Content Warning: This section discusses sacred sexuality, erotic mysticism, and the integration of sexual and spiritual energy.
If you’re not ready for that, maybe save it for later. But if you’ve ever been feeling confused about why your meditations have started feeling more like a sacred rendezvous, this might explain why.
I first discovered experientially that sexual and spiritual energy are one about 2 years ago. I only got the confirmation this year.
I was HORRIFIED, thinking something was wrong with me when I started falling in love so deeply with the Divine. I became so intimate with the Ineffable that in November 2023 (7 months into daily meditation) I had my first feelings of eros while meditating—of feeling yearning with my heart, my soul, AND my body.
I tried to find ANYTHING about it online and found nothing talking about this except practices outside of anything familiar to my Western mind.
I read about:
Sufism’s ishq (the intense fire of passionate love for the Beloved) and shawq (the intense magnetism of longing / yearning for the Beloved)
Bhakti yoga
Tantric union
But I saw NOTHING about an erotic encounter in deep solo meditation, specifically as a Westerner. And everything I read involving a partner was intentional between both parties, both on the same page that the encounter was to be more than typical lovemaking. But for me? It felt like an intrusive thought invading my most intimate moments, somehow amplifying them.
But as I was doing research earlier for my “Pissing into a Serene Lake” post (which complains about modern yoga being divorced from its spiritual roots), I stumbled upon Ida Craddock in the Wikipedia article for “Yoga in the United States.”
She died for speaking publicly of this realization. That was 123 years ago.
She had the same realization I stumbled upon for myself just MEDITATING on my own, no teacher, no book, no prior knowledge.
And she died for having the courage to proclaim it aloud.
Who was Ida Craddock?
I didn’t think much of Ida’s name when it first appeared in a timeline of yoga history.
I opened the “Vajroli mudra” Wikipedia article linked from the one I was reading. I wanted to learn about it because Ida was willing to die for it.
I then read the following under the “Reception” section:
Ida Craddock was the first Westerner to write about Vajroli mudra. The use she made of it enraged the American authorities, and she killed herself.
The earliest Westerner to write about it was the American yoga scholar and sexologist Ida C. Craddock. Opposing the predominant religious culture of her nation at the time, fundamentalist Protestant Christianity, Craddock was struck by the Shiva Samhita’s account of Vajroli mudra, with “the idea that sexual union could facilitate divine realization”. […] she asserted that God was the third partner in such a marriage, “in what amounted to a sacred menage-a-trois.”[3] Craddock’s emphasis on yoga and her new “mystico-erotic religion” enraged the authorities; she was tried in New York for obscenity and blasphemy, and imprisoned for three months. Facing federal charges on her release, in 1902 she killed herself. The yoga scholar Andrea Jain notes that Craddock’s “sacralization of sexual intercourse”[3] is far from radical by modern standards, but it was “antisocial heterodoxy” in the 1900s, leading indeed to her “martyrdom”.[3]
She left a suicide note to the public on October 16, 1902 that read, in part:
To the Public:
I am taking my life, because a judge, at the instigation of Anthony Comstock, has decreed me guilty of a crime which I did not commit--the circulation of obscene literature--and has announced his intention of consigning me to prison for a long term.
[...]
At my age (I was forty-five this last August) confinement under the rigors of prison life would be equivalent to my death-warrant. [...] I prefer to die comfortably and peacefully, on my own little bed in my own room, instead of on a prison cot.
[...]
For over nine years I have been fighting, singlehanded and alone, against Comstockism. Time and time again I have been pushed to the wall, my books have been seized and burned, and I myself have been publicly stigmatized in the press by Comstock and Comstockians as a purveyor of indecent literature. Yet this very literature has been all the while quietly circulating with approval among men and women of the utmost respectability and purity of life, and I have received numerous letters attesting its worth.
[...]
Dear fellow-citizens of America, for nine long years I have faced social ostracism, poverty, and the dangers of persecution by Anthony Comstock for your sakes. I had a beautiful gospel of right living in the marriage relation, which I wanted you to share with me. For your sakes, I have struggled along in the face of great odds; for your sakes I have come at last to the place where I must lay down my life for you, either in prison or out of prison. Will you not do something for me now?
[...]
I beg of you, for your own sakes, and for the future happiness of the young people who are dear to you, to protect my little book, “Right Marital Living.”
To summarize, Ida Craddock taught that:
God was the third partner in sexual union
sexual energy could be transformed into spiritual realization
the body wasn’t sinful—it was sacred
And she was willing to fight for 9 years to teach this and die for her beliefs rather than recant.
Why I’m writing this now
Ida encountered something that I have experienced multiple times over the past 2 years just meditating on my own with no teacher or formal practice... and she died for it.
My notes from before the blow:
Wow, so I’m reading the Wikipedia article “Yoga in the United States” for the “Brief History section” of my “Pissing into a Serene Lake” post and look what I found:
Ida C. Craddock became interested in yoga and tantra late in the 19th century, a time when Americans were questioning Christian orthodoxy while others were struggling to uphold it. As a woman, and the creator of a system of techniques to enhance sexual pleasure, she came under attack. […] She further enraged religious fundamentalists by asserting that God was a third partner in a sacralized sexual union, and in 1899 by creating a Church of Yoga. She was convicted and imprisoned in New York in 1902 for obscenity and blasphemy.
The sad part is I literally experienced what she said about God for myself not too long ago and was mortified at the thought. But I wasn’t even the first to think that and she literally got IMPRISONED for proclaiming it out loud.
But as soon as I looked into her more and saw the word “suicide”, my eyes started to water. I stopped reading. I felt a level of grief wash over me for a woman I never knew in an age I never lived in.
