HypnoGasm: R’s Story

Ed Note: On Monday we interviewed Eric Kendall, a sex hypnotist. SEX+STL volunteer R shares her very personal experience.

I’ve always been interested in hypnosis and I’m also interested in sex, so when I saw that Shameless Grounds was hosting something called “HypnoGasm”, I knew I had to convince my boyfriend it was the perfect activity for our date night. Here is a brief description:

Let the velvety voice of master hypnotist Eric Kendall lead you through the most mind-blowing sensual experience of your life. Experience very real and pleasurable erotic sensations through the power of your mind. You can participate or watch. All participants are fully clothed and no physical stimulation is used or required.

When my boyfriend and I arrived, Shameless Grounds was already almost full. We were surprised to see almost nobody we knew there. The hypnotist, Eric Kendall, began his show by asking a woman he had hypnotised at a past show to come up on stage. He put her under hypnosis and told her she would feel pleasurable sensations coursing through her body. She squirmed and moaned. He told her she would feel them increasing, and she responded by tossing her head back and wriggling. He said that when she felt his hand on her shoulder she would feel the pleasure increase until she had a very pleasurable orgasm.

He placed a hand on her shoulder and she began to squirm and moan until finally her eyes clenched and her hands gripped her thighs, then she relaxed with a contented little smile.  He led her through a series of other pleasurable hypnotic experiences – feeling pleasure when he touched her in a certain way, having extended orgasms.

I’m someone who can feel things vividly when other people describe them, and I found myself squirming in my seat as well. He invited other people to come up on stage.  My boyfriend urged me to go, but I was hesitant and stayed in my seat. I told him he should go but he wouldn’t do it either.

A few other women chose to go on stage, and the hypnotist described a variety of pleasurable experiences they would experience, leading up to orgasm. One woman didn’t seem to respond to his suggestions – she may have been asleep – while the second made some soft noises of pleasure to some of his suggestions. The third woman, though, she got into it. She was obviously and vocally having a good time.  I built up my courage, reminded myself that I knew almost nobody in the audience, and decided to go up and get hypnotized.

I’ve always thought that I was someone who would be suggestible to hypnosis. People who respond well to hypnosis tend to have two characteristics – they have a high level of absorption and they are able to vividly imagine things. Having the characteristic of absorption means that they are able to get so pulled into an activity that they lose focus on the world around them. I’m notorious for getting so involved in a task that I don’t hear people talking to me or see what is going on around me. I also find myself naturally vividly imagining things that are described to me. I’m a good candidate for hypnosis. (More info on predictors of hypnotic susceptibility can be found here.)

The hypnotist asked me to sit in a chair in front of the audience and approached me after a minute. He wore jeans, a tucked-in shirt, and boots which gave him a country-western flair to his style. His dark hair was a little longer in the back and a little shorter in the front, and my boyfriend and I had been joking about his mullet a few minutes before.

For some reason, even thought I didn’t know him at all this backstory for him popped into my mind. To me he looked like the type of guy who tries to project a slight country-western style to appeal to St. Louis women, but on his own in the evenings when he settles back with a beer he always put on classic rock or 80’s hair bands. Not my type, though not totally unattractive if I had been into mullet-wearing men who have a secret thing for Poison.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about getting into a sexy situation with him, even with no touching involved. He stood over me looking down, backlit by bright lights. I looked up at him and suddenly I felt different. The crowd, and the noises, and the rest of the room seemed far away. At his request, I looked up and focused on his brown-almost-black eyes.

Suddenly the bright lights and the strangeness of being the focus of audience attention made me feel removed from the world, like I was the subject of an alien abduction. With a soft rhythmic patter to his words the hypnotist told me I was getting relaxed and then abruptly in a startlingly sharp voice he told me to “Sleep!” and gently pressed my forehead. I’ve always thought it looked incredibly fake when hypnotists do that, but damned if I didn’t find my eyes closing and my head dropping in relaxation. He gently pressed back and forth on both of my shoulders telling me I would find myself relaxing more and more, and I did.

The hypnotist told me that I would feel pleasurable sensations inside me, and I felt something warm and throbbing forming in my lower dantian. I felt it glowing and pulsing and tingling, and it began to spread through my body. He talked about the pleasure inside growing stronger, and it did.

Then he announced to me and the audience that I would be having an orgasm – my first orgasm of the night. At that point I had the fleeting thought to interrupt and tell him that he was wrong – my boyfriend and I had had sex before the show and it would be something like my seventh orgasm – but I didn’t seem to have the power or motivation to speak and tell him that.

