Many of us came to OM wanting a better sex life. Our practice (of tuning into our bodies, learning to interpret its wants and needs, and communicating them through requests and offers) may have quickly shown us, that the sex we craved continued to elude us because we were completely out of touch with our deepest desires.
Beginning to tune in to our truest desires, we likely confronted an abyss of fear and shame. Few of us were spared the socialisation that demonises sexual desire as something that needs to be controlled within the confines of marriage, or at least relationship. Even those of us who do not come from a religious background may have been taught that our raw sexuality has the power to derail our lives - turn us into immoral monsters, dogged by chaos. More than a few us discovered that to be safe, we had traded our sexual yearnings for a desire to be desired - settling for a facsimile of an erotic life, instead of the real thing.
OM became an open invitation to craft a sex life liberated from sexual shame and constructed from the ground up with our turn on and desire. We would have to learn to break the rules, to stop avoiding power and play with it instead, to sit with the discomfort of ambivalence, and learn how to birth ourselves anew through our yearnings.
Entering the realm of open desire, was messy and confusing, but not the chaos we had been taught to fear. Renouncing appropriateness, we may have experienced a new freedom to be ourselves. Pushing out of a life of simply existing, we may have enjoyed surging vitality and a renewed appetite for living.
Whether or not we take the invitation to become fully sexually expressed and to be led by our turn on - through OM, the veil has been lifted on what’s possible, and as a result, our lives will never be the same.
(Reading from the Thursday 26th November International iOM meeting)