Just Because You Came Doesn’t Mean You Arrived

Written By ESSOESS

The orgasm is one of the most misunderstood phenomena in human history—worshipped in private, demonized in doctrine, and dissected in science without ever being fully understood. It is the only biological event that collapses time, ego, and speech in a single breath, yet its spiritual significance has been systematically erased.

That erasure was not accidental.

From the Doctrine of Discovery to the plantation breeding farms, colonial systems across continents invested in controlling not just land and labor—but the erotic. As Audre Lorde once warned, “The erotic is a resource… within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane” (Lorde, 1984). And what colonization could not control, it pathologized. What it could not pathologize, it rebranded as perversion.

The body became an enemy. Pleasure became criminal.
And orgasm—the one moment where the body might touch God—was flattened into function. Disconnected from Source.

But orgasm is not simply a biological spasm. In ancient Taoist sexual alchemy, it is understood as a gateway into shen—the Spirit. In the Huangdi Neijing, a foundational text of Chinese medicine, orgasm is described as a movement of jing (life essence) toward transformation, not depletion. Similarly, in Yoruba cosmology, sexual energy (àṣẹ) is sacred—an animating force used in ritual, creation, and spiritual transmission. Sex was never just for reproduction. It was the altar, the offering, the opening.

Western science, despite its best attempts at reductionism, has only recently begun to catch up. Studies from the Journal of Sexual Medicine have shown that orgasms trigger regions of the brain associated with mystical experience, including the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system—areas that light up during deep meditation and spiritual trance (Beauregard, 2007; Komisaruk et al., 2017). The same pathways used to pray are used to cum.

Ecstasy is not an escape from the Divine—it’s a direct encounter with it.

So, why does it take so much to feel, and so little to forget?

Because shame was carved into us by pulpits and patriarchs.
Because pornography fed us choreography before we ever learned connection.
And because trauma taught too many of us how to leave our bodies just to survive them.

Now we live in a world where people fuck to feel something, but rarely feel themselves.
Where bodies move, but spirits don't arrive.
Where climax is confused with communion.

The prostate, the cervix, the tongue, the perineum—these are not just zones of pleasure. They are instruments of revelation. They pulse with memory, with prophecy, with the remnants of things you never said out loud. They are archives of what happened, what hurt, and what healed.

Orgasm is not a release.
It’s a return.

⸻

Most people don’t know who they’re sleeping with.
They recognize the face, but not the frequency.

Because sex is never just between two bodies. It’s between two timelines. Two sets of ancestors. Two karmic contracts. And all the unspoken agreements in between.

Mainstream society teaches us to treat sex like a transaction. A swipe. A sensation. A story. But in African and Indigenous cosmologies, sex is an initiation. To enter someone is to engage with their history. To open to someone is to inherit their memory. Not just the sweet parts—the ache, the rage, the unfinished business too.

That’s why the body keeps score long after the bed is made.
Why someone’s energy can linger in your chest years after they left your sheets.
Why your orgasms might start to sound like someone else’s grief.

We call it chemistry. But it’s often recognition. A cellular remembrance of trauma looping between two spirits that haven’t done their clearing. And when two unhealed people come together, what they produce is not pleasure. It’s emotional sediment.

This is what happens when attraction outruns discernment.

Spiritual traditions across the African diaspora have long warned about this. In Kongo and Yoruba systems, there are rituals to release the spiritual signatures of former lovers—cleansing not just the womb or phallus, but the energetic field around them. Because the truth is, your body can be clean and still carry someone else’s echo.

And yet contemporary spirituality has made sex a performance of freedom.
Put a crystal on it. Moan a little louder. Rebrand it as spiritual alignment and charge extra for the affirmation.

But how can it be freedom if you’re not present in it?

How can it be healing if the person you became to survive is the one doing the choosing?

Because the body doesn’t just crave touch. It craves truth. And the truth is, most people were never taught to inhabit themselves fully—so they reach for others as a way to return home.

Sex becomes a search party for a self we lost in childhood.
For affirmation. For approval. For power. For softness we don’t yet know how to give ourselves.

And that kind of intimacy doesn’t awaken—it anesthetizes.
It leaves the spirit more scattered than before.
It pulls memory from the body, but doesn’t give it a place to rest.

We talk about soul ties like they’re romantic. But most are unspoken contracts written in codependency, survival patterns, and fear.

And until you remember who you are, you’ll keep calling your trauma your type.

⸻

They never taught me what to do with power that came from inside me.
Especially not the kind that pulsed through the hips.
Especially not the kind that made my eyes roll back while my soul came forward.
I come from women who learned to hide that sound behind their teeth.
Because where I come from, pleasure wasn’t celebrated. It was managed.
Whispered about. Prayed over. Shut down.
If it found its way into a girl’s body, it was treated like a symptom to correct, not a signal to follow.

I wasn’t taught to welcome the orgasm. I was taught to contain it.
To hold my breath. To look away from the miracle happening in my own flesh.
To feel it arrive like a storm passing through sacred ground I wasn’t holy enough to claim.
To shake and sob and pretend I didn’t feel closer to God than I ever had in church.

The first time I touched that place—the one that burned and broke and buzzed all at once—I thought I had done something wrong.
And maybe that’s the most political thing about the orgasm:
That it tells a truth we were never meant to carry without guilt.

Because what happens when you find God there—in the flood, in the trembling, in the part of yourself you were taught to fear?
What happens when your holiest moment is not kneeling at the altar but arching off the mattress?

