These sex meditation apps want to get you out. You may also fall asleep.

“So sexy, damn it” is not what you think before embarking on a really sexy activity, but I was very hopeful before hitting play my 8-minute “quickie” meditation. ” I was listening to “Guided by Glow,” an app that generates “erotic audio sessions.”

I see myself in sport shorts and a messy bun, lying on my bed – where I had eaten pizza just minutes before – ready to listen to a faceless, sweet-voiced woman named Sky “give [my] body and mind on a surrender journey [my] the sexual desires of the goddess within. ”

Wham, madam, thank you erotic it is not. This will take time. First, Sky would lead me through an opening meditation — inhalation, exhalation — while I waited for the story to begin.

“I picture you lying on some soft sheets,” she cooed. I stare at a greasy stain on my bedding the size of a giant movie theater stone. Sky led me to take a deeper breath, and told me to look at my belly. “I don’t want to,” I say back to Sky, but she keeps moving.

The setting: a picnic. We sat together on an open field, feeling the blanket underneath, the gentle breeze brushing against our skin. We are eating strawberries together. Now Sky is placing strawberries in many holes in my body.

“I accept you as you are,” says Sky, “with all your flaws.” That was rude, I told Sky, and then she added, “and your perfection.” I turned off the phone.

Now comes the end of “Scorpio’s Seduction,” featuring a deep, male voice named Miles. “Hello queen,” he said softly. “I admire your strength… Together we will go to the heart of the burning volcano.”

I really don’t want to go there at all. It sounds pretty dangerous. But Miles still whispers sweet things—he asks me to be comfortable, tells me I’m “the boss,” and that I’m “safe and seen.” It’s a bit much. Agree very sexy and all that, but at some point you just need someone to pull your hair and throw you around the bed (or volcano, whichever you want).

I turn to one final recording, a “sound image” called “Morning Snuggle”. That was the sound of waking up next to a man named Van, who seemed like he knew a lot about supply chains, while he asked me to do “morning meditation” with him. I don’t know where this story is going, because by the third minute I find myself doze. I woke up from my nap a few minutes later, and the story was over. I feel quite refreshed.

I’ve found Guided by Glow on (where else?) Goop Gift Guide, where interested parties can purchase the service for $4 a month or $48 a year. I reached out to Sayra Player, an actress who founded the app, and gave it a free trial in exchange for, um, research.

Player told me over the phone: “I don’t have much of a buzz with conventional porn. “But I do yoga all the time, and I like to give in, stop thinking and just flow. I was listening to a guided meditation and had this moment, “It would be great if this person talked to my body and brought about the sexual experience.”

The player wrote her first scenario and called it “Golden Boy”.

“That title can come in many ways, but it’s about being alone in the room with the person serving you and letting you know what they’re doing once they’ve done it,” she explains. She shared it with a writing group. “And everyone liked it, this was hot, so I asked them all to write one.”

Player says: “When you have someone in your ear, it goes straight into your system. “As a storyteller, I have the sensitivity to figure out when something gets people excited. Not just about sex, but it will open their hearts, or connect them. There are many different ways to do that. So I became a connoisseur. I don’t want to be a porn producer. I want to be a stylish person. “

Guided by Glow is one of many apps with millennial-friendly sans serif fonts that offer guided meditation to engage listeners. There is Dipsea, where one can listen to highly conceptual stories, like yoga teacher/student sex. There’s Ferly, where users join a program led by an expert to target specific instances of bedroom hangings such as low sex drive, stigma, or painful intercourse. Kama (as in the Sutra) offers meditations and lessons on masturbation to “help you enjoy yourself as well as make you a better lover”.

I listened to a 24-minute guided masturbation session by Kama during lunch, admittedly that’s not how it was supposed to be, but I’ve had a busy day. It didn’t get me to the pinnacle of pleasure when I munched on a salad. However, I appreciate the lack of story or concept — it’s a simple meditation — and the breath-taking voice leads the way, sounding hot but not overdone.

