Tag: tantra

Seeking stillness in ecstasy

 

We know to seek stillness in the face of adversity and to draw strength from it. Yet many of us forget, or do not even think, to seek stillness also in the face of ecstasy.

Although we seek ecstasy, we fear also its power to overwhelm us. We move its locus into the mind, seeking ways to control it. Our ability to neutralize the power of ecstasy in our lives is extraordinary, and we hardly remark it, so identified are we with suffering and so sure that its transcendence is the path to source. The tantric way, of course, is to seek awareness in the face of all overwhelming emotions and passions, regardless of how they are labeled by our minds.

To my mind, this does not represent a withdrawal from experience or a dilution of ecstasy in an ocean of equanimity. That the meditative state is one of equanimity is a widespread and profound misunderstanding. A state of equanimity can probably be cultivated by prolonged training of the mind, but such mortification of the mind is as far from the core of the mystical experience as  any form of “mortification of the flesh” is from somatic trance: they are both comparable asceticisms and both are life-renouncing.

The reason we seek stillness is to allow us to enter into the ecstatic experience more completely: acknowledging that, in fact, we are (or something within us is) ambivalent about union with the divine. We seek stillness in all circumstances of life to set aside fear and to replace illusion with reality; by which I do not mean some sanitized, undifferentiated reality, but the actual expression of spirit in the particulars and peculiarities of our human experience.

If you are anything like me, when you are down and facing challenges you meditate like crazy, you seek the light; yet when the fog starts to lift it’s back to business as usual. If this is so, then it has an important consequence: it means the universe has no way to awaken you other than to send you adversity. A key to cultivating a meditative attitude to all of life and allowing joy, not only adversity, to serve as a messenger is to remember that, however ecstatic the moment may seem, there is more beyond it that we are not experiencing; and we are not experiencing it because we hold back from it out of fear. This fear is not really any different to the fear we experience under circumstances which appear to threaten us: in both cases, it is the ego trying to hold on to the position it has usurped in the flow of our lives, and whether it impedes our enjoyment of life or our serenity in the face of adversity it separates us from the flow of source and the power inherent in it to change and direct our lives. As we become gently aware of this fear, we can begin to unmask it and cultivate pleasure, instead of suffering, as the gateway to ecstasy that it is meant to be.

Sacred sexuality

Amongst those interested in tantra, there is often a tendency to view sacred union in an abstract, metaphysical way which rarely corresponds to people’s experience. This is particularly so when tantra is repackaged as feel-good practices for couples. The striving after cosmic orgasm in union becomes, I have no doubt, a complete illusion for many, which entirely masks the essential radicalism which tantra embodies.

I suggest that, in so doing, we reify an abstraction, while allowing ourselves to maintain an ambiguous relationship towards that which concretely points towards it – its sociobiological context.

A sacred approach to sexuality has to begin at the roots and must be absolutely free of any social discourse which attempts to frame its expression. Transcendence in union, I suggest, is the end result of a process that begins in our bodies. We often try to judge and direct this process, either suppressing sexual instincts or, on the contrary, obsessively stimulating our sexual imagination in order to obtain a response which is not organically present. However, like everything else in life, we cannot productively force sexual feeling either into being or into non-being; we must let it come to us, bestow its gifts, and lead where it will.

We fear the destination of a liberated sexuality only because we bring to it too little awareness or we emancipate ourselves only from a part of the oppressive framing discourse. So many voices in society tell us that if we feel something then it “must mean” X, or if we do not feel it then it “must mean” Y. But feeling a sexual response preordains absolutely nothing, and presents a useless degree of risk only if you are not ready to be free. Otherwise it shows only that you are alive, and offers a bliss beyond analysis, just as does any other transcendent experience such as a sunset, a butterfly, or the laughter of a child. We are always free to choose how we respond to any stimulus, and to my mind this response, whilst not unimportant, is secondary. We may often be lying to ourselves if we claim to admit the feeling but manage the response, but still it is fundamentally true that no feeling requires a certain response. It merely opens our eyes to something that our biological nature wants, to a certain beauty which is already present within.

We cannot claim to consider the sexual act as sacred unless we begin by honoring the drive and allowing it to lead us into plenitude. It may well be a hard teacher, but if we are serious about living in alignment with our nature then we must embrace all of its wisdom and teachings. I see the sexual drive as an inner guru attempting to lead us into the light, but one which is so often suppressed that its distorted, violent manifestations are frequently catastrophic – a fault which is roundly to be ascribed to the distorting discourse and not to the drive itself.

To allow this energy to guide us, it is clear to me, though, that we have to abandon mononormativity.  We need also, though, to maintain an incredible openness of heart and hence vulnerability; this is the only way that we will learn lessons and not simply get hurt. Paradoxically it is only by opening ourselves to feeling pain in the short run that we can avoid it predominating over the long run.

