OM Training

The Excellence of the Senses

We know excellence when we see it, hear it, taste it, feel it. 

 The poet, knowing the ring of truth, who captivates thousands with her words, intonation, intention, and silence. The musician who crafts the music and lyrics that soothe our soul, or put us in the zone. The photographer with the eye for how to work with light and shadows and exposure to create the perfect sense of nostalgia. The gardener—master of water, sunlight, and pruning—who grows the perfect rose.

Excellence isn’t magic. It’s the result of quality attention. Of using the finely tuned senses to combine factors into something that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

You might say each moment of excellence is a chord, not a note. It’s the resonance we feel between things. It’s a relationship. Between flour, water, yeast, salt, heat, and time. Between pressure, speed, length, passion, bow, and string.

 And the sensitivity, the attunement of the one bringing them all together in resonance. 

We can feel when it’s a little off the mark. Or a lot. We can taste it. We can see it. We can smell it. We can hear it. We can feel it. We just know.

We know excellence through the senses. Our bodies are our greatest instruments. Attune the body and it will draw you to excellence. It doesn’t always feel good, but it feels true. 

Attunement requires incredible sensitivity. To tune your senses—your instrument—to sense resonance, you need something that offers you the most precise feedback possible. In the body, our sensitivity is based in our nervous system. Each nerve carries sensory feedback to the brain, helping us take in our environment and make every decision: what to go toward, what to avoid, when to be firm, and when to be gentle. So, to attune the nervous system, you need a standard of accuracy—something more precise, something capable of distinguishing a higher degree of subtlety than what you already have. You’d want the highest concentration of nerve endings available on the human body. The clitoris has around 8,000 nerve endings—the highest number of any body part compressed into an organ the size of a pencil eraser. With 8,000 nerve endings, the clitoris, and the person it’s connected to, understands subtlety. And to match and navigate that degree of sensitivity, you’d want to select the most dexterous part of the human body, the part with the finest motor control available—the tip of the index finger—to pair with it. When the clitoris and the tip of the index finger make contact, the potential for resonance is infinite. As is the potential for excellence. 

Introduction to Feeling Tones and Resonance

Two of the key principles you’ll need to start thinking about are the notions of resonance and feeling tones. 

What is a feeling tone?

Each of our senses offers us a different mode of perception. The eyes see, the nose smells, the mouth tastes, the ears hear, and the body experiences physical sensations.

And while no two senses do the same thing, they all share some common features. 

Each sense organ has a range within which we comfortably take in the world around us. We have a ceiling—where we hit a limit of how loud, or bright, or strong stimuli is and we feel compelled to make it stop, for example by looking away or plugging our ears—and we have a floor, where it’s too quiet, or mild to register.

The sense organs can also go out of range in other ways. There are colors of light that cannot be seen by the human eye, and there are sounds the human ear cannot hear.

The senses also overlap in how we process and describe them. The word “rich,” for example, could be used to describe a variety of sensory experiences. We might say a heavy, dense, warm, chocolatey cake is “rich” the same way we’d say that a slow, long, firm draw of a bow across the strings of a violin creates a “rich,” sonorous note. 

On the other end of the spectrum, a key lime pie has a tart, sour flavor. A violin plays a high, shrill note. Somebody might throw the curtains open in a dark room. The common word? Bright. Bright flavor, bright note, bright light.  

If you forget about the specific context in each of these, we see that rich describes experiences that have a feeling of gravity—an amount of weight or pressure, density, and slowness to them—while bright feels like it’s in the opposite direction, more high pitched.

Pressure can be measured visually in terms of brightness—bright and dim. When it comes to taste and smell, we know mild or strong and when it comes to touch, we know the physical sensation of firm or light.

It’s almost like each sense is speaking a different dialect of the same language. There seems to be something universal to all of them that both includes and transcends each one. In OM, we refer to these common sensory impressions as feeling tones. 

Each shift of one variable—pressure, speed, etc.—changes the sensory experience and thus the feeling tone we perceive. 

As we continue through the modules, we’ll show you how OM can help connect you to what you’re feeling and how you can share that with others. You’ll be building fluency in the language of feeling tones and sensation—the language of the body. 

Strokes

In OM, the various combinations of variables—pressure, speed, length, direction, and location—are referred to as strokes, which we perceive in terms of tactile sensation at the point of contact between finger and clitoris. So, for instance, you might find resonance with a firm, slow, medium-length downstroke on the left side of the clitoris for a period of time, and then you might find it again with a light, medium-speed, medium-length upstroke on the same spot a few moments later. 

