When I was very young, I wanted to save the world. I became a doctor because I was also interested in how the body works. My first year of medical school was designed to apply pressure that would weed out the less serious students. Only ten percent made it to the second year, including me, but I had a difficult time.
As I progressed through medical school, I saw many unhappy people who built their personalities and identities around being doctors. I was able to study the books and learn the skills, but I didn't like playing games around social status. Watching people take on the doctor role made me laugh. It felt like bad theater. By the time I completed my training, I was hungry for a direct connection to people who speak their minds.
After jumping through all the hoops to become a doctor, I had the tools in my hand, and I was ready to design my life. I wasn't going to make my life fit around my job. I wanted to find a life that suited me and see how my job could fit. So, I took time off to travel and explore yoga, meditation, and intentional communities. I went from studying in a French medical school to hanging out in San Francisco and Oakland. I experienced an expansive sense of community, with the freedom to make radical explorations in consciousness. I truly felt I could be anyone I wanted to be. It was a transformational time. After returning to France, I arranged my schedule to attend that event each summer. That's when I fell in love with Emily, who had been practicing OM intensively for years. She radiates feminine energy, lighting up the place. I sensed that everything she said and did, even her way of walking, was authentic.
When I learned about Orgasmic Meditation (OM), my whole body responded, “Yes!” My first OM was like being electrocuted. Incredible amounts of sensation surged through my body as if I had direct access to what was moving through her body and emotions. It was so intense I had difficulty staying present. Finally, I just had to surrender and follow along. It felt like an experience of pure truth in connection, something I had never felt before. At the end, she said, “Oh, you're a natural.”
We had a couple more OMs that week and then started a long-distance relationship. Whenever we were able to get together, we practiced a lot, and Emily put me in touch with the only French woman she knew who was OMing. I was eager to practice, feel, and get all the adjustments I could get. Emily was good at asking for adjustments to how I stroked, which helped me get better at it and tune in more to her. Sometimes, there's one little thing that needs to change in the stroke, whether it's speed, pressure, or position, and as soon as I change it, my body sinks back into the connection with a feeling of “Ah, yes. Right there.”
Her energy drives the practice, so I would never question any change she requested. However, I might not always agree with every adjustment in our relationship. We both have our truths, so I have to fully listen and take in her opinions while fully acknowledging mine. I had encountered the idea of the relationship as the third entity before, but Orgasmic Meditation (OM) brought my experience of it to the next level. I could see how it's not about you or about me; it's about the energy between us, the point of contact, and where it wants to take us.
My practice evolved even more when I started OMing with the French woman and discovered that the connection also works outside of a love relationship. The following year, I visited New York, where many people were OMing. My practice went on to the next stage through OMing with many different strokees, widening the range of possibilities I could experience during fifteen minutes of stroking.
I was learning to follow my intuition, even when I didn't know precisely what the next stroke should be. If I feel the connection has been lost, I can offer a change or make one on my own, based on the focused attention of the practice. That focus enables me to be completely absorbed in every movement and every breath, losing my sense of time and sense of self. Every decision is already in the finger, bypassing the thinking mind.
The effects of OMing are felt outside the nest as well. The more time I spent with people who OM, the more I noticed that my relationships with some other friends had much less juice. The bar was raised higher on the level of friendship and connection. I also felt relieved that I no longer had to waste energy playing games of status or trying to figure out what a woman actually means when she says something. Access to my truth and someone else's truth was much clearer.
Once Orgasmic Meditation had changed me as a human being, I couldn't go back to being a physician in the traditional way. Instead, I turned to palliative care, easing the passage of people at the end of life during their last days at home. The diagnoses, MRIs, and brilliant insights are irrelevant in end-of-life care.
I'm showing up for people who are in a vulnerable state, holding their hands, and being human. With the proximity of death, the masks fall away, and we live in the radical truth of those moments. There's no need to hide behind the doctor's white coat. It's all about what's going on in the human connection.
