The container of OM is always the same and yet each OM is unique. In OM, we enter the flow of life itself, which is always changing and becoming. Just as no two OMs are exactly alike, no two strokes inside the OM are identical. Each stroke, just like each moment, is unrepeatable. Once gone, it can never be replicated. This is the nature of OM, and it is the nature of being.
OM, like other forms of meditation, generates an awareness of the transitory and impermanence, but because it connects to the energy of life its apotheosis is not emptiness. It directs us toward merging and unity with the totality of what is as it pertains to our own part and purpose of a larger unfolding. Perhaps one could see this as karma, but in OM our felt sense is less deterministic and more playfully erotic, in the largest and most inclusive use of that word.
Which is not say there is not majesty here: the ecstasis of mystical union and unfettered expression; the daimonic infusion of spirit and divine inspiration; the perilous journey of Persephone into the underworld, where we experience an agonizing but necessary death and a difficult rebirth; and, finally, tikkun olem–the feeling in ourselves that by mending the fragmentation and fissures in our own souls that we are also repairing the world. I know that sounds grandiose. But it is true.
Founder Nicole Daedone has said that OM teaches us to live in the interstitial space between wanting and having, the razor’s edge of pure potentiality and limitless inspiration. The Zen master and photographer John Daido Loori wrote of the human capacity for creativity as an “endless spring”. OM is this kind of perpetually regenerative fountainhead. We keep returning to it, dipping into it, seeking the life force. It is not a transcendent medium but a guide to full and conscious incarnation, and in this it differs from other types of meditation where the ultimate aim is ethereal and disembodied.
The repetitive nature of OM, its focus on returning the attention to the stroke and its “goallessness”, align it with other meditative forms. But because it engages our sexuality, its psychodynamics are unique. As a partnered practice, it promotes connection and intimacy. It is said that in Zen we learn to feel an intimacy first with the breath and eventually with the “ten thousand things” or all of creation. In OM we learn to feel an intimacy with the stroke and with our OM partner in the dance of the OM, and then in our relationships and then with life.
Partners feel each other and play off each other with the stroker responding to and subtly directing the strokee’s experience. OM develops our “sixth sense”, the way we intuitively feel each other. OM is like the dancers and the dance. Are the dancers dancing the dance or is the dance dancing the dancers? Or are both happening simultaneously? Sometimes in OM it’s hard to tell.
OM often makes us feel vulnerable. It exposes us. It shines a kind of black light on the ways in which we are false or have betrayed ourselves and have been unthinking and unfeeling. It touches places inside us that are crying out for tenderness and it shows us where we have been withheld or manipulated people to get what we want. It has an unerring in its capacity to unveil unsavory parts of ourselves that we would like to deny. It stirs things up. In this way it could be thought of as similar to some forms of meditation, but it is very direct, very volatile, and it can push through a lot of the accumulated psychic sludge with far more rapidity than other meditative forms.
Psychiatrist and researcher Dr. Charles Raison, one of the world’s leading experts on depression, who writes on OM as a potential treatment for depression, says that there are schools of Tibetan Buddhism that believe individual enlightenment is possible with conventional meditative techniques only through three creations and destructions of the world. Hacking into brain-body systems, particularly the powerful way sexuality operates inside us, potentially accelerates that process.
Finally, OM also invokes states of serenity and calm that lingers after the OM and can, in the long term, actually change the brain. Dr. Andy Newberg’s data which you’ll read about below, shows that the resting brains of long term OM practitioners have decreases in activity in the brain areas that have to do with reactivity and defensiveness-aggression. Newberg says his findings indicate that OM makes us more open minded, less defensive and, perhaps, better able to stress. Newberg has studied the brains of accomplished meditators from various traditions, and we will look at his preliminary results on OM is light of his other research.