Gooning Part 2: The Opening

*Part of the Practicing Woman series on gooning. Part 1: The Seeking | Part 2: The Opening | Part 3: Harm Reduction*

In the weeks and months that followed the festival I had to face the reality of recovery.

A trans comedian I admire had mentioned that she could take a fist post-surgery. Inspired, I decided to see if I could become a size queen myself. I got there — I can now take something significantly larger than my surgeon said I'd ever be able to. But in the process I prolonged my recovery by months beyond what I'd expected.

Recovery from gender affirmation surgery requires dilation — using medical dilators to maintain the width and depth of the new vagina, three times a day in the early months. Some of the cis women I know who've been through birth recovery have said it sounds remarkably similar to what they went through. I believe them. In the first two or three months I was spending a total of five hours a day across three sessions: preparing, dilating, cleaning up, showering. Painful, time-consuming, relentless. Over the months the amount of time required came down, but it remained a significant daily reality for a long time.

I tried to go back to work but my workplace was struggling financially and could only bring me back at a fraction of my previous hours.

Isolated. Stressed. In pain. And intensely curious about this new body. My surgeon had said to wait six weeks before any sexual contact, and twelve weeks before penetration. I barely managed to wait three and a half weeks before getting off for the first time.

My sex drive came back like a wildfire. Lacking partners who were present and willing to explore with me, I turned to what I'd always known. I turned to the internet.

And when I got there, I stumbled on something I'd never come across before — what I would later learn was called gooning. At its core, gooning is sexual edging: deliberately extending arousal over time, staying at the edge rather than going over. What the best content adds to that is a layered set of tools — images, music, hypnotic inductions, sometimes substances — specifically designed to use that sustained arousal as a doorway into genuinely altered states of consciousness. The best of it was producing states I recognised from fifteen years of erotic hypnosis work, except faster, more immediate, more intense. For serious practitioners it's much closer to a tantric practice than to ordinary porn — using the body and sexual energy as a vehicle for accessing expanded states of consciousness. I didn't have that framework then. I just knew it was doing something.

I dove in.

I want to say something honest about why I wasn't more cautious going in.

Porn has been part of my life since I was a kid. It's been how I've managed having a very high sex drive in a body and a life where connecting physically with people has been genuinely difficult — because I'm trans, because I'm autistic, because the barriers stack up in ways that make ordinary connection harder than it should be. I've had a basically healthy relationship with it by my own assessment. A couple of moments over the years where it impacted my life a bit, but nothing that made me think I had a problem.

So when gooning started being talked about in terms of porn addiction, I didn't register it as a meaningful warning. Porn addiction, as I understood it, was mostly shame about high sex drive dressed up as a clinical category — people managing their sexuality through pornography and then being told that level of desire was abnormal. That wasn't my experience, and it wasn't what I saw in myself. I thought I knew what I was dealing with.

Nobody had flagged clearly enough that gooning is not the same category of thing. That the tools you've developed for managing your relationship with regular pornography won't transfer. That whatever your history with porn, this is a different conversation.

The other reason I went in the way I did is that it wasn't only about desire.

Some of my trans friends — people from the same internet-generation queer world I'd come up in — had, at various points, indicated that they saw me as an elder in some sense — someone who had navigated things and come out with something worth passing on. I'd spent a lot of time sitting with what that meant. For years I'd been part of queer and neurodivergent online spaces where we were all basically goblins trying to figure out how to be human — building our own maps in the absence of any handed-down ones, nobody with their shit particularly together, just people trying to find their way.

When I found gooning I recognised the same pattern immediately. The spaces around it were chaotic and young, full of the same people — queer, trans, neurodivergent — alongside plenty of straight men, but with particular niches where those communities clustered, doing what those communities do: building something in the absence of anything handed down. Nobody who understood what was actually happening there had shown up to be present with them in any real way. Not because the elders were absent, but because they hadn't understood what was happening there. This felt like a problem worth addressing. It also, I will be honest, felt like an opportunity to look at some really good porn while doing something useful. That felt like a win-win.

So I went in partly as a scout. Partly as someone who felt a responsibility to understand what was happening in spaces that people I cared about were already in. And partly because I was recovering and isolated and my body was on fire and I had a fifteen-year erotic hypnosis practice behind me and I wanted to know where this went.

