I posted in a Facebook group for women to see if others had experienced similar things, and I was shocked by how many had. Victoria, a 29-year-old working in retail in Seattle, can experience touch-free orgasms with deep concentration but used to get them without even trying as a pre-teen and teenager.

“The first orgasm I ever had at all was a touch-free one,” she remembers. “I accidentally stumbled across porn on the internet, and I guess I was just a super impressionable, randy little kid. I would covertly watch porn sometimes and sure enough, I continued to have one every time I did. Sometimes I would be able to remember the images later and have one while falling asleep.”

Mill, a 50-year-old writer in LA, has mentally willed herself to orgasm when BDSM partners gave her “assignments” to orgasm at a particular time, and Laura Dorwart, a 29-year-old writer in Ohio, regularly has her husband hypnotize her to orgasm. Like me, she describes her hypnosis orgasms as more diffuse. “I realized that the state of extreme relaxation also made me more aroused because I’m often really stressed, which kills my sex drive,” she says. “It’s definitely a type of release I often don’t get during sex because I have PTSD, and even if I’m really enjoying the sex physically, I don’t often get the full-body release I want because it’s so hard to relax.”

Sometimes, touch-free orgasms are not even desired. Christina Wolfgram, a 29-year-old comedian in LA, once had one in response to getting really stressed while running late for an important work event. “I was extremely tense, full body, and then all of a sudden, it felt like everything I was holding in pretty much dropped out of my vagina,” she says. “I came pretty intensely and got a head rush.”

Men report experiences like these, too. Max, a 56-year-old writer from Southern California, had a partner who would give him the “most amazing orgasms” of his life on command. “He would not let me orgasm for days, and then we would Skype and he would tease me and get me excited. Then he would order me to put my hands on the arms of my desk chair, and he would verbally tease me and order me to cum,” he remembers. “I think the verbal teasing worked so well because he had spent so long getting inside my head and getting me used to following his sexual commands. I was sort of like Pavlov's dog, ready to do as he told.”

Good Vibrations staff sexologist Carol Queen isn’t surprised by these stories. “Orgasm happens in the brain,” she says. “Orgasm is generally a culmination of the arousal process—and it doesn't have to be experienced via genital stimulation or even with genital feelings.”

One study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior confirmed that women who reported orgasming through fantasy alone exhibited the same signs of orgasm—including pupil dilation, rises in blood pressure and heart rate, and pain tolerance increase—that they did when they orgasmed through self-stimulation. This phenomenon is probably not that common, however. Sex research pioneer Alfred Kinsey found that two percent of women experienced orgasms solely through fantasy.

“I've seen a number of references to women as the gender more prone to hands-free orgasms, but I also think so many men never try to get beyond penis-centric stimulation that the penis becomes essentially a psychological/sociological reason not to explore this,” says Queen.

The ways in which people can orgasm without touch include fantasy, BDSM commands, tantric breathing, kegels; auditory stimulation like hypnosis, AMSR or audio erotica, and, yes, stress,” says Queen. Shree Ramananda, creator of Binaural Beats Ultra, says people have reported orgasming through his “binaural beats”—sounds designed to elicit specific feelings.

Hypnotherapist Kimberly Friedmutter, who has hypnotized people to orgasm “many times,” says orgasms through hypnosis are sometimes the most enjoyable and easiest to achieve because the conscious mind is what prevents or weakens orgasms. In fact, she has had clients who could not orgasm at all by other means and then were able to orgasm through hypnosis. Some of her clients have learned to orgasm through self-hypnosis so that they can orgasm faster amid their busy schedules. Rather than take the time to masturbate or have sex, they just sit down and imagine whatever sexy imagery gets them over the edge.

“The best way to explain the power of the subconscious is to remember a dream or nightmare you had where you woke up physically reacting (panting, sweating, exhausted from running, etc.),” she says. “Sex really is mesmerizing by the nature of what it is. Trance, hypnotic state, magnetism, entrancement is really just a state of deep relaxation, and we know that unless a certain level of 'relaxing into sex' occurs, orgasm doesn't.”

To induce orgasms, Friedmutter has her clients imagine a warm light in their erotic area of choice, sometimes along with vibrating sensations, and picture a scene that’s sexy to them. “The objective is to reconnect the mind to the body's capacity for arousal, a function easy to lose sight of in our demand for conscious attention to everything,” she explains. “My mantra has been to zone out, rather than zoning in, so the body is allowed to follow the plan it knows for climax. Which is why, by the way, wet dreams are so pleasurable, because the conscious mind is completely out of play when we sleep.”

If you want to experience a touch-free orgasm, Queen advises blocking out time when you can relax and won’t be interrupted and quieting any shame, embarrassment, or performance pressure in your mind. Then, imagine an erotic fantasy or experience from your past and breath deeply, focusing on the arousal building in your body and the erotic imagery in your mind. Once you’re immersed in the fantasy and sensations, tighten and relax your pelvic and butt muscles, and if that’s not enough, thrust or rock your pelvis.

It may take some practice, but Friedmutter believes everybody is capable of experiencing touch-free orgasm—most people just haven’t learned how to take advantage of this ability. “The mind's capacity for pleasure is vast and wide,” she says. “Those who do not believe they can climax are buying into a belief, and only that.”