When I consider what it is I actually do in a typical session, I realize there is no such thing as a typical session. Every sexual outing is different. All the various components that come together to contribute to the sexual experience are at different levels, be that physiological, neurological, hormonal, mental, emotional, situational. It is like an astrologer looking at how the planets align on any given day.
This chapter is more of a summary than it is breaking any new ground, a look at fitting the pieces together. How I do it involves putting into practice the many elements described here so far. At least trying to put them into practice. Some days are better than others, but still better than that good day at the office. You won't hear much I haven't said already and you'll think I'm repeating myself, but perhaps I can illustrate a bit of how these scattered elements combine to make this uncummed thing happen. My intent is not to suggest you follow in my esteemed footsteps and mimic my patterns like a blueprint. You will arrive at your own blueprint.
One of the biggest blockades to being able to control your ejaculations is the conviction that you can't. We repeat all the old litanies, as if we were reciting the damned rosary. "I just have to cum." "My cock controls me." "I have no willpower." "I could never go without cumming."
Never say never. Every experienced denier began at that ground zero.
I never learned to have dry orgasms as a kid. I'd get a funny feeling in my boycock, but never understood what it was or how the mechanics of it worked. My very first orgasm was an ejaculatory one at age twelve and I soon learned to cum in a hurry to avoid suspicion. Fast forward: after years of premature ejaculation and masturbation without nuance, the internet happened and I got involved in online chat and realized completely by accident that the distraction of typing into a chat box interrupted the runaway train just enough to allow me to avoid ejaculation. In 2007, I was invited to join a private semen retention group online. At the time I couldn't fully grasp why one might want to do this, but it changed my life. So my current masturbatory practice is unidentifiable compared to my teens.
My control and my results have improved over the years. I went from premature ejaculator to extreme edger and am often rather amazed that I would end up being an author on the subject. It just goes to show that it can be done, and there is hope for anyone who has heretofore been unsuccessful at controlling their ejaculations. If I can do it, anyone can do it.
The single most important step you can take toward controlling your ejaculation is to make the decision beforehand that the intention is not to cum. If you enter a session with only a vague hope that you might maybe kinda sorta wish you might hold off ejaculating, well let's not kid ourselves. We are accidents waiting to happen. If you go in thinking that you may or may not cum, if in the back of your mind you believe you might end up ejaculating, then when the moment arrives when you are so very close to losing it, losing it will be on your list of options. You decide in advance that when your cock presents you a choice, the choice has already been made, otherwise your cock will decide for you when things get hot.
It is not entirely an abstraction to consider the cock a separate being. We certainly engage in a battle of wills, as if he were a thing apart. Your mind will be telling you one thing while your cock and hormones tell you something else. If the cock is separate, then when he delivers an ultimatum, you are independent to veto the ultimatum. You can look upon the situation like an outside observer and tell the cock that regardless of his assumptions to the contrary and a history to the contrary, ejaculation is not an automatic privilege.
The mental tool that helps me most is one day at a time, one step at a time, one masturbation at a time. My only long term goal is to not cum today. Don't set a goal to stay uncummed for a week. Set a goal to stay uncummed the next 5 minutes. Weeks, months and years of abstinence are comprised of a series of single days of abstinence, an avowal to maintain abstinence in this present moment. I rarely set specific dates anymore as my goal for remaining uncummed, like attempting to go two weeks or whatever without cumming. If my record is 100 days, my goal is not 101. I don't want to deal with the letdown if the eventual accident happens on day 99. My goal is don't cum today. Don't cum this minute. Don't cum this stroke. Don't cum yet.
Don't cum yet.
When the cock insists you cum right now, if total refusal still feels a bit beyond your grasp, tell the cock "Not just yet." If it is difficult to deny ejaculation, try just postponing it.
Not yet. Not yet.
Someone once remarked in an online chat, "You procrastinate doing errands and chores. You put off social engagements. So you already know how to postpone events. You can postpone cumming."
