Yoga, Sex and Orgasms (for Men Especially)

A provocative headline on a popular news blog, Tina Brown's The Daily Beast.

Are Yogasms Real?

Touch is an integral and important aspect in teaching yoga but the intent behind the touch is what is most important and needs special caution.  The purpose of touching a student is threefold:
1) for bringing awareness to a part of the body or
2) to support the body in a pose or
3) to adjust an alignment.  

If the touch feeds the teacher's ego instead of the student's practice, then the intention is wrong.  And, no matter how subtle, this intention is conveyed and felt.  And it's pernicious because it can undermined so much that is so valuable and helpful about yoga.

So I'm uneasy about this focus, and especially the feeding of the ego teachers in particular.

Yoga brings awareness to the breath and the body.   And help people inhabit and feel their body.   That is inherently beneficial to sex.

And yes, it has once happened to me.

But what I found most interesting about this piece, and worthwhile if not redeeming, is the coverage of men and yoga and orgasms.

Alan Finger, founder of ISHTA (Integrated Science of Hatha, Tantra and Ayurveda) Yoga argues:

that men actually benefit sexually from yoga more than women. “The man starts at a disadvantage because his orgasm is outwards, which makes it briefer and shorter than a woman’s."...one can experience an intensely meditative (and arguably spiritual) full-body orgasm. “It fills your being rather than just being something that happened in your genital boundary,” explains Finger.

I came to yoga because of a man.  After we broke up, I missed his emotional strength.  I discerned he gleaned that strength from his daily yoga practice.  I had already been a dancer, so I took a few classes with him and I was interested,  but not won over.   Until I missed those certain qualities about him.   so I walked into a local class here in DC.   And thusly, another love affair began.

Comments?  What do you think of this sort of coverage?  Are you comfortable with touch in teaching yoga?

What are the Yoga Sutras?

Sutra literally means, “thread,” and each sutra contains a thread of a thought.    A sutra is an aphoristic statement or a work containing such statements.  

The Yoga Sutras is the source text of classical yoga.  These 195 aphorisms serve as a concise guide for the philosophy and practice of yoga.   Patanjali compiled them over two thousand years ago.  Although often considered the author of the yoga sutras, historians generally believe that he assembled and recorded the oral tradition of yoga.  

The Yoga Sutras are divided into four chapters:

1st chapter                       on ecstasy samadhi-pada 
Addresses the theory of Yoga is called the chapter on ecstasy
51 aphorisms.

3rd chapter                      on the powers vibhuti-pada
Sets forth the internal rigor and ability a yogi acquires
55 aphorisms.  

2nd chapter                     on the path sadhana-pada 
Introduces the practices of Yoga for the novice
55 aphorisms. 

4th chapter                      on liberation kaivalya-pada 
Delineates the freedom and peace gained from Yoga 
34 aphorisms. 2 

2 Georg Feuerstein, The Yoga Tradition (Prescott: Hohm Press, 1998), p. 216.   

What is Suffering? What is Pain?

‎Suffering differs from pain. Suffeering is caused by the emotional reaction we lay on top of our pain. By becoming aware of our emotions and thoughts about pain, their hold on us can be released...This awareness is the tada, or 'state of yoga' about which Patanjali speaks. From this perspective, spiritual seeking is not what we do outwardly, but what we acknowledge inwardly.

 - Judith Lasater, Living Your Yoga

Judith was the first yoga teacher who helped me understand this distinction.  When she first posited the concept to me, my first reactive (and arrogant) thought was that she didn't know pain.  I was incredulous that the two - suffering and pain - could be bifurcated.  

Indeed, it can be; it can be very hard, indeed.  Sometimes impossible.  

But yoga provides the space, the breathing space, to separate pain - acute physical pain, overwhelming emotional pain - from the experience of suffering.  

In that way yoga has saved my life.  

(Judith was also the first teacher who accurately reflected back my experience of yoga and fibromyalgia.  She correctly observed that sometimes moving is better, sometimes not.  The practice needs to stay nimble and responsive to the body on the mat that day - and it can take 5-10 minutes to feel that out.)   

"The Day is To Be Experienced, Not Understood"

I love this:

‎One day in the middle of their morning prayers, the (Hindu) sage suddenly rose and ushered his students away from the monastery. He rushed about them and shooed them back into life like little ducks, proclaiming, 'The day is to be experienced, not understood!' 

- Mark Nepo

It's the anti-navel gazing mantra.  An important counterpoint.