In 1997, I met a guy with tattoo sleeves and a motorcycle. Whatever eyebrows may be raised I should assure you he had also read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind—or at least I'd seen a copy of it in his backpack. He invited me to an event—I didn't know what it was. Dismounting his bike outside the venue, he put his hand on the small of my back and invited me to a demonstration of a woman in orgasm. I had no idea what that meant.
It was in the Richmond District of San Francisco in a beautiful house with taupe walls and dark brown curtains. Candlelight refracted through hurricane glass holders cast the room in a warm cream color. There was a Gustaf Klimt painting above the fireplace, and in front of me, there was a massage table covered by a perfectly ironed white sheet. Two women stood on either side, like ballerinas in their Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dresses. They were poised but entirely wild.
At the time, I was a graduate teaching associate in women's studies at San Francisco State University and a serious feminist. A postmodern feminist-deconstructionist-lesbian, with my "U.S. out of my uterus!" T-shirt and my Take Back the Night placard, carried while I marched without any shirt on at all. That's the person who walked into that room; it's not the woman who walked out.
A man entered, followed by one of the most breathtaking women I had ever seen and not solely for her physical beauty. Dressed in a gold robe, she had Catherine Deneuve cheeks and blond hair brushed back exposing translucent skin. Something else emanated from her. I couldn't look away. I couldn't think. They faced each other beside the table doing something called a heat exercise, but I couldn't focus or make sense of anything they said.
The woman removed her robe and mounted the massage table. The man turned and addressed the audience. "Just notice," he said. "That's all you have to do tonight is just notice. Notice she may have a flush in her cheeks. She may have swelling. She may have a pool of ejaculate. You may notice some shivering, the activation of the involuntary musculature. Just do your best to notice. Notice what she looks like now, because she may look different at the end."
The naked woman lay back on the table, her head on a pillow, legs butterflied open and supported by a cushion under each thigh. He stood to her right and bent over slightly. He put his left thumb in her introitus and with his right forefinger he began to stroke the upper left hand quadrant of her clitoris. While he was stroking her, I made my very best effort to notice. I just kept noticing. I was noticing. I was noticing. I was noticing and then all of a sudden . . . I was hit with a blast unlike any thing I had ever known.
I'm not really much of a hiker, but once, on walking up the very low mountain of Calaveras, there had been a snow and I remember that feel ing of clarity from taking in the pristine air, free from self-concern, immersed in eternal space. I felt connected to everything. The mind stilled. That kind of clarity. Not a single thought. Nothing. And then boom, I was back. Judging. Comparing. Fixing. I'm more powerful than these women. I'm a real feminist. Cover her up. She doesn't need to be exploited by the male gaze. The thoughts were choking me and then boom, I got hit again.
I was riveted. I couldn't avert my eyes, I couldn't move my head. I could sense that all of us seemed to be in the same state. We were moving in unison, connected, possessed, by this woman who was doing nothing other than being completely vulnerable. Then it struck me, wait a minute. Maybe THAT is feminine power. Not fighting the patriarchy, but the willful engagement in exquisitely tuned receptivity.
There's a term, duende, a quality of being passionately irresistible, in flamenco dance. The young flamenco dancers are very demonstrative, very dramatic. But as they become more seasoned, their powerful heat rivets the watcher. They become increasingly still, pulling everyone to the edge of their seats, holding them in suspense. For a dancer like this, one bat of an eyelash moves an entire room.
Receptive, attentive stillness: I saw in this moment a kind of power that wasn't usually acknowledged as such. But I knew in that moment it was the kind of power I wanted, the gravitational force that comes from vulnerability, that would move the world around me, rather than punching my way up or down. But, being a smart woman, I also knew it was dangerous. It was dangerous to carry that kind of power because that is real power. And the moment I realized that, I was knocked out while still on my feet. Everything went blank.
