Sex: You're Doing it Right

Image from the movie Shortbus

Image from the movie Shortbus

Originally posted August 7, 2012

View this article on elephantjournal.com

The truth, though, is that nothing is really wrong. Nothing is ever wrong and nothing can be wrong. It’s not even wrong to believe that something is wrong. Wrong is simply not possible. As Alexander Pope wrote, ‘One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.’ Wrongness is in the eye of the beholder and nowhere else—Jed McKenna, from Spiritual Enlightment: The Damnedest Thing (The Enlightenment Trilogy)

I’ve faced a mountain of resistance every time I sat down to write this article. Suddenly I would get a thousand Facebook notifications, texts, emails, voxes, insert-your-own-21st-century-distractions, which would take urgent precedence over putting my thoughts to the page. When asked what I thought was getting in my way, the answer came easily:

It’s still so hard for me to believe that I’m actually doing it right.

For example, the other night I was with my lover slowly riding the tip of his cock. The sensation was a low, subtle hum, like sonar pulsing through dense water. A tenuous thread connected us. I often felt lost. An uncomfortable scratching began to grate the left side of my pussy. The scratching suddenly ripped and out of the delicate webbing poured an ocean of hopelessness. I collapsed into tears onto my lover’s body. As we lay caught in the briars of our building orgasm, I looked over at him.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Angry,” he replied. Angry and, based on the electricity vibrating off of him, getting angrier.

The surface layer of my thoughts went something like, “Oh no, I’ve done it again. I’ve fucked it all up. I let the ball drop. I made him mad. I’m too emotional. I’m clumsy. I’m a bad lover. I’m going to lose him.”

But at my foundation, I knew everything was happening exactly as it should. My hopelessness was right. His anger was right. My spiraling collection of thoughts was right. Each crackling moment was right and provided a fascinating glimpse into the hidden powder kegs of our hearts.

As I surrendered into the ‘rightness’ of the experience, my body expanded, my breath deepened and my skin prickled. I knew our sex was big enough to hold everything.

When he had finished speaking, I said what I knew to be true:

“I love you.”

And with those words, we re-established the connection and my capacity to feel intensified.

This sort of ‘orgasmic derailment’ is not an uncommon occurrence in my sex these days. Don’t get me wrong. It isn’t always this painfully overdramatic. In fact, some of the sweetest and most powerful love-making I’ve ever experienced occurred in the days following that incident.

However, the trade-off for sexual authenticity and expanded pleasure is the complete annihilation of everything you thought you knew about sex. The old tricks of seduction no longer apply in the realm of orgasm. The old movies in your head about peak experiences are just that: old and in your head. It’s like an actor trying to copy a performance she once saw or replay one from a previous time. It’s stilted, forced and not rooted in the present.

Heraclitus once said:

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

Nowhere is this truer than in sex. ‘Beginner’s mind’ and curiosity aren’t just lofty ideals—they are vital to the immediate experience. You can’t fake sensation. It’s either there or it’s not—and if it’s not, there is usually a lie in the way. The work is to be honest when you can’t feel and be willing to reveal your desire.

The power is in vulnerability, surrender and death.

Which feels completely antithetical to everything we’ve been taught. Control, accumulation of knowledge, trophy collection and survival of the fittest all contribute to the current framework of sex. And if you’ve been operating in that paradigm, don’t worry! You’re doing it right. It’s natural to associate these momentary hits of validation as ‘proof’ of your worth. It’s all we’ve ever known.

It’s also natural to hide the wounds around our sex, since most of us adopt a belief early on that who we are and what we desire is somehow ‘wrong’ and that we must ‘earn’ the love for which we hunger in order to atone for this ‘wrongness.’

This is at the heart of what most people who work with me face. It’s never about the ‘problem.’ The fact that they lose their erections, have never climaxed, are addicted to porn, haven’t had sex in 20 years, prematurely ejaculate, experience lack of desire, etc., is simply evidence of an unconscious coping mechanism for handling high sensation. That’s it.  And they’re doing it right.

To go one step further, I challenge the notion that there was ever a problem in the first place. What if we left behind the idea that sex is a life-or-death dilemma (lest we die alone or trapped in sexless marriages) and adopt the idea that sex is a playground where all parts of ourselves are invited to play? The princess, the pervert, the virgin, the drug addict, the master, the scared child, the needy co-dependent, the king, the devotee, the betrayer—the list goes on. Is it possible to raise the white flag on the battleground of sexuality and expose the weapons we’ve kept tucked in our hearts?

I know it’s tough. Changing perspective feels like swimming upstream. That’s why I’ve been dodging writing this piece for so long; if I admit my inherent ‘rightness,’ then I have no more excuses for withholding my love. And within my emotional nakedness, I run the risk of pain, criticism and ridicule.

In Scott McPherson’s play, Marvin’s Room, Lee says to her son:

My feelings for you, Hank, are like a big bowl of fishhooks. I can't just pick them up one at a time. I pick up one, they all come. So I tend to leave them alone.

If you replace ‘Hank’ with ‘Sex’, it’s obvious why we run from it or try to cover it up with toys, techniques and romance. Fear warns us to avoid these volatile places and keep them hidden; so who in her right mind would venture in willingly?

Yet the fortresses we’ve erected are the very things preventing us from having the sex we want. We’ve protected ourselves from parental wounding, social rejection and feelings of profound loneliness, which sits on top of the fundamental lie that we are ‘not good enough.’

And, as if we don’t have enough work to do on our own, society capitalizes on this lie by reinforcing it and trying to sell us their ‘cures.’

I recently read a fashion article on the internet (obviously geared towards women) and on the same page, the following four pieces were listed as something I ‘Might Also Like’:

How to Touch His Penis - Sexy Penis Play Techniques (Cosmo)

Sexy Clothes for Women – Clothes Men Like (Cosmo)

How to Make Sex Last Longer - Romantic Sex Positions (Cosmo)

How Much Should You Really Weigh? (MyDailyMoment)

Every one of these suggests that unless a man sexually validates a woman, she isn’t ‘good enough.’ In this case, not being ‘good enough’ looks like ignorance, ugliness, incompetence and corpulence.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with wanting to please our partners and look our best—but if our motivation comes from the fear that we are not lovable, then we are setting ourselves up for resentment.

Men don’t have it much easier. Since it’s practically scientific fact that every man on the planet watches porn, and for a great majority of men, porn was their first education in sexuality, there is a formula for sex that is being continuously reinforced. It’s a one-sided script that goes from kissing to massive hard-ons to penetration to loud, simultaneous climax and cum-on-tits money shots in less than seven minutes. Cut. Check the gate. That’s a wrap.

If you know me, you know I am not anti-porn. Again, we’re doing it right. And if we use porn to escape intimacy and validate our egos, rather than in the spirit of entertainment and play, then both men and women can get locked in the pressure-filled world of ‘shoulds’:

I should be hard all the time

I should want to fuck him the moment he wants it

This sex should be more passionate

I should be making more noise

I should make her cum hard and loud

I should have a huge ejaculation

Anything that doesn’t look like this can cripple someone into thinking there’s something ‘wrong’ with him or her. In reality, most of our sex doesn’t look like porn and most of us don’t look like porn stars. But to cover his shame at not being ‘man enough’, a man may avoid sex or blame his sexual partners. And a woman may take on the false belief that unless she can take it hard and climax fast, she must be broken.

On the flip side of porn, we have what’s known as ‘sacred sexuality.’ What that world has to offer is also valuable, but where we often get caught is in always trying to ‘touch God’ and ‘be one with the light’ and ‘avoid negativity.’ Again, this implies that what is labeled as ‘negative’ is ‘wrong’ and that any experience where you aren’t ‘communing with the Divine’ is also ‘wrong.’ It becomes another pressure-filled world of ‘shoulds’—just with a lot more chanting, eye-gazing and sarongs.

And since none of us wants to look stupid, scared, inadequate or bitchy, we’ve become master pretenders: pretending that we’ve conquered sex; pretending that we know what we want; pretending that our desires aren’t that important; pretending that it’s ok to only have sex 10 times a year; pretending that it’s always the other person stopping us from having what we want; pretending, pretending, pretending.

Pretending: You’re Doing it Right

The good news: sex is big enough to hold your pretender. Your pretender has valuable information—most likely regarding your truth. And, well, there’s just nothing sexier than the truth, in my opinion.

And that’s all this article is, really. My opinion. My experience. My perspective. And if it all gets flipped on its head tomorrow, that’s ok. I’m still doing it right.

And so are you. As hard is may be to believe in the moments of embarrassment and confusion, there really is no problem. Stay connected. Feel. Play. Get thrown off track. Laugh. Cry. Hide. Come out. Hide. Come out again. Be willing to share your fears, your heartaches, your joys, your hungers, your love, your gratitude…everything. This is where the most nourishing ‘get-off’ is: in the messy, mixed-up combustion of all that you are. And if it hurts, just know that the hurt is simply a message pointing you in the direction of your deepest desires.

Just keep going. And remember to breathe. You can’t do it wrong.

The Hazards of Being an Orgasmic Woman

Originally posted August 7, 2012

Read this article on elephantjournal.com

There is a beast inside of me right now. She’s been neglected for a very, very long time. She’s pissed, starving and demands to be fucked.

If she’s like most women, she’s a sexual anorexic. This is NOT to be confused with a sexually hungry person. A sexually hungry person knows what they want and will do what they need to feed themselves (even if it’s living off Ramen Noodles for a while). A sexual anorexic, on the other hand, has too much pride to admit she’s hungry and gets off on having superior control. She looks down on all those creepy guys in the Tenderloin who stare at you as if you were a dripping, succulent steak. She’s fresh, pure and hops straight off the cover of Cosmo in her size 2 Prada dress.

