At first glance he had been too beautiful for me, and therefore, I
surmised, gay—so well groomed, such good posture, pen perfectly placed beside
his journal. Beautiful men are surely
vain. Or gay. That was the easiest way to dismiss this man
who stood out in the circle of 40. But
he wouldn’t easily be dismissed. For
example, one day at lunch I had a passing, silent, fantasy: wouldn’t it be great if this retreat had
waiters, who’d take my plate and bring me dessert—and just then the beautiful
and surely vain man beside me offered to take my plate and bring me dessert. I
was stunned. I let him. Way to make my dreams come true!
The first day of the retreat, during a very boundaried exercise,
women had been instructed to ask their partner (whether brought from home, or
met mere hours ago at the workshop) what level of touch he was comfortable with:
on his perineum or inches away. So I had
asked him, my partner of the moment, my beautiful, surely vain, possibly gay, future
psychic waiter. Let’s call him Rudy.
“What level of touch would you like?” I asked.
Rudy replied, with zero attachment, “Whatever you’re comfortable
with,” and I was struck by his verbal chivalry.
It mattered not to him how he was touched; he cared about his partner’s
comfort level. There was something about
him.
Me being me, by the end of that very clearly instructed,
efficiently orchestrated Tantra exercise, I had my hand in his pants. That was not part of the instruction. But I can be spontaneous. I like to break rules. Hand in pants was what I was comfortable
with! Here was this gorgeous young
specimen spooned in front of me, either gay or not gay, definitely not vain,
but cute and fresh with his Aveda scent, and there went my hand. He was irresistible. I was opportunistic. We were enjoying getting
acquainted. But I had some well set
boundaries, and had lunch with someone else that day.
At the end of the second to last night of the workshop, late, when
clothes were a distant memory to all of us, when all the body paint had been
used on each other, I noticed that someone in his group had scrawled on his
bare abdomen, like graffiti, “Sublime lingam,” with an arrow pointing
downward. Couldn’t help but notice. I’d noticed his sublime lingam too, more than
once in that 5-day course when we’d been unclothed. It was just plain sweet. I noticed a fleeting bit of envy that someone
else had labeled his lingam. To be honest, I am much more taken by women than
men. But this man was cracking my foundation…in a good way, gently, thoroughly.
The next night, the final night of the workshop, fully clothed, when all of the
guided moments of the puja were over, in a moment of play, I surprised him with
a full frontal kiss on the mouth. Immediately,
I too was surprised: I really, really liked it.
Who knew?
He did. He’d had his third eye on me, since long before the
retreat, when he had created a vision to meet a woman just like me…and had an
intuition to attend this level two Tantra retreat, “knowing” he would meet her
there. At a meal, he had overheard me
telling a friend that I would love to have a male Tantra partner who was
willing to dive deep with me, and not have it be about going to a movie and
dinner first. I wanted the sex to come
first. I wanted it to be just about sex. I was not into dating or having a
boyfriend. I wanted to learn to move my
sexual energy, unite my Shakti with Shiva, whatever that even would mean in
real life. I could go to movies with my
friends. I could go to movies
alone. I wanted Divine sexual
Union. In case he’d been wondering
whether I was the woman he’d created in his intention or not, this clinched
it. Little did I know--I hadn’t even
known he’d been listening.
Over the next few days of the retreat we spent plenty of time
giggling and partnering and rubbing each other’s feet, and on the last night
decided that the retreat would not be the end of Us. I arrived home to a poem he had written and
emailed me. About Us. We plunged into what became a five and a half
year long-distance revelry. Right away,
we decided not to call it a ‘relationship,’ which implied effort, compromise,
goals, seriousness.
“Let’s call it a journey,” I offered, and we embarked.
Before our first sexual experience, I said, “I want to love you as
much as I love you and not have it be about
anything. Not about diamond rings or
moving or the future. I want it to be
about love itself.”
“Perfect,” he said, in his laconic way, with the smile that fed my
heart. And I committed to love him as
much as I loved him, whatever that meant in any given moment, and if I didn’t feel
the love, it would be all about me and zero about him. That was our mutual commitment.
Rudy was so easy to love; and as a bonus he could make chai from
scratch and came equipped with compelling stories about traveling in
India. I was enchanted. He was funny,
excellent in the kitchen, and he gave me plenty of space to be me. Over the years, I loved him no matter what,
trained myself to recognize and transform any judgment about him that would
seek to keep me out of Love. I learned
there was nothing he needed to change about who he was; I just needed to
release my own habit of judgment.
Let’s never wish we
were anywhere other than Here Now, we decided at the end of our first weekend
together. Let’s not want what we don’t have.
Let’s channel the love and desire into our own life rather than wishing
we were together when we’re apart.
And…the biggest: we will handle our own issues, seeing each
other as mirror. Period. I commit.