I came to in a fit of self-consciousness. I'm nearly six feet tall; the women around me were sexy, elegant, svelte, and petite. I felt like a gum ball machine bobble in platforms and a leopard print jumpsuit with my Jennifer Aniston hair. I agonized over the rolls on my belly. I felt like a drag queen and they looked like Breakfast at Tiffany's. The comparison was torture. I searched the room for my date, for his affirmation, and I was again hit for the last time.
This is what sex is supposed to be. Energy that clarifies, that heals, that isn't a big show, and that isn't about me transacting in some way. Not about what it can get you, like a better grade, a role in a play, a break from a traffic cop, a boyfriend or a husband or girlfriend or a baby or a dishwasher. I had been looking at sexuality the same way the books—that I was passing out to the young women I was teaching—said men looked at women. I was treating sexuality like it was a second-class citizen I used for the extraction of things, position, power.
Chögyam Trungpa wrote a book called Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. It begins with the notion that real spiritual practice is when the limitations of the grasping, self-centered, self-conscious ego are dis solved, unleashing freedom, deep connectedness, and joy. But the self-grasping, me-first ego doesn't die easily. It can co-opt just about any thing, including the spirituality that's there to dissolve it.
When our spirituality doesn't cut deep enough, the ego dresses itself up in outward signs of purity: a mindful demeanor; prayer beads around the wrist or draped from the neck; hemp clothes and vegan shoes. Those who do this make sure you know they are spiritual. We think this is what spiritual looks like.
In the same way, we think we know what sexual looks like: a leopard-print unitard, teddies, vibrators, jade eggs, feathers, whips. But I started to wonder if this wasn't sexual materialism, a parallel to spiritual materialism. And just as spiritual materialism isn't the real spirituality of unleashing the heart and mind, sexual materialism isn't about the power, freedom, and authenticity of sexuality I was seeing play out before me.
I was lost in rumination when the woman being stroked sat up. It was over. And the man was right: she did look different. She was more light than woman. I remember thinking, I don't know how she does that, but that's what I want to do. That's who I want to be. The feminist in me who believed she was powerless in the face of oppression died that night. My own volition was finally awake.
John Perry Barlow says the difference between love and true love is the difference between a very large number and infinity. For me, the difference between sex and the protocol around clitoral stimulation I would come to call Orgasmic Meditation (OM) is the difference between a very large number and infinity. OM opens into a kind of infinity. It liberates you of the mind that's keeping track, the mind that compares, the mind that believes we are powerless and trapped in suffering. I have spent most of my adult life studying, practicing, and developing OM as an attention-training practice that brings human beings into alignment with the fundamental pure energy of sexuality.
In OM, there are ten spots, two directions, three pressures, three speeds. The aim is to meet, in pitch-perfect response, whatever the stroke is. Each spot has a particular frequency associated with it. One can see the clitoris as a clock with the twelve o'clock spot at the top, the six o'clock spot at the base. The one o'clock spot is considered the spot. You return there to orient, find neutrality with what is called the bread-and-butter stroke. The twelve o'clock spot, especially with light pressure and light speed, confers a sense of reverence. The six o'clock spot, a sense of deep earthiness. The nine o'clock spot, dark and mystical. And so on in various gradations, depending on pressure and speed.
Attention is trained through resonance to open to, meet, and receive the stroke. When this is done well, it doesn't matter the stroke—stroker and strokee become one, a gateway in consciousness opens, and entry into that place occurs. All becomes bliss irrespective of what it is. Reverence is as blissful as dark and gritty, the basic everyday sensation of the three o'clock spot becomes sublime.
We all have tendencies or preferences that make our particular signature. The aim is to fully develop that signature as a carrier signal while developing all other spots, speeds, and pressures in such a way that you have full optionality, while having a unique gift to offer. My frequency, for example, is the two o'clock spot. The stroke on that spot evokes what we might think of as the various expressions of love: ranging from a feeling of deep sex to compassion. Heavier pressure and it's sex; lighter and it's compassion.
We all have a weak spot and may spend years opening it so that attention is liberated to the same degree as what one is naturally proficient in. When this occurs, it is not linear. There is a phase transition and the lights go on in a way they never go off again. All flavors are now bliss while maintaining their particularity.