All that changes when you open your orgasm.

Many guys joke when they hear about it. “Geez, I wish my wife/girlfriend had that problem of wanting to be fucked all the time.” Really? Most men don’t know how to handle a woman when she’s in the throes of indecision of what to order for dinner. You want to throw a 20+ year backlog of unexpressed desire, anger, resentment and trauma into the mix? Good luck.

The current perception of igniting a woman’s sex comes attached with pink feather boas, blossoming flowers and rainbows shooting from vaginas. There also seems to be the annoyingly ubiquitous use of the word ‘juicy.’

Let me set the record straight: forget Barbie and her Sex and the City entourage. Say hello to your dirty, skanky heroin addict.

The other day I woke up in the grips of this otherworldly thing that demanded climax and would stop at nothing to get it. I had just enough consciousness to acknowledge the beast and created the space for her to emerge—and then I plunged pussy-first into the darkness.

I did something I haven’t done in years—I watched porn. Now that may not sound like anything shocking, but what was powerful for me to observe was how utterly helpless I felt in the moment. I needed the drug so bad that I wasn’t going to step out of my room until I had it. I grabbed my phone (which was closer to me than my computer) and searched for ‘free porn.’ I found a video, but when it took too long to download, I gave up and ran for my laptop like it was sexual crack. With shaking hands I flipped up the monitor, typed in my password and found what I needed. The Visitor 3. “I don’t give a shit about parts 1 & 2,” I said to myself. “I just want to get straight to the cock-in-pussy pounding.”

Three minutes later, after I had climaxed, a little bit of reality started to settle back into me. My belly felt swollen, like I’d just wolfed down three Big Macs. I was watching this video of two people clearly not connected to each other. And it was set to some of the worst music I’ve ever heard in my life. I started laughing at myself.

“Have I really become that kind of person?” I thought. “I feel more like a scared, pre-teen boy than a 31-year old woman.”

Then it hit me: this was who was rising to the surface—my hyper-sexual teenager—and she was pissed at being chained in the basement for so long.

There was a period in my life, from ages 11-13, when I would masturbate almost every day. Yet in the midst of that sexual exploration, I also felt profound levels of shame. I saw members of my family struggle with sexual addiction and unhealed sexual abuse. I grew up in the South where young, Christian ladies didn’t do things like that. I had heard boys joke about masturbation all the time, but girls never talked about it. I thought I was a pervert—and yet I couldn’t stop.

Until I was 13 years old and got suspended from school for drug possession. I will never forget the look of abject fear on my mother’s face when she got the news. I felt like this horrible, out-of-control animal that had brought shame upon her. A straight-A student fallen from grace. I made a vow that day to suppress anything that was ‘wrong’ or ‘immoral’—which included my sexual appetite.

Fast forward eight years. I’m 21 years old and I’ve just started dating the man I would eventually marry (who was, incidentally, also the first man with whom I’d had intercourse). I’m away for the summer and I meet someone else—someone who rouses that slumbering beast within me. And I fuck him. And again, I feel like this out-of-control animal. And again, I make a decision to tamp down that wretched appetite. I can’t bear to see the look of pain on my soon-to-be husband’s face.

So for the six-year duration of my marriage, I buried that secret along with my shame and my sex. It’s also no surprise that for those six years, I lived as a food anorexic. If history had taught me anything, it was this:

Appetite = People Getting Hurt

But in the back of my mind, I knew that starving it wouldn’t help. In fact, the harder I pushed it down, the harder it smacked me in the face the moment my attention drifted elsewhere. I had to confront it head on. So I left the marriage and decided I would do whatever it took to recover from anorexia.

The months following the separation from my husband were some of the most humiliating of my life. I felt so insecure sexually that I seduced men just to prove to myself that I could, even though I was clueless about my own desires and hadn’t menstruated in over two-and-a-half years. I cried for five months straight. I found myself, on many occasions, standing in my kitchen pantry at 3am gobbling three or four bowls of cereal in a row, not even tasting what I was shoving into my face.

Yet through it all, I knew I was giving my body exactly what it needed. When you hold a pendulum all the way to the left, it has to swing all the way to the right and back again, multiple times, before it finally finds its center.

And this is how it feels right now in my sex. In spite of the junk-food orgasm and the predator-woman who is ready to jump on anything in her path, I simply have to trust how the path is unfolding before me. It feels like I am going down again, only this time the well is deeper. I have fear of losing everything: my money to the credit card company; my credibility to people who know what they hell they are doing; my fiancé to a younger, skinnier, more sexually-embodied tantric goddess.

And here’s kicker: even with all this sexual appetite, I’m bumping right up against my ineptitude. It’s still so difficult for me to ask for what I want. It’s painful to admit to my lover when I’m faking my own turn-on. It’s agonizing to watch as I lie and withhold my love and gratitude again and again and again.

I recently had someone tell me that fucking me was boring. BORING!?

Dear God. Tell me I’m crazy. Tell me I’m out-of-control. Tell me I’m too much to handle. But boring?!?! With my ego thoroughly eviscerated, I had reached a new low.

So this is orgasm in its rawest form. No sparkly glitter parades or rose-scented sheets. Just a searing burn and unbearable pressure as I sit in the crucible of my sex.

But as I sit here, the words of Anais Nin rise to the surface:

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.


And I am reminded of why I chose this path and how lucky I am to feel alive. Those lonely, numb nights of starving madness are a place I can never return. Now that I have had a taste of what’s possible—electric connection, deep love and surrendered pleasure—I have no choice but to burn on.

This is what it takes to move from the chains of bondage to orgasmic freedom. The real sexual revolution doesn’t happen by burning bras or holding on to anger against men; it happens in our own minds, hearts and pussies. And it’s waiting for us, whenever we’re ready.

Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Biggest Secret for Great Sex

Originally posted August 7, 2012

View this article on elephantjournal.com

(Hint: Forget the Flowers, Toys & Eye-Gazing)

I was OMing (Orgasmic Meditation) a few days ago. During the OM, it felt as if there were an inch of waxy paraffin between his finger and my clit. An irritating voice arose:

Why the hell can’t he find me?

Why does my spot keep moving?

Why don’t my OMs feel like they used to?

Am I being annoying asking for all these adjustments?

What do I want?

What do I WANT?!

WHAT DO I WANT?!?!?!

The OM ended, I over-politely shared a frame (lest my angry, ravenous beast come out and bite off this poor guy’s head) and I asked for another OM. It started off the same way: we felt incredibly far away from each other. I couldn’t quite name it, but I knew there was something I wasn’t quite admitting to myself—like there was some pulsing, hungry truth locked up in a ballerina music box with pink ribbons and smiley faces.

Then I asked for him to move his finger a little lower and to tuck into the lower pocket of my clit. And that’s when it hit me: Fucking. I wanted fucking. But not just any kind of fucking. I wanted seedy, sleazy, $20-whore-in-a-cheap-motel-who-gets-used-then-left-in-a-pile-by-a-Wall-Street-creep-who-cums-with-his-tie-on kind of fucking.

Oh. Well that’s a little confronting.

I mean, I’ve had some hard sex in my life, but this was a little difficult to admit. Aren’t I a free-thinking woman who believes in equality of the sexes? Aren’t I soooooo advanced in my OM practice by now that I should be beyond the hunger for quick climax and heavy pressure? Shouldn’t I be working towards feeing the expanded subtlety of the lightest strokes?

But the evidence was clear. I couldn’t feel a thing until I acknowledged my desire: I wanted some nasty sex. In that moment, my pussy swelled with wet heat and I sucked him deeper into me, little electric hooks gripping onto each ridge of his finger.

We as a culture are so shamefully hungry to the point of secretly obsessing about sex. We surreptitiously Google search for the sexual holy grail: the perfect pill or the perfect position or the perfect toy to make her curl her toes or have him beg for more. But none of that will make a difference if you don’t have the courage to do the one thing that will light you up like nothing else:

Tell The Truth.

You know the feeling. Let’s say someone you have a crush on is sitting right next to you. Connect with your body in that moment. Can you feel your heart beat faster and your palms sweat? Does the thought of telling this person that you want to kiss him/her make you feel like you are going to fly out of your body?

Or perhaps you’re in a relationship and you’ve had some fantasies of bringing home the secretary. Imagine sharing that desire with your partner. Can you feel the nervous, carbonated tickle of the hairs on your neck?

Or imagine that you are angry at someone and you are finally letting out all your unfiltered rage. Can you feel the heat in your face, the hammering in your chest and the swelling in your throat?

All of that heightened sensation is orgasm that can be used in any turned-on way you choose. Every time you admit the truth to yourself, you peel away another layer that is blocking intimacy.

Conversely, every time you withhold your desires or feelings, you are piling another layer of crap on top of your orgasm. Over time, each caked-on layer gets thicker and thicker and you have to work harder and harder to maintain the lie that the mask of crap is your truth. Eventually, you may even start to blame the people in your life for all that shit weighing you down.

This is at the heart of why relationships fail. It’s not that the sex gets bad and then the relationship goes down the tubes. It’s actually the other way around. The relationship starts failing when we stop telling the truth, either out of laziness or fear of losing the person. When that happens, the first thing we run from is the exposed and highly volatile arena of sex. We make up excuses about why we can’t have it: too tired, too busy, not in the mood, it’s not that important, we have different schedules, the kids exhaust us—we’ve heard them all (and have probably even used a few at some point).

It’s not until the years go by and we find ourselves on the brink of a desperate starvation that we then grasp on to anything to save the relationship. You can pile on as many romantic getaways, kinky toys and love-making classes you want. But unless you have the courage to speak your truth, you’ll just end up in a candle-lit beach bungalow, handcuffed to the bed and gazing into the eyes of someone you’ve been loathing for the past ten years. Nothing fundamental will actually change.

