From Secret #1 - "Celebrate Your Senses" in MEDITATION SECRETS FOR WOMEN: Discovering Your Passion, Pleasure, and Inner Peace, by Camille Maurine and Lorin Roche, Ph.D.(HarperSanFrancisco, 2001)

Meditation and Sex

The quality of attention in meditation is a lot like sex, when you find the way you like it. It is a delicate internal meeting, a meandering discovery of what you enjoy, and a gradual surrender into more and more pleasure. And afterwards, you feel great! You’re a new woman, totally yourself: connected, renewed, juicy and relaxed.

The process is very similar in meditation and in sex: you get an inner urge or call and give yourself the time and space to sensuously explore. You create the safety to relax. It’s the best when there’s no demand for anything in particular to happen! You simply allow yourself to enjoy and gently unfold. You get interested. You focus on the intriguing sensory details, and as you pay attention your senses get turned on. You get present and you start to let go. Inevitably, just about then, you suddenly find yourself thinking of something else: oh, have to do the laundry, oh, I didn’t call Suzy back. You are “away” for a few seconds. But naturally and eventually, the pleasure calls you back (it is a compelling focus), and as you go with the sensations and movement, you let go a little more. There is a slow dilation deep inside, a melting open. You tap into your succulent nature. This cycle happens in waves, deepening in intensity, until you are absorbed in pleasure, taken over by the energy. Currents of life force surge through you, clearing pathways down to your toes and up through the top of your head, revitalizing every cell and balancing everything.

Meditation is a communion with yourself. You are finding what works for you – your rhythm, your body, your emotions. Its gentle, undemanding touch can help to heal any places of trauma, sexual wounds or inhibition. The secrets you learn in meditation will enrich your sensuality within yourself and how you choose to open sexually with another. Meditative awareness can be a rapturous lovemaking with the universe. This secret awaits you.

Taboo Check
When we slow down and enjoy our senses, we claim our sensuality. Sensuality is defined as surrender to voluptuous experience. Meditation stretches you; you stretch the range of your senses and it feels fabulous. But you will come up against your personal limitations on pleasure. Confront the taboo to pleasure; meet it head-on. Does all this sensuousness sound outrageous, scandalous, or downright wrong? Meditation this earthy may not be what you expected. Does it seem counter-intuitive to what you’ve heard? Let’s take a look at this belief.

When you meditate, you enter a special state of relaxation. Physiological research finds it is a state of rest even deeper than sleep, but you’re awake inside. Part of the time you’re even watching yourself dream. You may never have rested this deeply before, or never been conscious while so relaxed. What does incredible restfulness feel like? What does it feel like to lie in bed or on the beach and be completely at ease? It is delicious; it is sensuous.

Meditation is a distinct state with its own rules and permissions. A major part of learning to meditate is unlearning patterns of stress. You learn not to carry over the rules of work, driving, or being in school to your internal time with yourself. Work is good, but if you make meditation into work, it won’t be respite. It’ll just be one more damn chore on your long list of to-dos. Dispense with the old “no pain/no gain” attitude. It is obsolescent and untrue. Find your way to stretch a little more in the direction of pleasure. Part of your learning in meditation is to tolerate these new sensations.

Unless you give yourself permission to let meditation be sensuous and voluptuous, you’ll tend to limit your range. You will miss half the experience and half the benefits. Women have a natural sensuality and unless interfered with will tend to experience meditation as a caress, deeply pleasurable like a bath. The melted state feels vulnerable and you may wonder if there are rules that you’re breaking. You might even invent some. The very feeling that you are violating taboos is a sign of success; it means that you are going deep. It is a challenge to face this and you need to find ways to support yourself. So surrender to your own experience. Do not surrender to abstract ideas, techniques or gurus. Get this point right away so that you don’t bore yourself to death. Many women are afraid to really feel their sensuousness – or do not know how to – so their meditation becomes a very narrow experience. There is no hidden bonus to limiting yourself; you will simply not want to meditate.

You may as well construct your meditation practice out of what you love and enjoy, because then it will be easier to pay attention and you will want to meditate. One of the great secrets is how much fun meditation is. It can even feel deliciously naughty. Once you know how, you may find it is something you crave, and even prefer over your “vices”. Imagine how luxurious that is!

If you follow your own guidance, you will discover secret pathways, secret pleasures. Each teacher and each student has found little joys about meditation that no one else has discovered, tiny ways to observe. If you were in a garden with a cat, a dog, a child, a gardener, an artist and an entomologist, each one would show you a completely different world of delight, because each one enjoys a special aspect of the garden and explores it in a particular way. We’ve been listening to our students for thirty years and are always learning new things. Find your way – your unique, sensual and womanly way.


From Secret #1 - "Celebrate Your Senses" in MEDITATION SECRETS FOR WOMEN: Discovering Your Passion, Pleasure, and Inner Peace, by Camille Maurine and Lorin Roche, Ph.D.(HarperSanFrancisco, 2001)