by Milan
I’m a massage therapist, and I make my living touching people. I’ll say more about that later, but one key reason I went into massage was because I was impatient. That might sound strange; massage isn’t something that should be rushed, and you do need to be careful and particular in my line of work. What I mean by impatience, though, isn’t hurrying through things. It’s that I’m not interested in small talk and miscommunication. In my line of work, I get to what needs healing, and I try to get there directly.
I came to OM after many years of searching for practices that matched my energy and my desire for authentic connection. It was Tantra that led me to OM. I’d been involved in a tantric community in London for a while and was getting increasingly frustrated with how esoteric and impractical a lot of the teachings were. (I think Tantra can be wonderful for some people! That it wasn’t ideal for me is as much about me as anything else.) Anyhow, one of my friends whom I’d met in this tantric community suggested I look into Orgasmic Meditation; she thought it might be a better fit for me.
I had been single for a while before I came to Tantra. I had been married for ten years, and then gone through a divorce, and had been trying to learn how to date. I found it very difficult as if I couldn’t quite understand the language everyone else was using. I couldn’t pick up on cues I was getting, and it felt as if I was constantly getting mixed signals. I had several brief sexual and romantic relationships after the divorce, but miscommunication had been a problem in all of them. I was so good at knowing how to put my hands where a client needed them, but when it came to actual connection with other people, I struggled.
When I started learning about OM, I learned about the idea of a container. That was fascinating – it was the kind of structure and safety I realized I’d been looking for for so long. I wanted something where I could go deep and go there safely with someone. In order to start an OM practice, I needed to ask someone to OM with me so that no one was just going to be assigned to me. I had always battled expectations and getting hurt. I had so many memories of getting hurt because of misunderstandings and misreadings of situations.
What I learned in OM was how many veils we put up between ourselves and another person when doing something as simple as asking them to do something with us. When I asked a woman out in the past, I was already thinking about all my past experiences of rejection and acceptance. And in OM I could see that without the container, so many women did the same thing; they saw me through the veil or filter of their past experiences with men. We’re all so distracted from each other and from the present.
The active focus on being present started for me with the asking and learning not to take it personally if I heard a “no.” The “no” said nothing about me, it was simply an opportunity to move on. If I could get past the last “no,” then I could be ready for the inevitable “yes.” So for me, the OM is always more than the stroking. It starts with the asking.
Starting with my first experience in the nest, I felt something I’d never before. I touch people for a living, and I’m concentrating on what they’re experiencing. Here, I was concentrating on the practice itself, and I started to receive so much. I felt energy flow from my finger to my abdomen, then down to my genitals, then up through my chest to my throat. After moving around for a while, it centered in my heart. I felt, and still feel most OMs, so much connection to my body and to the other person.
In OM, the touch is centered on the clitoris, but it’s as if it’s realigning parts of the body and the mind that are far from the sexual organs. It’s like that one spot just opens up so much healing in other parts of the body.
OM is different now, thanks to the pandemic. There are fewer opportunities to meet with people. And yet, I can still draw on past OMs and what’s been released in them. I’m still sustained by past practice and still learning from it.
