Similarly to Monique Roffey’s book which I reviewed earlier, Maya Yonika’s No Mud, No Lotus recounts her personal journey prior to meeting the well-known sacred sex practitioner Baba Dez Nichols, her experiences at his temple in Sonoma, Arizona and the fall-out from it (link to her blog here; the main website www.ramamaya.com seems to be down at the time of writing).
Most of the book, in fact, is given over to the story of her life before she met Dez, which consists of a difficult childhood and a long subsequent search for her place in the world which is scarred by a series of misadventures, but also a degree of serendipity. Yonika emerges from the book as someone with a remarkable drive to survive and find herself, but nonetheless she seems still in many ways in dialogue with her inner demons. As, for that matter, does Dez. There is also a related film and a long exchange of views on Facebook, in which various practitioners take part, on the subject of whether or not it is ever appropriate for a sexual therapist to have sex with their client (although this is not really the focus of the book).
Maya experiences a lot of the power of sacred sexual healing both for herself and for others, but is left at best ambivalent as to the methods used by Dez. Her path after leaving the temple is not elucidated in any detail in the book, which also does not contain a definitive assessment of her experience. This is left up to the reader.
I would like to start out by quoting something that Dez says in the aforementioned Facebook thread:
“There is a common wound in the feminine experienced by those who have been abandoned, dominated or abused in some way (which is most of us). This wound causes us to lash out at others we perceive to be misusing power (and often misusing our own in the process). As the wound comes near to healing – normally when a masculine energy is willing to brave it out of love for the feminine – a deep battle in the psyche takes place.
“The feminine tests the masculine with everything she has – looking for every imperfection and trying hard to make the projection of abuser fit his face instead of having to reclaim it as part of the dynamic of her own wounding. In women at this stage, often the immature masculine in them attacks the wounded feminine in a man in order to feel some retribution for their inner wound. And in men, the wounded feminine often withdraws and goes into isolation and victimhood.
“In Greek legend there is the story of the archer left behind on an island on the way to Troy because he had a wound that smelled so bad no one could come near. The oracle later declared that someone needed to go back for him as he was required to shoot the winning arrow in the battle.
“I smell such a wound in many communications as we try to heal this collective wound. When real love has appeared in our lives and been deep enough to precipitate that final battle – if we take the lesson from the oracle, the winning arrow can only be fired when we go back to that inner island and brave the stench of the wound we have not (yet) been able to bear.”
This is brilliantly stated and I fully agree with it. At the same time, however, it is one-sided and the context renders it, for me, manipulative. That context, according to the book, is as follows: Dez plucks Maya out of obscurity, catapulting her into the role of his teaching partner despite hardly knowing her and despite her wounded past. She is also asked to offer sexual healing sessions, despite having seemingly little to no training and not having at all achieved a resolution of her own inner conflicts.
Maya has sound intuitions about sexuality, which Dez is portrayed as ignoring. She is certainly projecting on him, but he seems unaware that he is doing the same to her. They squabble in ways that are all too familiar, reenacting the cultural battle of the sexes, with Dez, it seems, unwilling to give any ground. In his role as healer, he seems ego-driven and out of touch with the spiritual heart of sex, as I have described it elsewhere on this blog. He is certainly marked by a considerable degree of attachment to Maya, whilst simultaneously unable to connect with an essential part of her nature.
Perhaps this is not surprising. What Dez and others have invented is not tantra, but a method of sexual healing. It is thus very reduced in scope compared to tantra, lacking in any other meditative practice, and frequently not very therapeutically informed. It may be exactly what some people need, but it is not obvious that many of its practitioners are in a position to make that judgment reliably. This is because it is not really a method, but a transmission; and this transmission, to operate reliably, necessitates a sufficient degree of openness on the part of the receiver – which has to be built progressively – and transcendence of self on the part of the giver. In the case of Maya, and probably in many other cases, it seems to me that Dez places undue reliance on the therapeutic efficacy of methods that are not adapted to many of the situations which they face. She cannot be his Dakini, because they never appear as equals. It seems that, from her, he learns little.
By contrast, a notion of therapy is almost absent in classical tantra, but it does require extensive preparation before devotees are in a position to engage in union in a manner which is spiritually beneficial. Union is certainly not therapy in tantra, or at least not baseline therapy; there is much besides.
Maya intuits that Dez is spiritually unavailable to her because he over-identifies with the role he has created for himself. I am inclined to share that intuition. As a result, she feels that sex loses its power and that she must look elsewhere. This stand-off may appear as a classic struggle between the sexual “natures” of man and woman, and certainly risks reinforcing that stereotype (as did also Roffey’s book), but – given that the notion that our species has been eternally engaged in a game of mutual self-destruction has to be rejected – this would be a naive conclusion. In the end, Maya may be inclined to seek refuge in exclusivity (this is not really clear) and Dez in multeplicity because they are the male and female halves of the same wound. Maya knows that she can love in infinite depth, and so multeplicity seems to her a rejection of profundity; Dez knows that he can love in infinite scope and misses the need for depth. Maya is attentive to his discourse, but reacts defensively because she senses she has another, equally vital discourse, to which he is deaf, and that therefore they cannot meet as Shiva and Shakti, but only on the basis of a subjugation of her feminine essence.
One could dismiss the story on the grounds that a little thought and research should suffice to make clear to any spiritual searcher that what Dez is offering is too limited to achieve a full spiritual transformation. Nevertheless, it does matter, because the need for sexual healing is widespread, and very many vulnerable people are attracted by what is, in essence, a practice which promises far more than it can deliver. This style of sexual healing has a lot in common with mind-altering drugs. At a certain moment in life’s journey, it can be the perfect way to open up to dimensions of existence of which one had been completely unaware. Yet it is valuable only if that is merely the start of a journey and not a substitute for it. The alternative is a state of dependency which may be very destructive.