This is what the system feared most—our pulse, our pleasure, our prophetic charge. They took land. They rewrote language. But it was the body’s unscripted Divinity that threatened them most.

“Eroticism is not outside of knowledge. It is one of its forms.”
— Nkiru Nzegwu, in African Sexualities: A Reader, ed. Sylvia Tamale (2011)

European colonial systems did not simply control sexuality through law—they criminalized and erased African and Indigenous sexual systems that were once rooted in ritual, fluidity, and reverence (Cambridge, Wikipedia).

Medical journals from the early 1900s labeled female orgasm as hysteria and pathologized Black sexuality as deviance, laying the groundwork for a century of bodily control disguised as science (Spillers, 1987).

The orgasm isn’t dangerous because it’s erotic.
It’s dangerous because it’s uncontrollable.
Because it cannot be colonized, predicted, or policed.

That’s why they tried to own it.
Why they forced it.
Why they denied it.
Why they hypersexualized us and sterilized us in the same breath.

The Black orgasm in particular is a site of resistance.
Because it was never supposed to survive the auction block, the missionary gaze, the medical table.
To feel good in a body marked by so much violation is to reclaim the very thing they tried to make untouchable: your Divinity.

And yet, we still hesitate.
Because the moment of orgasm—the moment the body dissolves and becomes light—is also the moment we’re most unprotected.

There’s no armor in the release. No filter. No strategy. No performance.
Just you. And Spirit. And whatever echoes through the opening.

It happened during a ceremony of the senses.
I was working with a priestess—someone who wasn’t afraid of what I was holding.
We weren’t chasing visions. We were just trying to feel.
To slow down enough to inhabit myself.
To stop managing and start melting.
To let my body be a body.

As the energy began to rise, I could feel my old reflexes kick in— the instinct to brace, to tighten, to hold back.
I murmured the words over and over with a softness that looped, part breath, part plea, part spell:
“Relax. Release. Let it go and let it flow.”

And then—something in me said yes.
A bolt of heat surged up my spine, like lightning wrapped in permission.
My chest opened. My jaw released. My root lit up like a fuse.
It rose like heat, like smoke, like thunder.

And then came the flood.
Visions. Voices. Memories I couldn’t name but somehow knew.
I could see everything.
Feel everything.
Hear the silence between every sound.

I was no longer just in the room.
I could see across timelines.
Hear the spaces between heartbeats.
Feel the pulse of my ancestors moving through me like song.

I didn’t cum, but it was the first time I understood what it meant to arrive.

After that moment, everything changed.
The way I saw, spoke, walked, tasted, touched.
The air smelled different. The world felt different.
I felt different.

I was seeing God in everything.
And everything was seeing God in me.

It was like touching every part of myself I’d been taught to fear— and realizing none of it was unholy.

The breath of every woman in my bloodline who was never allowed to arrive was breathing through me now.

That’s why I cried the first time I came with someone I loved.
Because I wasn’t ready for what came through me.
Because I heard my grandmother’s voice.
Because I remembered a death I never lived.
Because I didn’t know the orgasm could time-travel, excavate, baptize.

No one told me that climax could also be communion.
That it could be prophecy.
That it could deliver you back to yourself whole.

And now I know why they buried it.
Because every time we come fully, the orgasm cracks open the veil and calls your spirit by its true name.

⸻

Let this be the year you stop confusing silence with sanctity.
Let this be the year you stop collapsing your power into the shape of someone else’s desire.
Let this be the year you stop performing pleasure for people who can’t hold your spirit.
Stop moaning on cue.
Stop faking the holy.
Stop pretending you don’t know what your body is here to do.

Because you do.
You’ve always known.

The orgasm was never meant to be discreet. It was designed to interrupt.
To baptize. To bring the Divine back into the body through the only language it never forgot: sensation.

And for those who claim this is too much— let them sit in the pews of their own denial.
Because we are not ashamed to know God through our pelvis.
To let truth rise through the cervix, the prostate, the breath, the base of the spine.
We do not apologize for our portals.
We do not apologize for our knowing.
We do not apologize for coming back to ourselves.

They taught us to climax quietly so we wouldn’t remember how loud God is.
But the body remembers.
The spirit remembers.
The ancestors remember.

And when you come fully, you do not just feel—you remember.
You remember who you were before doctrine.
Before shame.
Before someone convinced you your light needed permission to glow.

Orgasm is not the end.
It’s a threshold.
A moment where flesh meets Spirit and says: I’m ready.

To be felt.
To be filled.
To be fully here.

This is the resurrection.
Not the kind they preach about in tidy tombs and patriarchal pulpits.
This is the resurrection of the untamed feminine, the electric masculine, the spirit-beyond-gender that pulses through all of us.

It rises.
In hips that move without apology.
In backs that arch toward the sky like altars.
In voices that shake the room.

This is not about sex.
This is about presence.
This is about prophecy.
This is about power that no empire can patent and no algorithm can suppress.

You don’t need permission to arrive, to feel the Divine erupt through you.
You don’t need to wait until someone else sees you.
You only need to return.

So come.
Come for real.
Come like a spell breaking.
Come like your grandmother’s freedom depends on it.
Come like a prayer your body already knows by heart.

Because you are the altar.
You are the invocation.
You are the resurrection.

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References

ESSOESS
Next

Redemption Song