This process of opening up has of course to take place in stages. I am not advocating a great leap forwards, and it is fine for me that all sorts of things exist which allow people to take things at their own pace, and even take time out or place limits which they never deconstruct. However, I do not think that it is ethically justified, as some do, to market something in a form which does not make sense just because it allows people indefinitely to maintain a comfortable illusion.

In my opinion, mononormative tantra is simply an oxymoron. Either you remain behind in your nest, or you abandon yourself to the winds.

No Mud, No Lotus – A review

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.

 

On the economics of therapy

The basic elements of effective personal development: bodywork, meditation and support.

In conceiving ones pathway to personal growth and healing, I think it is important to have a proper understanding of the processes involved, an understanding which is frequently lacking.

In a few words, my understanding is as follows. Within the bodymind there are two processes, both of which are needed because they depend on and reinforce each other and the end result is a product of the two. These can be characterized as a feminine and a masculine process. The feminine process involves softening of internal obstacles to the flow of energy, whether these be biophysical obstacles such as muscular hypertonicity or psychic obstacles in the form of existing representations at the conscious or subconscious level – such as the idea that certain behavior is wrong, that one should conform to certain norms, and so on. The masculine process involves increasing the quantitative level of life energy in the body so that these obstacles come under pressure from within, eventually leading to their crumbling or collapse. In terms of this masculine process there is no distinction between the body and the mind.

A simple physical model of this is as follows. We can think of water behind a dam, the release of which can be achieved both by weakening the structure of the dam and by increasing the weight of water bearing down upon it. Or we can think of the process of birth, where hormonal secretions soften the cervix which then opens under the weight of the embryo and the uterine contractions which increase the pressure applied to it.

As energy starts to flow, the process becomes self-reinforcing. We can think of water which, denied its route of least resistance, its natural pathway of flow, by the presence of the dam finds other pathways to bring rainfall to the sea. As the dam weakens, more and more of the rainfall will recommence flowing through its natural channel to the detriment of the diverted routes which had been previously established (this process of diversion is called in Freudian terms displacement).

Our bodies and our minds are always trying to rebuild the dams which we through our therapeutic endeavors wish to weaken. Many factors keep these dams in place. However, all of these factors are themselves due to displacement, because damming vital energy on a long term basis is not natural. (We can indeed restrain our vital energy over the short term by natural processes, under the force of the Reality Principle whereby expression is put off when its immediate expression would have negative consequences. We will also naturally channel that energy in different directions, partly by conscious choice and partly prompted by emotions, so that for example the energy is available to respond to a threat. This ability to control the flow of energy constitutes the biological basis for what is expressed pathologically in neurosis.)

It follows from this that there is always a weakest link in the line of defenses keeping the dams in place. This is the easiest and possibly only route to circumventing the process whereby the body heals breaches in its psychological defenses, and indeed builds stronger defenses if necessary. A direct confrontation of the front line of defense is quite counterproductive, but it may happen that when the underlying restorative mechanisms are weakened sufficiently, the whole edifice is at some point swept away.

At the deepest level, these mechanisms are representational. It is because we believe certain incorrect things about the world that we build inappropriate defenses. Only when we build new representations to replace these beliefs will we stop supplying the neurosis with the energy it needs to resist the energy naturally brought to bear on it by life processes.

All of this implies, I think, that we need to integrate two tracks in our work on ourselves.

Bodywork increases the quantitative level of energy in the body and corresponds to the masculine part of the process. All types of bodywork can help, but the most effective will be that which builds energy and allows it to circulate in the core life centers of the body, namely the pelvis where sexual energy is generated and which is at the crossroads of the flow of energy in the body and therefore the position which most naturally acts as a bottleneck.

Of course by bodywork I do not mean simply any physical practice. The practice must be appropriate, grounded and conscious to avoid being merely a vehicle to reinforce existing tensions. If it is not conscious, it will be manipulated by the mind to this end, or at least rendered inoperative.

The body will always reuse existing scripts if it can. Thus for example while a practice such as running may be marvellously energizing and, aside from its possible opportunity cost, is certainly not to be discouraged, it will not correct disequilibria in the body unless the body has really been deprived of this type of exercise before. Just as there are many ways to skin a cat, there are also many ways to run; the body is always going to use the method it already knows unless this method is not available to it. Thus if the physical movement relies disproportionately on certain muscle groups and inadequately on others, it will continue to do so because this is a perfectly viable, even if not the most natural, way to perform the task in question.

This means that running may be helpful, and there is no doubt that in principle it can lead to increased blood flow in the pelvis, but it is certainly not going directly to the heart of the problem. In order to do this you need to invite your body to do things which, while natural (if perhaps exaggerated for therapeutic purposes), it is not used to doing and therefore has no readily available script to deal with. Consciousness in this process helps to construct new neural pathways which can progressively replace, or remove the excessive strain on, the old.