He began to describe the intense pleasure inside me increasing and how I could feel an orgasm building, and I felt the warmth growing and my lower abdominal muscles tightening pleasurably. “Orgasm!” he said.

As he spoke, the pleasure built up and I found myself breathing deeply and rhythmically and making little noises of excitement. Later my boyfriend told me that I had been pretty noisy, although nowhere near as noisy as I usually am. The muscles in my lower abdomen clenched and I felt heat and pleasure pulsing through my body, focused on my pelvis. The pleasure got more intense and then subsided.

I’ve been asked: Did I have an orgasm? I find that a hard question to answer. What sensations qualify for an orgasm is not all that clear to me. In my two-and-a-half minute breaks with my Hitachi, I have what I think of as a classic textbook sex lab orgasm. I press that thing against my clit hard, and I barely have to fantasize before I’m feeling involuntary pleasurable orgasmic muscle contractions in my pelvis. It feels very good and I can do it quickly. It’s nice to be able to have quick hard orgasms on demand and I often do it a couple of times a day. And when I’m with a partner I will reach an orgasm that has the same sort of powerful involuntary muscle contractions a couple of times a session.

However, with a partner I often experience something very different from that, too. I will have a strong build-up of pleasure, heat and intensity which will reach a peak without me noticing the same type of obvious, strong involuntary muscle contractions that I’ve described above. Afterwards, I have a pleasurable release and I’m relaxed and happy, so to me it seems like an orgasm, although I sometimes wonder if Masters and Johnson would agree with that label if they got me in their lab.

Luckily, I don’t really care. It feels good, it is intense and pleasurable, and that’s good enough for me.  The experience during hypnosis didn’t have those involuntary muscle contractions I get from the Hitachi, but it did involve a build up of heat and pleasure and a release and dissipation, although not as strong as I get with a partner.

The hypnotist led me through several other pleasurable experiences. He had me hold hands with the woman next to me and feel the sexual energy from her and the other women on stage. The lady to the right of me was the other loud woman and I could really feel her energy flowing through my arm. He had all of us experience a reverse orgasm – starting with the peak and going backwards to the build-up.

Then he asked us each if we would like to female ejaculate.  I said hesitantly that I did.  I had never squirted before and I was interested in learning how – although I wanted to be able to do it occassionally and not all the time. The hypnotist talked about how there is an area of tissue on the front wall of the vagina, and with sexual arousal it builds up fluid. In most cases, the fluid is reabsorbed by the body after orgasm, but sometimes it is expelled.

He asked all the women on stage to imagine this tissue filling up with fluid, swelling, enlarging. I could feel that tiny part of my body get warm and full. Somehow, I could feel it get bigger. He described how we could feel an orgasm building and he said that when the orgasm came we would ejacuate that fluid that had accumulated. I could feel the heat and pleasure in my center building, and as it built to a peak I could almost feel the pressure of the fluid in me also reaching a level where it just had to come out . . .  but it didn’t. No squirting for me.

He walked the ladies on stage through a few other pleasurable exercises, then gave us a post hypnotic suggestion: Whenever our partners who were at the event set their hand on either of our shoulders, we would experience an orgasm. And that effect would last for the whole weekend. He brought us out of hypnosis after that. He told us that we would forget everything that happened under hypnosis until we had a drink.

I had the weird experience of hearing him say that and then being brought out of hypnosis and remembering him telling me I wouldn’t remember anything … and yet I truly couldn’t recall anything else that happened during the session until after my boyfriend handed me my root beer and I took a drink. My boyfriend set his hand on my shoulder, and I felt a strange sort of tension inside and shrugged his hand off me. This happened a few times when he touched my shoulder, then the effect wore off. His hand on my shoulder never caused an orgasm.

We went home soon after that and had sex, then slept, then in the morning we had sex again. At one point in the morning during intercourse, I was on top and my g-spot was being really pounded. My nipples were being sucked and suddenly I started to feel this really pleasurable pressure radiating from my g-spot. I found myself moving feverishly in a motion to keep the pounding happening  . . . and suddenly I had this intense orgasm and it felt just exactly like what I’ve read ejaculation feels like.

But then I immediately thought, “No, surely I didn’t ejaculate … I never have before … I probably just thought I did because the hypnotist brought it to mind.” But then my boyfriend said, “Uh, did you squirt? It feels really wet down there . . . ” And there was a puddle under us. I had ejaculated for the first time after twenty years of having sex, and it can’t be a coincidence that it came so soon after the hypnotist’s suggestion.