I alternate between cycles of regular ejaculation and cycles of cum denial. For me, a new cycle of extended denial begins when, for whatever reasons, I have gone a few days without ejaculation anyway. Maybe I've been busy. Maybe I'm just tired. But it hits me that this is as good a time as any to start the next round, the few days of inactivity having given me a bit of a head start.
I have learned that the first time I masturbate after being away from it for a few days, it is much more difficult for me to maintain control, until I retrain my sexual reflexes back into edging. The sex muscles get out of practice, so to speak. The mental game gets out of practice. So that first session is at high risk for an unwanted ejaculation.
The first couple of days are the riskiest for me, in part because I have little to lose. If I cum, I only lose one or two days and it only takes a day or two to get back to where I was. Throwing away 25 days or 40 days is not such a careless decision. You can't just recover that in two days. The longer I go, the less willing I am to discard it all and revert to day zero. This is where starting the new run after already having gone a few days without sexual activity puts me ahead of the game, already putting me past that throwaway window.
For the same reason, once I get well into an extended run, it becomes dangerous for me to skip more than a day or so of edging, because when I resume there is that same unstable condition where it is too easy to lose control. The longer I wait the more unstable things get and I might as well be starting out cold. It also begins to border on celibacy and not active denial. Of course, once an extended run is well underway, my cock becomes an obsession and I don't want to skip a day. So one problem takes care of the other.
Just as the first couple of days are the hardest in the long run, within any given session the first ten or fifteen minutes are the most delicate and dangerous, where my risk of ejaculation is greatest and I have to take my time. The uncummed cock rapidly hits the edge and is at high risk of spilling the load that has previously been denied release. All the male reflexes remember how ejaculation works and the system is ready to deliver. I know I must proceed slowly and carefully and not let my cock get carried away before it adjusts into a state of greater control. The cock may expel semen without orgasm and I must be careful not to be distracted. After that, things level out somewhat.
When edging transports me into The Zone, the physical reactions (and their psychic counterparts) extend well beyond cock alone. There is a boiling deep in my loins. Chills flow up my chest and face. I become more and more aware of the extent of the sex musculature distributed throughout my pelvis. It is not my cock alone that is being edged, rather the entire reproductive system is being edged. The prostate throbs. I feel its energy, feel the work it is doing producing semen. My balls feel heavy. There is the repeated rippling of the various muscles. I feel them react deep in their cores, like a bodybuilder feeling what is called the belly of the muscle. Delicate reactions within the individual muscles. Delicate and raw at the same time, the muscles toned and strong through weeks and years of being exercised. At the end of a long session, there is satisfying exhaustion deep in my core.
There is a certain conditioning of the muscles, but moreover there is a conditioning of the mind. There is a learning curve, learning how our bodies react. But the learning process is a great deal of fun. Better than whatever comes in second.
A cock can be a fickle creature and unload unexpectedly. Aware of my own history of unintended ejaculations, I know that I cannot become complacent at any point, no matter how many uncummed days I might have achieved at that point. I am manipulating my body's natural reflex to ejaculate, and the reflex does not disappear just because I have successfully denied it for days or weeks. As a commenter to my blog put it, overconfidence is the enemy. Just about the time I think I have a decent grip on this accidental cum thing, my cock is apt to trip me up as soon as my mind wanders and I lose my train of thought. We need to maintain a vigilant awareness to recognize the advent of the point of no return, and a vigilant willingness to short circuit the point of no return.
For me the signal that I am approaching the threshold of the PONR is not so much the muscular beginnings of orgasm, but rather the sense of wetness expanding and progressing in the direction of my slit, a sense that things are not holding still.
It is vital to monitor your body's signals as it approaches the point of no return. It is better to err on the side of caution, than to push too far and wish you hadn't. Your body will tell you when it is in the danger zone, and you have to proceed carefully. One technique is to avoid getting too close to the brink. I have said that I would rather experience the far edge and pay for it with the occasional accident as a consequence, but for a person still learning how to edge it is worthwhile to work with the concept of staying a safe distance from it.
