There was a period in early 2016 when I went on an online dating bender. I sent an average of 15 to 20 messages daily, if not more. I’ve worked it out, and between March and May, I went on about 15 dates with 15 different people. None of my potential mates lasted more than three days. I was like a time bomb: tick, tick, tick for three days, and then everything would self-destruct. I started asking for feedback from the women I had dated, and the strongest comments I received, which upset me the most, were that I was too intense. Several of them said that I needed to “dial it down.”
One day, towards the end of my binge, I read in a profile that the woman practiced a technique called Orgasmic Meditation (OM). I've always been interested in energetics, so the explanation immediately caught my eye. The energy transfer between people and the ability to access energy within one’s body seemed relevant to my situation.
Despite my sureness that this was for me, I was really, really nervous the first time I had an OM-Orgasmic Meditation. I struggled to keep the clitoral hood back simultaneously and my finger stroking the one o'clock spot of her clitoris. And I sweated profusely. I didn’t feel much of anything in my body, and when it came time to share our experience through frames, I was too nervous to say much of anything. I don’t think I felt any physical sensation until I had several more OMs. But I liked it. I knew I liked it. I came to realize that my dates were awkward because neither of us knew what we were doing. You don’t cleanly state your desires, so it can feel like smashing a square peg into a round hole if they don’t match up. It can feel like a hardboiled interrogation. And you’re doing it in a public place.
OM was different. The rules were set from the word go, and everyone knew, if only subconsciously, why they were there. I began to notice things about myself and how I work. I began to notice things about other people, things perhaps they couldn’t see clearly themselves. I began to notice that communication happens at a non-verbal level. I started to notice what all those women had meant by “intense.”
Completely unknowingly, I had been stepping on and trampling the flowers in the feminine garden. Not only was I bad at noticing any non-verbal cues that a woman was sending me, but I would routinely override those cues, stomping right over them and any other feedback on my way toward what I thought our relationship could be. Right around my twentieth Orgasmic Meditation, I began feeling my own energy and my partner’s as well. It was incredibly intense, almost like my heart was gently squeezed. Receiving so much felt strange, alien, and scary, but it was also necessary and nourishing.
What did this mean for me outside of Orgasmic Meditation? It is still very much a work in progress. A few weeks ago, I found myself in a passionate communication with a lover. In retrospect, it was less communication than a barrage of excited words on my part. It left her feeling overwhelmed, as if she didn’t have a voice. Nothing she would have said would have had any effect on me.
But even though I didn’t notice it at the time, my communication has evolved enough that I knew something was off. And she was able to communicate what it was later on. I realized I was getting too excited, stacking too many things on each other. I was unknowingly creating a lot of pressure in my relationships. In the past? The situation would have blown up. The time bomb would have gone off, and we never would have spoken again. We’re still friends.
I continue to practice Orgasmic Meditation regularly. It’s a practice, and I evolve in self-understanding every time I enter the container. And I think perhaps the greatest gift it has given me is that within that container, there is no goal. Goals, climaxes—the idea of what a relationship could and should be—was the driving force of my intensity as a dater. I had somewhere to go, so to speak. But I’m learning that the pressure is diffused within such a goalless practice as Orgasmic Meditation, where I focus on the process and the connection instead of the endgame.