Whilst bodywork is therefore an indispensable part of an effective therapeutic process, it is important to understand that it is really not adequate alone. I do not believe that bodywork is going to reprogram, in any reasonable span of time, representations in the psyche. Only the psyche itself can do this and in order to do so it needs to be exposed to a reality which is inconsistent with its prior assumptions, in a way which is safe enough to allow it to relax into the invitation which this situation provides to experience new ways of seeing the world.

This is, at a very general level, and as properly understood, the role of meditation. The choice of meditation is, however, hardly to be left to chance. Meditations should be, to a large degree, sexual and embodied. This is for the simple reason that the faulty representations are, to a large degree, sexual and disembodied. Where faulty representations are not directly sexual in nature, they are still sexual at a secondary level. Thus for example we may have a faulty representation of threats to our physical integrity, but as a result of this faulty representation a degree of sexual stasis has also resulted. Moreover, all such representations result in avoidance of behavior which sexual expression calls for, namely contact, intimacy, empathy and so on. I shall have more to say on this in a future post.

Again, both the problem and its solution are fairly easy to understand. We all know that if we are afraid of something in particular we will normally be able to overcome that fear by approaching the situation and becoming familiar with it, until we realize that our fear was not justified. If necessary, we start with baby steps or we take an indirect route. But eventually we become comfortable in the situation we had feared. Progressively, we change the internal representation that we have of the world, and the old one disappears.

To take a trivial (if for me painful) example, I for a long time was afraid to urinate with someone watching. This impeded my ability to use public urinals and was beyond my conscious power to change. This type of blockage is only going to be released by actually engaging in the activity in question under circumstances which are safe enough to relax and drop the subconscious conditioning at the root of the problem. Even if we frequently avoid doing so, it really is very easy in principle. You just find someone you trust, name the problem (by itself an important step), and ask them if they would be willing to observe you urinating. If it is too hard for you, you could ask them to start by watching from behind a curtain, or using a webcam, or merely be present while looking the other way, or whatever you can think of that is sufficiently below the blocking pain threshold not to activate the unwanted reflex. And you take it from there. To actually do this encounters some psychological resistance, but it is not really difficult if you want to.

This is where the methods of tantra come in. These methods may seem physical, and you may even be tempted to label them bodywork (correctly, of course, for a part of the methods). Yet these methods are really working on our false representations of the world in order to replace them with more flexible psychic structures which allow us to experience the world naturally, whilst still safely, especially in the dimension of sexuality and intimacy. Experience of the world as it really is naturally builds trust in our instinctive nature, because we see that this nature is in fact consistent with possibilities in the outside world, and not, as we had always supposed, inconsistent. This recreates the bridge, which in fact becomes an increasingly permeable membrane, between our inner world and the outer world, so that we can recognize these as two aspects of the same reality and move between them fluidly. In this way we have an embodied presence in the world, and not a disembodied antagonism to it. Our needs for intimacy are met and we become increasingly confident that they will always be met. From this reestablishment of trust is borne compassion.

Therefore I think it is really important to recognize and acknowledge ones needs and blockages in relation to sex and intimacy and of course not to hurtle in to situations which may be retraumatizing, but to find a way back to this source of ones being.

In this process, an exclusive preference for bodywork, which I encounter not infrequently, reveals enduring resistance to psychic change and only underlines the need for a complementary approach targeting the heart, emotions and senses. Bodywork is psychologically easy because it typically confronts nothing in ones relation to the other. It is an individual practice. Meditation can only be relational in nature, because psychic representations are relational in nature. Psychic representations, unlike physical representations, do not concern the organization of our body in its physical autonomy, but rather how we relate to others around us. This framework is largely a sovereign abstraction of the mind. It has some use in regard to real threats, but is dysfunctional in relation to imaginary threats. If we wish to change it, we need to allow ourselves to perceive their imaginary nature and reestablish the trust which we have lost.

As we move, of course, along this path, psychic material which underpins these representations may surface, together with the corresponding emotions (i.e. the affect). I am not trying to suggest that it is easy (or even appropriate) simply to plough ahead at such moments. Special talents are needed to help people safely and quickly through these occurrences. It is important to understand that there is not, as such, any psychic danger from this happening, at least in the vast majority of cases which are short of psychiatric in nature. It is only a question of the rate at which one makes progress, because these are critical moments in which either breakthroughs can be achieved or, conversely, one can slip back and have to start again (not of course from scratch, but the material will recede into the subconscious and this is evidence that it has not been processed and continues to affect the psyche). Whence the benefit of an experienced facilitator, coach or therapist.

So that’s the recipe: conscious bodywork (including breathwork), embodied and sexual meditation (once this type of meditation has reached its goal it can be replaced or complemented by others), plus ideally someone you can rely on to help you through the more challenging moments.

