Hermitage V: Tonglen

I don’t share a lot of explicit detail here about my sexual practices. Our erotic lives are dense with personal history, with private meanings that we don’t even ourselves consciously understand. I'd rather make room for people to explore their own inner landscapes than clutter the space between us with my own psychodynamic tchachkes. (Then too, maybe sometimes a still-internalized fear of shaming also holds me back.)

But long walks in the woods have a way of clarifying things, like when to put your money where your mouth is. So after two hours out on the trail this afternoon, here we are: sex in the hermitage. Masturbation, prayer, and how one can flow into the other. 

 

I’ll start by sharing something about me that will speak to some and not to others. As tortured as my relationship to wanking was all through my adolescence (and maybe because my relationship to it was so tortured in those formative years) it remains a staple of my erotic life. In recent years , men like me have increasingly claimed the emerging label of the “solosexual.”  Thank God for a website like Bateworld. Thank God for groups like the New York Jacks and the San Francisco Jacks and the Rain City Jacks, for every small local group some generous man is willing to host, and for periodic events like Healthy Friction. 

It’s not simply that I masturbate, like virtually all human males over the age of  thirteen or so. It’s not simply that my own cock and balls offer me pleasure and satisfaction beyond what most of us are willing to admit, given generations of repression and censure, contempt and derision for the most universal and readily available sexual experience men can have. It’s that I find my own body intensely erotic. Stroking myself to orgasm means as much to me as sex with partners. 

I’d never want to face a choice between sex with myself and sex with others. If I had to, I’d probably pick myself, behind Door Number One. I can and do relate lovingly to all sorts of people I don’t and would never have sex with. On the other hand, when it comes to sex, whenever I’m in the mood, by happy coincidence so am I. 

Solosexuality involves a lot more, though, than just an easy date:  the difference between a quick wank to get off and the deliberate, extended cultivation of pleasure, the practice of “edging,” whether for an hour or two or over whole days or weeks; the conscious, intentional spreading of energy and focus to the erotic capacities of one's whole body. Paradoxically, some solosexual men are as reluctant to reach ejaculatory orgasm as any devout Catholic schoolboy of the 1950’s. Not in fear of mortal sin, but in commitment to the heightened energy and juiciness of staying open to desire for as long as possible. 

Like many men for whom masturbation isn’t second best, or last resort, I do indeed want to share my solosexuality with others. I’d much rather have the opportunity to masturbate with another man, or with a group of men, than always experience the joy of my own body alone. I won’t try to explain this right now for those who don’t already “get it.” The depth of the fraternal bond between comrades that I’m talking about is either comprehensible to you, or it isn’t. You’re fine, either way: if you don’t get it, we’re just different. If you do get it, let me know if you’re free Sunday afternoons.

 

Even mentioning the potential depth of that bond, though, witnesses to how intensely I want to understand my solosexual side in spiritual terms. It’s as important for me to do so as it is to understand my sexual relationships with others in spiritual terms. 

When solosexual men find spaces to share about our experience, it emerges pretty quickly how profoundly centered we feel, sinking into the pleasure we give ourselves. When we go deeper, without distraction, everything else can drop away, just as it does in the most intense interpersonal lovemaking. We can find ourselves as blissfully absorbed in the present moment as we might be in deep meditation. Arguably, such an experience is deep meditation, as masturbation gurus like Bruce Grether, and more recently Jason Armstrong, have argued.  

So, finally--back to my week of hermitage, in the woods of southern Indiana... 

Two weeks before I made this pilgrimage, I formed an intention  to spend my time here cultivating and raising my erotic energy without release until the final night of my retreat. I don’t know why. Tantric practitioners talk a lot about the benefits of semen retention. I’ve never been drawn to the prescriptions of Indian ayurveda, at least not as passed on in the West. But I understand from direct experience how  emotionally open I’ve become on retreats where I’ve been encouraged to refrain from ejaculation, how intensely aware I’ve become of a Divine Presence enlivening me and deepening my connections with others. Something (where did this come from?) led me to choose this path for myself during this present week of prayer and simplified living. I asked a far-away friend (yes, another solosexual, and a tantrika into the bargain) to support my resolve, checking in daily by phone to anchor my intention.  

And then, it just started getting weirder, if you’re already wondering what planet I’m writing from. The night I arrived,  I set up my altar, burned incense, hung fabric and prayer flags around the room. The next day, six men were due to arrive for the weekend in response to my invitation to share two days of intentional community. As I prepared and consecrated the cabin,  a conviction enveloped me that I was laying my erotic energy at their feet. I’d use the emotional openness I hoped would result in order to hold space for them more lovingly throughout their two days as my guests. Upon their departure, I’d lay my erotic energy at the foot of my altar, in service to myself, and in communion with the Holy One who is, in the end, the best lover of all--as John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila knew so well. 

As the week has gone on, in these later days of solitude, breath and genital stimulation have complemented and balanced each other in my erotic practice: genital touch energizing breath, and breath enabling a heightened control of the urge to ejaculate. Seated before my altar, I imagine myself engaged in a version of the Tibetan Buddhist practice of tonglen: taking in the difficulties experienced by others, transforming them, and then breathing out healing and peace for their benefit and the benefit of all sentient beings. I’ve found myself praying through masturbation, found myself transmuting masturbation into prayer. Most vividly of all this morning when my friend checking in on the phone was as caught up in his erotic trance as I was in mine. 

I won’t describe more specifically how I’ve pursued all this,  visualized it, verbalized it, nor about how I intend to ritualize the release of energy that will close my weeklong practice. Partly because the details  are as likely to shut some readers out as to invite them in. But partly because (and maybe this is just a different way of saying the same thing), like many initiations into esoteric ritual practice, the transmission has to occur face to face and in living speech, when the time is right.

Even if you’ve drawn a blank on a lot of what I’ve described, you’ve still persevered to these last lines. If so, I hope that you feel invited into a calling we do indeed share as queer spiritual seekers living our lives in male bodies: to unite flesh with spirit; to forge links between earth and heaven; to become ourselves the ladder on which angels ascend and descend. If, on the other hand, you’re a brother solosexual--may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart bless you on your way.