We have soared as high as we can soar and just before we plunge back, we can taste a serene, open weightlessness. We are pure, potential energy.
Loss of the familiar
Embrace transition, making it home
A moment extends into timelessness, apotheosis
The most concentrated flavors of life are tasted
Everything that rises must fall. Eros is no exception. In Eros, this fall is a welcome relief; we come out of the electricity of turn-on and enter the refuge of the peak. This is a time of being suspended, the feeling of the moment we have reached the apex of a leap on a trampoline. We have soared as high as we can soar. Just before we plunge back, we taste a serene, open weightlessness.
We are in a bardo with pure, potential energy and a feeling of groundlessness, where all that was solid has melted. We feel as if we are moving in every direction at once. Our mind feels it can touch dimensions otherwise inaccessible, while also feeling into the depth of bone and sinew. Eros extends through and beyond the body in all directions.
Eros can go to either extreme, but it lives in this in-between, the moment at the top of the inhale, right before it turns into an exhale. Here, it is weighted and pregnant with potential.
This experience can be one of liberation from circumstance, or a type of hell for the mind that's been habituated to rely on familiar strokes or grooves to feel safe. For that habituated mind, this can be an experience of terror, of seizure from not knowing what to do, or of flailing and protest. This suspended space may be filled with anxiety and a sense of being untethered, encompassing a futile demand to return to an old feeling that's no longer there, and a desperate race to reach the next landing place.
In order to find ground, this weightlessness may birth a variety of compensations. The most common compensation is to use artificial gravity, labeling the feeling a "problem" so we can employ the tumescent mind in forcing a solution. The tumescent mind now has something to hold on to to bring it back down.
It can buck against the change, blaming the partner, or it can take another tack, seeking to draw the partner in further by providing a sense of security. It can also simply blot out awareness altogether by doing the equivalent of holding the breath until a landing happens.
The moment we call the peak a problem, our OM takes place in a field of neuroses. At the same time, all of our practice is for this phase transition.
Just as the heart is not a location but rather a result of connection, our capacity to respond in a peak with volition, rather than with the default of neuroses, is the result of our prior practice. (Incidentally, there is no way to develop the capacity to respond while in the middle of a peak; this can only happen on either side.)
The peak and how we respond to it reveals our emergent self—not the self we want to be, not the self we think we should be, but the self who emerges in environments beyond our capacity to rationally determine our actions.
Until activated by a situation, we won't know how we will respond to the natural impulses that have the power to take over us: anger, Eros, arousal, craving for power, fear for our lives, threats to our security. At the sensory level of an OM, even a simple shift in stroke can activate the root sensations of these impulses.
Root sensations are single units of sensation that contain the seeds these impulses would grow into. OM breaks them down to one stroke, giving the mind the capacity to meet them.
What happens at the moment the sensation and stroke change, at the height of a concentrated peak? We can conjecture, we can guess, but we cannot know. This is precisely why the peak is both thrilling and terrifying. The only way to know who we are beneath the command-and-control center of our tumescent mind is to see who we are in the peak, in stark relief.
Following a peak, an untrained practitioner may scramble to regain ground, trying to resecure the position with the finger or the clitoris, attempting to conceal the inability to know that comes with the peak. In this location, we may find ourselves feeling anxious, frustrated, scrambling, checking out, and perhaps struggling with a sense of disequilibrium.
Erotic practitioners, on the other hand, extend the peak as long as possible, eventually making it a home. The not-knowing becomes the wellspring from which all knowing comes. We recognize that the only self to know is the emergent self, released from the fastening of a stroke to a new variety of potential responses. A source of vibrant discovery rises to the surface.
We may be in the depths of the peak, rich with a dark, aquatic beauty, or we may become breathless in the light, upward strokes of reverence. We may, after nestling in the peak, face the discordant and disruptive stroke of change and extend our state of suspension into what feels like an eternity.
We see ourselves revealed in essence. We notice the way our mind is still inclined to wrap itself around the last stroke as a way of avoiding the transition, leaping to a thought or a feeling. Our mind may glide with precision with the finger, and we watch it all at the operating level.
Realizing this is not merely a world in between worlds but a world unto itself, we let it all fall into weightlessness. We feel relief in the continuity. We realize we are never abandoned, only that we abandon the sensation. The terrifying "nothing" is in fact something we can be with.
Change then becomes a beautiful and poignant experience in OM, rather than merely a transition we need to make it through. We enter the liminal, where the old falls away and the new begins to enter. The sensation is of two worlds existing concurrently.
The ultimate gift from this experience is that we are no longer at the mercy of the roller coaster of life. We no longer feel as though we have been dropped from a great height. Because we transition immediately before the sensation is ready to descend, we get to live at the heights of sensation—the most concentrated level of each of the flavors of life.
We inhabit the greatest depth of each of the spots, the most salient forms of the feminine concentration, the heights of reverence, or the richness of the "in-love" spot. We have developed an agile mind that can release exactly when sensation is about to descend, pulling us with it until we take birth inside it. For this reason, we leave when the window opens and enter the weightlessness of the peak. Inhabiting this, we are brought to a new spot that is fresh, alive, and saturated with the next sensation our body hungers for in its ever-deepening intimacy with life.
When we enter the peaking stage in OM, Eros courses through the body, bestowing a sensation akin to midair suspension—floating for a moment just after soaring prior to the plunge back down to earth. We become passengers rather than drivers of the experience, and are in the optimal state, able to go in any direction. If we are turned off, we feel disequilibrated, exposed, and flailing.
In this stage, the skills needed for OMing are being able to detect the peak, changing the stroke to maintain resonance, and speaking to stay connected. We practice approval and give ourself over to the stroke.
When stroking someone at the peak, stroking with absolute, crisp precision is important in order to catch the exact moment when the next stroke will have less sensation than the current one. We allow our finger to be moved with buoyancy, an organic levity that is the natural motion in the weightlessness of the peak. Even if the strokee is flailing, we stay steady with our finger and our attention.
When we are being stroked at the peak, tuning in to the sensation of change has us note how the shift in sensation promotes a shift in our mind, and a bridge of awareness builds. If we are turned off in this stage, we may notice fear. We make it the object of our attention and observe the way fear changes its shape. We stay in communication with our partner about what we feel.