Good luck everyone 🙂

Osho on relationships (again)

This Osho quote was a new one for me. I can so absolutely identify with this, it is kinda scary 😉

(found on wildtantra.com)

“…Any relationship between man and woman is playing with fire and particularly if you start also being a meditator then you are surrounded by a wild fire because so many changes are going to happen for which you are not prepared and cannot be prepared. You are going to travel in an unknown territory every moment every day, and there will be many times when you will be left behind or your partner will be left behind, and this will be a deep anguish to both. And in the beginning when it will start, the natural inference will be as if our relationship is finished, that we are no more in love. Certainly you are no more in the love you were before, that old love is no more possible, that was animal love. It is good that it is gone. Now a more higher quality, something divine is going to take place, but you have to help each other. These are the real difficult times when one comes to know whether you love your partner or whether your partner loves you. When these great gaps arise between you and you feel going far away from each other, these are the moments crucial of a fire test; that you should try to bring the other person, who is left behind closer to you. You should help the other person to be meditative. The natural idea will be to bring yourself down, so the other is not offended. That’s absolutely a wrong attitude. You are not helping the other, you are hurting yourself. A good opportunity is being lost. When you could have pulled the other towards highs, you have descended yourself. Don’t be worried that the other will be offended. You make every effort to bring the other also to the same space, to the same meditative mind and the other will be grateful, not offended. But these are not the moments, when you should depart from each other. These are the moments when you should keep with every effort the contact with the other with as much compassion as possible. Because if love cannot help the other in transforming the animal energies into higher spiritual energies, then your love is not love, not worth calling love…” Osho

Five Rhythms

I have been dancing the movement practice called “Five Rhythms” on and off for a couple of years now, and am presently in the middle of a series of workshops which are subbranded “Heartbeat”. As far as I can gather from the founder’s website, which is not however very clear on this, this is intended to be the second of five “levels” in the Five Rhythms practice (the subsequent ones are “Cycles”, “Mirrors” and “the Silver Desert” respectively – the site is in Java so there are no hyperlinks to individual pages but look under “The Dancing Path” and “Becoming a Teacher”). (Roth also calls these the “first five levels”; afterwards there is still “Embodiment” and “Expression”). Our teacher says that Heartbeat is “the name for the emotional work in Five Rhythms dance”.

Whilst there is a lot of wisdom in some of what Roth says and has transmitted to other teachers, it is time for a working hypothesis of my own in relation to what this practice is and is not, the claims it makes and the place it might occupy in ones personal development practice portfolio.

I dance Five Rhythms and will probably go on doing so basically because I find it a very good integrative practice, as well as an enjoyable way to practice embodiment and embodied meditation. The wisdom of the body is there to be discovered in the practice. Five Rhythms is very popular in the tantra community for this reason.

However, whilst it does not appear to eschew portraying itself as such, which I find very regrettable, Five Rhythms is not a transformative or complete practice, and certainly not a rapid and/or deep one. In my opinion Roth, like so many others, has succumbed to commercial temptation and erected her system into a clumsy systematic “theology” of branded personal growth which is as unconvincing as it is inoperative and unnecessary. Just as access to the Godhead is mediated through layers of priesthood in the folk practice of the church (not in its mystical tradition), so layers of practice are interpolated between the practitioner and his or her full embodied expression in Roth’s schema, and the more there are, the more profitable it is. This is not a new strategy. It has been the strategy of religion through the ages.

I am not of course saying that there is no role for trajectories in such practices at all. But all they are is practices. They are not paths. Roth loses sight of this by pushing her initially perfectly valid observations and frameworks into overarching metaphors which are presented as a kind of key to unlock the secrets of the heart and of being human, but which are no such thing.

As any theory which is helpful enough in terms of what it is designed to explain, its reckless extension by analogy produces only increasing distorsion. Roth’s pentateuchal fetishism in these successive layers of practice reaches levels which evoke the spirit of Pythagorean mysticism. What is to be discovered is no longer innate but increasingly arcane. This strikes me as a dance of the mind, fully disconnected from reality, ungrounded and hopeless.

Let me illustrate. A (supposedly positive) review of Roth’s autobiographical handbook Sweat your Prayers on amazon.de states that as a result of movement work with Fritz Perls (the founder of Gestalt therapy), Roth “came to isolate five rhythms related to five archetypes or states of being“. Now, the description of these as “rhythms” is itself strange, as they of course are not; they are something more like “musical moods”. That there are exactly five such “moods” (flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness) is hardly a taxonomy which exists naturally and objectively. Rather there is an infinitive variety of musical moods, which fade indistinctly into each other. Thus Roth has at the outset chosen what can only be reasonably considered a metaphor, and goes on to overapply this metaphor to everything that comes within her sight.

