OM Training
Session 3
Momentum and Consistency in Your Practice
OM as a Practice
The deeper meaning of taking on Orgasmic Meditation, or really anything, as a practice has three basic aspects:
- You make it a regular part of your schedule. As we mentioned earlier, building consistency and trust in the container is important as is getting used to the steps and stroking technique. Since you’re looking to create a space and time you can trust to greater and greater degrees, keeping to a regular schedule provides another aspect of that solidity. Generally, the more stable and steady your practice is, the more your vigilance will be able to relax.
- You have an intention in mind for doing the practice. There is something you are hoping to get from the experience and are making a conscious choice and effort to pursue it. The intention you have for doing the practice may shift over time, but at any given moment you’re doing it because you want something.
- Let it be an inquiry. You may set the perfect practice schedule and have the most thought out, most beautiful intentions for your practice but when the rubber hits the road it might all fly out the window. And that is ok. Working with any medium—be it paint, or clay, or the body and its senses—gives us an experiential understanding, not just a theoretical one. It means we will be informed by our interaction with the medium itself. Allow your practice to change you, to teach you about yourself. Where do you get impatient and withdraw from it? Where do you get angry with yourself? If you are truly engaged, it should be something that surprises, delights, and frustrates.
The best, most loving thing we can do for ourselves and anybody we OM with is treat each experience you have with OM as an opportunity to learn something. You may learn some aspects of the practice are really easy for you and you may learn some are much more challenging. Each time your attention leaves the present moment you always have the choice to think you did it wrong or to simply ask, “Why?” “What did I feel that I did not want to keep feeling right before my attention went to the future or the past or to some other thought in my head?” No matter what, the invitation of any mindfulness practice is to return to the present moment again and again, each time like the first time.
As in OM As in Life
From our experience with discovering new feeling tones in OM, we begin to learn to appreciate new, corresponding feeling tones in life—in other people, in foods we used to avoid, in the natural world, in our inner worlds, and in ways we never have before, or haven’t in a very long time. We can only identify with that which we can relate to in some way and since we have expanded our range to include more feeling tones, naturally we find we can relate to more of everything and are more relatable ourselves as a result. Unsurprisingly, this recognition of likeness makes us feel more connected. A part of. The feeling tones we now allow to resonate within ourselves we recognize in others. We can increasingly be with everything as it is and everyone as they are, at their native feeling tone. Nobody and nothing has to pretend to be anything other than themselves and itself for us anymore and vice versa. Our range of expression may increase. This wholeness and honesty confer a natural, organic, arising sense of intimacy. We now have an ability to relate and exchange with everybody and everything like an OM—mutually influencing and feeling deeply. With our bodies and nervous systems calibrated, our new capacity to meet any feeling tone in resonance allows us to enter situations we used to react within and maintain our center, like a gyroscope shows a pilot which direction is down no matter what orientation the plane might be in. We become free to interact with our lives in real time.
Meet the Body with Approval
In OM, it can be helpful to set a deliberate intention to meet whatever your body feels with positive regard. This can be hard! Meeting the body with approval is a decision we make that any of the body’s communications are welcome in the mind. “Wait a minute,” you might say. “What if it’s painful? Why would I want to welcome that?” Because the alternative is to stay numb to it. The same goes for any feeling tone, sensation, or emotion. You can decide if you need to respond to them in some way after the fact. But the first decision we make is that the body is inherently friendly.
On Learning
Remember, learning something new is often a challenge. We begin by not knowing what we don’t know and then once we’ve had some experience we begin to realize how much we don’t know. Don’t worry. Every OMer goes through this exact learning process. The feeling of being consciously incompetent lasts for a while and then, just as simply as ice turns to liquid, at some point you will experience a phase transition. Suddenly, you will feel something or experience something in an OM that you’ve never experienced before. It will be intriguing and you will want to practice again to see if it happens again. It might not, but then something else will and that will be just as interesting. There is no timetable for progress. In fact, many practitioners report they find the practice goes in cycles—that they might feel as though they’ve “really gotten it” only to come back a week later feeling like a beginner again. Give yourself some space to have an experience.
Journaling
During an OM, we find ourselves in a similar situation—able to feel a perpetually wider degree of raw sensation that often feels fleeting. OM Journaling is the method we use to return to those fleeting moments and become intimate with them.
Orgasmic Meditation helps us to attune to our bodies. We learn to sense a degree of richness and subtlety we might normally overlook. While we learn to grow our attention and our capacity to notice it all, oftentimes there is so much happening it’s impossible to track and attend to every single feeling and detail in real time. We share frames at the end of the OM to begin the process of digesting those complex, sensory experiences. The practice of frames is rooted in simplicity—a frame is one moment, like a drop of time, that we communicate in value-neutral language. Because there is so much more that happens—often, several moments and various sensory experiences occur during the OM—than what we can fit into a single frame, this is where journaling comes in.
The process of OM Journaling invites us to enter our memories and let them tell us what we were unable to hear when we were bound by time. We take a snapshot of a moment and blow it up to portrait size. We zoom in. Maybe when we try to remember the OM, it feels like a jumble, or maybe we have vivid memories to express. Either way, the practice of OM Journaling gives us the opportunity to take a little more time to slow down and revisit each moment, each subtlety, each bit of sensory information, and the impression it left on us.
Like frames, we’re pairing the felt-sense impressions of the OM with our mind and vocabulary. You can think of it like the body teaching us its sensory language; each OM offers a new opportunity to discover how the body and the mind want to interact today. We suggest you let it be an exploration: How do you describe that moment when a warm, tingly sensation moves from your pelvis to your chest? Or when a light, feathery heat pulses in your chest? What did you learn about the way you respond to more pressure, or what happened when the stroke quickened?
In an OM Journal, we are free to talk about any aspect of the OM we choose and to go into as much detail as we like on our own terms. It could take the form of a play-by-play, or a narrative, or even a conversation. You can choose.
We suggest starting small. Pick just one feeling and see how much you can mine it for detail.
Ask your coach for some examples!