Tantrika (3 page)

We assembled again on the floor.

“The thought of surrender is terrifying to a lot of people,” Pala told us. “But to enjoy sacred sex, you have to open your hearts. Write a word on a piece of paper. Tuck it under your pillow.”

Why not try? In my cabin, by the light of a flashlight, I scrawled one word,
Surrender,
and slipped the paper under my pillow.

I wondered if I could surrender. Was it possible to release my heart? Maybe it was I, not the men I chose, who feared intimacy. It didn't take much past Psychology 101 to realize that I wasn't choosing good mates. My twenty-nine-year-old who couldn't discuss his virginity wasn't quite material for a spiritual love connection.

One activity spilled after another in the weekend training schedule. Blindfolded, we ate food fed to us by our foot-washing partner. My partner was kind. He spared me the Tabasco sauce.

Blindfolded again, we thrashed coiled towels against the floor to unleash our anger. I thrashed and thrashed. We gazed into the eyes of the stranger next to us. My partner had gentle eyes that lingered. John Travolta taught us how to thrust delicately in a movie clip from
Saturday Night Fever.
This was a trick for men to keep themselves from ejaculating. Thrust, pause, thrust again. Men could do the Kegel exercises, too, we were told. Like women, all they had to do was tighten the muscles that stretch like a hammock from the base of the spine to the pubic bone, supporting
the sexual organs, the urethra, and the rectum. Al called the exercise “push-ups for the penis.”

We moved to a grassy lawn beside our log cabin retreat center. We were about to learn one of the most critical parts of Tantra, how to release and move the energy through our body through the seven chakra centers. They were the chakras Shiva and Shakti used in their lovemaking. I wasn't a believer. I sat on the edge of my seat as another Tantra student, Robert, pressed a finger into the soft of my skull.

“This is your crown chakra,” Al told us. “Hold the pressure. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it.”

How strange. I felt myself relaxing. Maybe this actually worked.

Robert moved his finger then to a dip at the base of the back of my head, the “Wind Mansion.” Then, he moved to the dips of my shoulders, “Heavenly Rejuvenation.” Then, right below my clavicle bones. I could feel my entire being release. It worked. I was a convert. The energy flowed down through me as if by some magical force of nature. My head collapsed. I could barely bring myself to pay attention. I pressed my own finger into the dip below my sternum, between my breasts. This was “The Sea of Intimacy,” the heart chakra.

“Press here to overcome your fears. To open your heart,” said Al.

We lay on mats on the grassy field. The teachers told us to put our hands on our waists and press our fingers into the dips there, “The Sea of Vitality.”

We slipped our hands behind our lower backs so that our knuckles pressed into the dip right above our butts, at “The Sacral Point.” Pressing on it was supposed to release raw energy. Naked energy. Lust. The idea was to unleash our energy so that it brought us to higher levels of ecstasy.

After a candlelight dinner together, we saw the sky had filled with bright stars. I walked down to the dock with Robert and the handsome weekend student, Frederic. Darkness had descended upon this lake, leaving glints of light on the water like sparkle dust cast from the skies. Robert breathed in deep and then left. The crickets chirped. A cloud floated over a star.

Frederic and I studied the white flashes in the woods to figure out if they could be lightning bugs. It was quiet except for the sound of chirping and our breathing.

“May I?” Frederic asked, reaching for my hand.

I was silent as he took my hand. I wondered what was coming next.

“Immerse yourself in the sound,” he whispered dreamily.

A smile crept over me in the darkness. Never heard that line before. I waited a polite moment. I withdrew my hand from his. He walked me back to my cabin.

I went in alone.

My next stop was Santa Cruz, California, the birthplace of many a New Age fad.

I stepped into the dimly lit ballroom of the Best Western Seacliff and, scanning the fresh faces and eager smiles, felt as if I'd walked into an Amway convention. But we weren't there to learn how to sell soap. We were there to learn how to create ecstasy. With fifty-six couples and thirty singles, I settled into one of the small circles as we bowed heads toward each other and gazed into each other's eyes.

