ABSTRACT
The regulation of women’s sexuality in traditional religious organisations has led many people to seek out new ways of embodiment based on empowerment and drawing on personal/inner strength. This chapter discusses one such space through an ethnographic study conducted with 33 practitioners of orgasmic meditation (OM) in London, the United Kingdom and New York, the United States of America. The ways in which people’s OM practice may incorporate spiritual and/or religious dimensions, and how this links to the potential disruption of and resistance to traditional gender and sexual power dynamics, will be analysed. OM is a practice that centres on the power of the ‘feminine’ and the female orgasm. It is not religious or spiritual by definition, but many of the practitioners interviewed in this study connected their religious and spiritual development to the practice, and saw this as being connected to what it meant to live an ‘orgasmic’ life. This chapter explores the embodied journeys of OM practitioners. I focus on how religion/spirituality is ‘lived’ in people’s everyday OM practice (McGuire, 2008) by considering participants’ conceptualisation of ‘living an OM life’, together with their experiences within the moment or ‘container’ of an OM itself. Within this discussion, I explore the ‘altered states of consciousness’ that OM practitioners may enter. In doing so, I illuminate the complex and sometimes competing ways in which gender, sexuality, spirituality and/or religion intersect in participants’ embodied OM practice.
