by Avery Young
My mom was always open about sexuality. When I was a kid, she would talk about how sex was a really loving and magical experience. From books and movies, I have also seen people having really beautiful experiences of love in their sex. I saw them having connection and openness with each other, receiving and seeing each other. There was expansion and vulnerability. I knew I wanted all of this.
As I grew into a young adult, however, I didn’t feel that magical way in sex. Sex was painful, dry, penetrating, hurtful. It hurt physically. I felt insecure; I felt self-doubt. I had low self-worth. I couldn’t figure out how to make the bridge between this experience of sex and the magical experience I so longed for.
I had a boyfriend for two years, and I remember feeling as though I was just having sex with him to be a good girlfriend. I would sometimes have orgasms, but mostly I didn’t even know what was going on down there. I never touched myself. I told myself women didn’t really like sex and decided this was normal.
When an acupuncturist called me frigid, it was literally the most painful insult anyone had ever given me. Then, my boyfriend cheated on me while on a business trip. With a vengeance, I determined to become a sensual woman and dove into understanding my body and how it worked.
This was the hunger that was waiting to be filled when I found Orgasmic Meditation. Initially, when a friend invited me to an Orgasmic Meditation (OM) event on Facebook, I ignored it. A year later, however, and with my new mission, I went to a lecture and discovered that Orgasmic Meditation was exactly what I’d wanted.
At the event, an OM instructor gave a lecture. She was totally confident and sensual. I knew she had something I wanted. As I listened, I felt something waking up in me. I wanted to learn to OM immediately.
I was nervous when I had my first OM. I opened my legs, and I didn’t feel much. I was calm. It felt more like being at the gynaecologist than a meditation.
As I continued my practice, my Orgasmic Meditation experience deepened. I often felt calm and expansive, and a sensation like breath moving through my limbs, my body, my genitals, my labia and swelling them just slightly. I remember a moment when I felt the finger of the stroker gently touching me and with so much awareness for my well-being. It didn’t have to be anything else other than that moment. It was so subtle. My head went quiet. Most of my OMs were quiet experiences like this.
When I spoke with that confident OM trainer after her lecture, she told me that her desire changes quickly and that every woman’s desire changes and moves. I had no idea what she was talking about. I had no idea what I even wanted. This is why asking for adjustments was very hard at first. I’d ask for a little less pressure, but that wasn’t really what I wanted. I wanted more adjustments, but I’d never say it. I had already made my request, and that was enough. Getting to a place where I was actually teaching people how little pressure I wanted—and even just realizing how little pressure I wanted in the first place—was significant.
Like most women I know, I felt shame about my body. The grounding and noticing steps—where the stroker places their hands on my thighs to ground us together and offers a value-neutral description of my genitals—helped me connect to something bigger than my shame. Over time, I began to feel less ashamed about my body. Orgasmic Meditation helped me to change my relationship with my body and my genitals completely.
OMing is about sensation, so it doesn’t matter if my belly is a little tubbier that day or not. As a woman, this felt so significant. It is insane how much I worried about how I looked. I used to spend so much time thinking about it! I could never just relax, surrender, and be seen without worrying whether the man was judging my body.
Orgasmic Meditation (OM) has brought me into my body in a powerful way. In a recent OM, I felt such a peacefulness, expansion, and soft, tingly pleasure in my clitoris and labia area. It was as though if my genitals could talk, they would sigh and say, “Ahh, this is what I’ve been wanting.” My heart and body were so open there was no barrier. All this expansion, all this connection, all this vulnerability… it was magical.