Unlike a violin where the strings always produce the same tones, the tactile experience of stroking a clitoris is ever-changing. The clitoris engorges, expands, and contracts, becoming firmer or softer, and changes dimensions and pliability throughout the experience, presenting an ever-varying tactile surface that can be felt by both partners while neither has any control over it. The practice rests on both OMers placing their attention on the point of connection where the clitoris meets the finger, each participating according to their role as stroker or strokee. This staying present with a dynamically shifting object of attention is what puts the meditation in Orgasmic Meditation. 

Introducing Vigilance

In cases where we feel our safety being threatened, we have a faculty of mind that kicks in to make sure we’re safe in such situations.

Science refers to the state of protective alertness as vigilance. Vigilance is related to the learned avoidance of pain we talked about earlier and refers to the functions of our minds that are ready to protect us from actual or potential threats. Vigilance is responsible for the extra-sensitive awareness we feel when walking down a quiet street at night and times when we sense somebody has an ulterior motive. Because so many of our negative past experiences are associated with interpersonal relationships and the feelings of disappointment, hurt, confusion, and powerlessness that seem to come part and parcel with them it makes sense that vigilance would rise up to protect us in the face of a physically connected experience like Orgasmic Meditation. A variety of cultural expectations regarding reciprocation and genital contact can also come into play. These expectations can raise vigilance because we feel pressure and obligation to do something we may not want to do. Vigilance is like a loyal guard dog—we want its protection under the right circumstances yet we don’t want it snarling at everybody and everything. 

How can we retrain this part of ourselves?

Enter the Container

Orgasmic Meditation takes place within a set of standardized, mutually agreed-upon parameters we refer to as the container. You’ve probably experienced a container before while playing a game. Games have rules like you can’t use your hands in soccer or you can only move certain pieces on the chessboard in a particular way. Break the fundamental, defining characteristics of the game and you’re not playing the game anymore.

In OM, the function of the container is to relax our vigilance. The container demonstrates to vigilance that the potential dangers that occupy it have already been mitigated, thereby relieving it of its duties. Quite literally, it is meant to contain us safely so our vigilance does not have to. Over time, the repetition of OMing within the container builds a sense of consistency and predictability. As a result, our vigilance relaxes to greater and greater degrees, allowing us more and more contact with the parts of ourselves vigilance had previously obscured. As we learn to rely on the container for solidity, we naturally begin to loosen up. Each aspect of the container is unchanging and non-negotiable, further adding to its dependability. 

An Attention Training Practice 

The container allows us to enter a space for a period of time with our full attention on the sensation, or feeling tones, we physically sense emanating from the clitoris—for both stroker and strokee. As we use our attention to match the feeling tones by adjusting the stroke, while no longer needing to block any of the spectrum of sensation out of fear of danger, we are offered the opportunity to witness our habits of mind. We find that even with our vigilance relieved, we still, even at this subtle level, and now more noticeably, gravitate toward some strokes and away from others. We may find fast strokes evoke certain feeling tones that make us uneasy or cause us to brace, that light ones feel irritating, that we only want slow strokes because they feel so pleasurably comfortable, or that strangely we don’t seem to be able to slow down as much as we might want to. We may notice sometimes we find resonance easily, and other times we cannot find the resonant stroke no matter how many strokes we try. But then we find one, and that one leads to another, and another. Bit by bit, stroke by stroke, our mental reactivity decreases as we learn to meet each new feeling tone while our palate—our sensational vocabulary and fluency—expands into the previously occupied space. 

This is the process of attention training. 

As we are able to maintain our attention on the sensation we feel to greater and greater degrees, we begin to discover that the feeling tones we had blocked out and hidden behind our reactivity weren’t themselves bad or harmful; they had just been rendered unknown, opaque. We see that every feeling tone, at its essence—while it may not be our preference to feel it, revealed out from under the fog of our reactive tendencies—has an innate beauty the same way every note in a symphony—sonorous or lively, dark or cheerful—has a beauty and place in and of itself. 

Aspects of the Container

Let’s continue our conversation about the container. Vigilance looks out at an unpredictable, dynamic world and does its best to offer a protective solidity against its potential dangers. The container flips the script by offering us solidity so we are free to become more dynamic and lifelike instead. Each aspect of the container is designed to address one or more aspects of vigilance by removing the potential that something unwanted or surprising might occur. The aspects of the container are:

•     The steps of OM must be followed in order and without omission or modification
•     Fifteen-minute timed stroking period.
•     Stroker remains fully clothed while the strokee only removes the necessary clothing to expose the genitals.
•     Stroker must use gloves, regardless of the nature of the OM partners’ existing relationship.

Consistent, Non-Negotiable Steps 

By requiring the steps of OM to be followed in order and without omission, the container relaxes vigilance in two key ways. 

The first is that at the outset, not having to negotiate—and scan for danger in the process—allows vigilance to remain inactive. Furthermore, if practitioners had to haggle, it would naturally incentivize them to only be fully present for what they had bartered for. It would be a purpose-defeating start to an OM. 

