and then what in its body. Just a finger, just pressure, just breath, just time.

The muscles, given that proposition for long enough, eventually believe it. And when they believe it, they release.

What releases with them is the part anyone who has done this work will tell you about and no one can quite explain: memory. Not narrative memory, usually — not and then he, and then I. Somatic memory. A feeling-state. A flash of being eleven. A flash of a hospital room. A flash of a boyfriend whose name she has not said in a decade. The flash arrives, the woman breathes through it, the practitioner holds steady, and the flash leaves, and something in the tissue is different afterward. Looser. Warmer. Hers in a way it had not been before.

This is not magic. This is what every good somatic therapist knows about how the nervous system unwinds when it is given safety, time, and pressure in the right place. The vagina is not special in this regard. It is only that the vagina is where a great many women keep the things they have never had a safe place to keep.

The Erotic Part

Now. Let me not be coy about this, because you and I both know why you clicked.

There is an erotic dimension to this work, and pretending there isn’t is the kind of sanitizing that drains tantra of its actual power. The yoni is an erotic organ. The hand inside it is an erotic hand. The woman on the table is, at minimum, in a state of profound somatic openness, which is the same nervous-system state as arousal even when arousal is not what she is feeling.

Her skin is hot. Her breath is slow. Her hips are soft. There is oil on her thighs.

The practitioner does not act on it. The practitioner does not, even subtly, angle for it. The practitioner notices her own arousal if it comes up, breathes it down through her own feet, and continues the work. The receiver is allowed to be aroused, or not, or both in waves. She is allowed to come, sometimes, if her body insists — and a good practitioner will let an orgasm move through without making it the point, without congratulating, without making the woman feel she has performed correctly.

This is the radical thing.

For most women, every erotic charge she has ever generated in her body has been, in some way, transactional. Someone was going to do something with it. Someone was going to want something back. The arousal was a currency, a debt, a promise. It belonged, partially, to whoever was in the room.

In skilled yoni work, the arousal belongs only to her.

It rises, and no one reaches for it. It crests, and no one rides it. It dissolves, and no one is disappointed. She is allowed to be turned on in a room with another person and have it mean nothing about what comes next.

I cannot tell you what that does to a woman the first time she experiences it.

I can tell you that some of them weep, afterward, for reasons they cannot articulate. I can tell you that some of them sleep for fourteen hours and wake up changed. I can tell you that some of them, over weeks of sessions, slowly stop bracing during sex with their actual partners, because their body has finally learned — has been allowed to learn, on a table, with a stranger’s gloved hand and a candle and a sheet — that being entered is not the same thing as being taken from.

The Practitioner

A note, because it matters: most of what circulates under the name “yoni massage” on the open internet is not this. Most of it is a man with a website and a camera and a particular interest in being the man who massages women’s vaginas.

There are real practitioners — somatic sex educators, certified sexological bodyworkers, trauma-informed tantra teachers who have done their own work for decades — and there are predators with a vocabulary. The vocabulary is identical. The work is not.

If you are seeking this out: ask about training, ask about ethics, ask whether they work with a supervisor, ask what they do when a client dissociates, ask what they do when they get aroused, ask whether they have ever had a client they refused to work with and why. A real practitioner will answer all of these without flinching. A predator will be offended that you asked.

If you are receiving it: you set the pace. You can stop at any moment. You do not owe explanation. You do not owe orgasm. You do not owe a particular kind of opening on a particular timeline.

The work is yours. The body is yours.The yes is yours, and so is the no, and a real practitioner will love your no as much as your yes, because the capacity to say no is the entire muscle being rebuilt.

After

Afterward, you lie there. You don’t get up right away.

The practitioner withdraws her hand slowly and rests it, flat and warm, on the lower belly. There is a blanket. There is, sometimes, a glass of water with something in it — rosewater, honey, a slice of lemon. The lights are low. You may have come and you may have wept and you may have done both and you may have done neither, and none of it is what the work was about.

What the work was about is this: somewhere inside you, in a muscle you cannot name, in a clock-position you cannot picture, a door that has been closed for a long time is now slightly open. You will feel a draft from it, for days. You will be moodier than usual, hungrier than usual, more honest than usual. You will cry at songs. You will want sex in a way that has nothing to do with anyone in particular. You will look at your own body in the mirror and find, briefly, that you do not hate it. You may even, for a flickering second, find that you love it.

This is the work. This is what the inside of a woman has been waiting, very patiently and for a very long time, for someone to come and do.

Not take. Do.

There is a difference, and your body — given the chance, given the hand, given the candle and the oil and the time — has always known it.

Thank you for reading. If this moved something in you, I would love to hear. The body keeps the score, and sometimes the score is a song.

– Where I Break Open (previously @whereibreakopen on Substack)