Before I came to Orgasmic Meditation (OM), I believed that I was a good partner and a good boyfriend. I was kind, and I was honest in my relationships. I also knew I was missing something.
I had established a pattern. I guess you could say I was a serial monogamist. My relationships could only go so far, though I certainly let some get closer to me than others. No matter how close they got, we always seemed to hit a wall. The same thing happened repeatedly: I knew I lacked empathy and would start looking for a way out. It was an unhealthy pattern I couldn’t figure out how to break.
I had enough self-awareness that I was stuck between this huge desire to settle down and this fear of being trapped. I was afraid of being with the wrong person for the rest of my life. So, I would just keep moving. Eventually, I figured out that part of my problem was that I kept wanting women to be more like me: I always felt that women came from a place of feeling that men couldn’t relate to (especially me). It didn't make sense to me. And so, when I was in a relationship, and my partner would see things differently from me, I would see her viewpoint as ridiculous. Many break-ups happened when I gave up, hoping she’d be different.
On the one hand, I enjoyed being single. I enjoyed dating whoever I wanted. Part of me liked being in many short relationships. It was fun and exciting, and I felt I was learning a lot from each relationship. Each woman was a teacher. The problem was that I was learning a lot about myself but wasn’t learning how to have a real relationship. I was getting older. It was frustrating that I wasn’t getting what I really wanted most.
I had just gotten out of another brief relationship when a friend told me about Orgasmic Meditation (OM). When he explained what it was, I scoffed in disbelief. The practice seemed so wild. Honestly, I signed up more out of incredulity than anything else. I needed to see this for myself! And yet, just behind that suspicion, a part of me hoped so much that it was as good as my friend said it was. I was genuinely hoping it would help me better understand women and, more than that, empathy for them.
I thought I would take to Orgasmic Meditation (OM) like a fish to water. I figured I was knowledgeable about women’s bodies. Instead, I found myself nervous and awkward about every aspect of it. I was panicked about doing it right and worried that I would offend or upset the woman I was stroking. It was nerve-wracking before I even got into the nest. Once there, I couldn’t find a comfortable position. My back and legs hurt, and I started to sweat and cramp. On top of it all, the stroking seemed so much more strenuous than I had thought. I walked out of that first OM, shocked at myself – but also determined to try it again. I decided to give myself three months. If nothing got better after 90 days, I’d quit.
I needed every second of those three months. I didn’t feel what other people were feeling for the longest time. I’d hear other strokers talk about this heat and energy flowing from their fingers into their chests, and I wondered if they were making it up. I didn't feel anything on my finger, much less my chest. Mostly, I felt the cramps in my quadriceps. Then, after nearly three months, it happened – my God, it was there, just like I had heard. There was a buzz on my fingertip, and then there was the heat in my chest, and then, strangely, my back and legs just stopped hurting altogether. I could feel the grounding, the smoothing, the distinction between upstrokes and downstrokes. To use video game language (I work in video games), I had finally leveled up.
I started to think of OMing as a game. The strokee and I were playing together, surprising each other, and leveling up. I would take each correction and each observation and use it to encourage myself to stay. I created tiers for myself. “I’m a level two OMer now! Okay, now I’ve hit level three!” And so on. It helped me attune and focus more.
Eventually, I started to see how an energetic component is created in an OM. When I stroke my partner, we tap into that energy that is part of a greater cosmic energy. The technique I focused on was part of getting there, but I needed to move beyond technique and into a state of just being present with that energy. Once I could do that and just start to be present with everything flowing in the nest, I started to have that empathy and connection I knew I’d always lacked.
If that sounds too simple, believe me, it wasn’t. I didn't realize how apprehensive I was about adjustments. Every time I got an adjustment in the beginning, I was like, Oh, I'm messing it up. Oh, my gosh, she's right; I should have done that instead. What was I thinking? It took me a long time to realize that this panic about adjustments came from trauma in my childhood. Specifically, it was connected to a memory of my mother scolding me. What I was able to figure out was that if I could learn to work with these adjustments, I could start to heal some of that early trauma. Over time, the adjustments had less of a painful impact on me.
Without the women changing at all, what I had initially perceived as scolding began to sound like a suggestion over time. Instead of freaking out or having upsetting memories come up, I could sit with the suggestion and implement what I was hearing. I realized that this had been a huge part of why I always bailed out of relationships after a certain point; old injuries kept coming up. Learning to hear adjustments as suggestions shifted everything.
I said earlier that I had wished women were different. Orgasmic Meditation changed that for me. One day, not long after my back and legs finally stopped hurting in the nest, it hit me just how much courage it took for women to trust the men in the practice. To take off your pants and lie back and trust? That’s unbelievably brave. That courage humbled me, and my realization of it gave me a whole new level of respect for women – not only for my partners in Orgasmic Meditation but for every woman in my life. I’d come into Orgasmic Meditation knowing I needed something, but I’d also come in cocky and walled off. This practice broke down that wall of arrogance, and I’ll never stop being grateful.