The second is that by insisting these particular steps proceed exactly as described, the container eliminates the potential for being surprised during the progression of the steps, specifically being surprised by something unwanted that it might have to mount an objection to. Remember, vigilance is ready to react. Letting it know it will not have to is the only thing that relaxes it. Predictability is the key. 

Clothing Removal

By requiring the removal of only the clothing necessary to expose the strokee’s genitals, the container keeps OM’s unique context clear from ambiguities. This is helpful for the stroker as well, as their attention is meant to remain on what they can feel in their body and their finger at the point of contact for the duration of the OM. Undressing in any way aside from removing footwear or perhaps wearing more comfortable pants draws unnecessary attention away from this primary focus. The same is true for the strokee. Undressing beyond what’s necessary introduces the potential for distraction for both partners and opens unnecessary room for context drift. 

Mandating the use of a protective barrier, i.e. gloves, is another vigilance-reducing measure for both partners. The vaginal area discharges fluids that aren’t necessary to touch barehanded and may present a health danger for the stroker. For the strokee, it removes concerns regarding how thoroughly the stroker might have washed their hands or what they might introduce into this particularly sensitive organ. It only takes a microscopic amount of bacteria to cause an infection, and there is always a chance of this without gloves. That chance, small as it is, is enough to keep vigilance active. Veteran OMers attest that the gloves do not interfere with the benefits of the practice for either partner.

Co-Reception 

The only way to be in touch with the sensation you feel in your body is to be in the present moment in your mind. The two are practically synonymous. If you’re thinking about the future or the past, you are, by definition, occupied by the thoughts of your mind. In OM, the further our attention gets from the present moment, the further we find ourselves from the sensation we’re able to feel. For many practitioners, one of the greatest obstacles to staying present in the OM practice is the idea of reciprocation—that having received, it is then proper, considerate, and only fair to return the favor in kind or degree. We all know how it goes—Person A gives to Person B, then Person B gives something they both agree is of equal or acceptable value back to Person A. 

The key to becoming fully present and exiting the reciprocation mindset for both partners is introducing the concept of co-reception. Co-reception presents the notion that there is enough good to be had in both roles of the OM concurrently; that both partners agree to receive at the same time albeit through different body parts—one simply moves and one does not. Co-reception says anything happening in the present moment, regardless of how seemingly insignificant or dissatisfying it might be, is more valuable than any hypothetical future outcome simply due to the fact that one actually exists and the other does not. This mindset has the potential to shift each partner’s attention substantially. The strokee, no longer believing there could be anything to give back, can relax and simply place her attention on the present moment. The stroker’s attention is then freed up to do the only thing that—according to the principle of co-reception—will actually bring the only true benefit to both there could possibly be which is to allow their attention to be entirely absorbed in what they can sense at the tip of their stroking finger right now. Because all good is suddenly located in the present, there is no reason for either partner to think about the future; to plan for or try to prevent anything from happening in it. 

Goallessness

There are few things more anxiety producing to a competent human being than feeling incompetent in a consequential moment. Suddenly, our goal-oriented minds are on the body’s terms without a linear, clearly defined map to success. It is no surprise that when placed in an experience that calls for a process-based orientation, our goal-trained minds panic. Without a prescription for “doing it right” and producing a certain outcome, how will we know our value? How will we survive? Naturally, our attention reaches for what appears to be the nearest knowable, achievable goal—to induce climax. On the one hand, it seems like a relief; like dry land after being lost at sea. But it comes at a high price. Attention that could be free, open, and available for the perception of any feeling tone the body wanted to express is suddenly recruited in the service of forcing this particular outcome to occur. Ironically, trying to tell the body what it should do usually has the opposite effect. 

We’re out of the present moment, fixated on a goal in order to avoid the discomfort of being at the mercy of the body. The feeling tones that are actually there to be explored and felt go unmet and instead of feeling relieved, the body starts to feel congested with their buildup. Even if one or both partners does succeed in making the body climax, it will have been at the expense of whatever else was there to be felt; it will feel the opposite of connected.

 This is also not to say climax itself is bad or wrong or that the goal of OM is NOT to climax. In the course of following the body and stroking for resonance, it’s entirely possible the body will want to climax at some point. Climax is one thing bodies do. The point is: how that climax comes about determines how we will feel and what benefit—or detriment—we will derive from it having happened.

In OM, competency is measured by the ability to stay present with whatever naturally arises—to treat the experience of OM as an unfolding process. With process-oriented attention, the question shifts from “How quickly can I get to my chosen destination?” to “How does this experience naturally want to unfold?” Instead of imposing our narrow agenda on the experience, we let the experience inform us and as a result we build our capacity to be with whatever the body, the OM, or—by extension—life brings us.