SARA’S ACCOUNT

(Sara is a thirty-eight year old woman. She has been a member of a spiritual community for eleven years; Sara has been married eight years and has no children. She is a renunciate who serves her community full time and has been initiated into an advanced level of practice. She related a transcendental sexual experience that occurred when she and her husband were away from home.)

Actually there was an experience, now that I think about it, which did actually cause a transformation. I don’t know if I can talk about it because it involved kind of an
unusual circumstance. I’m not sure. Well, let’s put it this way. It involved a circumstance that was not with Robert but with a woman. We were using a vibrator, and she had it on my clitoris probably for half an hour. It was a really intense, big, heavy vibrator. Something happened in the midst of that because when she first started I was afraid because of the pain I always experienced when my clitoris was touched too hard or too much. And I felt that pain, and I felt that around the pain was this contraction. I wondered what would happen if I relaxed the contraction. So I relaxed the contraction, and the pain changed, until it was only pleasure on a purely physical level, and all of a sudden….that’s when I first experienced the most vivid, obvious vision of the current of energy in body. And it was the first time I actually felt the Goddess force, the Shakti, as a being, not just as energy, come through me….

I was her, I mean my body just became a corpse. It was just a box. The feeling was simply forced, the overwhelm of the nervous system….The intensity of the stimulation on the nervous system and hormones produced an actual effect…..It wasn’t psychological, it was intuitive. There was a shift – maybe tat’s psychological- there was a shift in my sense of being. I was still noticing this, but I was not noticing it as I am now sitting here noticing the room.

All that was left of the noticing was just the noticing function. It wasn’t Sara noticing it. It was the noticing function awareness itself, but what was happening was a being coming through me. It almost felt like somebody actually coming in…It was definitely a possession.

There were two of us, and she was revealing an aspect of existence that could be know bodily, and it was energy in the body and he heart. It was a wild, wild crazy woman, wild eyed. I felt my eyes bugging out of my head and my tongue sticking out of my mouth and my hands like this…..and I started speaking in tongues also, which completely blew my mind. As soon as the vibrator was taken off….that was it.

But this changed my experience of sexuality forever… It blew up this kind of thing you have about sex, the good feeling you get from sexual experience, or try to get. It broke that because it was so obviously about submission. It wasn’t about me trying to do something. It was about me not doing something, but rater receiving or allowing it, rather than doing and creating and making.

(When asked whether she had an orgasm, Sara responded :)

It was continuous, uninterrupted…This was definitely something else, which I’ve not really experienced completely like that ever again.

(Sara was next asked whether any psychic changes resulted.)

Oh yes, definitely. From the standpoint of spiritual practice its always full of insight, a sort of insight that comes afterward, about how I shut down from the ecstasy in my usual state, because its obvious that the ecstasy is inherent feeling at the body(level), of my being…and also naturally it would affect my meditation. I would be in a much more relaxed and receptive disposition physically, emotionally, and psychically when I sit down to meditate….I don’t know what this has to do with anything, but meditation becomes very sexual, whole bodily, playing with all those hormones. Very often in my meditation there is a stage as its deepening where it goes through something like love play in the hormonal sense. I feel the heat and change of energy and so forth, and then it just cools out. That’s when deep meditation begins.

Its definitely bliss into ecstasy because the bliss is something that I feel in the body. The ecstasy is something where the body is gone. Energy goes up. Its communion. Its love. Its transcendent, the energy feeling, transcended, even the light I m talking about in meditation, and gone just into light.

…When my meditation gets very deep it affects my spiritual life, because when we lay down together I’m already available, although the direction is not predictable, whereas sexuality very directly will affect my meditation. Meditation doesn’t always have the predictable effect because there’s so much complexity in the relationship. Even when I m having a deep meditation, I can be completely uptight…That’s the ecstasy part really, the loss of the self-sense, separate, mindlessness.