The same source goes on to say that “Roth claims that even terminally inhibited people can learn to enter these rhythms and sense how it feels to inhabit ‘mother, mistress, madonna, father, son and holy spirit.’ The three feminine archetypes follow a flowing rhythm, according to Roth, while the energy of the masculine archetypes corresponds to a staccato rhythm. Roth discovered that when the masculine and feminine fuse, a rhythm of fertile chaos results, as in acts of artistic creation or love. The resolution of chaos is the lightness and liberation of a lyrical rhythm, while stillness is the most profound rhythm of all.”

This is once again a fully extraordinary statement. Firstly, the identification of the Christian trinity as a trinitarian aspect of the masculine akin to the three feminine aspects embodied in the ancient European triple Goddess representation is to my knowledge unprecedented and very odd. Although there is a superficial similarity (the number three), the feminine trinity represents the three phases of the moon and of adult womanhood; the “masculine trinity” (the Christian one at least) represents no such thing. Furthermore, the Christian doctrine of the trinity as such is a late innovation which in no way can be or ever was designed to supplant the cult of the triple goddess. The subjugation of female by male deities had been complete millennia earlier. Thus the two have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

The inherent counter-intuitive and speculative nature of the “discovery” of the fusion of masculine and feminine into “chaos” and the rest of the ontogenesis of the Rothian pentateuch (which looks like a discovery of three additional genders) I leave as an exercise to the reader…

In the workshops we have been invited to experience more exotic combinations of the “rhythms”. The “five” emotions (which is Roth’s own and certainly not a canonical list) of fear, anger, sadness, joy and compassion are paired with each of the “rhythms” in a way which is not really obvious, nor consistent with the characterization in Roth’s own book Maps to Ecstasy of some of these rhythms as “masculine” and others “feminine”, and the proposition of a fivefold classification of character (with no theoretical or experimental basis at all) corresponding to each of the five “rhythms”. In my view this is absolutely no reasonable basis for a scientific psychotherapy. It is basically, as another reviewer on Amazon characterized it, “cumbersome and tiresome psychobabble”.

We are then invited to experience one rhythm within another, the rhythm with and without the corresponding emotion, lightness within each of them … an utterly confusing attempt at embodied “visualizations” which sollicited the head far too much for a technique supposed to be centered in the body.

The workshops have primarily involved actual dance, but there have also been some exercises, mostly with no particular power to them compared to what I have found in pretty well every tantra workshop I have attended. I have found that in Five Rhythms it is very easy to avoid contact with the other dancers and this is what most people in fact do – contact is only fleeting and never to the point of discomfort which might prompt psychosomatic response. I see no real reason why the practice, relying as I said on “embodied visualizations”, should reorganize the psychic armoring. In my view this is a secondary phenomenon in the workshops which mainly draws on experiences outside of them. When a psychosomatic response does occur, it is not built upon to the benefit of the group – the workshop leader does nothing with it, certainly at group level.

This is why I characterize the practice as “integrative”. The best experiences I have had dancing Five Rhythms have been when I entered the room with a quantity of open psychic material, as a result of life events or of other workshops. I have felt it has an ability to “sew me back together”. But not to rip me apart. Of course to some degree it might if the very fact of engaging in such a practice is challenging for the practitioner. But this strikes me as a relatively low bar to clear. Most people will be well able to engage in the practice without troubling their resistances.

In short, I still like the practice notwithstanding its quasi-metaphysical psychobabble and I have certainly also drawn benefit from it, some of which I will hopefully describe in future posts. However, I think it would be far purer and more useful in a form freed from the oppression of the omnipresent pentateuchal metaphysic, and less comfortably solipsistic. There is a place, undeniably, for gentle approaches which are accessible to a wider audience, and for restorative methods, not only the deconstruction of defenses; but these approaches should be honest about what they can and cannot achieve.

With the kisses of his mouth

I just finished reading Monique Roffey’s “With the Kisses of his Mouth”, an astonishingly forthright – if frustratingly incomplete – account of the author’s exploration of her sexuality following her breakup from her former husband, through casual sex dating, swinging, tantra and new age practices.

The book is so personal that I have hesitated in how to review it. It feels like I have become a party to confidences which normally stay safely confined in workshop spaces, as if a private diary had been left on a train and discovered by me inadvertently. In short, it seems indecent to respond publicly, and even more so in a critical, if I hope sympathetic tone. On the other hand, the decision to publish so uncensored an account belongs to the author, and puts her views on record. By virtue of this it makes a leap from subjectivity to intersubjectivity, occupying a shared space which is also mine. I also get a sense that part of the author’s purpose is to invite readers to react. So here goes with my thoughts.

There are already several reviews out there. Julie Myerson’s in The Guardian is excellent and I largely share it. The book has an engaging character despite its literary flaws, and this is essentially because, at all times, one senses the author is being breathtakingly honest – to the point, indeed, of a degree of dullness at times. Literary critique should however be carefully distinguished from the slutshaming disguised as esthetics that has evidently motivated a number of her reviewers, and which I feel no obligation to reproduce.