We have to learn to strip sex down to its barest essentials: me, the sensation in my body and my desire. That’s it. Once you’ve tapped into that, share it with someone. If that person doesn’t want to meet you there, let them go. They are not for you. If they are willing to play, treat them well—and continue to stay honest about your desire.

This is why whenever I am feeling disconnected sexually, I don’t rush to fix a ‘problem’ or assign blame for why someone else is a crappy lover. I slow down and ask myself the questions: What am I running from? Where am I lying? What am I not admitting? As in the case with my OM, I wasn’t admitting the part of me that likes being a tacky, climax-driven, trashy whore. The moment I gave her permission to exist, my body flushed with orgasm.

The turn-on lies in the admission itself—in the moment of expressing desire. What happens afterwards is simply choice.  I could go out and pay some douchebag for a lay (perhaps not the wisest option). I could enroll a willing partner to play out the scene with me (fun!). Or I could let the acknowledged desire sit in my body and carry it around as my happy little secret to brighten the day.

Once you admit your truth, sex becomes about abundance and exploration, rather than fear and hiding. Maybe you want to experiment with wielding a flogger—or perhaps you want to take a sexual breathwork class—or maybe you’ve been dying to have sex with that one Michael Bolton song playing on the stereo. Either way, you have chosen to express yourself from a place of erotic authenticity.

So go on. Admit it. Remember, the truth will not only set you free—it also makes for great sex.

I'm a Crazy Fucking Mess: Orgasmic Tuning & PMS

Photo by SimplyAbbey

Photo by SimplyAbbey

View this article on elephantjournal.com

Originally posted August 7, 2012


You don’t want to be around me right now.

My body feels heavy, full and thick. I’m exhausted. Every nerve is raw and exposed. I’m prone to burst into tears at any moment and if you question what I do in any way (even if it’s just the way I make coffee), I might be tempted to throw a French Press at your head.

Another typical day in the world of a pre-menstrual woman, right?

Well, not quite. It’s another typical day in the world of a woman whose orgasm is out of alignment (to clarify, when I say ‘orgasm’, I don’t mean ‘sexual climax’, but the electrical driving force that is always coursing through your body). What we call ‘PMS’ is actually the result of stuck orgasmic energy building in the uterus—the seat of sexual expression, unconscious desire and creativity (a.k.a Second Chakra). Acupuncturists call this chi stagnation. In orgasmic terms, we call this tumescence.

The basic definition of tumescence is ‘swelling’ and to be tumesced is to experience this kind of energetic swelling. It’s a neutral state—neither good nor bad—and anyone can experience it, though it is significantly prominent in women just before their periods. In the case of PMS, the swelling of orgasm will continue to accumulate and most women will experience symptoms of heaviness, discomfort and lethargy unless a) the orgasm is expelled or b) the container (your body) that is holding the orgasm itself expands.

Most of us are pros at Option A. We cry, we get angry, we cram our faces with sugar, we go impulse shopping or we have lots of hard fucking—thereby alleviating the pressure in the moment, but failing to address the underlying issue. These methods tend to decrease your ability to feel rather than increase it. We become masters of energetic anaesthetization and lose the opportunity to utilize the extra orgasm.

Then there’s Option B. In connecting to my orgasm through Orgasmic Meditation (a.k.a. OM, a simple, two-person sexuality practice where one person strokes the genitals of another and focuses at the point of connection), I put my full attention on the sensations in my body, learn to approve of what arises and ultimately create space for that energy, which can then be used as fuel for my desire.

Let’s say you’re a guitar player, your body is the instrument and the strings are your orgasm. The guitar is out of tune. What do you do? You don’t yell at the strings (anger), blame yourself (crying), avoid the strings (shopping/eating) or bang them really loud and hard (fucking). You slow down, pluck each one, listen to the vibration and turn the peg until the sound created is in alignment with the desired note.

If it’s that simple, why do we run away from tuning our orgasm?

One of the biggest reasons is shame. Our genitals, one of the most sensitive and highly electrical parts of the body, are laden with social conditioning, fear and unexpressed desire, which trap orgasm inside us. This orgasm eventually rots and putrefies into what we call ‘shame.’ To desire is selfish. To be hungry is weak. To feast is morally unclean. So we pack all that energy into numbed-out, but highly explosive, pockets on our clit. It’s no wonder we shy away from sharing a sexual landscape riddled with landmines to anther person.

Also, our patriarchal society is notorious for culturally gaslighting women into thinking that emotional fluctuations and sensitivity are symptoms of mental instability (or at the very least, fodder for mockery), thereby adding another layer of embarrassment and shame. This can be seen in TV shows where the hapless dope has to run into the drug store to buy tampons for his insane, hormonal girlfriend. Many men won’t talk about (much less have sex with) women on their periods because it’s ‘disgusting.’ In the workplace, women (or men with more feminine natures) are not given as much credence because their ‘emotionality’ and ‘sensitivity’ are evidence that they don’t have the ‘balls’ to handle high-level positions of power. Finally, we are in the midst of an all-out, political war on women and reproductive rights. If both sexes continue to treat each other as enemies, how are we ever going to feel safe enough to take off our pants and ask to have our genitals stroked?

In addition to shame, there is also simple ignorance; we’ve never been taught how to manage energy. If we don’t know what we want, how can we ask for it? PMS is considered a ‘normal’ affliction in our society. How many times have you told your friends “It’s that time of the month,” and their response is something like “Yuck, I’m so sorry.” You never hear anyone say, “Awesome! How are you going to use all that extra energy?!” or “Sounds like you could use an all-downstroke OM.” The social prescription includes popping a Midol (or twelve), grabbing a carton of Ben & Jerry’s and burrowing in a cave for a week.

Finally, I see women (and men) avoiding direct interaction with orgasm in the name of being a ‘good, spiritual person.’ What that means is people go to yoga or meditate or say affirmations or cling to non-violent communication or ‘send heart vibes’ or utilize any method to avoid confronting ‘darker’ energies. Anger, hate, jealousy, terror, fear—all of these are part of the human experience. I see so many people try to ‘rise above the negative’ and therefore sacrifice connection to all of who they are. They get caught in their own spiritual vanity (yes, I’ve done it too). This is not to say that yoga, meditation, etc. don’t do anything to help in energy management. To the contrary: they are integral pieces of the whole. However, to return to the guitar metaphor, you can buy the highest quality instrument, clean her to a shine and study musical theory—but eventually, you have to leave music school, get out in the real world and play the damn thing.

But if you practice connecting to orgasm, expanding your capacity to receive, learning to ask for what you want and including the whole experience—even with its judgments, messiness, pain and tears—you will find a terrain rich with desire and raw power. And this power, converted from tumescence to turn-on (which is essentially tumescence plus approval), can be a most delicious experience.

Case-in-point: yesterday, I was a total nut job. Crying, depressed, pissed off and completely indecisive. Then I had an OM. I felt my orgasm drop down from my belly, through my pussy and to my legs. The air around me was dense and crackly. My body felt light and spacious. Later on, while I was having sex, I noticed there was much more openness in my pelvis. The blood that was once trapped had room to flow down into the undernourished pockets of my genitals. Instead of heavy, dull ache, I felt thick, lush wetness dripping out of me. Painful cramping transformed to a velvety, electric undulation that pulled my partner deeper into me. This was not hard fucking to run away from sensation—this was sex that had me grateful for all the sensation available.

Good sex is just one way to utilize the energy made available through alchemizing orgasm. Maybe you want to write a book. Or start a family. Or run for president. The choice is yours. My hope is that you will choose something that is in alignment with your deepest desire.

Or at the very least, I hope you find a little more space for the crazy, fucking mess of a woman that you are. She’s gotta a lot of love to give—she just needs a little orgasmic tuning.

The Right Number: A Short Story

Originally posted June 10, 2012

John McLean tapped the cracked screen of his yellow iPhone and brought it to his ear.

“Hello, Ming’s Café. What you want?”

“An order of egg rolls, Hot & Sour Soup…”

“…and Pork Lo Mein, right? I know your voice. 3337 Guadalupe Street #2? Same credit card?”

Sigh.

“Yup.”

“20 minutes.”

Click.

John tossed the phone on his grey, tweed couch and glanced around the apartment. The oily, plastic tubs, used chopsticks and red & white, cardboard trapezoids served as evidence of his dietary apathy. A living museum. Empty cartons petrified in time. A hunger that was once wrenching and desperate—now reduced to a low grumble. Eating was more like an annoying habit these days.

Six months. Six months since she left. Only two things remained: her white sapphire and 18K yellow gold engagement ring and a 43-second message on Google Voice. He had it memorized. Verbatim.

Katherine didn’t really say much. After almost two years, she just—poof—vanished. Said her heart wasn’t in it. Said she didn’t want to hurt him. When he returned home to Austin from his mother’s funeral in Mobile, she had packed her things and placed the custom-made ring on the top of his dresser. Where it still sat. Untouched. An orphaned relic of a past life.

Their courtship was short-lived. She was an intern in the hospital where his mother was staying. They had known each other for about five months before he popped the question. She had comforted him through the toughest parts of his mother’s MS. Perhaps their bond had formed out of security rather than love, but still, he had never opened himself with anyone as much as he had with her. If it weren’t for the ring’s insistent existence, he might have believed their relationship was just a passing dream. That would have made things easier.

But it was real. And he now had the Chinese take-out boxes and extra 40 pounds to prove it.

He looked into the mirror and slid up his greasy, white tank.

