I don’t know how many ministers will tell you what they do, or say, or pray when they are approaching orgasm, but Seth and I are a different kind of clergy and we are down to share it all.
There are two prayers we’ll say, from two different lineages close to our hearts. Two prayers, holding one vision of a healed world.
One prayer is the opening lines of the Sh’ma, a foundational prayer in Judaism which is said daily, in many sacred moments, including when one is facing death. The other is the Vajrayana Buddhist Dedication of Merit, a much longer prayer that we frequently recite as climax is building, a prayer that devotes all of the potent blessings of that present moment toward the liberation of the entire web of life.
Regardless of which prayer spontaneously arises, we both hold the same vision: a world that works for all of life, a future worthy of our children, the liberation and wellbeing of all sentient beings.
Right now, we’re finalizing the materials for the final phase of our course, the EDGE, where we teach many practices which have steadily transformed my entire relationship with sexuality. I specifically am teaching the practice of dedicating the merit of pleasure to the benefit of all beings, visualizing the best possible timeline for all life, and going there, fully, in my mind and body at the moment of climax.
This orgasmic prayer is a living process we will be teaching, for the first time, as Devotional Creation in this sixth and final phase of the EDGE.
It sounds poetic, maybe even abstract, but it’s strikingly simple once you begin practicing. As you approach climax, alone or with a partner, you turn your awareness toward the living world. Toward the beautiful potential of collective planetary regeneration. Toward the sacred. You offer up the vitality, the love, the clarity generated in that moment as a prayer.
You can find or develop your own words for this, but the essence is something like this:
May the power of this moment fuel peace.
May it support liberation.
May it bless others the way it’s blessing me.
May all beings know the beauty, love, fulfillment, and freedom I feel in this moment.
It hasn’t always been like this.
Like many, I know what it is to be shaped by a culture where sexuality was not a source of connection, but a source of control. I know what it is to inherit spiritual values that elevate celibacy while leaving entire generations fumbling in the dark with shame, secrecy, and silence.
The specific site of my youth was very unique, but the effects of religiously enforced sexual norms that I have had to desconstruct in my life are unfortunately not unique to me or my upbringing.
I was raised on an interfaith ashram where celibacy wasn’t just encouraged—it was required. Unless you were trying to conceive, the ideal was to conserve your sexual energy for higher, spiritual pursuits. Brahmacharya is the Hindu practice at the root of this norm within our community. A noble path, rooted in centuries of tradition. And I understand why it exists. I genuinely respect its power.
But when celibacy becomes a communal requirement, not a personal path, it changes shape. It becomes a rule that weakens the power of that individual choice and practice, and it weakens the bonds of families and couples, and it can be wielded as a weapon to carve out who belongs and who doesn’t. And over time, I’ve come to understand this not just as an overreach, but as a hallmark of high-control spiritual and religious environments which lays the ground for further abuse. Not just in the ashram of my childhood, but in many places where sexuality is tightly governed by those in power.
I want to be careful here. When I critique these dynamics, I’m not holding up “mainstream” culture as a healthier alternative to where I was raised. The dominant culture is often equally disconnected from the sacredness of sex—but often it is expressed in different ways. I’m not saying repression is worse than commodification, or vice versa. I’m saying both distort the truth of what this energy is.
For me, it’s been a lifelong unraveling.
There are seasons when my sexuality has felt like a wellspring, gushing forward, vibrant, alive, creative. And there are seasons when I have felt shut down, even repulsed by sex. Both are easy for me to judge and feel shame about.
I have learned to honor both as real and authentic expressions of where I am in that moment, and thankfully, out of more than a decade of swinging between these two poles, I have arrived at a state of dynamic equilibrium, and a more joyful, steady, connected, beautiful sex life than I ever thought I’d have for myself.
When you set out to teach others something that has made a profound difference in your own life, even after years of training to be a teacher of it, and years of refining one’s own pedagogy, you still don’t know if what you teach will actually make a tangible impact on someone’s life until they move through it. This is why, even as we’re still putting the finishing touches on the EDGE, we’ve opened the doors for early adopters and have offered some 1:1 correspondence to all of them, to be sure it’s truly serving them deeply.
Here’s a message we received from someone else who was raised in a high control religious community, a message that has fueled my confidence that this is something that has the effect we intend for it to have:
“I can’t properly express what has arisen and begun to move again in me from this practice. I don’t think I’ve tapped into this place in me for a few years now, it made me remember a time when I moved from my center, my genuine desire, and from a generous life force. This is the beginning of moving from that place within me again.”
When I have been in seasons of sexual dormance, which at times have lasted for up to and even a bit past a year, it’s always an invitation to do some deep inner work. Not because I owe sex to anyone (though in all honesty, these haven’t been the easiest times in my marriage), but I do owe myself a commitment to my own aliveness. I owe it to myself to understand myself and connect with this part of me that I really do love, and that brings me so much joy when it is flowing.
