Illustration: D’Ara Nazaryan

The Pleasure Principle

I Tried (and Quit) an Orgasmic Breathwork Class

Orgasm requires surrender, and I’m not used to surrendering without feeling like I’m losing part of myself

Morgan Jerkins
ZORA
Published in
5 min readAug 12, 2020

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This article is part of The Pleasure Principle, ZORA’s ultimate guide to solo sex, self-pleasure, and self-love. Take our Sex Survey to share your experiences.

I don’t know what the hell I was thinking when I signed up for an orgasmic breathwork class.

I want to say that I was bored and the title of the class seemed intriguing, but that’s too easy. The truth is that up until that point, I was terribly touch starved. I wasn’t quarantining with anyone, and the last time I was romantically touched by a man was last summer. I was intrigued, and I was also worried that I was using my vibrator so much that I was going to burn my nether regions. I knew there had to be other ways to give myself pleasure.

But orgasmic breathwork? I consider myself to be woo woo, but I have my limits. How can someone get off by just breathing? It didn’t make sense, but I figured that if I was ruminating on the class for this long that it piqued my curiosity. And furthermore, what else was I going to be doing during a weekday evening? I was running out of options, so I thought…

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Morgan Jerkins
ZORA
Writer for

Morgan Jerkins is the Senior Editor at ZORA and a New York Times bestselling author. Her debut novel, “Caul Baby,” will be published by Harper in April 2021.