“Something’s gotta change,” he thought to himself. “Jesus…man. I feel so numb inside. Like I’m spending my life waiting to die or something. I don’t want to live like this. The fucking Chinese delivery lady knows me better than anyone else, for Chrissakes! How fucking pathetic is that?”

He sat back down on the sofa and absent-mindedly reached for the remote.

ABC

CNN

Comedy Central

TBS

He paused. TBS was playing Die Hard. Again.

“Typical,” he muttered. He loathed this movie. Or rather, he loathed his inadvertent affiliation with it:

“John McLane!? Like that Bruce Willis character in ‘Die Hard’? I love those movies! Are you gonna save the Nakatomi Tower or something?”

No, you fucking moron. I’m gonna bash your fucking brains in with a two-by-four.

“Uhhh…yeah, funny. No, not saving anything. He spells is differently anyway. L-A-N-E. I spell mine L-E-A-N.”

“Well, we know who to call when the Germans come to town, eh?”

Fucker.

But on some level, he knew it wasn’t their fault. His name did have a level of notoriety. If he had met a woman named ‘Elizabeth Taylor’, he’d probably say something just as douchey like, “Really? How are the ex-husbands?”

And yet, like a scab he couldn’t stop picking, he didn’t change the channel.

“Ironic.” he reflected. “The hero and the loser. The champion and the deadbeat. John McLane, the savior of humanity and John McLean, the king of Chinese delivery.”

The tinny sound of Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ jolted him from his self-loathing.

“That’s strange,” he thought, “no one ever calls me. Maybe the Chinese place ran out of eggrolls or something.”

He looked at the phone, but didn’t recognize the number.

“Oh what the hell,” he said, answering. “Hello?”

“Well hello yourself! I have been waiting for over an hour-and-a-half at Spider House! Where the hell are you?!” shrieked a woman’s voice on the other end of the line.

“Ummm…what?”

“What? WHAT?! Jenna said you were a little flaky, but this is RIDICULOUS!!!”

“Jenna? Who…who the hell is Jenna?”

“Jenna…your cousin? Wait. Is this Randy Morgan?”

“No. My name is John. John McLean. You must have the wrong number.”

“Oh my God…I am so sorry. It’s just…my co-worker—well, former co-worker—tried to set me up on a date with her cousin and she texted me his number and…well, clearly she made a mistake and sent me the wrong number and…oh, Christ, it’s just been a long day—a long week really. Oh who are we kidding, this whole year has been pretty shitty, what with the divorce settlement and losing my job and my father’s accident…,” she trailed off, stifling her tears.

“I’m sorry,” John said, genuinely moved by this strange woman’s pain.

“No, no, I’m sorry…for dumping all that on you and for screaming at you and…geez, you must think I’m some sort of crazy woman, huh?”

“Well, actually, I think you’re pretty spot on. I mean, if I had to deal with a divorce and losing a job and the father thing—and on top of all of it, being stood up—I’d be upset too.”

“Thanks,” she said, softening. “What did you say your name was?”

“John McLean.”

“Why is that so familiar?”

Ugh.

“Um, Die Hard?” he muttered, grudgingly.

“What?”

“The Die Hard movies? The main character is John McLean?”

“Never seen them. Not a Bruce Willis fan.”

“Oh.”

“Wait a minute!” she cried. “Westlake High? Class of ’92? Well, I guess you were ’90 or something…?”

“Uhhh…’89…?”

“Yes! This is Marsha! Marsha Graves. Well, Marsha Reynolds now, but soon to be back to Graves. We were in band together. I played sax and you were trumpet, yeah? You were pretty good in those days.”

John remembered her. Pretty. Blonde. Soft features. A little flighty. Spent more time smoking weed under the bleachers than in band practice, but she was always kind.

“Sure, I remember you. What you been up to since high school?”

“Oh, local community college. Left after a year. Got it together long enough to get my aesthetician license and been doing nails ever since, though the place I worked for closed down last month. Tough times, ya know. Plus my father just got in a car accident. He’s alive, but his legs are crushed. Not sure if he’ll ever walk again. And he has no pension and no insurance—what with being the local handyman all these years.”

“Medicare?”

“Too young. He was 17 when I was born. So mom and I just have to do what we can to scrape up the money to pay for it.”

John glanced quickly at the ring on the dresser.

“Hmm. I’m sorry to hear that. Seems mighty unfair, if you ask me—for God to rain down a bunch hard stuff on just one person.”

“I stopped believing in God a long time ago,” she answered coldly.

“Me too. It was just a way to get my point across. Haven’t been to church since I stepped foot out of my momma’s house. Though I do miss the music. Always liked Amazing Grace and…”

In The Garden,” they both said simultaneously.

“Ditto!” she cried. “That one was always my favorite!”

“Heh, yeah, mine too,” he laughed.

His laughter took the edge off his uneasiness. He hadn’t had a conversation that lasted more than three minutes in some months. He feared he wouldn’t be able to remember how to be politely sociable. But the clumsy frankness of Marsha felt open and fresh. It gave him permission to reveal a bit more of himself.

“Well. Nice to hear we have something as lovely as In The Garden in common,” he said.

“Indeed. So what about you? I’ve been talking this whole time. What happened to you after you left school?”

“Well, I went to A&M, got a degree in computer science, found a job where I could work from anywhere, so I moved back home to be with my momma. She was sick with MS for a long time.”

Was sick?” she asked.

“Yeah, she died about six months ago.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I’m not. The years of hell that woman went through. I’m glad she’s found her peace,” John retorted, a bit too callously.

“Oh.”

“Anyway,” he said, trying to soften the moment, “we scattered her ashes in her hometown of Mobile, like she wanted. And that was about the same time that my fiancée decided to skip town. Left me just a phone message and a ring. Haven’t heard from her since.”

“Wow, that’s a little selfish, if you ask me.”

“Yeah, it felt that way at the time.” John was surprised at how quickly he’d opened up to Marsha. He hadn’t revealed this part of his life to anyone since Katherine left. He did most of his work from home, had no siblings or close cousins and his father had been out of the picture since he ran off with one of the neighbors’ wives when John was 12. They both died in a boating accident one year later. John never forgave his father for leaving him alone with his sick mother. He allowed himself a maximum of 30 seconds of grief when he heard of his father’s death. The rest he packed away in a hermetically-sealed time-capsule lodged in the back of his heart.

“But, you know, time heals all wounds, I guess,” he said, brushing off the memory.

“Yeah, except yours don’t seem so healed.”

“You’re poking a little too deep for someone I just re-met over the phone,” he said jokingly, but not without a real intention to end the conversation.

“Haha…ok…another time, perhaps.”

“Perhaps.”

Silence.

The hard, electric buzz of John’s doorbell jangled the pregnant stillness.

“That’s my dinner, Marsha,” he said, somewhat relieved at having an excuse to get off the phone.

“Oh, OK,” she replied. “Well, maybe I’ll give this Randy guy another 20 minutes or so before I give up on him.”

“Yeah, maybe he lost his phone or something and is caught in traffic...”

“Yeah, maybe…”

“Yeah...”

Silence.

“OK, well. 20 minutes. Spider House. Then I’m heading home,” she firmly declared.

“Good luck, Marsha.”

“Yeah, you too John. Maybe I’ll see you in band practice sometime,” she joked, a little too nonchalantly.

“Heh. Yeah, I wouldn’t count on it. I haven’t touched a trumpet in ages.”

“Hm. Pity.”

Buzzzzzzzzzzz.

“Better answer that, John.”

“On it,” he said, without moving a muscle.

“Goodbye,” she said.

“Bye.”

Pause.

Pause.

Pause.

Click.

Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Stillness.

The phone started ringing again. John eagerly prepared to answer it, only to find it was Ming’s Café, no doubt wondering where he was.

He sat motionless until the ringing stopped, the driver stepped off his stoop and the car drove away, undelivered Chinese food in tow.

“What the hell just happened?” he thought to himself. “It was just a simple wrong number. She didn’t actually want to talk to me again, right?”

And yet, he remembered the hint of an invitation in her voice when she joked about band practice. And there was something in the way she said ‘Pity’—it was almost like she was seeing deeply into him and pulling out…what? He didn’t know how to explain it, but, for the first time in a long time, he could feel. His heart hurt. His forehead was hot and slick. His skin felt tingly and tight all at once.

And then he knew was it was—that simple piece he would not allow himself to acknowledge.

Joy. Pure, innocent joy. The joy he felt when he played his trumpet. They joy he felt when his mother sang in church. The joy he felt when his father bought him his first Miles Davis album. And the joy he felt when he and Katherine used to slow dance in the hospital stock room, sharing one pair of earphones.

But unfortunately, with joy, comes hope. And dreaming. And love. And history had proven to him, over and over again, that every time he allowed himself the luxury of love, life was going to abandon him in a swamp of unfulfilled desire.

And yet something’s gotta change, he reminded himself. He knew it. He didn’t just know it—he felt it. The truth was pouring out of his body. In his shaking, his sweating, his crying.

He didn’t have much time. He slipped on his tennis shoes, threw on his leather jacket and grabbed the ring from the dresser. He didn’t know if it was worth enough to cover her father’s medical expenses, but he knew it could help.

“Something good needs to come out of all of this,” he thought, as he stuffed the ring in his pocket.

As for what would happen next, he wasn’t sure. Would he and Marsha strike up a friendship? A love affair? Marriage? Or would she even still be there when he got to Spider House?

Honestly, none of that mattered. He wasn’t doing this to try to win a relationship. He was doing it in gratitude to the gift of joy that God (or whatever) had given him that day.