Only if we absolutely couldn’t resolve an issue on our own would we
bring it to each other’s attention. It
was pure bliss. Whether he flew to
Chicago or I flew to Miami, it was about sex, reverence, play, indulgence. Not about issues.
“Just so you know, I can’t be monogamous,” I had said that first
weekend. “It’s not who I am.”
“Ok,” he said. “Whatever
works for you.”
“Actually, I want to be monogamous,” I said, the second weekend, a
few weeks later. “With you.”
“Ok,” he said. “Me too.”
Immediately, people—friends, clients--began to ask me where our relationship
was going, what our plans were. “It’s a journey. No destination,” I’d say, and that didn’t
always register. So I would over-explain. “It’s a journey. It’s not about where we
aren’t, what we don’t have. I have a
partner who looks at me with reverence. He doesn’t want anything from me,
except to be a mirror. I don’t want it
to be anything other than what it is.”
“But really, when are you going to get married?” they’d ask. People
had simply no paradigm for a girl-boy alliance that wasn’t “going” somewhere,
leading to something permanent.
We had made an agreement around sex, right away. There was no flirting or messing around, no
wondering who would make a move. We made
as clear an agreement as we could make.
It went like this: “Let’s have
sex.” And at any given time, after sex,
or after breakfast, or during dinner—often—one of us would say, “Let’s talk
about sex.” It was our favorite topic. There was no stone left unturned;
neither of us was too shy to say how something felt, what we wanted more of,
less of. We both cared about how we
could generate more energy to play in, how we could circulate that energy,
between, within, around us. It was
heavenly.
More than one person—and these were the people who I could
actually tell—wondered how on earth
we could have sex for four hours a day.
“Well, we split it up. It’s about
two hours in the morning. Two in the
afternoon.” Rarely did we have sex at
night, before bed, like everyone else. (That was our time for eating pie.)
--But what on earth do you do for two hours, they would wonder
aloud. And what makes it tantric? And do you ever just want to have a quickie? And
does he ever get to ejaculate?
These are all good questions. We could have sex for four hours a
day because we had magnets implanted at the beginning of time, magnets that
drew us to each other. I have no better
explanation. We were drawn. We knew there was a higher purpose to it, and
the purpose was to move this supercharged
energy, to not have sex be about sex, but about personal transformation,
then about making the world a better place.
Whatever we wanted to clear up, clean up—that’s where we would direct
the energy, intuitively and intentionally.
He could tell which way the energy was flowing—or not flowing, which was
a special gift of his. As we cooked, we
blessed our food with the sacred energy we had created; it was a way of
reabsorbing it. Sexual energy wasn’t
lost in the way that it is during Western sex, because, even if we did
eventually have orgasms, it was after transmuting the energy.
I think it worked—we worked--because in addition to loving sex, we
both loved to meditate; our sex was a compelling combination of both. Before ever meeting me, he had practiced
maintaining an erection, which required a level of discipline; but if he didn’t
maintain it, I didn’t fear that it was about me. (And if he did accidentally prematurely
ejaculate (which for us meant, well, 45 minutes in) then, of course, it was about me: he just
couldn’t control himself.) I had no reason to ever think I was anything but
utterly compelling to him. Because we had no issues—not because we had no
issues, but because of our initial commitment to have no issues.
Did we ever want to have
a quickie? No. What made it tantric?
Being conscious of the energy flow, conscious of knowing each other as Divine.
Being conscious of every breath, every moment, while in ecstasy. Sending the energy where we wanted it to
go. Did
he get to ejaculate? Yes! He knew when it was physically necessary, and
his timing was masterful. (And if I may
digress, did you know that the ejaculate of a meditator is known to be
supercharged with consciousness?
Indeed. I have a friend who once
requested semen from a monk so she could use it for a facial. It’s a long—and funny—story. Truly one of my
coolest, most self-realized friends. So,
men who save their semen, tantricly—men who run the sexual energy through their
body without ejaculating—as opposed to monks, who we assume don’t run any
sexual energy at all—have some very precious nectar. Sort of a fountain of youth.) Meanwhile, in addition to experiencing the
delights of Rudy’s Shiva energy, we would also explore the secrets of female
ejaculate. The female body is quite the
storehouse for emotions. I’d laugh, then
cry hysterically. Or cry, then laugh
hysterically. Then we’d have to
relax. There was just no TIME for a
quickie.
What intrigued me, ultimately, even more than sex with him, was,
actually, pujas, blessings, ritual. Sex
goes hand in hand with puja, for me, and at this level of sexual-spiritual, I
can barely tell them apart. Reverence
was the main course. I was just as happy
to be fully clothed, blessing him in any way my imagination permitted. And he was willing to receive what the
Goddess, as embodied by his earthly partner, had to offer. Even though it was all about sex with us, at
the same time it was not at all about sex.
