“What moves you?”
Casey frowned a little, moving her focus inside, trying to answer this question from her breathworker. Laurie looked at her, not really expectantly, but with a soft emphasis, one that compelled her to take the question seriously. What moved her? She had little doubt that Laurie was guiding her, and most likely somewhere she needed to go, but Casey found she didn’t know what the question meant.
Laurie continued. “I know you want to help Jason. The truth is, the most effective thing we can do to help others be healthy and whole is to be healthy and whole ourselves. When we are aligned with the life force that is always in us, healing and growth occur naturally. From that an intrinsic energetic momentum is created that invites those things in others as well.”
Casey tried to take in Laurie’s words. She had started breathwork several weeks ago out of a kind of desperation, a yearning for something to help her deal with the pain of her and Jason’s separation, with Jason’s affliction and the searing feeling that she had no way to help him. An acquaintance at her yoga class had introduced her to breathwork, explaining it as a healing modality that focused on the breath as the connection between the individual (form) and the universe (spirit) and as such the basis for profound physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual healing and transcendence.
“I’d like you to ponder that question,” Laurie said as she began arranging the mat on the floor for the breathing portion of the session. “What really moves you, deep inside, beyond what you perceive as obligation, what you ‘should’ do or are ‘supposed’ to do. Be still and allow yourself to look beyond those internal commands and see what is really there. That’s where your power is. That is where you will feel your alignment with the universe and its complete unconditional support of you.”
Casey felt an inexplicable unease. “What if it’s something that’s not supposed to move me?”
Laurie smiled. “If it’s authentic -- if you receive it when you are still, not from your mind’s ingrained patterns and habits but rather from now, a spontaneous arising from the stillness inside you -- then there is no such thing.”
* * *
As she pulled into the garage, Casey glanced at the empty place where Jason’s Jeep used to be. For a moment she recalled an evening not long ago when they had arrived home at the same time. Jason had jumped out and met her as she got out of her car. After a quick kiss, he had promptly bent her over the hood of his jeep, leaving her gasping with surprise and laughter as he hiked up her skirt and entered her before the garage door had even fully closed.
Her body tingled as she pictured the scene, his breath hot on her neck, her squeals of surprise turning to eager moans as he started pounding into her from behind. Grasping her hair, he had pulled her head back and run his fingers up her neck ever so lightly before sliding them to her lips, where her tongue nipped over his skin as the garage light faded into darkness. The heated sound of their breathing had seemed to intensify in the pitch blackness as Jason thrust deeper inside her, wrapping his arms solidly around her body from behind.
Casey jumped now as the phone rang inside. She shook herself and stepped through the door to answer it.
“Jason is having trouble,” Jessie, her sister-in-law, said softly after greeting her. Casey took a deep breath, and Jessie continued after a pause. “He was definitely intoxicated when I got there last night.”
Casey closed her eyes as a painful jolt lurched through her. He was trying so hard, she knew. She knew how much Jason wanted to be sober, wanted his life to be his own again.
Their separation was three months old. She had tried everything in her power to help him for the last two years, as alcohol had gradually taken her place as the thing he prioritized over all else in his life. She felt that if he would just open up to her, let her be there for him, she would be. But he didn’t give her a chance. He would face the drug’s savage takeover of his being before he would face the reality of needing support. Finally she knew couldn’t stand by helplessly anymore while he shut her out and perpetrated his own unhealth through the poison of not only alcohol but also the harsh repression she knew it took for him to seem so unfeeling all the time. She knew that repression hurt him. She wondered if he did.
As Jessie continued talking, Casey squeezed her eyes shut and reminded herself that she couldn’t fix him. Reopening them, she reached for the tea kettle and abruptly noticed she wasn’t breathing. Laurie had mentioned something like that at their first appointment -- that the breath unconsciously became more shallow and haphazard at times of stress -- but that was the first time Casey had ever noticed it in herself.
She took a deep breath, concentrating on it solely. As she did, she suddenly saw that she was repressing a need to cry. She blinked, partly in surprise at the clarity with which she saw this and partly in distress: She didn’t want to cry.
She didn’t want to hurt. She didn’t want to feel that vulnerability right now, and she certainly didn’t want to show it to Jessie.
A vague and painful frustration flared through her at this recognition. “Hey Jess, I need to run for a little bit. I’ll call you back after while. I just need to -- think about this.”
“I understand.” Jessie’s voice was quiet and calm, and Casey had the somewhat uncomfortable feeling she did understand. She hung up the phone and leaned against the counter, tears spilling forth like water from a pitcher. It felt that natural, and that irrepressible -- like a movement of gravity.
When the crying subsided, she went to the living room and sat on the couch. She tried to pray for Jason or send him healing energy or whatever it was she could do to help him. Instead she found herself restless and unsure how to do any of those things. Choking on a new sob, she fell back against the cushions.
Focusing in earnest, she tried again. She conjured an image of Jason and tried to relax and breathe. With a start, she found herself thinking about the last time he had taken her on the couch on which she sat. She jumped up, feeling horror at the irresistible arousal enveloping her when she had been trying to pray. Biting her lip, she paced around the room, tears again filling her eyes. Suddenly she missed her husband so much she couldn’t stand. Wilting to a heap on the floor, she wailed until her body didn’t have the energy to cry anymore.
