Published May, 2024
Tumescence is felt like a swelling, a buildup of pressure caused by the body’s natural response to physical, mental, spiritual, and sexual arousal.
That release comes through in the forms of reactivity: fight, flight, freeze, or fawning behavior. It is a collection of energy that takes on its own life and gets activated with the introduction of arousal. In many traditions, we must merely subdue it. In this tradition, we exploit it and convert it to energy that we will use to further power our attention.
Tumescence often feels like a stranger, though it is not an unfamiliar feeling within us. It is a constant gathering of sensations, emotions, ideas, and experiences—of raw Erotic wants and needs. When we experience this arousal, we begin to fill.
We experience the desire to cast aside convention, to expose our true self, to live from our primal, animal nature.
We aim to be in the optimal sweet spot with arousal, both in terms of opening to it and then directing it. Reaching that spot requires using our attention to direct the energy released in arousal. Any energy we do not consciously hold in our attention, or do not discharge, turns to tumescence. The result is an undirected activation of drive that overstimulates our instincts.
So few have been trained to work with tumescence that consequently, what the vast majority of us end up with is negative tumescence—a kind of inflammation of the psyche—because we do not confront the tumescent energy until it actually “turns negative.”
Instead, it accumulates and becomes stuck in the body, and occurs as agitation, discomfort, or pain.
