Understanding Tumescence
If you look in the dictionary, it will give you a wholly inadequate understanding of tumescence, limited to the sexual drive. But tumescence is a phenomenon that haunts us.
The joy that ought to be flooding our lives turns toxic. Our raw energy is restricted. We become critical, bitter, overly sensitive, angry, controlling, and agitated. We pick fights instead of allowing the energy of Eros to power a couple’s creative energy, building their connection and intimacy. Tumescence plays its pervasive Muzak making us feel stuck, as if holding our breath, turning up the steady hum of anxiety, neurosis, despair, and hopelessness. Tumescence blocks passion, leaving us with the experience of dissatisfaction, emptiness, and a vague hunger. It’s an epidemic least identified by those suffering most from it. Separation feels like immutable reality.
The dissolution of tumescence is the dissolution of the barrier.
Many years after discovering OM comes the moment I know there’s no going back: I’m lying on Ray’s bed. Legs butterflied open. Ray’s finger is a feather stroke, high and light, coaxing out a stream of electricity from the very core of my being. We have done this so many times, and something in me always holds back. But this time I let go. I let the wild river of sensation take me wherever it wants. The session is the culmination of years of study with Ray at the Orgasm Monastery. It’s the night before a formal ceremony, a demonstration that in our tradition, will be a bit like a nun taking her vows.
Ray is my mentor. The man closest to me in the world. What we’re doing might look like sex to some, but it’s as different from sex as daydreaming is to meditation. I am learning to meet every sensation. No clinging. No fighting. No fleeing. A full-throated engagement with life.
Ray’s bedroom wall is an enormous pane of glass that overlooks all of San Francisco. The soft, afternoon light bounces off the crystals dangling from the ceiling. I never liked those crystals. I thought they were cheesy, reminiscent of the woo-woo, signature Bay Area tantra, what I call bindi sex. But the crystals send rainbows dancing across my shoulders and thighs, and the exhale that spreads across my body feels like it could roll past the bed, out the window, and over the highways, like tule fog billowing across the entire city. This was true orgasm.
We live in a world obsessed with climax, but climax is a one on a scale of ten for me—a sneeze between the legs. Think of climax as a movie trailer for what’s possible when a woman turns on in the way that she can’t be turned off again; a gentle but ferocious force that remains and sustains. It’s the kind of abandon we’re looking for in intoxication, obsession, yearning, grasping, chasing. But it’s an abandon into your own erotic self. It’s endless, and it’s yours.
Pure feeling.
Ray had studied orgasm the way a virtuoso studies his Stradivarius. Ray knew how to sustain a note, and he knew how to summon the perfect chord, but he also knew there is a moment when you are no longer playing the instrument; the instrument is playing you.
The goal is not mastery so much as harmony—to live in pitch-perfect response with another human. You’re waiting for the moment a chord finds the air, and everyone in the room lives inside its vibration. This is the great discovery. True orgasm is shared, a feedback loop between human nervous systems. When it’s turned on, we’re all inside of it.
But turning on is not easy in a world that asks women to lie. I once heard a woman’s orgasm is the result of how honest she has been before lying down; how willing she is to be vulnerable but also accountable to the truth of her desire and feelings. “We women want to feel everything,” a teacher told me. “We’ve just been told that what we’re feeling is wrong.” Anger, grief, jealousy, obsession, and other so-called negative emotions don’t mute orgasm; they are the fuel and the ground of spiritual discovery.
The opening doesn’t happen in a moment. It doesn’t happen in a month, or several months. For me, it is a slow, steady crawl across many years. Doorways creaking open that lead to more doorways in an infinite hallway. Grabbing and transmuting anger, grief, jealousy, obsession to fuel the unfolding of love. But that afternoon in Ray’s bedroom, with the rainbows dancing over my body, is the day I open the door I can never close again. I hear the still, quiet voice inside me say: I am a free woman.
Bliss is not the word. Ecstasy is not the word. All the words in the world can never explain the beauty of that moment, but maybe the closest word is this: Home.
Most women have no idea what freedom tastes like. They think it’s freedom from something—namely, freedom from oppression. The freedom from the grabbing of men’s hands. Freedom from hard work. Silencing the inner critic. But freedom only comes from a radical engagement with those things we fear. You have to open up when you want to close down. What we must rouse in ourselves is power—raw, chaotic power, which is the force of our desire. I wanted to give women access to this power. I knew this is what I had to do in the way you know that spring follows winter.
The Age of Eros is led by women.