Before rushing out onto Guadalupe Street, he pulled his iPod from his jacket pocket, stuck an earpiece in each ear and pressed the bottom of the white circle. And as he closed the door behind him, he raised the left corner of his mouth in a slight smile as Bye Bye Blackbird began to play.

11 Reasons Why I’m Getting Married (Again)

Photo by Karl Baba

Photo by Karl Baba

Originally posted June 5, 2012

View this article on elephantjournal.com

I swore off marriage when I was twelve years old. I was a jaded pre-teen with a bit of a feminist streak who had witnessed the demise of her parents’ relationship a few years before. I decided that I was never going to fall prey that heteronormative, societal slave trap. I was going to make something of my life and no amount of schmaltzy, romantic bullshit was going to stand in my way.

Ten years later I was married (life has a funny way of taking our belief systems and packing them with dynamite). I was a good wife—or at least I tried to be. I cooked and cleaned. I was understanding and kind (sometimes). And I really, really cared about my husband. But, admittedly, my heart was not in it. Nobody’s fault. We simply weren’t the best fit for each other and hung on for much longer than was respectfully necessary.

So, I ended up joining the ranks of one of the real housewives who get to say fashionable things like “My ex-husband this” or “My divorce settlement that”—all before the age of 30.

Joking aside, it was a pretty intense period of my life. Walking away from everything I had known about love and relating. Feeling like total failure. A selfish, sick little girl with no stable ground to stand on. Even though through it all I knew I was making the right choice, I was shaking with fear behind my mask of quiet bravery.

And with that mask came a resounding voice from the past: don’t ever get married again. No really. You are not wife material. You are not a mother. Do you want to put another man (and possibly innocent children) though hell?

Then five months ago he came along. And my whole system went “What the hell are you doing, Candice? Again? Really?”

No, not really. Something was different. Some puzzle piece went ‘click.’ The first part of the puzzle had to do with me. The fact that I done some deep soul spelunking, made peace with my hunger and discovered the courage to share my desire made a huge difference in being able to fearlessly express love (even in the face of inevitable rejection and humiliation).

Then, when you meet someone who totally compliments you and loves you and trusts you exactly as you are, there is a sort of ease and freedom that arises. Rather than trying to maintain some ideal of what I think wifedom and marriage should be, I am encouraged to peel off the layers and reveal parts of myself I have kept in the shadows for many years. In fact, the more intimate we are with each other, the better the relationship gets (case in point: jealousy and anger make for great raw material in sex).

And so I had to once again re-examine the voice that was against marriage. OK, so I am not in favor of the stagnant, co-dependent models of relating that parade themselves as marriage. And I think the way that marriage is represented in American culture isn’t truly rooted in love and commitment. I mean, we hungrily follow which football star Kim Kardashian might shack up with next. So-called ‘reality’ TV like the The Bachelor and The Millionaire Matchmaker have reduced marriage to the level of game shows, with husbands and wives as the ultimate prize. And as women, we get caught in this schizophrenic bind of having to find a husband and wanting our freedom: either we have to hunt him and trap him before we turn 30 (because the clock is ticking, ladies) or we give up relating all together for casual trysts that fill the gaps between power lunches and spin classes.

Cut and paste all that against the backdrop of a fierce political and religious debate surrounding the ‘sanctity’ of marriage as it’s ‘threatened’ by homosexual couples and you can see why we have a pretty twisted notion of what it means to be wedded in holy matrimony.

And it’s at this point that I settle onto my mediation cushion and find the pearl of wisdom that rests within me:

“Candice?”

“Yes, oh Sagacious One.”

“Do whatever the fuck you want.”

Exactly. At the heart of it all, I want to marry this man. He’s so fucking cool! I get excited when I think about living a crazy, rockstar, dream life with him—a life that goes way beyond the bounds of ‘normal’ marriage. We—my Beloved and I—get to create something unique and authentic. We get to make the rules (and break them). And in the end, we answer to no one but ourselves.

But I like to make lists. And I like to write articles. And I like to make lists when I write articles. So even though there’s really only one reason I’m choosing marriage (because it’s my desire), here are 11 Reasons Why I’m Getting Married (Again):

1. It was spontaneous. And I just love that. It feels much more honest when life happens at the unfiltered speed of ‘Yes.’ If you give me the perfectly scripted diamond-ring-and-down-on-one-knee proposal, I may smile and think “Oh how sweet,” but I’m not going to be sold. But if you give me the day of a total eclipse at the Symbiosis Festival in the Reckless In Love Shack at 3am while surrounded by an inebriated gang of Brits, you have yourself a winner.

2. He’s my best friend. We don’t just love each other; we like each other. We have lots of cracked out, dorky fun together. We like singing Bohemian Rhapsody (the entire thing!). We like quoting cheesy movies to each other. We make each other fall down laughing with our free associations and impressions of other people. And if after 13 days of spending nearly every moment together (days that included very little sleep, 30 hours of driving and camping out in some pretty harsh conditions) we still want to hang out with each other, that’s a pretty damn good sign.

3. We know when to take space. And then, after the 13 days of traveling together, when I say to him, “Honey, I need the night off,” he meets me with understanding and respect. He also knows when to ask for space. We may say something like, “I miss you. I feel sad. I’m disappointed not to see you. My body aches for you.” But in the end, absence does make the heart grow fonder—or at least our relationship stronger. For when we take the time to cultivate our individual passions, we come back together from a place of fullness and energy, ready to share our discoveries with each other.

4. I want to grow old with him. What’s more, I could even see myself having our child (yikes!). This is a very, very hard piece for me to admit. It hits my pride as a ‘free woman’ on so many levels. And yet, when I slow down and feel my desire, I discover joy in the possibility of building a life together—who we are as a team is infinitely greater than who we are alone. I don’t have to spend my life with him. I know I can survive just fine. But I’ve had flashes of his wise, old face in a rocking chair on the front porch of our home. I’m choosing to stick around long enough to see that.

5. He cries. I trust a man who is not afraid to share his innermost wonder and grief. It gives me the courage to share mine. His raw vulnerability is a huge gift in a world where masculinity is falsely touted as being some unbreakable superhero. No, dear readers. The masculine face of love sheds many, many tears on the journey of opening one’s heart to a woman.

6. Because why the fuck not? I don’t ever want to say on my deathbed “Thank God I played it safe when I was in love.” I want to be able to revel in the fact that I risked it all and made the most of every second life had to offer me. I don’t think the universe makes mistakes and I certainly don’t see my first marriage as a mistake. I think it was a glorious journey that has taken me exactly where I need to be. This time, the universe has raised the stakes and I am ready to play balls out.

7. We inspire each other to keep growing. Settling for ‘ok’ isn’t good enough for either of us, even if that means discomfort on both our parts. But that discomfort is just a sign we are hitting a fertile boundary, ripe with creativity and promise. And we are both courageous enough to stay connected within the change, even when it includes some scary shit like moving to another city or exploring our sexuality with someone outside of the relationship.

8. We trust each other’s inner compass. And we strive to speak our truth and have space for the other person’s experience. When he feels something is ‘off’, I listen. When I get intuitive hits about where to go next, he pays attention. This kind of respect is not something I take for granted. It requires a high level of communication and trust to say things like:

“What’s your deeper desire?”

“Where are you right now?”

“Stop playing nice.”

“You feel far away.”

“What are you not saying?”

“I know we planned to turn right, but I’d like to go left.”

“You don’t feel connected to your heart.”

“I love you and I am fuckin’ pissed.”

“This is a hard boundary and I am saying ‘No.’”

9. I get to wear a kick-ass dress. OK, perhaps one of the more shallow reasons to get married again (and also why this list went from 10 to 11) but I like dressing up. And last time I got married at the Justice of the Peace in casual pants and a sweater, so this time I want to go all out. Think Tim Burton meets Moulin Rouge. Yeah, you know you’re jealous.

10. He’s a rock. In the sense that I can throw all my wackiest, off-the-wall, crazy, angry, jealous, freaked out, neurotic shit at him, and he’s still standing. Not only is he still standing—he’s still loving me. He’s not afraid to violate the rules I have locking my orgasm. His commitment to total presence in the face of my feminine outrage liberates the woman in me—and the delicious reward on the other side of that liberation frees us both.

11. I like kissing him. Don’t get me wrong—the sex is awesome too. And if you know anything about me, you know that I place a high value on quality sex. However, there’s something so intimate about kissing someone. There’s nowhere to hide. It’s as if I’m emotionally naked and all the faces of my desire come out as he is staring into my eyes. The warm, electric promise of more when he brushes his lips below my ear and slides his thumb over my nipple. The comfort of home when cups his hands over my ears and grazes his mouth against my forehead. The rousing of my hungry animal when he thrusts me against a wall and devours my face, while pressing his cock against my thick, wet pussy. The sweet, adolescent innocence of his soft, full lips against mine as our tongues barely caress each other. I’ve had a variety of terrific lovers, for which I have tremendous gratitude. But to know how to slake a dying woman’s thirst with just the right kiss—that’s enough to bring me to my knees and pledge a lifetime of eternal devotion.

Womanhood and the Reawakening of My Erotic Innocence

Originally posted May 23, 2012

Also view this article on elephantjournal.com

I have been a very dirty girl. And I’m OK with that.

Well, sort of. It’s more like I am learning to love this part of myself. She’s been in hiding for some time now, afraid that if she speaks to loudly or chews with her mouth open or runs naked through the streets, people will get angry. Or they will laugh at her. Or they will watch her with a starving madness and she will feel their shame burning through her skin (which will then light the fire of her own shame and her ‘good girl’ cover may get blown).

But this ‘dirty girl’ is not what you might be thinking. She’s no ‘been-there-done-that’ kinda chick, nor does she spend her nights trolling around town looking for the next hot lay. She’s actually quite naïve—she comes from a place before her sex got tied in the knots of social conditioning.

