We ultimately seek four things in life: to love and be loved, to see and be seen, to know our purpose, and to feel connection. We are drawn to the Erotic because we sense these things are possible through it. Sensation is the language through which these essential elements of intimacy are communicated; we know when they happen because we can feel them in our body. We may have these kinds of experiences in OM. An OM can go from soaring and uplifting, to soft and dark, to outwardly expressive. We feel a vibration start in the other person’s body and then run into ours. We notice a heat, and as we move into or away from this heat, the shakiness in our body increases or decreases. That is connection.
How do we get back to these resonant moments of sight, love, connection, and purpose as they are communicated by sensation in the body? How do we live our life inside these experiences? The way forward isn’t scientific, and it isn’t random; it is somewhere in between—an art. In OM, beauty arrives through feeling. To be able to feel is the essential skill of Eros. Our attention must be so attuned because the beauty of OM is the emergence of the hidden self: the essential daimonic self that expresses, feels, and acts from our deepest involuntary nature.
In OM and in life, we guard this essential self. The work of OM is to draw out this essential self through its layers of protection. These layers are often the product of survival skills that evolved to help us navigate the vagaries of the world as we sought to feed our loved ones and ourselves.
In order to reach beyond these layers and touch the truth, we must be willing to use our felt sense to guide us. As a stroker, to reach a strokee effectively, we need to know the truth beyond what even she knows. We need to sense her beyond what even she is aware of sensing, beyond the smoke screens she may send—like when she rewards us for stroking the wrong location or utilizes added electricity to “turn on” a spot that isn’t her natural spot.
We can learn to perceive when the essential self is emerging. The skill we are tapping into is a primitive skill, not a developed skill. We look for a concentration, like the foreground standing out from the background in an overexposed photo. We watch for changes in lighting because they will bring out the contrast, helping us to see. In OM, each stroke acts like a filter on this lighting.
We are looking for where the lighting gets brighter or dimmer, more wavering or more stable, whether the sensation is closer to us or farther away. All of this tells us what is happening as Eros passes through us as we OM. Optimal lighting has a certain concentration. Notice when the light becomes dense rather than diffuse. See if there is a continuity and steadiness rather than a flickering; where the light is neither too bright—where the attention is pushing—nor too dim—where the attention has been withdrawn. The optimal light is where the attention is stable and there is a continuity to the flow of Eros.
It is effortless, easeful, flexible, soft, pliable, and can be moved. To find the optimal lighting, vary the location, speed, pressure, length, and direction of the stroke. The variety of sensations, the boundaries of those sensations, and the interplay between them elicited by any stroke indicate where Eros expresses. Different sensations can be grouped together, like different feeling groups that get played on the clitoris, including basic notes, primary notes, and the musical notes we learn to recognize and express in unison.
