Discovery, Fusion, and the Limits of My Yidam Practice

A Pleasant Stage — Containing the Seeds of Its Own Ending

After discovering the overwhelming mental states induced by this practice—which I’ll still call Yidam, though it may not align perfectly with canonical definitions—I repeated the procedure daily. Soon, I realized the being I was fusing with was not a goddess, but the idealized memory of my first Tantric lover — the woman who had introduced me to those states long before I had any conceptual framework for them.

Day after day, I saw her running toward me—her eyes filled with joy, her heart with love, her belly with lust—exactly the feelings I had experienced with her, and in my first Yidam experiment. We fused in the deepest embrace, but this time, skin was no barrier. Our bodies overlapped, and every cell within me danced with the cell within hers, from head to toe, in a dance that tasted of lust beyond lust, love beyond love, and joy beyond joy—all blended into a cocktail far greater than the sum of its parts.

This was an extremely pleasant stage in my journey, yet it contained the seeds of its own ending. As the practice evolved and reshaped my perception, the truth became evident: I was not fusing with anything—goddess or lover. I was simply discovering the real nature of this subtle body, hidden all my life and now unveiled. There was no “other” interacting with me. It was just me—to be precise, this pure consciousness free from thoughts, which had always been there and had nothing to do with the “mundane me” made of thoughts, fears, and desires. This seemed to be the real “me” finally taking possession of its energy body.

Changes in Perception

As the fusion extended across what internal alchemy traditions call the three dantians, distinct perceptual shifts became apparent.

• At the level of the lower dantian, sexuality lost its binary character. The energetic body revealed itself as neither male nor female — or perhaps as containing both polarities simultaneously. Biological sex remained a fact, but it no longer defined the structure of experience..
• At the level of the middle dantian, what had initially appeared as intensified love transformed into something more spatial than emotional. A strange feeling of spaciousness—like watching the starry sky from a mountaintop, yet feeling I could touch the stars, as if a subtle veil separating near from far had been removed. Love, typically structured as a relation between self and other, shifted toward a perception of inevitable interconnection once experiential space ceased to function as a barrier.
• At the level of the upper dantian, fusion expressed itself as joy — not private satisfaction, but shared exhilaration. The closest ordinary analogue would be the collective surge when a team scores a decisive goal, or when a crowd sings in unison. In those moments, individual identity briefly relaxes and a larger coherence takes precedence. The joy was of that nature: distributed rather than owned.

These shifts did not prove anything metaphysical. They demonstrated how radically perception can reorganize when identity becomes fluid.

Taking Possession of the Energy Body

Eventually, however, the figure faded.

The lover, the goddess, the dakini — all dissolved. What remained was a persistent sense of energetic coherence without a relational counterpart. One duality had collapsed: there was no longer an “other” to fuse with. The qualities previously attributed to her were now recognized as intrinsic potentials within my own experiential field.

Yet this resolution generated a new tension. From this expanded, less localized mode of embodiment, there emerged an impulse to extend the same fusion outward — not toward a human partner, but toward reality as a whole. Energy no longer seemed directional. It appeared to arise from everywhere at once.

It would have been easy to interpret this as movement toward something “divine.”

More cautiously, I would say this: the configuration began to resemble what many traditions describe as divine — boundaryless, sexless, interconnected. Whether that resemblance reflects ontological truth or the nervous system’s capacity for large-scale integration remains an open question.

The experience was convincing. Convincing experiences, however, are not the same as verified conclusions.

Balancing Yin and Yang

A final corrective emerged in a later internal image of my dakini. This time, she was not the soft, feminine lover of the first stage, but a warrior princess wielding her sword, full of power, boldness, and assertiveness. The symbolism was transparent: in leaning deeply into receptive (yin) qualities, I had overcorrected. If androgyny was the goal, it required dynamic balance, not identification with one pole.

That marked the end of this pleasant but incomplete stage.

The Yidam, once discovered as a scaffold, evolved into a powerful reinforcement loop before dissolving. Recognizing the limits of my yidam practice led to a clearer understanding of how imagery and identity co-construct one another, and why even the most luminous forms must be relinquished.