by Susan Freed
For three years after my husband died, I cried every day. I had been with him for 50 years, married for 45 of them. From the time I was 18, I was with no one else. The natural inclination in that sort of sorrow is to close off your heart. My life was filled with grief, and I was worried. I remember looking in the mirror about a month after his death and telling myself, “No matter how your life is going to unfold, you are going to keep your heart open. At any cost.”
My marriage was wonderful. I really did have a great life. I’ve always been a spiritual person, and I converted to Judaism for him. It’s ironic because he was never a particularly observant Jew, and now I’ve been studying Kabbalah for 15 years. Upon his death, I formed a women’s Torah study group in his name, and the wonderful rabbi I formed it with assures me that this takes his spirit higher to God. I can just see him up there, laughing, going, “Really? For me?”
When I first learned about Orgasmic Meditation, I was immediately intrigued. I recognized that my grief had put me in a place of total disconnection. The loss of physical touch was an unbearable way to live. So, I came at it from a practical standpoint, but when I finally tried it, OM felt like one of the last pieces of the spiritual puzzle I’d been assembling all my life.
I’d always felt challenged by the idea of reconciling my deep sensuality with my spiritual side. Before I started OMing, these things felt very separate. Sensuality was one thing, and my spiritual path was quite another. I spent a great deal of my life outside my body as a result. But OMing, being touched on what I now recognize as one of the most remarkable parts of the human body, has integrated those two worlds. In reality, integration is what spirituality is all about. Our souls, our bodies, and our minds are all connected. There’s something about OM that connects you so beautifully—internally and to the people around you as well.
I’ve never felt so connected to myself. I feel totally grounded and aware of myself in the world — as a body, as a human being, as a soul, as a spiritual person. I feel fully integrated. The practice, the actual practice of OM, does this for me. When I’m not practicing frequently, I can feel that integration drifting away, the interference of the world returning. But when I’m in an OM, there’s a silence that’s so extraordinary that I become pure soul. It’s utterly transcendent, yet it’s grounded in the deepest foundations of my body.
Because my husband was sick, there had been a long stretch in my life where there wasn’t much physical intimacy. OM has transformed my libido; I feel like a teenager again. I’m experiencing pleasure without restriction, just feeling who I am through being stroked. It’s one of the most extraordinary things I can imagine.
It feels like such a natural part of living to me now. It surprises me that only a few people I know are aware of OM. Everybody should be. People should be able to touch each other safely within a container, just like this. It leads to higher levels of consciousness, the simple act of stroking. It builds on itself, storing the memory of that heightened consciousness like a stairway every time you share a frame.
Thinking back on myself, standing in front of that mirror, it frightens me to think what may have happened had I not stumbled upon this practice. Might I have closed my heart despite what I said? Maybe. Maybe not. But I know that OM, at its extremely vulnerable core, protects you from that fate. I can’t imagine trying to live with a closed heart and OMing. I don’t think it’s possible. It’s the opposite of the fragility of a guarded life. It is quite literally to be open to the universe, and I am reminded to live each day as openly as in OM.
