A new study suggests that your brain reacts the same way to meditation as it does to sex. Both dissolve our sense of self-awareness, separating ourselves from our ego.
The lead researcher, Gemma O’Brien found that people meditating and having an orgasm both experience “diminution of self-awareness” and “alterations in bodily perception.”
When you meditate, the left side of your brain lights up and when you have sex, the right side of your brain lights up — both experiences leading to a stoppage of mental chatter in your brain and helping you lose physical and mental boundaries.
Pleasure is also linked to a loss of awareness of the boundaries of our body, and this, too, involves both sides of the brain. Orgasm and meditation dissolve the sense of physical boundary, but the activation patterns are distinct. Meditation does so in a somewhat cerebral way, altering bodily self-awareness by enhancing activity in specific brain regions, such as right angular gyrus—regions that become most lively during attempts to imagine ourselves from a stranger’s perspective, during out of body experiences or déjà vu, and in a neurologically obscure disorder in which patients lack awareness of their own paralysis or bodily infirmity.
During orgasm, the cerebellar deep nuclei and vermis, also in the cerebellum, glow. The cerebellum used to be thought of as the “motor bit” tacked onto the back of the brain. The deep nuclei are mysterious, but they seem involved in planning and initiating movement, motor learning, rhythm, synchronizing and smoothing of movement. The vermis tracks the movement of the body through space outside of conscious awareness. Unlike meditation, orgasm seems a heightened sense of being within one’s body rather than the sense of being outside of it. The disconnected awareness meditation (“I am not my thoughts, I am not this experience”) is antithetical to the self-forgetting of sex in which wallowing in the experience, and the relationship, is precisely the point.
See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-neurobiology-of-bliss-sacred-and-profane and http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-2821/Meditation-Sex-Are-Same-to-Your-Brain.html for more.
Obviously, none of this is new to folks who regularly read this blog as I’ve written about this phenomenon numerous times before. This effect is one of the reasons our Engineering eXperiential Ecstasy programs (https://briandavidphillips.net/2001/06/12/dvt25-experiential-ecstasy/) are so effective and why processes used for metaphysical and introspective pursuits often have erotic results for folks who know how to tap into that part of themselves. This is also why when we created a multi-product of all of our erotic hypnosis materials into the Ultimate Pleasure Hypnotist package () we included the ecstasy material as well to create a massively comprehensive program. In fact, right now, you can get the Eroticatrance (https://briandavidphillips.net/2001/06/12/dvt31-eroticatrance/) and the new Advanced Eroticatrance (https://briandavidphillips.net/2012/08/28/dvt36-advanced-eroticatrance/) programs along with the Engineering eXperiential Ecstasy and the core skills set and much more all together in one package. See the pre-release page for the advanced program at https://briandavidphillips.net/2012/08/28/dvt36-advanced-eroticatrance/ and order the ultimate pleasure package there for amazing savings and a very comprehensive program in guided ecstatic trance training and much more.
Those of you in Taiwan are welcome to join my own upcoming PSYCHEDELIGASM free workshop where I will be going over some psychological psychedelic erotic hypnosis techniques, albeit for very different contexts . . . so we will also be covering other less-performance-oriented material. See https://briandavidphillips.net/2012/08/28/psychedeligasm-14-october-2012-free-workshop-in-taipei/. There event description has more videos.
If you’re in Taipei and interested in hypnosis, check the services page linked to in the top left sidebar. Not in Taipei, check the store for recordings in the same menu area as well as links to lots and lots of info and goodies.
Brian
www.BrianDavidPhillips.com
please contact Dr. Phillips at brian@briandavidphillips.com.