Mikael O (who you'll remember from his essay quoted earlier on learning control) has put it: I try to limit myself to the high state of arousal, where there is no actual danger of cumming, and avoid the edging zone. On those occasions when I feel like I must have some edge, I have learned to differentiate between light (not so dangerous) and heavy (dangerous) edging. What I had to do was put heavy edging into to the same category as intentional cumming and just don't go there anymore. Put another way, this makes it possible to view cumming as an option that you choose not to take, rather than an obsession that you have to fight.
Mike's approach is not for me, but it could very well be the tool that gets you past the habitual patterns of being convinced you can't control it and then proving just that to yourself.
You could also work with cock control by undertaking a series of short sessions. Paulo talks about stopping before getting too close, then taking pleasure in the process of starting over, and then starting over, and then starting over. The software bug becomes a software feature.
Getting precariously close to the edge can take a couple of different forms, very similar to each other and easy to confuse, but distinctly different from each other and you would be wise to recognize the difference. On the one hand you can get close to the edge and feel like you are solidly in control of where you are at and how far you are pushing. On the other hand you can get exactly the same distance from the abyss and have a feeling that things are a little loose, that instead of the sense that you are managing the exact proximity to the edge, it instead feels like you at best are maintaining an approximation to the edge. It's kind of the difference between driving down the highway of lust with both hands firmly gripping the steering wheel, compared to barrelling along with your hands off the wheel and hoping for the best. When you are out there in the wild and you feel like control could easily get away from you, it is time to stop. You don't have to stop until tomorrow. But if you don't stop, there is a real likelihood you will wish you had. This is not the time to dare yourself just to see if you can. You can prevent ejaculation but you can't un-ejaculate it. There is no changing your mind after it is too late to change your mind.
The moment passes ... if you let it. That sense of imminent loss of control subsides. Think with your brain and not your cock. You know when it feels unstable. You know when control is getting sloppy and you could easily go over the edge. You know when your mind wanders a bit. Just back off. Take a break, get a drink, go take a piss. It is not necessary to do a complete cool down - just enough for the crisis to pass.
Indeed I find it more difficult to control my cum if I need to piss. The urge to piss is commonly misinterpret as the urge to cum. This seems to stem from the physical reality that holding back piss and holding back semen involve some of the same muscles and I am asking them to do double duty when they already have plenty of work in front of them.
We get addicted to the endorphins, addicted to the heady rush and it can be so tempting to push just a little further, just a little, but sometimes with unwelcome results. Interrupting the cycle can be an important component to ultimately controlling the cycle. This doesn't mean you have to zip up your pants and go mow the lawn. It just means giving your cock a moment or two to normalize.
Instead of looking at it as a stoppage or discontinuance of edging, you might as well enjoy the quivering terrible energy radiating from the frustrated mancock. The absence of stroking and the cock's helpless suspension while it waits, while it tingles in expectation, can be erotic in itself.
Sometimes I just know. Sometimes it isn't rocket science to figure out that I'm trying to walk on water and objectively know that I am simply not in control at the moment — at least not as in control as I want to be or need to be. It is stupidity to try to muster on. Go fix lunch. Go water the garden. It doesn't have to mean you are done for the day, but it means you are done for the moment. You can get back down to business in fifteen minutes or thirty. Just as a ten second orgasm isn't worth what it costs, neither is ten more seconds of edging. I've made the mistake and have regretted the mistake.
Likewise, if I am dumping a lot of actual semen, either visibly or it suddenly feels sticky in my hand, it is a signal that my body has shifted into the next phase of preparation to ejaculate. At that point the body is ready to kick into auto-pilot and do what it is physiologically programmed to do. You're not going to win such a battle against your neurological software.
So these are a few of the things that work for me. At least most of the time. There is still the unwanted accident, but these techniques constitute my list of best practices — an ever-evolving protocol. Hopefully we all continue to learn and grow. Part of learning cum denial is realizing that if you do everything the same as always, the result will be the same as always.
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