At least in the traditional sense.
No one understood. And that
was fine.
We could do it forever.
Until we didn’t. Until…five
plus years in. It seemed as though we
had peaked. Our journey a macrocosm, in
a way, for the act of intercourse itself.
It was time to either set new intentions, or separate.
When we broke up, I released so much energy, so much, I could
barely identify it all. It filled my car, where I sat, holding my
phone. It was fear and dread...and I
didn't make up any stories around it. I just felt it. There had been nothing to
fear except the fear of breaking up, which had built up in me, and maybe us,
over a couple of months. When he’d
answered his phone, I had said, “One of us needs to be the one to call the
other one and break up, so, I volunteer.”
“Ok,” he said.
Just like when we had come together, when we broke up there
was a recurrent question from my posse out in the real world: “What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” I would reply.
“It was just time. The energy was
no longer supporting our Union.”
“But…what did he do, what happened with you two? You seemed so in love!” We were.
So in love.
The first cultural assumption is that a good and viable
relationship must be permanent. The second assumption is that surely
something went wrong, if it didn't "last." Who made this
up? That true love lasts
forever is such a prevalent assumption.
What if true love and true union and the beauty of coming together have
nothing to do with permanence? What if
they have to do with presence? Until you
choose not to be present?
“What happened?” people asked, with deep sympathy. “I am so
sorry!” It was difficult to explain why there was nothing to be sorry about,
without sounding delusional, in denial, new agey...the expectation of pain was
so high, among everyone. I really did sound like I was in denial. I
found myself almost wondering if something were indeed wrong with
me...callousness, for example. Because
it didn’t hurt. It felt great.
“And how is he taking this?” I’d be asked.
“He feels the same way,” I said, more than once. It was so
simple. But only to us, it seemed. Even out of union, I loved our Union, our
agreement to be simple, our agreement to be immune to potential dramas, our
agreement to create our own unique itinerary on our journey.
We exited in the same high level of consciousness at which we
entered: present, engaged, listening to our hearts, listening from our
hearts. It was lovely, and I could only celebrate. But because our
way of celebrating had always been, well, sex,
we didn’t actually celebrate.
What an amazing 5-year path of discovery, of learning to be
receptive, of opening to the masculine Divine, of letting my Divine Feminine be
present with no need to hold back, ask for a guarantee, or claim ownership.
I had learned to experience higher consciousness as embodied by
this man, specifically as delivered by his "sublime lingam." I had learned to let that energy travel
through my spine, like a pole of light that exposes anything that isn’t
Love. I had learned to revel unfettered
in my own Divine Feminine, in Shakti, the energy of creation, to ride with it
for hours that felt like moments and moments that felt like hours. I had learned to expose it all, without
feeling exposed. I had learned to love
someone no matter what. I had learned
that monogamy is simply placing all my eggs in one basket, but that it’s
important to be selective about the basket.
Quite a journey. At its
completion we were both sated, filled, changed.
So yes. The breakup was
conscious. Tantric. “What if we take all
of our sexual energy, our lower chakra connections, and bring it up into our
hearts,” he suggested.
“And what if we take all of our shared consciousness, the psychic moments where we know what each other is doing, and bring that down into our hearts. So going forward, we feel like dear friends, and not exes,” I said.
“And what if we take all of our shared consciousness, the psychic moments where we know what each other is doing, and bring that down into our hearts. So going forward, we feel like dear friends, and not exes,” I said.
“Perfect,” he said. We were
so aligned.
We sat there on the phone together and did it, brought the energy
into our hearts. I felt nothing but love
for him. So much love that I was tempted
to not break up.
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you too.”
Our Divine journey was finished.
I was grateful that we had seen it coming—we had seen it coming because
of the clarity we embodied. We had seen
it coming, so our journey could exist forever in its pristine state: we had never had a fight, rarely a disagreement,
there was no blame to assign, there was nothing either of us had “done.” We were just done.
We were happily, beautifully, complete. And yes, there was a part of me that wanted to get naked with him, right then, to
celebrate—and I think that pretty much sums up why Tantra is the perfect
spiritual path for me.
In retrospect, beyond
our Divine journey, what I have to celebrate is this: you too can do it a whole new way. You can love and be loved, without having it
have to be about anything but love. You
can come together consciously and exit consciously—or not exit at all, and just
stay conscious. You can call in the
partner of your dreams, and they can be better than you’ve ever dreamed. You can live in Love. You can choose the most blissful spiritual
growth path imaginable—sex!, and Let Love Rule.
We do not need to live within an old paradigm that was designed by
people who were not as enlightened as we now are. We can design a unique New Paradigm that
feeds and sustains our bodies, minds, and spirits. Now is the time.