Many of us were conditioned—whether by religion, culture, or trauma—to believe that numbness is safer than fully feeling our desire. That shutting down was more acceptable than being fully alive. In nervous system terms, this can create a chronic pattern of dysregulation.
For me, that’s often looked like hypoarousal, a kind of flatness. Lethargy, emotional dullness, a desire to disappear. Sometimes it shades into depression. But dysregulation doesn’t always look like shutting down. For many, it swings the other way into hyperarousal. That might show up as constant anxiety, edginess, overfunctioning, or even craving intense stimulation just to feel something.
Many of us swing between these poles, and it really takes a toll on our lives.
I’ve come to see these patterns not as personal flaws, but as intelligent adaptations. The nervous system is always trying to protect us. But over time, these states can disconnect us from the very energy (our sexual life force) that makes us feel most alive.
This is what happens when something as natural and necessary as sexuality is stigmatized, controlled, or suppressed: it doesn’t disappear, it distorts. What should be a source of vitality and connection gets pushed to the margins, and over time, the pressure builds. The pendulum swings hard between extremes, leading to damage that ripples through bodies, relationships, and entire cultures.
We are living in a time when the deep, toxic distortions of sexual energy at the highest levels of power are being exposed in ways that are impossible to ignore. The ongoing release of Epstein emails just this week is just one example of how abuse, secrecy, and control have been embedded in the systems that govern us.
At the same time, Christian nationalism is resurging, with its long legacy of seeking to legislate sexuality, enforce purity codes, and punish deviation. And the hypocrisy is staggering. Again and again, we see that the most extreme accusations often reveal the accuser’s own shadow—projection as confession.
Wherever you fall politically, one thing is clear: distorted sexual energy is not a side issue. It’s at the root of so many of our collective ills—abuse, exploitation, disconnection, and the distortion of power.
That’s why, in creating the EDGE, we’ve focused on offering more than just information. Our pedagogy balances education, embodiment, and empowerment to create a path of practice for reclaiming sexual energy as something sacred, sovereign, and life-giving. Through the integration of both neuroscience and Tibetan Tantric wisdom, we guide students through a process of deepening embodiment and relational clarity.
This is not just for personal healing, it’s preparation for culture repair. We believe deeply that when individuals begin to shift their relationship with sexuality, the ripple effects touch the interpersonal, the intergenerational, and the institutional.
The individual work is not the endgame, it’s the starting point, the first step to reclaiming your personal power through direct relationship with your life force, your desire, and your pleasure.
The Ashram I was raised within was and is quite unique in the world. In many ways it was a place of healing of religious trauma for the many LGBTQ+ people who have found their spiritual home there, as the community was incredibly welcoming and affirming of their sacredness. But when you lived there, no matter your orientation, you were expected to be celibate.
Of course, like every celibate community, we’ve learned that there was still plenty of sex happening. Just hidden in shame and secrecy and double standards. What’s repressed doesn’t vanish, it leaks out in other ways. It gets twisted, contorted, and the distortion gets passed down to the next generation.
This is why it’s so important to look at the roots: culturally, spiritually, and somatically. Not to condemn religion or dismiss tradition. Not to shame anyone who find what they are looking for in a path of celibacy. But we must tell the truth about what happens when people are asked to sever themselves from their own desire in order to belong.
In our work, we’re trying to offer a different pattern. One where people can build an honest, empowered relationship with their sexuality rooted in physiological intelligence and spiritual integrity. The nervous system science and mystical traditions don’t contradict each other, they resonate in a dynamic harmony.
Our sexual energy, when it’s not co-opted or suppressed, is the current of life force energy. It connects us to ourselves, to each other, and to the greater field of life. And when we learn how to circulate it, how to direct it toward the world we long for, it becomes fuel for everything else. Our creativity. Our service. Genuine belonging to the family of life.
I don’t think we should always want sex. I don’t think we need to always feel turned on. But I do believe we can live every day connected with our own life force, our own creative birthright, our own devotional passion for the creation of a better world. And I believe, in every cell of my body, that bringing Devotional Creation into our arousal, into our orgasms, can help us to cultivate that world. Devotional Creation is in some ways a practice for the climax of a sexual encounter, but really it’s an opening, a beginning. It’s planting a seed of vision. It’s working with the incredible potency of the most beautiful, earth-shaking experience we can share with ourselves or another to orient and steer toward a better world for all.
When we dedicate the fruits of our blessings to something greater, we shift from scarcity to abundance. And when we bring spiritual practice into our sex lives we join a long, and too often forgotten lineage of ancestors who knew that pleasure and prayer were never meant to be severed from one another.
But the key is that you can’t do it in a way wholly dictated by an authority outside of you. You must find your own visions, integrate your own prayers, innovate your own practices to find what feels the most profound, empowering, and authentic to you.
I believe that pleasure, reclaimed as prayer, is one of many essential steps in the long walk to healing this world.
If this type of reclamation, experimentation, and healing is something you believe you or someone you love would benefit from, please join us at the EDGE. And if you have any questions, please ask them in the comments below!
