by Sharon
When someone’s Orgasmic Meditation post popped up on my social media, I was eight months into a devastating grief. My daughter had died. Nothing mattered to me. I was in a state of wandering around, not caring about anything. It was beyond depression. It was an empty, vast apathy that is hard to describe. But something about that post had a ring of life-force to it. The fact that it opened my curiosity when absolutely nothing else mattered was reason enough for me to follow it.
It wasn’t until many months later that I understood why I trusted the pull I felt towards OM - I realized it was like a bookend to death, reminding me that the opposite of death is life. My system was guiding me toward engagement with life.
I have sexual trauma in my past, so it took a while before I dared to go to an event. But six months after finding out that OM existed, I attended an introduction evening, and registered for a class. I felt an overwhelming sense of pride for doing such a bold thing. I met some great teachers that day and decided to try the practice.
I remember leaving my first OM with a feeling of buoyancy - a lightness and a lifting. This was incredible, given the dense, thick state of grief I’d been in. I found that I could reengage with life-force energy in a way that didn’t require willpower. All my other practices, like yoga, meditation, and talk therapy, were giving me enormous relief and helping my grief along its path, but during Orgasmic Meditation, I could feel elements of the grief actually burning off through my body, and the fact that it could do that in only fifteen minutes felt miraculous.
I’ve been OMing for five years and even became a certified teacher. I generally feel some version of lightness afterward. That piece is consistent. There is also a feeling of oneness with my stroker and a feeling of oneness with all of creation.
Having gone through two-and-a-half years of the most intense practice of all - being present with my daughter as she endured cancer treatment - I can be present with almost anything. My experience with any discomfort in life, no matter what form or source, is that the more you can be with it, the more it lets you be. So when discomfort comes up in an OM, like the sharpness of a certain spot, I can easily be with it until it shifts into something else.
The few times I’ve felt some sort of unusual sensation in my OMs, I’ve gotten fascinated and curious about it. Then, the sensation just goes wherever it goes. I’ve learned I can approach high-sensation situations anywhere in my life that way.
Aside from the healing through grief, OM has completely dissolved every last shred of my past sexual traumas. That’s huge. I’ve done enormous amounts of work on healing those traumas over the years and have been open about them: When I was 11, I was molested in a single incident by my dad, and then when I was 24, an intruder broke into my home at night while I was asleep, held me at knifepoint, and raped me.
OM felt like teasing apart the threads in a tapestry. I was 54 when I started OMing, and I thought those issues were long ago dissolved. I didn’t realize the effect I was still living with until it was gone. That’s a long time to be living with the effects of sexual trauma.
I am fairly certain that one reason such healing is possible through the practice is that it’s an intimate experience with a man, but distinct from ordinary sexual experiences in that it’s not sex. There’s no expectation of any sort of performance or reciprocation. All I have to do is be in my body and be present. It feels like I’m breaking up old neural pathways and developing new ones.
OM has certainly made me much better at communicating needs and desires. As the oldest of five, I was socialized to take care of others, make sure everyone had what they needed, and wait patiently if I needed something. It’s not that I’ve become demanding, but I can now tease apart which aspects of those patterns are not serving me anymore. People say, “Wow, that’s amazing you can ask for what you want.” And I think, “Why not?” and then I remember, “Oh yes, I used to be like that!”
