For nearly two decades, my social, sexual and philosophical life revolved around the subculture known as S/M, BDSM or leather. I spent every weekend and many weeknights at dungeon parties and S/M discussion groups. I traveled around the country monthly, teaching workshops like “How to Take More Pain ... and Get More Pleasure From It” and “Warm Cheeks, Warm Heart.” I wrote and published books about it. I relied on its unique jolt of arousal, endorphins and adrenaline to get me through bad moods, PMS, creative blocks and anything else that was bringing me down. It was a heady era that fed my ego and libido abundantly and my pocketbook at least adequately.

It ended. Not with a whimper -- the gradual tailing-off that many S/M folks experience as age and relationships take the edge off their desire -- but with a bang.

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My frequent co-author Dossie Easton and I were working on a book called “Radical Ecstasy,” charting what is known in S/M-land as “spirituality”: the transcendent, ecstatic, deeply connected state that may occur during and after a good scene. We were enacting intense S/M scenes with one another and our other partners, and the scenes were often chosen to illuminate some aspect of the manuscript: edgy role-plays designed to tap into both personal and cultural histories of trauma and abuse, as well as intense, prolonged experiences of bondage and pain. They were risky scenes both emotionally and physically, challenging every skill we’d acquired during our combined half-century-plus of experience. In the spirit of research, we added tantra and other quasi-religious practices into the mix and took classes in those, too.

It was, as we wrote at the time, “a commitment to extreme, exaggerated spiritual openness over a period of approximately two years, an experiment in living without skin over an unnatural period of time.”

As we neared the endpoint of the work, though, I was beginning to fall apart a little. My social life withered and died; I cried for any reason and for no reason. Something deep inside me was apparently coming closer to the surface.

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And then, at a weekend-long tantra workshop, it came. We’d been practicing breath, eye contact, movement, visualization and therapy-like exercises with different partners for a day and a half: everything from the one where you picture your partner as a creature of perfect innocence and vulnerability to the one where you say the things to your partner that you would say to your mother if you dared, all mixed with breathing techniques and pelvic motions. Each exercise peeled away another layer of protection, so we were all wide-open and quivering, naked as oysters, as vulnerable as people can be in the presence of strangers.

For the last exercise, on a balmy Saturday night, we rejoined the partners we came to the class with -- in my case, Dossie. There was nothing special about this particular exercise. We were in yabyum -- the tantra position where you sit in each other’s laps with your legs wrapped around one another and your bodies lined up heart-to-heart, eye-to-eye -- and we were breathing and undulating our hips. No special visualization or verbalization instructions, no particular shoulds or shouldn’ts. And then, whatever was inside me decided to come out.

I began to scream, and I kept screaming. I tipped over backward, arched up off the floor, borne only by the crown of my head and the soles of my feet (with Dossie, caught, straddling me in midair). I was utterly out of control, my body wracked with wave after wave of energy.

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It was like grabbing a live wire -- slower, deeper, more systematic, but with the same inescapability and the same terror. And it was the deepest ecstasy I’ve ever felt, like orgasm times a hundred, from the tips of my hair to the ends of my toenails. I couldn’t remember how to stop. I thought I might die. It actually lasted, I’m told, about a minute and a half, but a minute and a half is a very long time to scream at the top of one’s lungs without pause except to suck in more breath, or to lift one’s own 200-pound weight and one’s partner’s 175-pound weight on one’s feet and head.

When it was over, I laughed softly in wonder. And then, with no transition, I began to cry, hard. I cried for a long, long time.

I have since learned that what happened to me is called a “kundalini awakening” (or “kundalini crisis” or “spiritual emergence”). Many tantrikas and other meditators consider this experience very desirable, an important step on the path to being fully evolved. A few also warn that it can be terrifying and life-changing and can cause physical symptoms including unpredictable trance states, vertigo, back and neck pain, changes in sexual desire, etc. (I’ve had all of these and more.)

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I’ve never heard of a teacher or class that warns beginners like me about kundalini awakening because it happens so rarely to beginners. Given that tantra is traditionally hostile toward S/M and other alternative sexual paths, perhaps the tantrikas have no way of knowing that many advanced S/M players are already well along the path that they are teaching. S/M teaches one how to find pleasure in non-genital sensations and also how to hang in there when sensations or emotions begin to seem too intense to be borne – both of which, I believe, are ways of opening the floodgates for whole-body orgasm. (One of the things Dossie and I saw as we invited friends to join us at tantra is that our friends from S/M tended to catch on extremely quickly to the exercises and to begin having orgasmic experiences much sooner than such things ordinarily happen.)

Of the little that has been written about kundalini-awakening-or-whatever, the vast majority has been written by people I frankly think are kind of weird. Most of it describes concepts like, from Wikipedia, “two nerve currents in the spinal column, called Pingalâ and Idâ, and a hollow canal called Sushumnâ running through the spinal cord.” This sort of thing has made it very hard for me to figure out what happened to me, or how to recover from it. I am in the position of the hardcore atheist who has received a convincing visit from a big, deep-voiced guy who says his name is “God.”

You see, I don’t believe in kundalini, at least not in the way that devotees do. I went to tantra because I was writing a book and wanted to learn what the tantra people know. And, after my first whole-body orgasm during an introductory two-hour workshop, I discovered that they know a lot -- but that they frame their knowledge in a faux-Eastern haze of abstraction and mysticism that makes absolutely no sense to me and does not fit in with the way my world works. Tantra people think kundalini is a manifestation of the Divine, an energy that pervades the universe or a “force that lies coiled at the base of the spine” (whatever that means). I think it’s a simple physical energy like electricity, or perhaps a neurochemical phenomenon, that we don’t yet have the instruments to measure.

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