We’ve only been recently reacquainted.

I’m face down on the bed. My legs are spread. My lover pushing himself inside me. My right fingertips are on my clit. His hands are tangled in my hair as he shoves my face into the pillow. I am bellowing from a place deep within the basement of my soul. It’s uncontrollable, as if a fury has taken over my voice. I vacillate between crying and laughing. Grieving the release of past trauma and marveling at the humorous absurdity of it all.  I am a 31-year-old woman possessed by the banshee spirit of a 4-year-old while in the throes of some pretty brutal fucking.

And within it all, the anger, the terror, the hilarity and the tears, is a tremendous amount of turn-on. My whole body is alive. I have expanded to a point just a hair’s breadth beyond the limits of my safety, for the moment. I feel a twinge of guilt in not pushing further, as if my sex were some sort of product to deliver (and the business of my sex demands utmost customer service), but we fall asleep, sweetly drenched in the hair and sweat of our electric togetherness.

But what expands, must equally and oppositely contract. A few hours later, he reaches for me in the vulnerable darkness, hands on my ass, cock pressing against me. All at once a rage snaps my body tightly together, a violent ‘No’ escaping my throat and I clutch the sheets in a feeble attempt to scurry away. I am angry and terrified, as a childhood ghost flies through me. My lover holds me tightly, letting me know that I am safe. After a few tense seconds, my body slackens, but what was once alive has now gone numb.

And this frightens me. I know this place. I took up residence for a number of years. Starving myself in the addiction of anorexia in the attempt to quell the voices of a ravenous (and dangerous) sexuality. Maintaining a pre-pubescent state of being so I didn’t have to face the terror that comes with stepping into womanhood.

After a few minutes I fall asleep. I leave his place the next morning, quiet and unfeeling. I don’t know how to make sense of what I am experiencing. Is it resentment? Violation? Pain? Anger? Shame? All I can tell is that my emotional body has shut down and is on some sort of autopilot. A big block of cement sits right on my belly. If I let the old Candice take over, a passive aggressive brew of sexual withholding and the silent treatment isn’t far away.

A few hours go by and the pain starts to thaw. Vulnerability wins. I can feel again. I break down and call him, crying. I am a confused mess of a woman. On the one hand, I am angry at all men who rape women and for every man who has ever only wanted me for my sex. On the other, I ashamed at my compulsive need to have every man I meet want me sexually. Who am I if I don’t have my sex to offer as collateral for my right to exist in this world? My insecurity breeds a way of being in the world that invites the very reaction I most fear and therefore, it also invites a reaction that comes with a large amount of desire. Desire to confront and know myself as a woman of sexual maturity.

We end the conversation. I feel a bit more relieved, but there is still a bubble of unexpressed desire sitting in me. A few hours later, I meet with a friend for an OM (Orgasmic Meditation). The moment his finger slides onto my clit, the bubble wells up into my eyes and I am silently crying. In this moment, as he is stroking me with tenderness and care. I connect with the sexual innocence of a child. It is sweet, soft and nurturing. I feel emotionally safe and free from shame—something for which my body has hungered for a long time.

As kids, we are naturally curious about our bodies and express pleasure without concern for what others think. Children aren’t born with shame; they experience it once they learn from adults—who are themselves wrestling with their own unhealed wounds around shame and fear of abandonment—that some part of who they are is ‘dirty’ or ‘wrong.’

Our erotic journeys begin at conception, which is itself a sexual act. You see little babies touch themselves in utero. We are birthed through our mother’s genitals. We are nourished at our mother’s breasts. Our fathers hold us in their laps and tickle us to tears. The entire experience of young childhood is both sensual and innocent.

Then shame enters the picture. This can look like adults condemning erotic expression and setting up walls between themselves and children; or, as in my case, adults will be so erotically starving and are unable to share that with their adult partner (if they even have a partner) that they will use their children for energetic support, which opens the door to emotional or physical incest.

Here are a few highlights in the tapestry of my childhood sexual shame:

I can remember being 6-years-old and the neighbor boy pulling down his pants and showing me his ‘wee wee’ and me thinking “Oh my God, I hope my mother doesn’t walk in on this.”

I can remember being 9-years-old and having family members tell me not to dance or lick my lips like Madonna, lest I get the ‘wrong’ kind of attention.

I can remember being 10-years-old and having play acting sessions with my girlfriends in which I would pretend to be the ‘guy’ and we would kiss and rub up against each other. I was both frightened that they would tell their parents and mortified by how much I desired to kiss them again.

I can remember being 11-years-old and teasing one of the girls in after-school care about being sexual. She went and told one of the leaders, who then accused me of child abuse.

I can remember being 12-years-old and thinking I was the only female in the world who masturbated. I had heard all the jokes about boys doing it, but not girls. I thought I was some sort of pervert.

Shame is an arena where most of us can relate, but are too afraid to share with each other because of the repercussions society dishes out for deviating from the sexual ‘norm.’ We women are supposed to hold on to our ‘precious’ virginity as long as possible and only give it up for guys that are ‘marriage material.’ Then once you finally pick one guy, only fuck him for the rest of your life. Be a whore on-demand with him at night, but totally asexual during the day. Without the freedom to explore our desire and communicate it to our partners, we often live our lives with our orgasm locked in resentment and rotting inside our bodies.

Men don’t have it much easier. They are expected to walk around with perpetual hard-ons and their worth as a man rests on their ability to please a woman all night long (a farcical notion frequently expressed in many love songs). If his only experience is from watching porn and talking to his buddies, he may lie to cover up the fact that he doesn’t know how to handle a woman’s pussy and is too ashamed to admit it. This shame, which is vacuum-sealed like Saran Wrap around our fear of sex, is why both men and women continue to hide within the ‘safety’ of societal conditioning; thus, unfortunately, widening the chasm between ourselves and our authentic erotic expression.

Many of us in more ‘liberal’ cities may think we have moved past this kind of archaic relationship with sexuality, but I contest that it is very present. The war on abortion and women’s reproductive rights is a direct attack on female desire. The recent ban on gay marriage in North Carolina (as well as the ban on civil unions for both gay and straight couples) reinforces the belief that unless you are in a monogamous, long-term, heterosexual relationship, you are an unlawful deviant of society. Abstinence-only sex education is getting more of a push from right-wing leaders and now, young girls are attending events known as ‘Purity Balls,’ in which female teenagers pledge their virginity to God and elect their fathers as guardians—a role which then passes only to her future husband.

As you can see, there are many people and institutions more than willing to take the load of sexual responsibility off our hands. And the longer we continue to play this charade, the harder it gets to separate our personal truth from the social lie.  To stand up and say, “No, it is my life, my body and my sex. I will decide what is right for me,” is nothing short of revolutionary.

In the past, I thought this meant doing all the kinky things I had avoided during my young adult years (my focus on school and my marriage were great places for my sex to hide). This ‘saying yes’ to every sexual opportunity that came my way was ‘proof’ that I was sexually expressed. I see now that the more powerful (and vulnerable) choice lies in reclaiming my own erotic innocence, i.e. that part of myself that is simple, pure, unfiltered in her desires and lives with the ethos of ‘pleasure for the sake of pleasure’ and enjoys something simply because it feels good (rather than looks good), without the fear of ‘not deserving it’ or ‘what do I have to give up in return.’ She doesn’t have to show off or prove her worth. For her, ‘No’ is a valid response—it gives her ‘Yes’ that much more power.

And my erotic innocent is a little dirty at times. Because it’s fun to break the rules. To be a little bad. It turns her on. Rebellion is exciting because it paves the way for some new discovery—shakes up the status quo and creates the opportunity for messiness, play and growth. In confronting my childhood trauma, shame and hidden desires, I am now creating the space for all facets of my erotic being to emerge. Within this sexual self-compassion comes the ability to empathize with each person and accept their erotic self. The newborn, the homeless guy, my father, the elderly lady on life support, the nun—everyone is a sexual being. We are all perfectly built for sensuality. And it is through personal acceptance that the doors of inspiration, abundance and living the life of your dreams open. It’s not a silly, utopian fantasy or a special place reserved only for those lucky enough to find it; it is your birthright.

The journey is not easy. But if it were easy, it wouldn’t be as much fun. The pain, the shame, the falling apart, the voices of doubt—they are not my enemies. They are the raw material for my creativity and serve to remind me just how exquisitely human I am—all I have to do is to surrender to them. What a gift that is. To recognize the gift, accept it with humility and pour out gratitude in service to the Divine is nothing short of grace. And it is within the grace of surrender that an erotic innocent is ushered into Womanhood.

Sex: Not for the Faint of Heart {Adult}

Photo: Bryan Brenneman

Photo: Bryan Brenneman

Originally posted May 4, 2012

Read this article on elephantjournal.com

I got fucked open by the Universe recently. And not in a hippy-dippy, namaste, all-you-need-is-love sorta way. I mean in a total possession, out-of-control, freak-out sorta way. And since filling you in on the details would probably involve a good five hours of chain smoking and tequila shots, let’s just cut to the chase and say, it wasn’t very pretty—or rather, it wasn’t very ladylike.

There’s a reason why American conservative and religious leaders are doing their very best to crack down on sexuality. It threatens a system built on predictability, logic and the survival of a moral code based on patriarchal rule. We are seeing more and more the push for abstinence-only education, new bills are being passed limiting talk of ‘gateway sex’ in the classroom and abortion rights and easy access to contraception are under fire.  