“Feel the circuitry of love. Breathe love to your organs,” encouraged a middle-aged man, Charles Muir, sitting in the front of the ballroom in tight blue silk pants, floral Hawaiian shirt, and bare feet.

His partner, Caroline, looked like Olivia Newton-John. She welcomed us in a singsong voice. Together, they sat yoga style with hands on their knees, facing palm up.

“Joy is part of your inner nature,” Charles pronounced. “Tantric lovemaking is the sweetest of meditation. I am loving. I am lovable. You all are. This isn't just about sex. It's about loving sex.”

Like the other women at the workshop, I was a goddess, here to be worshiped like Shiva worshiped Shakti. It's her powerful energy that runs through women, and it's this energy we're supposed to harness to create “the divine feminine.” I pressed the palms of my hands together, fingers upward against my chest, in the Hindu ritual of greeting, more foreign to me as a Muslim than it was to some of these northern Californians who had learned the gesture in yoga classes.

“
Namaste,
” I said, not even knowing what it meant. Charles explained, “It means, ‘I bless the divine within you.'”

Charles continued with his instructions. “Be the little girl. Now, men, be cute. Be the little boy. Show her your Doberman eyes.” I felt a kinship
with the man across from me. I hurt for his hurts. I thought of the boys in the men that I've known. And I thought of the little girl in me.

“Hey, beautiful!” The shout came from the yellow school bus that had just dropped me off near my home in Piscataway, New Jersey, when I was about eight.

I turned around.

“Not you! The tree!” The shout turned into snickers as the bus drove away.

I let go of this memory as Charles instructed us to draw closer to each other. I stepped toward the man across from me. Following directions, I pressed my right hand onto his chest and my left on his back, to create “a circuitry of love.” The stranger was Harrison, a California native, thirty-seven, single, seeking his soul mate. Drenched in sweat, he started weeping.

“This is kindergarten Tantra,” said Charles, a Bronx native.

“We all have the ability to release unlimited sexual energy, to have wave after wave of glorious, easy release,” Charles cooed.

“Inside every woman's vagina is a sacred spot. If a man is willing to take the time, he can learn to touch this spot in a way that will pleasure and heal his woman,” Caroline purred.

Charles took over. “In the yoni is stored a conglomerate of mixed energies. It may feel bruised. It may feel burning. There may be emotional tensions as layers of fear and guilt come up. This is the energetic entry point that enables people to access past experiences that caused them to close down their sexual energy.”

With a partition splitting the men and women, Charles coached the men on how to “awaken the goddess” by massaging a woman's “sacred spot,” the mysterious G-spot that has eluded scientific confirmation since its apparent discovery. “It's a sacred duty for you guys to awaken an energy that seems to lie dormant. This is not just for bodies. Sexual love is a sacrament that will bring you closer to your god, as well as to each other.

“Use the third or fourth finger. Palm upward, reach into the yoni and curl the finger toward you in a kind of come-hither gesture. First, just hold the contact without movement. After one minute begin linear
stroking, experimenting. Gradually proceed to all the other strokes, pulsing, tapping, vibrating, using a circular motion or going side to side. After trying all these strokes, make a dance of all of them.”

On the other side of the wall, over tears, the women whispered tales of abuse and dejection and neglect. Rape, sexual abuse, depression, emotional walls. I thought of all my hurt through the casual and episodic relationships I'd had over the years, filled with dreams that never crystallized.

It was my turn to divulge why I was sitting at this workshop. I returned from my daydreaming. I told them what I dared: my life started in the country where Tantra began, and though this was a reporting assignment, I was hoping to gain something from this personally for I, like everyone, was in pursuit of the things that touch our souls. There, I thought, that was enough.

The partition slid away, the married couples retreating for “homework.” The single men assembled into a
puja
circle, sitting cross-legged with their eyes closed, while the single women stood inside the circle.

Charles instructed the women to hold hands, “breathing energy” out their right hands, and told us, “Honor the goddess within you. Here are your choices. You can go home alone and experiment by yourself. Or you can say, ‘I'd like to experience sacred-spot massage, and I'm willing to trust someone to do it with me.' If you choose to stay you will have a memorable night.”