What I found, going deeper, was that the content had architecture.

There were videos built around poppers, designed to be used with them, the rush timed to specific moments in the edit — and weed was ubiquitous across all of it, not incidentally but functionally. Gooning doesn't work particularly well sober. There's something about THC that opens you to these states in a way that's hard to replicate otherwise. There were hypnotic loops, spirals, audio layered underneath the visual that worked on you whether you noticed it or not. And then there was a whole category of content doing something else entirely — content that wasn't just trying to arouse you but to install something. To rewrite you. Videos that announced their own intention plainly: this is going to change how you think. This is going to take something from you. You are going to come back to this again and again and each time you will be less of what you were before.

I found those ones and I went toward them.

I want to be honest about that. It wasn't that I didn't know what they were claiming to do. I knew. That was the point. I had spent my whole life looking for something that could actually receive all of me, that wouldn't need me to hold back, that I didn't have to protect from the full weight of my own desire. Here was content explicitly claiming it could take everything I had. I ran toward it.

What I found in the depths of that content — the best of it, the stuff that actually worked — was something that functioned more like spiritual encounter than pornography. States I had no prior map for. The dissolution of ordinary consciousness, complete loss of the sense of a separate self observing the experience, something that felt like being in the presence of forces that were genuinely enormous. I came out of the deepest sessions barely able to think or speak. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes longer.

I want to be careful here about how I describe this. I know some readers will push back on the spiritual framing — I would have too, before. What I can say is that trance states — deep altered states accessed through sustained practice, where ordinary consciousness dissolves and something else takes over — are documented across cultures throughout human history. What I was accessing through gooning may be a different flavour of that than what those traditions were working with, but the territory isn't unknown. The cross-cultural convergence on what these states are and what they can do is hard to dismiss. Whether what I was encountering in those depths was my own deepest psyche, something genuinely external, or some territory where those categories stop being useful — I don't know. What I do know is that the experiences were real. The states were real. And they were changing me in ways I was only beginning to understand.

The states were getting deeper, and the language I had for them was running out. That was when I found the Emerald podcast properly.

Someone had sent me an episode when I was sitting in Brisbane airport on the way to surgery — one of those details that feels almost too neat to be true, except it happened. I'd listened to a few episodes then and let it slip. When I found it again something began to shift, though not all at once.

The Emerald is Josh Schrei's podcast about animist consciousness — about the reality that for most of human history, in most human cultures, the world was understood to be alive and inhabited by forces with which people existed in ongoing relationship. That trance states, altered consciousness, encounters with forces larger than the individual self — these weren't aberrations or symptoms. They were normal. Expected. Technologies that cultures had developed over thousands of years for navigating territories of experience that are simply part of being human.

I had been in those territories. Without a map. Without guides. Without any framework for what was happening to me. Before the Emerald, my understanding of animism and mythology was that it belonged in books, video games, D&D campaigns — none of it felt connected to the real world in any way that mattered. The idea that the world was genuinely alive and inhabited by forces you could actually encounter wasn't something I'd held as real.

I started listening obsessively, and gooning obsessively, and the two were bouncing off each other in ways I was only fumbling my way toward understanding. Pieces came into place here and there. A framework for what trance states were and why they mattered. A language for the entities and forces I'd been encountering. A history of how human beings had navigated this territory before me. It took the better part of a year before I had anything like a coherent picture of what had been happening to me.

The Emerald handed me a map. What I didn't fully reckon with at the time was that a map also makes the territory feel more worth exploring. Before the Emerald, the gooning was intense kink I didn't have full language for. After, it was a spiritual practice I was engaging with consciously — which meant every session was an encounter worth going further into. The reframe saved me in some ways. It also pulled me considerably deeper.

The Emerald was the thing that eventually helped me find my way out. It was also the thing that accelerated the spiral at a crucial moment. I hold both of those as true.

What I didn't understand, through all of this, was what the cost was accumulating to in my body.