As I have some familiarity with the settings portrayed in the book as well as with the quest that underlies it – and care about it also – my own review is from a different angle.

There is no denying this is a courageous book. It captures a lot of the flavor of tantra in the UK, and also of the other places the author visits and discusses, insofar as I am familiar with them – Cap d’Agde for instance. I am glad she is proud of her sexual quest and willing to say so. This is a major contribution to creating a sex-positive climate for her peers, from which we can all only benefit. However, I do find the book, as an account of a quest which is ultimately and obviously spiritual – as the title of the book, taken from the Biblical Song of Songs implies – painfully self-absorbed.

Moved by the author’s predicament, one reads on hoping at some point she will transcend the limitations of her own tragic discourse on love and achieve a new triumphant synthesis; and yet ultimately this is not so. This gives the book a feeling of incompleteness and anticlimax which I found frustrating. The attempt at a synthesis at the end feels little like one, and more, in fact, like a distraction from the themes discussed throughout the book.

Viewed from Europe, with most of my experiences in Osho-related and German milieu, which stress humanistic psychology and meditation rather than sex and esotericism (much less BDSM), the UK tantra scene the author describes – accurately I believe – looks erratic, veering off into new age meanders the purpose of which can only be to escape the path inward. Roffey’s book is absorbed with the question of who she is: but not yet really as a spiritual enquiry; it comes across still primarily as an attempt to salvage the ego. The author’s journey – perhaps also her decision to publish the book – appears as a quest for an intellectual and/or relational refuge which would finally allow her to affirm that how she is, is actually OK. This quest, by its very existence, however, is evidence she is still consumed by doubts on this score. Her inner dialectic between salvation and self-doubt is markedly narcissistic and ultimately, I found, also became for this reason tedious in the retelling (scarcely a word attempts to establish a bridge between writer and reader; all this is left to intuition). Yet there seems to be little or no awareness of this indelicate degree of self-centeredness. It would have been the job of her spiritual teachers to point this out; I am a little disappointed if they have not. (Astonishingly, Osho is dismissed in the book as “much vilified”; in my view there is no more profound and practical teacher, and it sounds like Roffey knows him only at second hand).

The dilettantism of the author’s quest is illustrated especially by her discussion, in the closing pages, of Quodoushka and her valedictory declaration that she has discovered herself to be “monogamous”.

Now Quodoushka, apart from being hilariously funny (and hard to spell), has little else going for it. It is a patent and unimaginative fraud, as the link to the Wikipedia article makes amply evident, best known for (and in Roffey’s account largely limited to) a somewhat bizarre character typology based on genital types. In contrast, however, to the Reichian analysis of character, or the one offered by the enneagram (discussed by me here and here) – the purpose of which is to uncover and deconstruct patterns of childhood conditioning and to return to essence – the Quodoushka typology relies on allegedly objective anatomical features to categorize people into categories which they then can hide behind, but never change.

Conceivably there might be elements of truth in this typology, though I highly doubt this given how ridiculous it is. But in any case the spiritual point of this – other than the convenience of escapism – eludes me. Ultimately we are one; it cannot be that acquired character traits have in fact some indelible nature. And more particularly, it cannot be that some of us are “monogamous” and others not, or suffice for our salvation that we accept such a conclusion and move on. It can only be, as I have argued time and again on this blog, that those who stress monogamy have sensed certain truths but missed others, and those who stress polyamory may have lofty ideals but still often fail to engage with the challenge of unconditional love for actual real people because it is too painful a mirror of themselves.

One may, perhaps, accept that one is conditioned in a certain way and likely to remain so conditioned; but then ones spiritual quest is at an end. And this is not the kind of end to which, in my eyes, such a book should point.

I in no way want to denigrate what the author means by identifying as “monogamous”, but her adoption of this label seems to preclude further enquiry and, against the backdrop of a hoped-for epiphany, is wildly disappointing.

Roffey uses the term “monogamous” as if she knows what it is. But she, and we, do not know what it is, at all. We have no idea, or rather a wealth of conflicting ideas. “Monogamy”, as uncountable studies show, is an essentially contested concept. The behavior she recounts in the book moreover – with, if I am not wrong, some pride and satisfaction – is hardly “monogamous” in any identifiable sense, past or present. She seems simply to conclude that it lacks something and remains unsatisfying – and thereby prepares the bed for her inane critics and the chorus of self-justifying I-told-you-so’s.

This “something missing” she leaves, in line with the dominant social mythology, to serendipity, to the future, to a force outside of herself. The hackneyed, and overbearingly dehumanizing, “knight in shining armor” projection which so disappoints in every encounter man has with woman: that moment of realization that it will never be you that is object of love, but only ever a distorted representation of you.

