Sofia Pt. 08 - Memories of Delhi

"We have grown up in societies that have taught us to be ashamed of what we are. Our religions have taught us that we are guilty - "forgive - us - our - trespasses" - that God is pointing his finger at us, watching us, judging us. What a dreadful idea - to never be whole, never good enough. But we tantrikas do not talk of moral and immoral, of right and wrong. This week I will offer no commandments, provide no short cut rules to live by: once you are truly awake, once you feel your oneness with the rest of the universe, once you are freed from the energy blockages and the voices of control that kink your energy, then you will need no such commandments: for you will live the beauty way, the way of the heart.

"We have grown up in societies that have told us that sex is dirty, that sex is power, that sex is money, that sex is pornography. Our parents and our teachers have told us that our urges and desires are perverted, dirty, immoral. Our magazines and televisions have taught us that our bodies are commodities, and that our own goods are flawed, bad imitations of the plastic perfections they peddle. What a dreadful idea - to have sexuality reduced to a second-rate transaction. We tantrikas embrace pleasure as the path to awakening, value bodies not as instruments to be used but as vessels for the universal energy, see sex as the highest expression of our divinity.

"I congratulate you. You have taken your first steps. You are here. You have arrived."

The opening circle lasted more than two hours. A gnarled staff the length of a forearm - a talking stick - was passed around the circle, so that each person could introduce themselves and explain what they wanted to get out of the week. It was the usual mixture of shyness and self-indulgence. I can't remember what I said. The Unicorn spoke about his spiritual journey of awakening, a journey which had taken him from a career-obsessed corporate workaholic to a freedom hunter and truth seeker via a major nervous breakdown. He spoke with passion, with his whole body, physically shaking the frustration of the past out of his system, ending with a climax in which he leapt to his feet, springing, dancing into the centre of the circle, spreading his arms like an eagle about to launch himself into the air: "I will not make myself small any more, I will be free, I will be me!" Rapt attention, nods, straightened backs, a ripple of appreciative fingers showering him with love from a distance; the girl sitting next to me weeping quietly in appreciation of his brave willingness to reveal himself to the group. The Unicorn sat back down in his place.

Then it was Anabelle. A melodic, expressive voice. She was here because she loved "this work", was here to support, to assist, Hawkeyes, and was in service to the group: anyone who needed support could come to her at any time.

"Yes", said Hawkeyes", "I am very happy to have Anabelle here, to have my beloved by my side." They touched hands. "In the morning we begin. 0800 in here. Come dressed to dance."

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When I got back to my room, I was unsurprised to find The Unicorn sitting on the other bed. Like novelists, people who go to tantra retreats generally don't believe in coincidences. If Participant A wonders why they were randomly paired with Participant B, to reply: "because your names come next to each other in the alphabet" would be to misunderstand the nature of the question. Participant A would probably respond, "sure, but why are our names next to each other in the alphabet?" Despite appearances, this would not represent an invitation to begin a discussion on the utility of arbitrary ordinal systems of information collation.

The correct response, I've learnt, is that A and B have something to teach one another. This is particularly the case where A isn't too keen on B, something which indicates that B is "mirroring" something in A that poor A hasn't yet acknowledged; annoying B is annoying precisely because he's threatening to make A aware of a one of A's sub-conscious shadows. A and B may have had a checkered history in their past lives. Possibly they were brother warriors in Genghis Khan's horde, until B slept with A's favourite wife and A found out and castrated B with his bare teeth. Or possibly B had been A's cruel slave master in Ancient Rome, until a sudden slave revolt finally gave A the chance to castrate B with his bare teeth. Probably both.

I didn't like The Unicorn. I wasn't sure I'd ever castrated him with my bare teeth, but I could understand why someone might feel the urge. Why? Because he was phony, narcissistic and of doubtful intellect? Or because he felt comfortable walking across life's stage with the spotlight shining on his face? Because I could already see how his unreflective confidence in his own specialness exerted a magnetic pull on the women around him? Because I suspected he was untroubled by the nightmares of cosmic emptiness, insignificance and meaninglessness that crept up on me in moments of stillness?

We were wary of each other. We hugged in greeting: it would have been as out of place here to shake hands as it would be for you to greet your boss's wife at a cocktail party by getting down on your knees and sniffing her arse. But our attempts at conversation were stilted and broken, with none of the assumed proximity that are the default for interactions at these kinds of event.

I was distracted, anyway, by thoughts about Anabelle. She'd made a strong impression on me. I felt drawn, almost compelled, to pursue her, to test if I'd be rebuffed. But I felt rather guilty at the idea of attempting to create a dynamic with her. Despite my adventure with Swati, I don't much like playing the cuckolder. And my relationship with Hawkeyes might have been complex - I found him infuriating at times - but I felt great respect for him. And, unlike many tantra teachers, I knew that he was not the easygoing polyamorous type: he always said that, in his experience, a mutual commitment to monogamy is vital to the deepening of a connection with a lover and supports emotional growth. Indeed, he was, by reputation, a jealous man. I fell asleep with my mind a mélange of vague fantasies and uneasy premonitions.

