Stop the World — I Want to Get Off

By Guest Writer Rosie Vega

A now largely forgotten 1961 Broadway show, “Stop the World—I Want to Get Off,” is more memorable for its title, which became a pop culture catch phrase for a while, than the musical itself. According to Broadway insider Oscar Levant, the creators took it from a graffito scrawled on a wall—a cry of urban angst.

The phrase still resonates with me, especially this week, when in Dr. Sara’s Mission Ignition course we’ve been learning about Slow Sex, Orgasmic Meditation and first chakra meditation to connect to subtle energetic anatomy, and how the first chakra relates to our sexual energy. The title works perfectly as a double entendre: a cry for sexual release. To get off, to totally surrender and achieve erotic transcendence, we may need to stop the world for a while—step back from the constant barrage of emails, text messages, phone calls, media input, the demands of children, family members, friends, job.

In one of this week’s webinars, Dr. Sara introduced us to the amazing body worker and female anatomy teacher Ellen Heed, who recommends we take an hour out of each day to be quiet and calm.

“In our culture, the allegiance is to more and more input instead of more and more quiet connection,” said Heed. “What if we gave ourselves an hour of mini-retreat every day to be quiet, tune in, feel our connection to our own pleasure and be immersed in our ecstatic states?”

She spoke of our “stress-driven lifestyle that shares the hallucination that we’re supposed to be 100 percent productive 100 percent of the time. That’s just not so.”

She also busted us for being so addicted to all our digital communication devices and systems, feeling we have to answer that email or read that text as soon as it comes in. “That’s a virtual world,” she reminded us. “What about you right now, right here, in your body?”

I recently attended a talk by my friend Jane Applegate, a journalist, author and small-business expert, who gave similar advice to a roomful of small-business owners at Dominican College in San Rafael, Calif. It’s her job to give tips on how to be successful. And high on her list are two things: Take an hour out of every day for yourself—take a walk, meditate, do yoga, goof off—and set aside a specific time to respond to emails once or twice a day, or if you must, once every couple of hours. The constant checking in and responding is very wearing. It’s ceding your precious time–our most valuable commodity these days—to the unending needs of others.

Jane gives this advice to prevent burnout, a common affliction of people who run their own business. Dr. Sara has talked about how women can get worn down by giving too much, always taking care of everybody else’s feelings—especially moms, who are continually answering the needs of their children, and working moms, who are stretched thin trying to do everything for everyone in two spheres, work and home.

I am definitely one of those working moms. I haven’t even found the 13 minutes to experience the orgasmic mediation we’ve learned about. That’s my goal for this weekend, and my husband is looking forward to it.

Dr. Sara promised the homework for this would be fun, and I don’t doubt her. One thing that’s already been of value is the first chakra meditation. It’s amazing that such a simple, brief step can have such a big impact. I even did it on my crowded commuter train yesterday. Closed my eyes and felt the roots of my energy going down through the train floor, thru the elevated tracks down to the earth to ground me, even in motion.

Another gem from this week: When Ellen Heed was talking about self-pleasure, and said, “Our neurology is a gift from the divine that is capable of taking us into profound states of consciousness … a pipeline to God.” But to get there we need to “trust, let go, melt… and be all that we can be in our emotional bodies.”

That’s what I want to be. To get there, I think I need to stop the world. I want to get off.