Encoded in each stroke are the instructions of how to respond. You can't figure it out any way other than to get the stroke, listen, and attune. You learn to move the attention toward or away from, make the aperture more open or closed, push out or draw in. At the point that one is "lit up," the response is second nature; it occurs in ambient attention rather than directly. It's always fun but a new level of fun starts there.
You never know where you'll end up but you know you have the capacity to find bliss there even in the strokes most often avoided—heavy and grinding or frenetic or a certain hovering or absence from the stroker. Preference and aversion dissolve as one learns to meet the stroke. In other words, attention affixes to the potential rather than fixing, and the result is that neuroses dissolve in the wake.
Again, this takes years, decades, or lifetimes. There is no final master ing it, just as one does not master an instrument. You can always refine. You discover tiny "stuck spots" that invite release.
Mastery in this case is deliberately going into what is stuck without pushing, with the delight of knowing that what seems difficult is only stuckness and if one remains with it, it will always open into greater bliss—more complex and vivified. What was stuck, when brought into circulation, becomes fuel.
The demo is one's declaration that they have met the requirements to find bliss anywhere; and yet it is just the beginning. A shift occurs. A woman learns to strengthen her signal to "stroke from reception," to call in. She also learns to actively seek out what is difficult or unfamiliar. The positive reinforcement upon opening to where one was closed is so great that the art at this point lies in throwing oneself into the unfamiliar and attuning the gyroscope. Now you know in practice, not in theory, that you can find joy.
The practice is pure play. Challenges occur in getting attached to a particular stroke or field, especially at the peak point that naturally occurs, as life is impermanent. You peak at the moment the next stroke will be less sensational. If one grips, sensation not only decreases with the light that confers bliss diminishing but it becomes painful until one opens to the new spot. The second you open again, bliss is restored, and the "new" is fresh and exhilarating.
I often say I've lived my life on the tip of a finger, from an actual physical finger to an ever-increasingly-subtle invisible finger. There is always a spot that is the most resonant. When perfectly attuned, the stroker and strokee hear it, attune to it, and the pure intimacy, the experience of mutual emptiness occurs: connected to the totality, no sense of self, eternal.
Upon reemergence, the intimacy is unreal. A knowing and trust, a sense of minds merged to move in lockstep together. More practice is more seamless merging until the two sense this in all things, and together, radiate it into the world. This radiation lights up the world around it. Others are lit up around the field of the two, but even when separate there is no separation. Stroking has its own set of instructions. But ultimately, there is a transceiving where, like an instrument, it's unclear where the stroke is issuing from: her invisible frequency or the stroker's finger.
This abstracts into one's experience of the world. The fast hard stroke of Harlem becomes the same bliss as the great meditators' caves in Tibet. Jealousy as electric as a kiss. Having as pleasurable as wanting. All is welcomed without cutting anything off. Rage is primordial sex when fully received. Rather than deny or redirect or transmute, one feels all the way through. Eventually, every last bit of it reveals itself as undifferentiated love, but only if you meet it on its terms, which might look like anything but.
You don't need to eliminate the sense of self but instead become the self that is the totality. This way one can issue effective care and compassion on the terms of what one is meeting without imposing or dismissing. You do not expect another to come to your place on high; you meet them in intimacy. Again, this opens the gate to where you would bring them. This allows people to be free, as who they are, and to feel spacious love.
This is my art and I pride myself on my capacity to open to, add, direct with reception whatever comes my way. Sometimes it takes my gyroscope a second to adjust to a new stroke and see how I could open to or love even this, what needs to be let go of and what needs a greater pull. I do this by going into my one o'clock spot of solitude until what is called for emerges. When vibrant clarity comes, the procedure is complete and I'm ready again for any stroke.
These Sutras are a result of so much of what I've learned. I have spent decades codifying and clarifying them in the hopes that you may discover the true power, freedom, and love that exists within pure Erotic energy.