It must be obvious, and it is obvious to all true spiritual teachers, that this claimed contingency of self-realization is only ever a sign of resistance to self-knowledge. What Roffey seeks is what we all seek, and few of us, whatever our relationship status or history, ever actually find, namely the ability to utterly abandon ourselves and to dance in love among the stars. But, to this end, members of the opposite sex, and relationships, are merely vehicles. The turgid institution we call monogamy is antithetical to the desire for transcendence in most cases, and tangential to it at best. Marriage simply is not the logical consequence of the numinous rapture we call “falling in love” which it purports to be. In self-identifying as “monogamous”, Roffey makes an ersatz projection which at the same time precludes what she is looking for – unimpaired and ecstatic love.

My advice to the reader is to reach beyond this well-disguised counsel of despair. Love where love is – as Roffey has been doing in practice – and become aware and compassionate towards the feelings of incompleteness which result, because they are a guide. Monogamy is not a precondition of plenitude. Pace Aristophanes and his drunken nonsense, there is nothing out there for you to find in order to become complete, but only things inside of you, negative self-judgments, to drop. Sex has no importance at all, it is just a celebration of what is. It only becomes important because it is so problematic: the barriers we put in place to our sexual expression tell us almost everything about our conditioned selves and our inability to love. The monogamy fixation, by abandoning the moment and subordinating it to expectations and unmet needs, voids sexual experience of its essence, voids it in fact of what we sense is there and some of us imagine to imply monogamous pre-eminence. Monogamy clutches at stars, for fear they will elude us. But they will not elude us; it suffices to open our heart and they are always there.

Life may certainly be lived in such a way as to be marked by deep union with just one soul. There is no reason why not. However, there is equally no need to choose this or to accord it preference, and still less normative status, blindly unaware of the mixture of motivations that contribute to the moment of rapture and the meaning given to it. By projecting on a man the burden of impossible roles to play, a woman can only estrange herself – and her partner – from self-realization and numinosity.

Porn as meditation

In which I blast my blog into the outer reaches of cyberspace. Well, we’ll see. There is no intention to court controversy, but, as always, there are some things I just have to say.

Google these two words – porn and meditation – together, and what you’ll get is mostly links to pseudo-oriental “treatments” for (so-called) “porn addiction”. Although many people enjoy (so-called) porn, and sex-positive activists have generally embraced its production and consumption, at least within certain limits/genres, it seems that it has yet to make its way into the mainstream, or even any sidestream, of new spirituality. Continue reading “Porn as meditation”

Sexual orientation

I inadvertently wandered into a sea of hostility when I posted recently a few thoughts on this subject on the blog of a person self-identifying as bisexual. Although I was extremely supportive and only doing a bit of thinking out of the box, I encountered what can only be described as a ghetto mentality: you’re not one of us, therefore you can’t be on our side. Which I find rather sad.

In the hope of launching a more serene debate, let me try again here. This is, I think, a subject that troubles the tantric community. In tantra there is much talk of the male/female polarity, sexuality plays a defining role and, accordingly, non-heterosexuality is difficult to reconcile with both practice and theory. Osho seems never to have taken non-heterosexuality seriously as a natural phenomenon, and writers like David Deida offer not only a stark dichotomy of the sexes, but also what might be viewed as unhelpfully stereotypical portraits of “superior men” and “superior women”. Sure, all this gets politically correctly glossed as being about “essences” not biological gender and sure, we all have male and female aspects to us, but this only allows the head to be held above water. It is anything but satisfying. At the end of the day some of us are men and others are women, and tantric union occurs between those who are men and those others who are women. Of course some form of union may also occur between men and other men and between women and other women, but this form of union then has no characteristics to distinguish it from any other experience of mystical union with whatever element of nature; it does not occupy an archetypal position, either in theory or in practice.

At the same time, the practice of tantra contributes a lot to the breaking down of barriers to same-sex intimacy. As in society at large heterosexuality is generally equated with homophobia (which encompasses not only a rejection of homosexuality, but often of any form of intimacy between men, even non-sexual), the loss of this barrier is destabilising and may lead some to feel they need to redefine their identity. If I can enjoy intimate touch from men, does that mean I’m gay, or, at “best”, bisexual? For women, who have close biological bonds to their mothers and feel less cultural pressure to be homophobic in the first place, this question may be less insistent. Still women, in my experience, may like to identify as bi, and this for a number of reasons. For a start, there is a much greater demand on the part of men for their female partner to be bi (or “bi”) than vice versa. Anecdotally, at least, it seems that many men are turned on by the idea of their wives playing with other women; in any case many more than there are women turned on by the contrary scenario. Secondly, for men, to self-declare as bi, especially after a period of heterosexual identification, not only runs into society’s homophobia, but also risks being seen as a cover for actual but unadmitted homosexuality. On the other hand, women seem, in my culture at least, to be less at risk of this kind of stigmatization. Lesbianism is statistically less common than male homosexuality, but although in some countries such as the USA more men than women seem to have had same-sex sexual experiences, in others such as France and Australia the reverse applies (see here). Because it is a bigger “deal” for men than for women, women may tend to adopt a wider definition and be more ready to self-identify as bisexual, and self-identification may not accurately portray underlying behavior.