“I need a minute,” I said as I got up from my desk where I was working on the previous article. I felt myself getting pulled to my cushion, my other “desk”.
I sat down to meditate. I felt a genuine desire to honor her. My notes before dropping into meditation:
She and this topic deserves its own article. It will be the deepest deep end of my Substack [...], but she does not deserve to be just a footnote. [...] I know I, for one, was horrified at how viscerally in love I fell with God and had no idea who to even talk to about it because I felt like I was going insane to the point that my mind was making connections that would have gotten me killed back then, that I can’t even speak about without it seeming like a bizarre fetish. I’m pretty sure I went looking online for this phenomenon once but didn’t see any blog post about it, just mystical practices in exotic systems to me like Sufism and Bhakti.
I then felt the name of the post come to me as if by request: “What Ida Craddock Died For”. It was settled before I could even ask what to call the post I would write.
I then fell into meditation for an unknown amount of time. I felt an energetic, almost electric surge and felt the need to ground myself into the floor with some yin yoga poses. These slowly escalated into what as a bystander would have looked like lovemaking...if my partner was completely invisible and I was fully clothed. This is apparently the things that happen at my “desk” at “Mystics Inc.”
So yeah, that’s my “Level 3: Union” take on “Pissing Into a Serene Lake”: Americans 123 years ago drove a woman to suicide because they weren’t ready for what “yoga” truly meant: Union with the Divine. Physical poses, but not in the sanitized YMCA or suburban yoga studio.
What Ida died for is alive
Ida Craddock taught that sexual union could facilitate divine realization. That God was the third partner in sacred marriage. That the body wasn’t sinful—it was a temple. That sexual energy could be transformed into spiritual immortality.
For saying this out loud, for teaching it, for creating a “Church of Yoga” that included these practices—
She was imprisoned. Hounded. Driven to take her own life rather than rot in a prison cell.
Her last wish was that the matter she fought 9 years for against Comstockism didn’t end there.
It didn’t.
123 years later, I’m sitting on a meditation cushion in suburban New England, having experienced the exact same truth she died for—without ever knowing her name, without reading her work, without any teacher.
My body taught me what she died teaching others.
And I’m writing this so no one else has to suffer in silence.
Same energy, different frequencies
I also did some more research recently, cross-referencing it with my journals. I realized that what I was encountering and lamenting about in late July of this year is actually a spontaneous rediscovery of the principles of brahmacharya (celibacy/energy retention) found in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and Ayurveda.
The ancient texts posit that virya (sexual energy) and ojas (spiritual energy) are the same force at different frequencies.
To “release” the energy physically is to dissipate the fuel needed to propel Kundalini upward.
This also tracks with the Taoist practice of jing retention to nourish the shen (Spirit).
The distress I experienced wasn’t prudishness (I’ve been in a loving relationship with my spouse for a decade now), but an energetic recognition that the “chalice” (the body) is leaking the “wine” meant for the altar.
This wasn’t a conscious decision. This was an arising, a symptom of awakening.
If this is happening to you
If you’ve felt eros arise during meditation—
If you’ve fallen viscerally in love with the Divine—
If your body moves in ways during practice that you can’t explain and are terrified to admit—
If a third “Partner” has entered your most intimate encounters—
If you’ve wondered whether you’re going crazy, whether this is “appropriate,” whether anyone else has ever experienced this:
You’re not crazy.
You’re not alone.
You’re not the first.
I once thought I was. Then I found out recently that this is a documented phenomenon across every mystical tradition:
Rumi’s poetry about “The Beloved” (explicitly erotic)
Mirabai dancing for Krishna as a lover
The Song of Songs (biblical erotic poetry about union with God)
Tantric practices (sexual energy as path to enlightenment)
Sufi practices of ishq (divine passionate love)
Teresa of Ávila’s “Transverberation.” See the “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” statue in Rome:
The language is always erotic because the experience IS erotic.
Not metaphorically.
Actually.
When consciousness expands toward union with the Divine, the body responds with its most intense sensation: eros.
This isn’t projection. This isn’t repression. This isn’t fetish.
This is what union feels like when experienced through a human nervous system.
And it was suppressed—violently, systematically, across cultures—because it’s dangerous. Not to people—but to power structures.
Because if people discover they can access the Divine directly—through their own bodies, through their own practice, through union with their beloved, they don’t need:
intermediaries
to be told they’re sinful
salvation from external authorities
They realize: I AM the temple. My body is sacred. My pleasure is holy.
That’s what Ida died for.
That’s what I’m reclaiming.
That’s what’s alive in me—and maybe in you too.
P.S.
I will admit that I sat on this post for 11 days, partially because I needed to launch the “Space Division” (Level 3) first, but also because this is a legitimately scary post to write. Again though, it helps no one if I withhold it.
P.P.S.
Right after publishing this, I was clearing my tabs related to this post and saw this on Wisdom Library (emphasis mine):
Sahajolīmudrā (सहजोलीमुद्रा) (or simply Sahajolī) is the name of a Mudrā, according to the Amaraughaprabodha: a short 13th century treatise on Yoga attributed to Gorakṣanātha which teaches the fourfold system of yoga (Mantra, Laya, Haṭha and Rāja).—Accordingly, “[...] When the mind has attained equanimity and the breath moves into the central channel, [then] these Amarolī, Vajrolī and Sahajolī [Mudras] arise”.
The "throbbing" I documented in my journals? The bodily responses I couldn't explain? They have a name. They're documented. And they arise automatically—not through technique, but through being.
Once again: When being becomes doing, NOT the other way around.