In the year 2000 I entered in my first tantric space. It was in NYC, I have flown all the way from Europe for a weekend course that a boyfriend at the time had recommended me to attend. I had developed premature ejaculation and intimacy was painful. Every time I became intimate with him I would fear that I would come in no time. That made me feel very inadequate. I did not know at the time but that premature ejaculation had many layers, most of them had nothing to do with my sexuality: I was dealing with coming out to my family and rejected by my parents. Secretly I so wanted to be a ‘slut’ and have sex with many, but in reality I was crippled by judgment and I would be the first one criticising somebody doing that. The years of being bullied at school, as the other kids probably sensed I was gay before me, created a survivor. I had thickened my skin by building up an armoury of uber-masculinity: the gym was one of my crutches. I also attended my first meditation course, to try to cope with high levels of anxiety.
That weekend course was pretty daunting. The first time I did an exercise with one partner that involved genital touching, I came in 2 mins. If I needed a proof that I was a ‘loser’ in sex (that was the language I used against myself at the time) then I had it. The following day it was a longer exercise. I was going to be touched for 90 mins by two men. One only stimulating my genitals. I was convinced that the exercise would be over for me in no time, but at the same time I had spent so much money to be in that room, that it would be crazy not to attend.
The following day I volunteered to be first to receive, I wanted to have it all done quickly. They offered me a blindfold and I took it, I did not expect that the blindfold was going to be a game changer. Not being able to see, allowed me to have an internal focus and really drop into the sensations in my body rather than being aroused by being vouyeristic looking at the other men naked in the room. I could not expect what it was about to happen.
My first multiorgasmic experience
There were two men massaging my body, one in the lower half and the other in the upper half. I remember waves of arousal, but there was something different. The arousal was like a tingling sensation moving from my cock as an electric current through my body. I never wanted to come. At some point it was so intense that my fingers got into spasm. I remember begging for somebody to uncurl my hands while that current was possessing me and making me to physically convulse in the bed like if I had an episode of epilepsy. It was so weird, but at the same time I was not scared, it felt like I was tapping into an unknown reservoir of energy that I never had encountered before. I felt completely drunk by it. At some point I felt that part of me was leaving my body and I had what some people has described as an out of body experience. This had happenned once before, the night I first had sex with a man 6 years before. It has never happened again. That day in NYC changed the course of my life as I knew it. I was having what the tantrics describe as a ‘peak experience’.
A peak experience
In Barbra Carrellas book Urban Tantra she describes peak experiences as an encounter with ecstatic bliss. Ecstatic bliss has a quality of expansion and they do change your view of the world. It’s like suddenly you have experienced something that your mind could never have imagined and as a result life can not be the same again.
Often when we think about ecstasy the idea that comes to us is the ‘big bang’ the massive build up of ‘feel good energy’ the cascade of happy hormones like dopamine. Carrellas talks also about the after glow effect of that ecstatic experience. I remember that after that moment of incredible arousal, it came a whole two hours where I felt I was kind of ‘drunk’. I felt full of the most inmense love by everything and everybody. The world around me felt crisper and with a Technicolor quality. I was looking at things differently and everything felt unusually alive.
I have never had experienced psychedelics before, but this felt like a truly psychedelic experience. However I was drunk by love and all of it was inside of me, I did not take a pill.
Ecstasy is not adrenaline
Carrellas also talks about how in the Western world we are so use to try to find ‘external’ thrills to give us that adrenaline quick. Often we can also do that with sex. The problem with adrenaline thrills is that they often have an unhealthy side and can quickly turn into depletion. More and more sex, shopping, money, alcohol, drugs…. does not often make us happier, but just simply more dependent from the thrill. Also our systems need bigger kicks every time to get the thrill going and we can easily get hooked into unhealthy and not sustainable processes.
And yes, we can also consume sex in the same manner. Sex at its best should be life reaffirming, enhancing of our beings, make us feel more connected to ourselves and to others. Sex however, can also be consumed and used in order to fill a gap of dissatisfaction. It can be turned into another adrenaline kick, and not the blissful kind.
The qualities of ecstasy
When I go back to think about the qualities of that time in NYC when I encountered bliss, I realised that behind it was: being present, dropping a need to perform and surrendering of my expectations. I realised that on the second day in that weekend, my mind stopped fighting. I stopped trying to perform, I accepted that I may come and that it was ok. I really dropped into body sensation and gave myself permission to feel without having to give anything back. My mind did liberate my body from its made up prison.
Osho describes bliss as an opportunity to feel ‘timelessness’, when one is in the middle of an orgasm or a multiorgasmic experience, time seems to disappear, there is only the here and now. He also mentions how we become ‘egoless’ as our sense of self becomes the experience, and if we are with another partner we can just become ‘one’. He also talks about how bliss makes us blend with nature, how being in that egoless space makes us to be taken by the force of the universe, by something that we do not control.
Sex as an spiritual practice
Since then I have had a chance to really dive into tantra with my work with T4GM, both as a student and also as a teacher.
I now lead men into practices to explore the potential for growth that sex brings us. I was never the spiritual type, but tantric sex has allowed me to tap into a potential that I did not know it existed. It made me connect with life beyond the construction that I had created. A construction that often was a prison and that would not let me grow. The pain of premature ejaculation was ultimately my get out of jail free card, and tantra was my vehicle to freedom.
I will be teaching with my amazing colleague Armand a full weekend of ecstasy in Manchester (UK) this is Igniting Your Sexual Power:
29 & 30 April-23 – Manchester, UK – Read More / Book Here: https://www.tantra4gaymen.com/event/igniting-sexual-power-manchester/
Or for a deeper journey read about the Diploma week on Ecstasy & Orgasm in July in the UK here: – https://www.tantra4gaymen.com/event/ecstasy-orgasm-with-armand-pep/
Tantric Freedom 