Meditation creates space between thoughts and your response, making automatic spirals less inevitable.

Suffering comes from judgments about a fetish, not the fetish itself.

Notice your thoughts without suppressing them or adding commentary, then gently return to your breath.

Meditation is a tool for creating distance between yourself and the onslaught of default thoughts, emotions, and sensations that make up our moment-to-moment experiences. This distance enables choice and provides the most profound type of personal freedom on offer: the freedom to decide how you feel about things, your sexuality being chief among them.

Here is the most basic meditation I’m aware of. Try it if you dare:

Sit down somewhere comfortable. It can be in a chair (like the Germans do), on your couch (like Americans), or cross-legged on the ground (like the Buddha).

Start breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth. Don’t worry about pacing—just breathe to stay alive, per usual.

Notice your breath—like really notice it. Notice the slight coolness inside your nose when you breathe in, the mild but still somehow sharp pressure in your lungs as they fill with air, the subtle tingle on the inside of your lips as air exits through your mouth.

Keep noticing the sensations that arise with your breath. There are a lot of them; they never stop, and they’re always different.

Your mind will wander. Thoughts will pop into your head—thoughts as quotidian as "Jeez, I still........

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