Then you have social conditioning parading around as ‘normal behavior’ adding another layer of obscurity to our already warped sense of sexuality (much of it tied up in the arenas of romance, commitment and relationships). This can be seen in books such as The Rules (a woman’s guide to capturing the heart of Mr. Right), classes taught by professional ‘Pick-Up Artists’ and Hollywood films hammering home the message that once you find ‘The One’ then all your fairy tale wishes will come true.

Finally, if you get through the labyrinth of political and social nonsense sitting on top your sex, you have to then contend with your own booby traps and deadbolts:

I’m too tired for sex
I don’t deserve sex
My vibrator/pornography gets the job done without the hassle
I’m straight/gay/married, etc, so I could never have sex with that person.
I’m too fat/ugly/old for sex
If I have sex now, I’ll be giving away the milk before he/she buys the cow
I’ve been hurt by sex in the past

So yeah, it’s pretty obvious why opening one’s sex is one of the most stigmatized and misunderstood of human journeys.

Sex.

Is.

Fuckin’.

Scary.

Period.

OK, a little more context. I went to a meditation retreat a few weeks ago and one of the things that came up for me was a huge amount of sexual trauma in my body. I had some floating memories of where this came from, but the history mattered less than the knots of terror that had embedded themselves in my genitals and were now passing through my system. The result looked a lot like a scene from The Exorcist. Screaming, shaking and crying rushed out of me as my pride (which had calcified on top of my trauma) began to burn away. Through the rusty faucet of my now flowing sex, a rotting cesspool of unexpressed anger took me over so powerfully, I thought I was going to die.

Obviously, I did not die (literally), but afterwards I felt as if I had been flayed alive. Every sound and touch was like pots banging in my ear or mites biting my skin. I had no more filter for how I was experiencing life. With no filter, my self-expression was direct, concentrated and immediate. This expression didn’t have time to collect a residue that would eventually fester and stink of shame (which would, of course, later end up in the basement of my soul with the other unsavory bits).

And then…something miraculous happened.

In the midst of my rawness, my lover came to me…and I could feel my pussy for the first time. I mean, on a profoundly deep level. All these years of thinking I knew what good sex was (I mean, I’ve been climaxing with a stash of porn since I was eleven, thank you very much), I had never dreamed of feeling something like this. It’s a little hard to put into words, but just set aside your woo-woo prejudice for one moment and stay with me.

Whereas before I was simply feeling my own body, I was now feeling my own body through the tip of his cock, which he was feeling (obviously). And I could feel him feeling his cock and feeling me with his cock. So it’s as if there was a circuit of connection—from me, to his cock, to his mind, back to his cock, and to me again—that added a whole new dimension of sensation to the experience. I wasn’t only in my orgasm, I was also in his orgasm, which then melded and becomes the shared orgasm. It’s as if one plus one did not equal two, but infinity.

Now I’m not saying every moment was bliss and rainbows and magical Candyland. For me, sex encompasses a lot more than the linear trajectory we typically ascribe to it (a kiss leads to above the waist action which leads to oral which finally leads to the grand slam intercourse and ejaculation). I mean, is it sex if, as he’s entering me, my body contracts into an accordion of fear, with the infantile mewing of “No, no, no” escaping my lips? Or is it sex when a man is reduced to tears of repentance the moment my velvet pussy lips slip around his cock? Or is it sex if I spend the whole night floating my hand over the warm fur of his chest in a state of wonder? For me: yes.

Sex is the most volatile arena for exploring who you are in the world and what you are running away from will typically arise in sex—quickly and in obvious contrast to everything you think you are. Facing this kind of ego death is a viable reason to keep sex tucked away in the back drawer of our psyches. But the reward for allowing all of myself to arise and to be witnessed and loved by someone else in that vulnerable state was nothing short of total liberation.

And I realized: to the extent that I could set aside my ‘script for good sex’ and allow myself to be penetrated with no judgment on what arose, I could actually experience God in connection with another human being. Which is what I think we are most hungry for on this planet (case in point: I had a recent OM, a.k.a. Orgasmic Meditation, with a friend of mine, who was grateful to stroke a woman who has spent time cultivating her orgasm because for him it was like ‘physical nourishment’).

Society teaches us that power lies in being the unrelenting penetrator. Go in hard, no holds barred and don’t come back until you’ve got the prize. It’s goal-oriented, it’s hard and fast and relies on brute force. We feel like we are in control of it all and get an ego boost when we shoot a giant wad after just one good thrust from our monstrous cocks, be that in boardroom or in the bedroom. It’s a brand of pseudo-masculinity that’s sort of like bad Chinese food—it fills you up in the moment, but leaves you hungry and undernourished over time.

Yet to admit that underneath all the bravado, we are dying to be penetrated is to come face to face with every taboo we have around sex and relating, especially for men. Look at the snarky remarks made whenever anyone mentions anal sex. Or the brutal jokes told in reference to gay men. In fact, the phrase ‘To be fucked over’ implies that you were a dumbass who put out and got nothing in return (which also ties into the often transactional nature of sex—make sure you get yours before they get theirs, lest you be ‘fucked over’). And who in society gets ‘fucked over’ all the time? Why pussies, of course.

Unfortunately, this negative view of being fucked (and the notion that the one being penetrated is somehow ‘weak’) is keeping us from the intimacy and connection we so desperately crave. Let me tell you from experience: it takes a lot of courage to be fully fucked open, to surrender to the Spirit within and to let all of her out in the presence of another. It is not weakness to be fucked open, but a place of power. And within that power, you will find innocence. 

As for penetrating: this is actually the most surrendered position of all, for the penetrator must be willing to hold total presence and ride the waves of whatever arises. And it’s not physical strength that matters most, but the strength of commitment to stay 100% connected that creates the space for the penetrated to open and release.

In time (and to make things really interesting), there comes a point when the roles of penetrator and penetrated switch between partners from moment to moment—regardless of who has what member in what orifice. Many a skilled courtesan has deeply penetrated a man while his cock was inside of her.

And in the final stage of pure grace, the roles fall away completely and the Universe takes over. You become the penetrated and the penetrator. The fucker and the fucked. Kali and Shiva. Adam and Eve (and Lilith and the Apple and the Snake).

Get it? Of course you don’t. I don’t even get it. It’s a felt experience, not a rational one. In fact, I feel like I have had only a taste of the sheer potential available in the realm of my sex. Will I ever have this kind of experience again? Who knows. The path now is to simply keep feeling my way rather than trying to chase an ideal. But my intuition says if I continue to play like this, there are many doors that will open into ballrooms and caverns I never thought possible. I started my OM practice over two years ago and what was once an opening the size of a pinhole is now a quarter-sized aperture of orgasmic expression. It feels like the journey (with its feathers, stingers and silky, warm wetness) is just beginning.

Courageous Ones

By Candice Holdorf (written May 2009)

 

It’s the Courageous Ones

Who dare to tread My salty shores

Who spread their fingers

In My deceptive seas

(with hidden octopus

and pink jellyfish)

 

But when My tempests rage

And oceans wage war

Against their virgin skin

(Which rebels in welted bliss)

They think of it as a baptism

And bow their heads in honor

 

For who but a holy fool

Would offer sacraments

To My shrine…

And spend his whole life

Suffering for the religion

Of My Love?

Legend of the South Seas (written 5/3/2009)

Venice Beach, CA

Venice Beach, CA

Originally posted May 1, 2012

Legend of the South Seas

(written 5/3/2009)

 

My heart hums in a secret volcano

Hidden patiently dormant

Midway between Helena and Espiritu Santo

Teetering on the tip of tectonic bliss

 

A loner by nature

(She never fit in with Pangea)

She calls the ring of fire

Home

 

Enigmatic magma rumbles

Beneath her crest

Luring worthy sailors

To slip onto her shores

 

Map-less, they must brave her currents

(No easy sextant for celestial navigation)

Caressing her whispering zephyrs

Riding her blistering squalls

 

‘Til they wash up famished

On her full, wet sands

Igniting her belly ablaze

Swollen earth morphs to enveloping lava

 

And in unrivaled eruptions

(Pele is so jealous!)

Impassioned ashes descend

Searing skin-to-skin, soul-to-soul

 

Immortalizing their bodies

In cinder-splendor

A pacific monument

To her tempestuous love 

Top 20 Hard-Knock Life Lessons from Orgasmic Meditation

Originally posted April 14, 2012

Article also featured on elephantjournal.com

View just the Top 20 List Here

In Defense of Orgasm

This past Monday night, I attended the launch party of The Best Sex Writing 2012, published by Cleis Press and edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel, in San Francisco. Many of the most prolific and controversial American sex writers attended and read from their essays, which are featured in the anthology. The pieces ran the gamut, from atheistic sex to the difference between sex trafficking and sex workers to political ‘sexting’ and polyamory.

However, the moment Tracy Clark-Flory took to the mike to read her article, The Worship of Female Pleasure (which was posted on Salon.com), I knew I had to brace myself. I remember the piece well, in which she speaks about her experience at viewing an impromptu demonstration of Orgasmic Meditation (also known as OM) at a women’s weekend retreat she recently attended.

Full disclosure: I teach the practice of Orgasmic Meditation and learned it through the ‘slow sex’ coaching program’ she derides—mainly because of the cost and the “good old-fashioned capitalism” displayed in offering such a program (side note: most yoga teacher and life coach training programs cost anywhere from $3000-$20,000, so the price for the Slow Sex Program is well within the limits of financial reason). Though I am finished with my training and now have my own private practice and business, I am deeply grateful for the coaching program and for what Orgasmic Meditation has taught me.