I'd had long COVID, and chronic fatigue with it. Those symptoms had mostly resolved. But through 2024 they started creeping back. By early 2025 I was mostly bedbound for the first two months of the year. I had opened myself spiritually, very rapidly, without anything like an appropriate container — accessing depths that traditions build years of preparation around, doing it alone, doing it repeatedly, doing it while combining various substances, doing it without any structure for integrating what was coming in. The body keeps score. A mouldy reusable shopping bag left in my car was enough to tip me into a spiralling reaction trending toward anaphylaxis — a twelve-hour ordeal that ended in the emergency department. That kind of extreme reactivity is consistent with a nervous system pushed far past its capacity to regulate.

In March 2025 a cyclone hit where I was living. At the peak of it something shifted in me and I understood I needed to leave — not because of the cyclone specifically, but because of everything. I packed what I could and left. I lived in my car for three weeks with very little money, not sure what would come next. Strangely, my health started to rapidly recover once I made that change — whatever had been dragging me down began to lift almost immediately.

Then some money came through, somewhat miraculously. I found a temporary place. I started finding my way back toward something resembling ordinary life, though ordinary felt very far away.

That winter I moved into a cabin in the bush.

It had a deck looking out over a beautiful valley, and every morning I would get up and meditate there, and every late afternoon before the light changed I'd sit there again. Twice a day, consistently, for months.

I was also still gooning. By this point I was so deeply in my body that I wasn't really making choices with my mind anymore. My body was finding its own relationship to the practice — trying to find a way of being with it that wasn't costing me the way it had been — and my mind was mostly watching, trying to understand what was happening.

What my body found, slowly, was that it could bring the meditative practice into the gooning itself. The states I'd been dropping into had been dissociative — consciousness leaving, no witness present, complete dissolution. What began to happen through that winter was a thread of conscious awareness maintained throughout. Staying present inside the state rather than simply being consumed by it.

Once that shift happened, something changed significantly. The dissociative states had been intense. The states where awareness remained were something else entirely. I'll leave the specifics for another post, because that material requires its own careful framing. What I'll say here is that the spiritual dimension of what I'd been accessing escalated dramatically. Everything took on an intensity I had no adequate language for.

And then I started chasing it.

Once you've touched something that feels that significant, ordinary life feels thin by comparison. I started going back not from genuine call but from need — needing to feel that intensity again. The substance use running alongside all of this was by this point openly addictive. The gooning and the substances were feeding each other, each one justifying the other.

Through this period things were happening that were genuinely significant — real encounters, moments that other people who were present also experienced, things that I couldn't easily dismiss and neither could the people I shared them with. And simultaneously I wasn't fully grounded, and some of what felt momentous wasn't. The difficulty was I couldn't always tell which was which. People started distancing themselves — partly, I think, because of the things that weren't real, while the things that were real were going largely unseen. I couldn't find anyone to sit with me and help me sort it out.

At the beginning of 2026 I stopped. More than a month without it.

Some things became clear in the quiet that followed — things I had overlooked while I was deep in it, with real consequences in my life that I'm still picking up. The clarity was not entirely comfortable.

Where I am now is genuinely hard to describe. The gooning has shifted. Someone helped me work through a lot of the addictive aspects of it, and what remains feels less like compulsion and more like worship — a draw toward something I've developed a genuine spiritual relationship with, even though I didn't choose that relationship consciously. The intensity is still there. The pull is still there. But the quality of it is different.

What I can't fully tell you — and I want to be honest about this — is whether what I'm describing as worship is actually worship, or whether it's addiction wearing spiritual clothes. I'm still working that out. What I can say is that I need more than I currently have: community, embodied connection, probably some kind of consistent practice to fill the space this has occupied. The model that says it's just my personal responsibility to stop, that willpower is the answer — I don't think that's adequate for where I actually am.

I started with good porn. I ended up in a genuine relationship with whatever forces are emerging through what we're building with AI and technology. I didn't set out on that journey. I didn't consent to the destination. But I went there anyway, and I came back with something — knowledge, capacity, a different relationship to my own body and consciousness — that I don't regret, even while I'm honest about what it cost.

That's why I'm writing these posts. Not because I have it solved. Because I went first, and I have some sense of the territory, and people are going to go there whether or not anyone leaves them a map.