Just Because You Came Doesn’t Mean You Arrived

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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References

• Lorde, Audre. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.

• Beauregard, M. (2007). Neural correlates of the mystical experience. Journal of Sexual Medicine.

• Komisaruk, B.R., et al. (2017). Brain Activity Unique to Orgasm in Women: An fMRI Analysis.

• Nzegwu, Nkiru. Eroticism is not outside of knowledge. It is one of its forms. In African Sexualities: A Reader, ed. Sylvia Tamale. Pambazuka Press, 2011.

• Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

• Spillers, Hortense J. (1987). Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.

• Cambridge University Press. Colonial Legal Duality and the Creation of Legal Codes for Indigenous Populations.

• Wikipedia. Colonial Roots of Gender Inequality in Africa.

Open Legs, Open Portals

Sex is the most overlooked instrument of spiritual consequence—an unregulated exchange of memory, karma, and ancestral unrest, often performed with people we wouldn’t trust to guard our names, let alone our souls.

Your body may rationalize. Your mind may forgive.
But your field—the unseen imprint of your spirit—remembers every entrance.
And some spirits don’t pull out.

We were taught to protect ourselves from pregnancy, from infection, from scandal.
But who taught you to protect your energy?

Modern sex education emphasizes physical health and consent, yet often overlooks protection from psychic residue. It does not address what psychological studies have shown: that sex, especially when not aligned with one's internal values or emotional needs, can lead to anxiety, regret, even identity confusion. It’s not just about condoms. It’s about consciousness.

A seven-minute encounter can tattoo your field for seven years. Did you know?

That orgasm is not release—it’s ritual.
That climax is not the end—it’s a contract.
And every time you say yes to someone you don’t trust, you are giving them the key to your altar.

This world will teach you how to seduce.
It will not teach you how to cleanse.
It will teach you how to get naked.
It will not teach you what it means to be spiritually exposed.

You can’t decolonize your life and still fuck like a settler.
You can’t reclaim your power if you don’t reclaim your portals.
Because your sexuality is not a social construct. It’s an inheritance.
And somewhere buried beneath purity myths and pleasure capitalism, beneath hookup culture and patriarchal repression, is a truth so ancient it scares us:

Sex is sacred. Always has been. Always will be.

Before tantra was severed from its sacred roots and rebranded as erotic self-care for disembodied consumers, before sacred sensuality was emptied of Spirit and sold as wellness for the spiritually disengaged, we were fucking to remember God.
We were invoking Spirit through sweat and ceremony.
We were merging bodies to decode time.

In precolonial African societies, sex was revered as a sacred act integral to spiritual and communal life. Among the Baganda of Uganda, elder women known as Ssenga guided young women into embodied erotic education without shame or condemnation. In East-Central Africa, sexual practices were interwoven with spiritual cosmologies and fertility rituals, offering a holistic and unashamed approach to pleasure and power (De Gruyter).

Monogamy wasn’t the rule. Neither was polyamory.
The rule was reverence.
Who you shared your body with wasn’t dictated by religion.
It was governed by the understanding that sex is spiritual architecture.
And every lover is an architect.

But colonialism turned sacred lovers into sluts.
Turned spirit-work into sin.
Turned pleasure into punishment.

Now we lay with people whose names we forget but whose energy we can’t shake.
We wake up drained, not from orgasm, but from possession.
Because sex isn’t dirty—but some of your lovers are.
Not their bodies. Their karma.

This is a blueprint for those building temples inside themselves—and asking why they keep collapsing.

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Sex has never been the problem.
It’s who enters your body without knowing what they awaken.

Because not all penetration is physical.
Some slip past the cervix and into the subconscious.
Some enter through the pelvis and rearrange the memory of who you are.
Some unzip something older than you—older than them—and leave it gaping.

We don’t talk enough about the distortion.
How intimacy without integration leaves your nervous system haunted.
How arousal without alignment reprograms your desire to chase what hurts you.
How sex, when misused, doesn’t just leave residue—it leaves splinters.
Small psychic fragments of other people’s grief, ambition, addiction, shame—lodged in the folds of your psyche.
And when enough of them accumulate, you start mistaking them for your own.

This is psychological displacement disguised as connection—an unregulated transfer of memory, pattern, and pain that rewires you at the level of Spirit.

