J and I attended a workshop facilitated by Reid Mihalko, and it was quite the experience!

Here is the description of the workshop from Reid’s website, so you have some understanding of what we got ourselves into:

“Explore Kundalini, the “Tantric Twitchies” and the Dance of Vibrational Luvin’ Without the Woo-Woo! (with live Demos, too)

Remember that Cosmo magazine article that talked about how Tantra and breathing could give you explosive orgasms? How about the urban legend about Sting having sex for eight hour stints?
Regardless of your tolerance for words like “chakras” and “yoni,” there is a non New Agey way to understanding and incorporating ecstatic experiences into your bedroom routine that is fun, easy, and explosive.
If you or a lover have ever experienced post-orgasmic spasms or “twitches” after lovemaking, or feelings of heat and tension in your lower back, hands, neck or throat… You might be more energetic in your sex life than you think! And if you’ve never experienced those things but would like to, you might be pleasantly surprised how easily dancing with energetic sex is, and that YOU can grasp and play with.
Join sex and relationship expert Reid Mihalko of ReidAboutSex.com for an evening of frank, fun, and electrifying learning targeted for folks who aren’t necessarily New Agey. Reid promises to drop the woo-woo and leave his Sandskrit-to-English dictionary at home! And, for those of you who say Namasté instead of “thank you,” Reid’s got you covered, too!

You will be introduced to:

• Reid’s particular views on how sexual energy “behaves” and how it “works,” as well as ways you can begin accessing more energetic awareness in the bedroom, on the dance floor, and throughout your life
• What Kriyas (“the twitchys”) can look like and what to do when you or a lover experiences them
• Three possible approaches for engaging sexual energy and expanding it when exploring energetic sex with a partner or solo with yourself
• What playing a singing saw has to do with energetic sex and expanding your lovemaking
• Simple breathing and “presence” techniques to build up energetic awareness
• How to use “pressure play” and where so you can help unlock and activate points on your lover’s body to augment energetic experiences during love making
• A few advance tips and tricks that will make you smile and your partner moan regardless of whether “the twitchys” happen or not!

Whatever your level of experience with sex that seems to be “more than just sex,” Reid’s humorous and informative instruction, sex education, and live demonstrations on this esoteric (and yet more common than you think) realm of energetic sex is not to be missed!”

Okay, well J and I were a little our of element here. We both anticipated the workshop being a bit more basic than it was. I was really excited about the breathing and presence techniques, as well as the pressure play. We didn’t touch at all on those topics (disappointment on my part).

Reid was really great at talking about how energy play experiences can make a ton of sense or no sense at all, depending on whether you are a “science” person or a “mystic.” He was very honest with how he has a foot in both camps, and doesn’t fully understand where his own “tantric twitching” comes from. And for some people, he said, maybe they are really just faking. But then, who cares? If everyone is enjoying themselves, what does it matter if it is “real”? I can get behind that philosophy, although as J said, it can make it more difficult to teach and understand.

The beginning part was really awesome, because Reid consistently got us breathing deeply and exhaling with sound. That was grounding and calming. When he had us do visualization exercises of what our energy felt and looked like to us, I found that really valuable. He had us think about what our energy looked like internally, how it moved and felt, what it might look like or smell or taste or feel like. He had us do an exercise, pretending we were making a wine glass sing. He asked us to remember what that felt like and where we felt it.

It was really empowering to hear about his concept of “resonating” with another person’s energy. He contrasted this to the concept of “cording” in Shamanism, in which one person sends out energetic cords to another person. Energy flows through these cords, which can be really amazing but also really destructive if the relationship becomes destructive. With his concept of “resonating” though, you simply share energy, and then when the experience is over, you simply pull your energy back in and make the outside of yourself smooth so that the other person’s energy cannot stick to you anymore. He used the metaphor of velcro, in that the outside of yourself is like the sticky part of velcro and when you are resonating with someone and sharing energy you can stick to each other. But when you are done, you simply flatten out the little velcro hairs and suck them back in so that nothing can stick to you. This was an empowering concept, because I think we are often taught to give and give and give to partners and other important people in our lives. But that can be quite draining. You can literally feel like you don’t have any energy left over for yourself. But if you can learn how to share and then ground back into yourself after an interaction, you have shared the positive parts and then can continue on without taking on anyone else’s needs or issues, or expect someone else to fix you or save you or solve your problems.

The rest of the evening, though, went more “woo-woo” as Reid exchanged and played with energy with different workshop participants. I would never doubt that what the two people felt and experienced was real, but I did not have a frame for understanding what it could feel like for me. I was just trying to hold onto the small feelings that I sense from my own energy.

Something that I really appreciated from the end of his workshop, was a discussion about energy play and different chakras. He used the idea that there are seven chakras, and within each chakra there are seven registers. So if you think about the groin chakra as the place where you feel totally grindy, thumpy, and humpy, there are seven places within that chakra that you can play. You can play at the high end, where you feel “om Shanti, Shanti” or you can play on the opposite end where you feel even more grindy, thumpy, and humpy. That was an enlightening concept for me to hear about because I have had this idea that to have “Tantric sex” means that you would have intercourse while feeling out-of-body (so in using his language, it would mean accessing the groin chakra and playing in that upper register so that you feel all floaty, angelic, and above the cloud- om Shanti, Shanti if you will). But he did not place any value judgements on different places of energy play/tantric play– if it was fun and consensual, it was worth doing. It was also really fascinating to hear about how he can play with another person’s energy in a “non-sexual” chakra (for example, the heart chakra), and then access the lower register (the grindy, thumpy, humpy register)- in effect, “fucking someone’s heart chakra.” It was a little above my head. I just haven’t done enough of my own investigating, thinking, and experimenting to fully grasp everything he talked about. But it was certainly thought-provoking.

Lastly, I wish he would have simply provided more “beginner” type information. I want to know what his favorite book is on the topic, or if he has some simple meditation or visualization exercises that you could do solo or partnered. J and I discussed how our experiences with the hypnosis videos a while back are a kind of bridge to understanding how to “play with energy,” and I think using hypnosis as a frame of reference could be helpful to us in exploring energy play/tantric play.

I am really glad we went into a space we don’t normally go, to learn about something that neither of us has done very much researching on!!