When she next opened her eyes, Casey felt a warmth that seemed to break her heart open. It spread throughout her body, mingling with her pain in a way that felt quite unfamiliar and that she didn’t know how to categorize. Suddenly Laurie’s question came back to her. What moves you?
And then there was an answer. Unbidden and unexpected, it startled her, but she breathed slowly and deeply and stayed with it for a moment.
Sex. Sex was what moved her. Not just the act, but the pure, profound, inherent power of sexuality, that force which encompassed the deepest realms of humanity, spanned the spectrum of life and held within it every possibility of human existence. Sex was life force embodied; it was strength, it was beauty, it was joy, it was –
Healing. Sex was healing. Casey stopped, realizing all she had forgotten. She had forgotten that visceral understanding of sexuality she had had for so long. So divergent from social, cultural, religious messages about sex that at times she had wondered whether it was just utterly skewed, she had eventually allowed that understanding to be subverted, pounded down to the recesses of her subconscious by the relentless permeation of mainstream attitudes about sex.
Now she remembered.
She sat up, recalling how moments before she had felt instantly guilty about thinking of her husband sexually when she was trying to pray for him. Now she slowly let that orientation come back, her breath catching as she remembered the hard, wanting look in his eyes as he grabbed her and pushed her against him, as if he were trying to physically meld them together, and her feeling of their absolute mutual willingness to do that if they could.
Love, she said silently, concentrating on the word -- or rather, what the word meant to her. She focused all her energy on love, on summoning it, embodying it, projecting it, and then she pictured Jason. Eyes closed, Casey breathed in love, pulling the energy of it into her being and sending it back out with her exhalation, so that love was what she was moving through the universe, love was why she was breathing at that moment.
Then she moved her hand between her legs.
Holding this concentration, she moved her fingers in circles around her clit, her breathing increasing as she held love in her consciousness and visualized her husband. She came surprisingly fast, gasping as she felt as though love itself was exploding from inside of her as orgasmic energy rushed through her in physical form. She lay in surprise both at how quickly the orgasm had come and also at its power -- it wasn’t necessarily more powerful than her usual orgasms. But it was a different power.
She didn’t move as she caught her breath, eyes resting on the chandelier on the ceiling above her. There was an exhilaration in her beyond the sexual satisfaction she usually experienced when she made herself come. She had the inarticulable feeling that she had truly just actively manifested love in the universe.
Then she realized what it was. It was prayer. That was the moment Casey realized her personal form of prayer through orgasm. In conjunction with her physical body, through the sacred, luminous, incomparable power of orgasm, she was embodying the intention to manifest the energy she aspired to bring to the universe. What else was prayer than that?
Casey guided her focus to healing. Her fingers still resting on her clit, she began the gentle circular motion again, this time holding the intention of healing for Jason. She was generally multi-orgasmic, but once again she was astonished by how quickly she came, crying out as the energy of healing moved through her as if from somewhere else, as though her body was just the conduit, the building of arousal pulling healing energy in and the orgasm sending it slicing out from her body so intensely she almost couldn’t see.
She lay panting, her desire for her husband so strong she felt it racing through her body like an electric current. She looked back at the couch and let the memory come this time: the heat of Jason’s touch making her catch her breath as he came up behind her, the stubble of his two-day beard grazing her neck as he whispered in her ear how much he wanted to fuck her. She’d turned, and he’d pushed her onto the couch, ripping at her clothes as her breathing grew heavier and her pussy wetter. He had pushed into her with a voracity that made her cry out, an involuntary sound from deep in her core, the same place she felt the connection with him that took her -- took them both -- to another plane of existence, a place beyond thought, beyond form, beyond any separation between their physical bodies.
Casey shuddered now as she pictured it, bringing herself to climax once more with the simple memory of that connection; an orgasm just for her this time, beautiful and powerful but personal.
After a while she stood to return to the kitchen. A warm, weightless light seemed to fill her, infusing her simplest movements with a feeling of sacred energy. As she refilled her teacup, the phone rang.
She looked at caller ID and felt her heart crack open. Barely able to speak, she took a deep breath and answered it.
“Hi,” her husband said, and the hesitation, fear, and desperation Casey heard in that one syllable overwhelmed her. She dropped against the counter, silent sobs pulsing through her body, and begged the universe with all the might she had for her husband. For his healing, his happiness, and if it were possible amidst those two things, for their reconciliation.
“I was just thinking about you, and -- I wanted to see you,” Jason’s voice cracked in a way Casey remembered hearing perhaps twice in the 10 years she had known him. “There’s so much --” his voice halted, and Casey’s hand went to her breastbone as she felt the pain in him shoot through her own heart. “There’s so much I want to tell you,” he finished, his voice unable to hide the tears in it by the time the sentence was out.
Casey breathed. Slowly and consciously. She hadn’t seen her husband for three months. At their separation, believing it to be best, she had instigated a “no physical contact” rule that neither of them had yet initiated breaking.
“Can I see you?” Jason whispered.
Casey felt the depth of connection beyond even her capacity to think about it, as simply something known, understood, emanating from her core.
Moving her.
The word slid out as part of her breath, an unbreakable whisper from an abiding stillness: “Yes.”