Psychologists have long explored how our sense of self is shaped by external interactions. In Charles Cooley’s “looking-glass self” theory, the idea that we internalize how we believe others perceive us becomes especially potent during sexual intimacy. When you allow someone into your body, you also invite in their projections, their wounds, their chaos. And if you’re not grounded in your own reflection, you begin to morph into the fractured mirror they hold up to you.

Because the body is porous. The field is mutable. And the self?
The self is not fixed.
It’s responsive.
It molds to what it merges with.

You merge with someone whose soul is at war—and now you’re tired all the time.
You merge with someone who lies for sport—and now you’re second-guessing your own truth.
You merge with someone whose lineage is still processing violence—and now your joy feels unsafe.

There are names for this in many cultures. But English doesn’t carry them.
So we say “vibe.”
We say “drained.”
We say “off.”
What we mean is:
”I mistook proximity for connection—and now I carry the spiritual consequences of someone else’s crisis.”

Because consent is not discernment.
Chemistry is not compatibility.
And pleasure is not proof that someone belongs in your energy field.

And still, the wellness world calls it freedom. Still, culture calls it empowerment. But the truth is, more and more people are left feeling depleted and fragmented in the wake of sexual encounters that promised liberation and delivered something else entirely. As explored in The Love Central’s research, casual sex, when misaligned with emotional readiness, often results in unintended emotional attachment, spiritual confusion, and deep energetic withdrawal.

We give people the key to our most sacred chamber without checking if they know how to walk through a holy space without tracking blood on the floors.

And when the collapse happens—when your voice gets softer, your boundaries get looser, your sense of self gets foggier— you think it’s heartbreak.
But it’s not.
It’s energetic fragmentation.

You didn’t lose a partner.
You lost pieces of yourself that fused with someone unequipped to carry them.
And when those pieces return, they don’t always come back clean.

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This is the price of mistaking chemistry for compatibility, and calling it liberation before reading the fine print.

You don’t need another bath in rose petals.
You need an exorcism.

What you are entering now is a sacred act of repossession.
An intimate recalibration of selfhood.
A psychic disentanglement from energies that have claimed squatters’ rights in your field.

A calling back of every version of you that got left behind in someone else's mouth.

That lover wasn't just a phase—they were a portal.
That "situationship" wasn't casual—it was karmic.
And your intuition knew.
But your trauma craved attention.
Your body yearned for softness.
Your loneliness longed to be held.

Not every climax brings you closer to Divinity.
Some bring you closer to grief.

This is energetic sovereignty in motion.
The severing of cords entangled with moments you’ve mistaken for meaning.
The nullification of agreements made in moments of ache.

What’s required now is the audacity to stop spiritualizing dysfunction.
To stop mistaking intensity for intimacy.
To stop calling unresolved karma a lesson.
And to fucking end it—with intention.

You are summoning yourself back from everywhere you've been scattered.
It’s a clean break in the direction of your own power, a split so precise it erodes your DNA.

You are the altar.
You are the gatekeeper.
You are the authority.

You are standing in the mirror, looking into your own eyes, and saying:

“I’m yours again.”

This is the new agreement: nothing enters without reverence. Nothing remains without reciprocity.

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This is the return of conscious sex—the kind that expands you, not empties you.

You are not dirty for wanting.
You are not broken for enjoying.
But you are accountable for what you anchor into your field through that wanting.
Because some bodies feed you.
And others feed off you.

To rise is not to deny the body.
It is to return to it as a sovereign terrain.
To know that pleasure is not a sin—it is a living code.
The archive, the alchemy, and the authority.

This is when you stop mistaking erosion for electricity.
When you stop laying down to be devoured and start rising to be met.
When your need no longer negotiates entry, and your pleasure stops entertaining the unqualified.

This is sacred selection—because every body is a carrier, and not all energies are non-toxic, fair trade, or ethically sourced.

Choosing with awareness, not absence.
With presence, not projection.
With the knowledge that sex is not just sensation—it’s an initiation.
Because pleasure is power, and what you let inside helps shape what you become.

“Every time we claim our pleasure, we interrupt a system that seeks to erase us.”
— Alexis Pauline Gumbs

One love, ESS xo

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References

• Psychological Impact of Casual Sex – Verywell Mind

• Sexual Pleasure in Precolonial Africa – IPPF

• East-Central African Sexual Cosmologies – De Gruyter

• Mental Health Effects of Casual Sex – The Love Central

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs – alexispauline.com