by Axel Metayer
When I married at the age of 25, I had a romantic, Disney-like idea of how relationships should be, and I was deeply in love. But I noticed the relationship was not as crisp as I wanted it. Eventually, we broke up, and I went on to the next relationship, which was way more nourishing. But even that one started to lose its energy and crumble. I was looking for something and didn't know what it was. I even went to a therapist to try to figure out what was going on or to see if something was wrong with me.
Then, I read about Orgasmic Meditation (OM). It sounded like it could teach people intimacy, which is what I was craving. In my first OM, there were so many intense sensations going through my body that I was overwhelmed. At the same time, I could feel there was depth to the practice and sensed I could get a lot of benefit from it if I kept practicing.
I tried OMing with my partner, but we had too many unspoken emotions lurking under the surface. The relationship exploded. I decided it was time to do all the stuff I hadn't let myself do when I was 25. I dated and had sex, but something was still missing. I realized that it actually felt more vulnerable to ask for an OM!
It took me almost a year to trust my instincts about stroking. I often had a sense that changing the stroke would make a better experience for my partner, whether it was moving to the left or right, putting more or less pressure. But I had the idea that I was supposed to wait for the strokee to ask for an adjustment, even when I could tell I wasn't in the right spot anymore. Usually, when I had such an intuition, ten to thirty seconds later, the strokee would ask for exactly what I was thinking I should do. Finally, one day, I made the decision to follow my gut feeling and change before she asked. I could feel the strokee respond, sometimes sinking deeper into the nest or moving in a different way. From then on, I felt a lot more confident.
There was one woman I OMed with every week. Each time, we experienced a new and surprising sensation, to the point where we would sit there looking nervously at the nest, wondering what would come up this time. In one of these OMs, her body started to shake in a subtle way. I would have been agitated earlier in my practice if something like that happened. I'd scatter the energy by asking her questions or even turning my focus to some other sensation. But this time, I felt really grounded. I was able to stay in the sensation and keep stroking, grounding both of us. The energy smoothed out, but it didn't drop, and we stayed in sync with each other.
Orgasmic Meditation taught me how to create a container and how to hold other people. I was able to communicate to a strokee, “Here's what we're going to do, and here's how it will work.” The container includes steps that ease us into the stroking, like what we call safe-porting or saying, “Okay, now I'm going to put my hands on your thighs,” in the grounding step, for instance. That ability to be specifically communicated to the rest of my life helped me discover an ability to connect to people quickly in a way that helped them trust me.
I came to have a lot of respect for the container and how it could stabilize interactions in and out of the nest. If a stroke felt shaky at the end of a session, I would offer, “We can have a second OM if you want, but let's not dissipate the energy we built.” In a similar way, I would notice in a business meeting if the energy was going into a lull. Then I would find a way to refocus everyone's attention and build the connection back up. My teaching also benefited from this ability to sense people and put my attention on them. Orgasmic Meditation (OM) widened my field of view and made day-to-day communications more alive. I want other people to experience that aliveness.
