Dharmakaya

the white-browed tit-warbler

For optimal mental and physical health, I think everyone should have at least one heart orgasm per day. Heart orgasms are similar to sexual orgasms, but instead of being stimulated externally, they are cultivated internally. They also give males access to full body orgasms. Here is a 6 step process for experiencing heart orgasms: Step 1: Generate Pleasurable Sensations in Your Heart This can be done by bringing to mind someone you love or something easily lovable like a puppy or child. Another method is the heart-smile method I’ve discussed previously in my Notes here. Classic Buddhist style metta practice can work here too. Step 2: Notice Pleasurable Sensations in Your Heart It might sound strange to make noticing a step in its own right, but noticing here is an important skill in itself. When you have generated the pleasure in your heart, you want to bring a lot of awareness to the pleasure is arising and train yourself to be sensitive to it. When you get good enough at Step 2 you won't need Step 1 any more, as you will start to notice that there is always pleasure available in the heart, with no stimulation required. Step 3: Maintain Smooth, Unbroken Contact with the Pleasure Sensations Once you start noticing the pleasure sensations, you want to remain in constant contact with them, similar to how you would with your breath during a breath meditation. Every time you get distracted from these sensations, smile at the distraction, welcome it into your pleasure party and return to the pleasurable sensation. You want to treat distractions not as annoyances to be shrugged off but as temporarily unintegrated parts of your psyche that you are recruiting lovingly into your pleasure project. Step 4: Amplify Pleasure Sensations For some, Step 4 may not be necessary as the sensations will naturally amplify given enough unbroken contact. But for others, you may wish to amplify this process by learning the mental motion of relishing/savouring the pleasure. To get a sense of what this mental motion looks like, consider something you naturally relish like your first sip of coffee in the morning. Learn to relate to the pleasure in your heart with the same mental motion, relishing and savouring it. As you get more skilled at cultivating pleasure, the amplification will happen naturally without needing step 4. Step 5: Spread the Pleasure Around Your Body Once the pleasure in your heart goes from feeling merely pleasurable to ecstatic (think bubbly shivers of intense orgasmic joy radiating from your heart), you can start spreading it to the rest of the body. The spreading shouldn't feel less actively spreading butter with a knife around your body. Rather, it should feel more like naturally letting the butter of bliss in your heart melt into the rest of your body. It is more of a than a Step 6: Release All Effort and Marinate in the Full Body Ecstasy Once the ecstasy has fully spread to all areas of your body, you want to completely let go of all effort or doing. Stop doing any of the mental motions described in Steps 1 to 5 and simply rest in the full body ecstasy. Relate to the ecstasy like a bath of bliss that you are bathing in, simply relaxing deeper and deeper into it. To capture this sense of non-doing, think of how you behave in a warm bath. In a warm bath, you are not just still, you are deeply relaxing all the parts of you that are stuck in patterns of doing. If you marinate in this full body ecstasy, eventually it will naturally mellow into a softer joy, and then peace. You may eventually feel your body disappear and expand into various altered states of consciousness. At each stage, you want to remain totally relaxed and not grasp on to any new state that may arise, but simply let go of it into whatever arises next. ——————————— If you are on a spiritual path, these whole process can also be the basis for developing many non-ordinary insights into the nature of reality. But that is slightly beyond the scope of this post. I believe anyone, whether they are on a spiritual path or, not can greatly benefit from learning how to experience heart orgasms and practicing them daily.