by Taylor Silva
I developed an eating disorder at a young age. Stuffing myself with donuts, I'd end up too full to notice my emotions. In high school and college, exercise helped me clamp down on the sensations I had to hide. I was the captain of the basketball team and the softball team.
Mothers would come and cheer on their daughters, but I wouldn't even tell my mother when I had a game. She just wanted me to wear a little dress and curl my hair. At home, I hid the athletic abilities I was so proud of because my mother would equate it with not being the right kind of girl. It was the 1950s, and the climate of the country was repressive.
When I slept over at my girlfriend's house, we would sleep in the same bed, although there were two beds in her room. Her father figured out we were having a romantic relationship, and I wasn't allowed to see her anymore. It felt completely natural to kiss a woman, yet the world's viewpoint meant there had to be something unnatural about me. Many such experiences contributed to the shutting down of my identity.
Since my twenties, I've been involved in therapy and all sorts of programs and training. I've always liked to learn for the sake of learning, but I also felt damaged and was seeking healing. OMing was just one of the many things I've done, although edgier than most. My ex-partner suggested it might be good for me, given my past trauma.
It seemed logical to me that not having freedom would affect the life flow, especially around the charged area of the clitoris. I'm pretty brave-hearted, and taking my pants off didn't bother me. The only thing I found difficult was finding a female who was willing to be a stroker. But I felt strongly that the protocol was good, so I decided to go for it anyway. If a guy wanted to do the practice with me and had no further expectations of me, I didn't have to go to dinner with him, and I didn't even have to like him, then I was willing to try it out. I wanted to wake up my genitals. I wanted to heal.
My first Orgasmic Meditation was pretty clumsy. I didn't feel much. In fact, I didn't feel anything in Orgasmic Meditation sessions for a really long time. In the sharing frames step at the end of a session, where you each report a sensation from the OM, I used to make things up. I'm extremely kinesthetic, but I was dissociated from my genitals after all I had gone through. It was a long, slow process of noticing if I felt something and then locating the place in my body where it was happening. Then, I had to decide if I wanted it to be slower or faster.
It felt like I was in training, like going to the gym. It wasn't always sensationally pleasurable. It was more like I was practicing how to connect with myself. Gradually, I was thawing out. For a while, I OMed a couple of times a week and started to feel more alive. The engine was revving. I felt a lightness and sensed how my brain and my genitals were connected. A higher vibration came through, letting me know my true self still existed.
I feel I haven't totally integrated what I learned, but Orgasmic Meditation got me further along than I was before. But there wasn't anything like it in the lesbian community, so I came to the straight community to get what I needed.
I recovered a part of me that had been cut off by dissociation. Now I feel closer to the whole.