So imagine my chagrin Monday night as people are snickering and rolling their eyes when she describes the reverie that the stroker of the OM demonstration was feeling, saying that her “throaty exhalation…sounds as if it belongs in a Lamaze class.” She notes that two members of the retreat are “overcome by the intensity of the performance and are silently crying” (insert more snide laughs here) and says that one has to dig beneath the “freaky OMing exterior” to find some semblance of a relatable message. Even the slightly snarky title, The Worship of Female Pleasure, suggests that to foster a deep relationship with our genitals (an area continuously shrouded in shame and secrecy, especially for women) is borderline religious, woo-woo weirdness.

Now, let me say that I genuinely respect Ms. Clark-Flory’s experience and her process. Her opinion is entirely hers and her perspective 100% valid. She doesn’t paint a completely negative picture of OM. She says that it’s a “refreshing counterpoint to the porny mainstream” and she touches upon the aspects of OM that are based in intuitiveness, mindfulness and countering our negative conditioning around sex. And I can also understand how she was caught off guard, since the women’s weekend advertised that there would be “no sexual activity.”

But to write off Orgasmic Meditation (or laugh it off, in the case of Monday night’s audience) without even having tried the practice seems completely closed-minded. I mean, there I am, frozen with shock in the middle of Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco (the Mecca of sexual adventure), at a freaking sex book party, for Chrissakes, and I am the black sheep of the sexual family. Rape fantasies, transgender prostitutes, penis gagging—all of that is welcome—even celebrated (as it should be!). But putting clean attention on a woman’s pussy for 15 minutes (while the other partner is clothed, no less!)—well that’s just too freaky.

Granted, a part of me can see why “not even most coast-dwelling liberals are ready to be intimately stroked in a roomful of strangers,” as Ms. Clark-Flory concludes. Shining a light on a woman’s orgasm and stripping it down to its barest essence (with no fancy toys or ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ to cover it up) can be extremely confronting. I can also understand that directly addressing the nature of female desire is still highly taboo in our culture. Hugo Schwyzer touches upon this in this essay, “I Want You to Want Me” (also featured in The Best Sex Writing 2012). He notes that while men are hungry to be physically looked upon and admired, the cultural gaze continues to stay fixated on women:

Teaching women that their bodies have great power over men creates a huge problem for women. By putting the focus on managing male desire, women are taught to ignore or suppress their own desires. It’s a loss for women and it’s a loss for men.

Finally, there’s my own personal orgasmic path, which hasn’t been all succulent delights and shrieks of ecstasy. Oh, make no mistake—I have had my share of sexual escapades. Tied up in rope for hours, gagged, spanked, flogged in public, anally penetrated, anally penetrated others, public sex, play parties, threesomes, foursomes, fivesomes—and of course, the good, old-fashioned American jackhammer fuck. I always considered myself a ‘good lay’ and achieving climax was never a problem. Perhaps you could call this my “Girls Gone Wild” phase after my divorce (my marriage being a time when I was so terrified of sex, I would just lay on my back while he ‘got it over with’). I thought it was my sexual duty as a self-proclaimed free woman to say ‘yes’ to any offer that came along and I even had a game going where I wanted to sleep with one man for each sign on the Zodiac (yes, I won).

Mind you, don’t get the idea that I am writing off these experiences as shallow and lacking in value. Many of them cracked me open in ways in which I am profoundly grateful. And I don’t want to give the impression that the only meaningful sex comes from hours of eye-gazing and ‘tantric’ breathing. The distinction for me comes not in what I was exploring, but how I was exploring. At times I felt like I was playing sexual ‘Truth or Dare,’ rather than asking for what I really wanted in the moment (oftentimes because I couldn’t even identify exactly what it was that I wanted).

Through the “Girls Gone Wild” phase, I was OMing—and tapping into massive amounts of sexual energy. Sometimes it looked like stretches of thick, hot pleasure, but oftentimes it was intense bouts of crying as layers of shame and fear melted off my clit. But through it all, I held onto the ‘knowledge’ that I was a good fuck and that my sex was being liberated. My adventurous escapades were the evidence I needed to prove that I was, once-and-for-all, a woman open in her sexuality.

However, in the past few months, there has been a sharp and noticeable shift in my orgasm, and therefore, my sexual identity has come under the microscope. Whereas before I was ready to ride anything that came along, I find myself wanting to spend more time alone or with just one other partner. My orgasm on the physical level feels much lighter and softer. I notice that I feel more sensation when my lover lightly breaths on my nipples than when he is pounding my pussy. What once was loud and brash and fiery is now more like a cool whisper. And peeking out from behind these new sensations is an innocent, barely-ripe ingénue who simply loves for love’s sake and has no battle-weary sexual résumé to back up her scars of knowledge. In fact, she really knows very little at all.

While there is an excitement in exploring these new flavors, there is also a tremendous amount of terror that I have somehow lost my electricity. I am afraid I am ‘less of a woman’ (an experience I had during my years of anorexia when I wasn’t menstruating). Connecting physically to my partner is easy in the light caresses, but somehow that thread gets broken once we explore higher levels of energy. I have an intense fear that no one can feel me here or find me in this place.

My identity is breaking into pieces. Who am I now, if I am not an insanely erotic beast ready to burst at every man’s touch? Who am I if I can not satisfy my lover on all levels? Am I really the monogamous type (cuz my pride tells me there’s no fuckin’ way I’m getting caught in the vanilla marriage trap again)? What right do I have to teach Orgasmic Meditation if I have no clue who my own erotic self is?

It’s as if I’m standing on this very tiny, unstable lilypad—and everywhere I turn, white smoke spans out beyond me as far as I can see. I don’t know which way is north. I don’t know if there is solid ground beyond where I am standing. I can’t seem to feel or hear anyone. Loneliness, blindness and grief sit smack in the middle of my sex. Indeed, I am crying as I write this and I wonder, “Will I ever have the kind of timeless connection with another human being for which I have been hungering for all my life?” I’m not talking about schlocky, romance, happily-ever-after, til-death-do-us-part bullshit.  I am talking about soul-to-soul, naked in all our beauty and madness and filled up with so much orgasm that we just burst into another realm of existence. I have had glimpses beyond the veil, but I have no idea what those glimpses mean or how to get back.

My faith began to waver. “Fuck you, Orgasmic Meditation,” I cried out, “and your fucking false advertising.”

And then, a few nights ago, I saw a women experience OM for the first time. Afterwards, she looked at her partner with such love, tears filling her eyes. “I want to cry,” she said. “No one has ever put that kind of attention on me.”

Her orgasm reached across the room and warmed my whole body. Tingles ran over the backs of my hands and along my neck. My heart swelled in gratitude. “Yes,” I thought to myself, “this is why I teach this practice.”

She was a reminder of all that OM has taught me and was a testament to the power of the practice. One of my dear friends (and fellow coaches) noted that perhaps this soft part of me that is emerging was being ‘held hostage’ by the fact that I was a ‘hot lay.’

And so, without further ado, here is my list of the Top 20 Hard-Knock Life Lessons from Orgasmic Meditation:

1. Life is so much richer when you aren’t grasping for climax. This way you are open to feeling all the nuances of what is here now, as opposed to clamping down on how you think it should be.

2. Sometimes all you need is a good, clean downstroke to carry you to the bottom, help you peel off an old layer, and bounce back up again.

3. Know when you are full and express your gratitude. It will help you expand your capacity to receive.

4. Every experience begins with desire. It’s your choice whether or not you express it, but if you hold back, there will be static between you and the other person that will make intimacy that much more difficult.

5. Don’t overstroke. When the peak has ended, be courageous enough to change.

6. Before there’s “get off,” you must first put simple attention on what is, approve of it and engage it 100%.

7. Stroke for your pleasure. The moment you start doing something to produce a result, you are setting yourself up for resentment.

8. You’ve already done it “right.” All you have to do is show up and get into position.

9. Focus on sensation. It’s the purest language between you and your partner. Let go of the story you have around who that person is and who you think you are.

10. Life, like an OM, is an experience unto itself, not collateral for a future transaction. You don’t owe anyone anything for participating.

11. Push out through your genitals. The world is hungry to feel your orgasm. It’s the fuel that drives you and the energy that magnetizes that which you desire into your life.

12. Sometime we go up, sometimes we go down. The practice is in riding the waves, rather than drowning in them.

13. Breathe and surrender. The rest will be taken care of.

14. Be willing to ask for the exact stroke you want. Set yourself up so that the people around you can win.

15. “No” is not a rejection of you, but of the offer. Don’t take anything personally.

16. Sometimes you are the stroker and sometimes you are the strokee. Know your role in the moment and play it fully.

17. Oftentimes, it is the lightest stroke that draws out the deepest desire.

18. Slow down. Feel. Include. Expand.

19. Orgasm is big enough to include everything and volatile enough to burn away what is false.

20. The ride alone is the reward.

And so, Ms. Clark-Flory (and various other SF audience members), I can understand why you might snicker and scoff at the ‘bizarre’ and ‘freaky’ practice of Orgasmic Meditation. It does look weird. On the surface, it’s not as glamorous (and therefore not as easy to sell) as other sexual exploits. And, no doubt, it knocks on the doors guarding your pride and intimacy, as it does mine.

But OM is my foundation. I know this not because I have practicing it for over two years, but because my desire keeps bringing me back here (oftentimes against my will). As much as I want to escape into the known world of externally-validated sexuality, my body feels hollow and hungry the moment I turn my back on my practice.

Granted, OM may not be the path for everyone. One’s sexuality is a very personal exploration, as varied as there are people in the world. But I would appreciate a little care, open-mindedness and inclusivity for what resonates with me, just as I extend the same egalitarian attitude towards what works for you.

Or not. Because even if the whole world writes me off as some wacky crackpot, I will continue to do the thing that is most authentic and nourishing to my erotic self. For in the end, she answers to no one but her own desire.