Energy Orgasm: What Sex, Love & Goop Didn’t Show You

A woman lies blindfolded on a massage table. A man stands beside her, one hand hovering above her heart, the other above her pelvis, never quite touching. Her breath deepens. Her back arches. Waves move through her whole body, and on the sofa across the room, a couple watches with their mouths slightly open.

If you have seen that scene from the Netflix series Sex, Love & Goop, you probably remember it. Since the show aired, it is one of the questions people bring to me most often, sometimes shyly, sometimes straight out: is that real? Can you actually have an orgasm without being touched? And can I learn it?

The answer to all three is yes.

The reason I am writing this piece is what often comes next. The enquiries that reach me after that episode tend to ask for the same thing: a session, maybe two, to learn the energy orgasm, the way you might book a course to learn massage. It is an entirely reasonable request, because that is exactly how the episode makes it look. It is also the setup for one of two quiet disappointments: deciding the whole thing was television nonsense after all, or deciding that something is wrong with your body when the waves do not come. Neither is true. There is something about that scene the episode never quite tells you, something that changes what the yes means.

First: I love this programme

Nothing that follows is a takedown. I love what Sex, Love & Goop did. It is a frank, warm-hearted look at real intimacy, and it shows everyday people what sexological bodyworkers and somatic sex educators actually do: the care, the skill, and the change this work can create in people's relationships and in their own bodies.

It also did something no amount of writing from practitioners like me could do on its own. It brought this conversation to ordinary people watching Netflix on an ordinary evening. And Gwyneth Paltrow putting her name and face to it matters, because celebrity credibility reaches people who might otherwise have dismissed this whole field as sleazy.

So this is not a correction of the show. It is the bit of context an hour of television could not fit in, and it starts with looking again at that scene.

Look again at who is on the table

The woman being brought to orgasm in that scene is not one of the couples the show is following. She is Jaiya, the somatic sexologist presenting the episode, a practitioner with more than two decades of experience in this field. The man moving the energy is Ian, her long-term partner, who teaches this work alongside her. Between them lie decades of practice, and years of building energy together as a couple.

The couple whose story frames the episode, Erika and Damon, do not have an energy orgasm on camera. They watch one. Jaiya brings Ian in to show them a glimpse of what is possible for two people: what the show presents as the result of practice and intention. What lands with many viewers on the sofa at home is: one session with the right expert, and this happens.

An hour of television compresses things; it has to. What you saw was not a beginner's first session. It was closer to a dance performance: what bodies can do after a decade of training.

It is real, and I know because I live it

I am not writing this as someone reporting on a trend. My partner and I have practised tantric lovemaking together for seven years, and much of that time has been energy lovemaking: whole-body orgasmic states that arise from breath, presence and the movement of energy between us.

What the show gave you was the magic trick: the version that looks impossible, an orgasm arriving without a single touch. Television needs that moment, and there is nothing false about it. Hands-off practice is real and has its own place; some people are drawn to it for its own sake, and in a workshop, where you may be practising alongside people you have only just met, working without touch is often exactly the right container. In my own relationship, lovemaking is full of touch, caresses, primal movement, penetration, the whole of it.

But whether hands are involved or not is not the core of this. The core is what becomes possible when you give the body time to learn to feel energy at all. When orgasm stops being something you pursue and becomes something you make room for, feeling opens up, and what arrives can be far more intense than most of us are used to. Chasing bigger and bigger hits of pleasure is everywhere; staying present when real intensity arrives is a different skill, and a much rarer one.

I know this from the inside. I shake a lot during lovemaking, and recently much of that movement has been rising up my spine, what the traditions would call kundalini. We spend nearly all our lives controlling our bodies, and letting something bigger than your will ripple through you can feel very out of control. Learning to stay with that, rather than clamping down on it, is a real part of the journey.

What an energy orgasm actually is

Here is the reframe that the show never quite makes: an energy orgasm is not a technique that someone performs on you. It is a capacity that lives in you.

The hands hovering over the body are the visible part. The invisible part, the part that took years, is the receiver's ability to feel subtle sensation at all: to notice warmth, tingling, streaming, pulsing, or whatever form energy takes in their particular body, and to let it build and move rather than dampening it down. Without it, the most skilled practitioner in the world can wave their hands all day and nothing much will happen.

This is not a new idea that arrived with Netflix, and it did not begin with the modern teachers either. Working with energy in the body belongs to lineages far older than any of us: the classical tantric traditions of India, with their subtle-body maps and the rising energy they call kundalini, and the Taoist practices of China, which have treated sexual energy as something to be cultivated and circulated for thousands of years. What contemporary neo-tantra teachers such as Barbara Carrellas, and practitioners like Jaiya, have done is translate parts of that inheritance for modern Western students, and they have been doing so for decades, always as a practice: something cultivated through breathwork, attention and time.

Jaiya herself has described first discovering hands-off orgasmic energy with a client who was unusually energetically sensitive, someone whose capacity was already there, waiting to be met. Some bodies arrive with more of that sensitivity than others. Most of us have to grow it.

How the capacity is built

The good news is that growing it is not a chore you get through on the way to a party trick.

In my practice, the foundation is learning to listen to the body rather than instruct it. In a session that might begin with something as simple as slowing down enough to notice what you can actually feel, and discovering what your body wants more of. For some people sensation shows up as heat, for others as trembling or tingling, for others as emotion rising, tears or laughter arriving out of nowhere. There is no right way for energy to feel, and part of the work is finding out how it speaks in you.

Tantric massage is one of the most direct doorways, because the entire practice is a slow building of energy through the body. Rather than aiming for a quick release, touch and breath gather arousal and spread it wider and wider, and the holding practice at the end, where all that gathered energy is contained rather than spent, is precisely what can open into the full-body orgasmic experience you saw on screen. For partners, this becomes something you learn together: breathing in rhythm, building energy between two bodies, and discovering that arousal can be something you cultivate as a pair rather than something that simply happens or doesn't.

How long does it take?

The truthful answer: it depends on where you are starting from, and anyone who promises it in one session is selling you the television version.

Some people are naturally energetically sensitive and touch the edges of this experience quickly. Others have spent years, sometimes a lifetime, living from the neck up, and the first stretch of the work is simply coming back into the body: feeling more, softening the places that have learned to brace. That stage is not a delay before the real thing. It tends to transform how someone experiences all touch, all intimacy, long before any dramatic peak arrives.

What I can tell you is that the path is learnable, that it starts giving things back from the very first step, and that the destination is not reserved for experts on Netflix. The scene that stayed with you was never really about the hands hovering over the table. It was about a body that had learned, over years, to feel.