Jessica Graham, a mindfulness coach and author of Good sex: Going out without checking, has been recording sex meditations since 2017 with the Simple Habit app. Graham told me over the phone: “Men get caught in the head during sex, especially during the climax. “This happens to people of all genders, not just women, they tell me they can’t climax with someone else because there’s so much anxiety and pressure. This meditation can be helpful for that — it teaches you to get into your body. ”

Graham adds that these apps “can be used with or without a sexual partner” and do not need to be used for explicit sexual purposes. “I always tell clients that it doesn’t have to be sexual,” she says. “Certainly it can be something that you use to regulate your sexuality, but also just for fun in general. You can do mindfulness meditation but just stroke your arm, hug yourself and say, ‘I love you, and I’m here with you.’

The intro of the sessions can certainly be frustrating for those who are used to it erotic. You have to be patient and wait for the build-up and take your time breathing in the voice of a random person before they decide it’s time to flick your clitoris, or pop a strawberry into your vagina. of you, or whatever one does inside that volcano of sex.

“When you slow down, you have access to all the fun and conveniences that are available, but often get ripped off,” says Graham. “As a culture, we are very focused on the instant gratification of a copy and go down. So many people think that if they don’t succeed, then they have failed. But it takes patience in learning to slow down and be with your body that way. “

A 24-year-old New Yorker named Sabian, who I’ve never met but am familiar with on Instagram, answered my call to see if anyone wanted to try the sex meditation app and report back. (Sabian, like everyone else I participated in this experiment with, asked me not to use her full name.)

“I think it’s going to be very weird and I don’t have high expectations,” Sabian said. “I thought, OK, it’s going to be corny.” On her first try with Guided by Glow, Sabian picked a story but quickly turned it off because “the guy has a very thick southern accent.”

“I was like, no, this isn’t it,” she said. “You have to be picky. So this whole side quest of mine is to find a voice that won’t bother me for 15 minutes, especially if they’re going to tell me what to do — I don’t need them to speak with a southern accent. ”

Sabian tries to regulate the mood in her room — she wears noise-cancelling headphones, turns the laptop’s brightness all the way down, and lies under the LES lights. She listened to a voiced man named Rhett, whose conceit was simply that he approached her in her bedroom for a quick chat. “I can’t get into that,” she said. “He said I smelled ‘like a misty morning by the sea’, and I lost it. Because I know that I don’t. ”

The “fake compliment” was a bit difficult for Sabian – at one point, Rhett referred to her clitoris as “my dear pink pea.”

Sabian found a few other things she liked, though she was starting to expect the meditative pattern – starting with breathing exercises, then moving on to the sexy stuff. “It’s a great break from regular porn, and it feels more comfortable,” she said. “Sometimes after watching porn I feel really embarrassed, but with this I have no experience.”

Another friend, a New Yorker named Bianca, told me the experience was “like having sex on the phone, but with a woman.”

She said: ‘It felt so naughty, like I didn’t want my neighbors to hear. “The voice is fake, with the forced inhalation, but it drives me crazy. So I guess it worked”.

An acquaintance of mine named Frances also attempted to enter the “burning volcano” from the recording of “Scorpion Seduction”. “I fell asleep,” she said. “It literally put me to sleep. I lay down to relax and then take a 10-minute nap in between. But I had particularly good sex later in the day, so maybe that has something to do with it? “

Sabian, who is single and lives alone, said she “feels like a cat girl” when she listens to the app. “There is a romance novel aspect, and when I think about those things, I think of older women,” she said. “At first, I thought it was going to be funny, but then I enjoyed it a little bit.”

When I said this to Graham, the meditation coach, she offered a clear counterpoint. “Being alone in a room with a meditation app really makes you feel great,” she notes. “You are not a failure. You are really rad, because you are educating yourself. What a gift to your potential future lovers that you had this discovery. ”