In the course of this debate, which was unfortunately cut short by the blogger in question, it was both suggested by me and put to me that sexual attraction might be a better gauge of sexual orientation than simply the incidence of same-sex play. On a basic level, it may be considered that erotic touch by persons of either sex creates a similar primary response and may be similarly enjoyed without activating or being associated with other layers of sexual experience, in just the same way as other characteristics of the person providing the touch may not be very relevant, such as age, appearance, education and so on, factors which nonetheless play an important role in pre-intimate sexual response, that is, the response to sexual stimuli and signals other than intimate touch. If same-sex touch is not so enjoyed, this is more to do with its mental associations and conditioning, factors which, again arguably, could be considered not germane to determining primary sexual orientation.

On this basis, one could legitimately ask the question of whether the typical hormonal response that characterizes heterosexual attraction, with which I am familiar, is comparable in the case of homosexual attraction and whether such attraction is, then, comparable in nature or somehow distinct. From the little I have found on the subject, the endocrinology appears to be similar for men, whilst for women the results are more difficult to interpret. According to Wikipedia, in a 2004 study at Northwestern University, female participants, both heterosexual and homosexual, became sexually aroused when they viewed straight as well as lesbian erotic films. Among the male participants, however, the heterosexual men were turned on only by erotic films showing women; the gay males, however, were aroused only by films showing men. (I suspect though that a lot of the women were simply yawning at both types of film – and maybe were even more turned on by some gay male porn, which according to some reports women quite like)

Be this as it may, I do wish that homosexual and bisexual persons of both genders would show a bit more interest in engaging with those who call themselves heterosexuals in order to better understand each other’s sexuality. This ghetto mentality I find appalling. And I am pretty sure that many people denied entry to today’s ghetto really just long to talk to other people with whom they in due course would find common ground and friendship (or, for that matter, love).

I hate society’s hypocrisy and discrimination, but personally I am not too concerned by what the answers are, I am only curious. I am open to all experience, yours and my own. Whatever your orientation, sexuality should not be a battlefield, but a celebration.

Saying yes to life

Like most Europeans, and all masochists, I am a compulsive pessimist. Not only that but I take pride in it and identify with it as if it’s some kind of sign of my cultural superiority.

Actually, of course, it’s a sign of weakness. Feeling superior to people, being able to outwit them intellectually, gives me pleasure because it is an outlet for my repressed sadism. Being always able to gain the upper hand, I am safe in the knowledge that no one can really get to me. I don’t run the risk of being vulnerable and of getting hurt. That means I’m safe; but missing out on life.

For some reason I’ve never quite figured, life on the other side of the pond has evolved in an opposite direction. Or perhaps it has just not “evolved” at all. There is something about the American outlook on life that grates terribly on a lot of Europeans. That little children laugh and play in African villages is still OK, Europeans can feel superior and still benevolently disposed towards these manifestations of joy in a simpler life, more at one with nature. However that Americans have the hubris to believe that they will succeed against all the odds, that they dare to try to infect us with their enthusiasm for frankly daft projects, well, that’s just too much. They strike us as naive, often dangerously so, and  nowhere outside the mountains of Afghanistan and the souks of Baghdad is the Schadenfreude at American failures greater than in the refined salons of European capitals.

Strangely, our own failures (and God knows they are plentiful enough) fail to fill us with the same sense of joy. Actually, they fail to fill us with anything at all; we are blind to the ways in which the European nation-state extinguishes personal initiative in both the economic and private spheres.

I am certain that the American outlook has a good deal of neurosis built into it, too. I am not trying to eulogize it any more than I am trying to deprecate European sensitivities. However, when the result is that genuine joie de vivre is taken by Europeans for a marker of cultural naivete, it should set alarm bells ringing. This is called cynicism, and it is always an ego defense.

The thing is, ersatz Lebenslust is merely amusing, or sad, but it is not threatening, you do not need to defend yourself against it. And if you defend yourself against what turns out to be the real thing, you miss the opportunity to be taken up in a positive vortex; you miss out on living. In fact your ego defenses are the only thing that prevent you from living: the mirror is being held up to your own resistances.

And so it is that I am delighted to welcome tantra teacher Dawn Cartwright to Brussels. When I feel resistance at her enthusiasm, which I do, I am grateful for the chance to examine what it is that keeps me from jumping into the river of life; and then I just let myself fall in love. Life has this quality, that it is very easy to fall in love with; because life is our nature and it seeks out itself. When we are in love, we are dissolved, free, we are ourselves.

Join us 27-29 November in Brussels; fall in love; and, if you can, dive deeply into all of Dawn’s offerings in Europe this fall. They’re on her website at www.dawncartwright.com.