Energy Orgasm at 30,000 feet
4 min read
You know how your body gets louder when you ignore its bids for attention—like that tightness in your neck that creeps upward into your clenched jaw? The reverse is true, too: when you tend to what pleases the body, that pleasure expands. Sometimes involuntarily, and quite miraculously.
Four years ago, about a year into working with various psychedelic medicines in therapeutic contexts, I took a business trip to Chicago. Leaving home before dawn for an early morning flight always made me feel thin-skinned like a homesick camper, but especially so after working from home for many months. I’d fallen out of work-travel practice.
By the time my plane reached its cruising altitude, I’d settled into a fixed and mindless gaze out the window. The sun was up and the sky was endlessly blue. Just blue. Flat and one-dimensional. No dramatic clouds, no impressive sunrise. No texture at all. The world beyond the window seemed equally real and imagined.
After a while, the vast, horizonless sky made me suddenly dizzy. I gripped the armrests as an inexplicable sensation filled my chest, my heart heaving with joy and sorrow, simultaneously. It was an unbidden, unnamed current with no narrative, only force. I had the presence of mind to breathe through the feeling—taking one deep breath, then another as my eyes absorbed the sky’s unchanging blue.
The poet David Whyte, who often speaks of horizons, came to my mind:
“Horizons mark the threshold between the world that I inhabit and the one that seems to wait for me, between a world I can almost understand and what lies beyond the imagination of my present life.”
Why was it, I wondered, that his words found me then—floating in a horizonless sky? My body answered in his accent as my heaving heart gave way to a pooling sensation in my belly: “It’s the part of you that’s already matured into the next dispensation of your existence.”
A low vibration moved without warning along my spine—like a shiver in the cold. It was my autonomic nervous system shaking me from the inside out with elemental force. Then began a pulsing in my vulva, faint at first, then stronger like a cord of energy vibrating along a vertical axis from my pelvis to the crown of my head. “It’s the part of you that lives at the center of the pattern.”
I closed my eyes and yielded to what I can only describe as a delicious longing from deep inside me. But for what? It was unlike any carnal desire I’d ever known, all-knowing and all-consuming. I sensed it might create or equally, destroy. Whyte’s words returned again: “It’s the part of you that already knows it’s going to have to give every last thing away.”
Just then my seatmate, unaware of the fire consuming the quiet traveler to his left, reached for his ginger ale, jostling my elbow. I shifted in my seat, blushing, as he gave me a nominal smile.
***
My airplane experience left me with an ill-defined but strong sense of possibility. My body, in recent months, had been like a dormant machine, slowly awakening to the hum of electricity. Now, the resurgence was overwhelming, intoxicating. But for my husband, it was confusing. He knew something was happening with me, but he didn’t understand what.
One day, after spending the afternoon with one of his closest male friends, my husband asked, cautiously, in a way that suggested they’d been discussing their wives and their dissatisfying sex lives, “Is it menopause that’s eliminated your libido?”
I just about dropped the heap of hot-from-the-dryer laundry in my arms. I couldn’t remember hearing my husband use the words “menopause” or “libido” before and certainly not in the same sentence.
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” I said, measured. Things had changed in me, yes. But I was more alive than I had been in decades.
True, we weren’t having sex, but mine was not a sexual moratorium; it was a phase change, like transforming from a liquid to a gas. I’d felt lighter every day since Delta Flight 5643. Given the opening, I told him about what had happened on the airplane, about swimming in a horizonless sky and feeling part of its vastness as something nascent emerged in me, something I could not even name. This was what turned me on these days, I told my husband. It was the mystery and magic unfolding within that electrified me.
My husband looked stunned—surprised by my confession, and perhaps a little intimidated by the force of its delivery. I made no apologies for my desires and who they did or didn’t include.
“So that’s what’s going on with me,” I added.
“Well,” he said, tentatively, “that’s good to know.” Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. My perplexed husband wasn’t sure if he’d be included in this new version of my desire. Neither was I.
***
I love you.
Juliette
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