Orgasm Times 100? How My Tantric "Awakening" Turned Me Off Sex

I thought I might die. In years of kink writing, I'd never felt anything so scary.

Photo Credit: (Credit: Korionov via Shutterstock)

March 17, 2013 |

For nearly two decades, my social, sexual and philosophical life revolved around the subculture known as S/M, BDSM or leather. I spent every weekend and many weeknights at dungeon parties and S/M discussion groups. I traveled around the country monthly, teaching workshops like “How to Take More Pain … and Get More Pleasure From It” and “Warm Cheeks, Warm Heart.” I wrote and published books about it. I relied on its unique jolt of arousal, endorphins and adrenaline to get me through bad moods, PMS, creative blocks and anything else that was bringing me down. It was a heady era that fed my ego and libido abundantly and my pocketbook at least adequately.

It ended. Not with a whimper — the gradual tailing-off that many S/M folks experience as age and relationships take the edge off their desire — but with a bang.

My frequent co-author Dossie Easton and I were working on a book called “Radical Ecstasy,” charting what is known in S/M-land as “spirituality”: the transcendent, ecstatic, deeply connected state that may occur during and after a good scene. We were enacting intense S/M scenes with one another and our other partners, and the scenes were often chosen to illuminate some aspect of the manuscript: edgy role-plays designed to tap into both personal and cultural histories of trauma and abuse, as well as intense, prolonged experiences of bondage and pain. They were risky scenes both emotionally and physically, challenging every skill we’d acquired during our combined half-century-plus of experience. In the spirit of research, we added tantra and other quasi-religious practices into the mix and took classes in those, too.

It was, as we wrote at the time, “a commitment to extreme, exaggerated spiritual openness over a period of approximately two years, an experiment in living without skin over an unnatural period of time.”

As we neared the endpoint of the work, though, I was beginning to fall apart a little. My social life withered and died; I cried for any reason and for no reason. Something deep inside me was apparently coming closer to the surface.

And then, at a weekend-long tantra workshop, it came. We’d been practicing breath, eye contact, movement, visualization and therapy-like exercises with different partners for a day and a half: everything from the one where you picture your partner as a creature of perfect innocence and vulnerability to the one where you say the things to your partner that you would say to your mother if you dared, all mixed with breathing techniques and pelvic motions. Each exercise peeled away another layer of protection, so we were all wide-open and quivering, naked as oysters, as vulnerable as people can be in the presence of strangers.

For the last exercise, on a balmy Saturday night, we rejoined the partners we came to the class with — in my case, Dossie. There was nothing special about this particular exercise. We were in yabyum — the tantra position where you sit in each other’s laps with your legs wrapped around one another and your bodies lined up heart-to-heart, eye-to-eye — and we were breathing and undulating our hips. No special visualization or verbalization instructions, no particular shoulds or shouldn’ts. And then, whatever was inside me decided to come out.

I began to scream, and I kept screaming. I tipped over backward, arched up off the floor, borne only by the crown of my head and the soles of my feet (with Dossie, caught, straddling me in midair). I was utterly out of control, my body wracked with wave after wave of energy.