Over a vegetarian meal, earlier that day, one of the single men, Ben, a local with a business card that read “sexual healer,” had volunteered to give me “a sacred spot massage.” “I'm excellent,” he'd said. I stepped out of the circle. The other women paired up with the men, retreating into the night together. One woman feasted that night with a man she had just met. They drank Bartles and Jaymes wine coolers and ate coconut macaroons he bought from 7-Eleven. She solved one mystery. She discovered she had a G-spot.

Over avocado soup, the Muirs wove the tale of their ascent in America as Mr. and Mrs. Tantra. The Muirs launched their Tantra teaching business even though neither one of them had been to India. The business enjoyed years of success. But the Muirs now carried a secret. They had
separated two years earlier and gone on a “relationship sabbatical” because Charles wanted to do “research” on healing other women.

We walked the curving sidewalk to an intersection that led the Muirs to their room. Caroline cast me a smile. “Two years ago, we would have asked you in to have sex. If I wasn't here, Charles would ask you now.”

I smiled politely and scurried away.

A few months later, I experimented privately with the art of sacred spot massage behind the white lace curtains of the Grand Hotel du Nord overlooking the main plaza in Reims, France's capital of champagne production. My boyfriend was a twenty-four-year-old French-Algerian my childhood friend Sumita had introduced me to at the corner of Montague and Henry Streets in Brooklyn Heights in front of John's Pizza when he was visiting America and earning money scooping Italian ice out of a cart marked Italian Queen.

“Surrender,” my Western Tantric teaching told me.

With no instruction from me, my boyfriend did the things Charles had instructed the men to do to worship women. It was both painful and ecstatic. But my boyfriend hadn't gone to college, he was nine years younger than I, and his father couldn't read or write. I pressed upon my heart chakra to release my fears. No surrender could transcend doubts about a career in Italian ice.

I returned to America for my friend Sumita's wedding. She was marrying a Muslim friend of mine from Iran whom I'd introduced her to after meeting him on the volleyball courts on the Washington Mall. Her grandmother didn't know she was marrying a Muslim, but it mattered little to Sumita, who always lived with a pure heart, transcending the judgmental tendencies that seeped into our immigrant culture from India. In her home, appropriately, I experienced my first
puja,
not the kind I'd seen in Santa Cruz, California, where singles paired up, but a prayer to a Hindu god, Ganesh. As others used their hands to waft smoke from the fire ritual upon their faces, I hesitated. “Go ahead,” her father encouraged me. I did and breathed in my first blessing from a Hindu prayer.

I discovered the mysticism of my roots through Sufi poetry, especially that written by the poet Jalaluddin Rumi, born in 1207 in modern-day
Afghanistan, sparking even more of my experimentation with surrender to the mystical. A man of Colombian descent followed, leaving me to reread his love poetry to me while his former girlfriend visited from her native Madrid to surprise him for his birthday.

My casualties accumulated with an intern I met when I arrived at NBC studios for an on-air interview by anchor Brian Williams. The intern called me to go out. I dreamed great thoughts about his rise on TV, my book, our future. I used my Tantric principle of surrender to release my soul to him. While I daydreamed about our future, he rose from bed. “I've got to get up early in the morning.”

“How are you getting home?”

The subway, he said. I figured it would be too dangerous at that late hour. He said he was out of money. I reached into my wallet and pulled out a twenty for him to get a taxi. I remembered another twenty-something I'd dated in Washington. We'd rendezvoused in front of the Lincoln Memorial. We were breaking up. I cried. He cried. When we parted, he asked me if he could borrow a twenty to get home. As I gave the bill to this NBC intern, he turned away from the doors with the words, “I'll call you.” I never got a call.

I still believed in love. Though I wept over these men, I was grateful to them for teaching me lessons of dharma, what Buddhists call “knowledge.” They crystallized for me a realization that I had been approaching for some time now. This path upon which I was treading was not the one I wanted for myself. Every few months I met a man with whom I thought I could start a relationship. But, sure enough, each time my judgment was wrong. American Tantra taught surrender, but the philosophy of surrender as I understood it was foolish and filled with suffering.