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On re-reading, my description of the first evening at Bacchus feels cynical. That slightly snide tone comes naturally to me, and there's so much that is ridiculous and pretentious about capital-S 'Spirituality'. But I'd come because I also love the goods on offer: the surprising connections, the ecstatic experiences, the space it gives to drop into my body, to detox for a while from the world of planning and calculation and just experience. And the first day was certainly that. I woke in the morning with my body still tense, my head still grasping and analyzing and dissecting everything around it. By the evening I was in a quite different state.

The morning dance was totally unstructured: just music and the invitation to move. But it's amazing what a difference it makes being given permission to dance purely as self-expression, freed from the need to conform to any aesthetic standard: no need to be rhythmic or fluid, no need to look happy or dignified, permission to distort your face into some hideous shape if the urge takes you, permission to shriek or cry or laugh like a maniac. Permission that comes not just from the knowledge that it is allowed, but from the reality of there being many others going through the same journeys of the grotesque, the frenzied and the hysterical.

As I danced, my body began to remember its size and form, the range of movement it could achieve - things it had forgotten during months of desk work. I became aware of great dams of tension and frustration in my body that I'd been carrying around without noticing. For some time my mind kept up its usual verbose commentary and criticism, creating feedback loops of frustration, until I felt the need to bellow. It worked, the movement and the noise slowly drowned out my own chatter. At some point I found that I was frantically shaking my body, the whole length of it, like a dog throwing off water or like I was having a vertical epileptic fit, and I kept on shaking like that for a long time. And as I shook the dams began to crack and the pent-up tension to be released, transmuting itself into a wild, aggressive energy that flooded my body.

I felt so alive, so primal: I leaped and stamped and thrust and contorted my body. I wanted to hunt, to fight someone, to rape, to kill something. Yes, that's how alive I felt: alive beyond all acceptable boundaries for aliveness. I wasn't a slightly diffident academic, I was übermenschlich: not Dr Wright but Mr Wilde. God, I loved that feeling of primordial aliveness, that body-power, that wildness, the rediscovery that civilization is a choice. I'd reached that place before. I knew that manic freedom. It's addictive. It's a large part of the pull that keeps me coming back to those kinds of places.

For most of the dance I was barely aware of the other whirling figures in the room - my eyes were shut or unfocused, deliberately allowing the room to become a blur. As the music died away and the trance subsided I let the room return slowly to focus, and found myself facing Anabelle. She was a couple of feet from me - her blonde hair mussed, a trickle of sweat on one temple, chest heaving - looking directly at me as I returned from that trancelike sate. And she was smiling a knowing, happy, complicit smile. Her eyes were shining like a cat's. I half stepped forward, I think I was actually about to grab her and pull her to the floor, but then a bell a rang out and Hawkeyes was calling everyone to re-form the circle. We parted.

Next there was a meditation where we had to stand with arms raised and visualize a two-way flow of energy through our bodies: a crimson stream rising up from the earth and through us to the sky and a white light descending from heaven through our bodies to the earth, with the two flows merging at our hearts to form a pink rose. The power of visualization, permission and suggestion is quite extraordinary: soon the room was a forest of windblown trees, feet planted like roots, arms raised like branches, bodies ecstatically undulating to an energetic flow conjured out of nothing by imaginations following a course laid out for them by Hawkeyes' carefully chosen words.

Now receptive, open and vulnerable we were gathered around Hawkeyes and Anabelle. She had changed into a sarong at some point, which she now let fall with almost shocking artlessness, exposing herself down to her black knickers. They faced each other and performed the namaste bow - I noticed the contrast between her slim waist and wide hips, and the buoyancy of her breasts - and then Anabelle lay down. Hawkeyes began to demonstrate a massage, supposedly of Native American origin, on her for our benefit. His hands flowed repeatedly over her body - circling it five times, with five different kinds of touch - from her left foot, up her leg, over her torso, across the two arms linked above her head and back down her other side.

He would speak sometimes, explaining the purposed of the different techniques - this firm touch to bring the receiver into their body; this wringing movement to loosen energetic blockages; this plucking to bring the loosened energy to the surface; this light, erotic touch to awaken sensitivity; this non-touch to heighten the receiver's sensitivity to the astral cloud surrounding the physical body. But mostly he was silent, exuding a palpable intensity of focus. His presence, his attention to her, was exquisite. And so were her responses. Sighs, a visible unfolding and unfurling of her body, with each moment you could see her relaxation deepen and observe how she inhabited her flesh more completely. I could feel myself swelling with desire for her, and felt jealous of his fingers on her silken skin. At the end she lay still, her breath relaxed and slow, her face transfigured.

"Remember", Hawkeyes said afterwards, looking around the room, "the person who is massaging is engaged in an act of service. Never be ashamed to enjoy such service, but always remember that you are giving and not taking."

We were instructed to arrange ourselves into pairs. A young, porcelain-faced thing, caught my eye. She had shy, darting, grey eyes, with a hint of girlish laughter in them. She was pretty but looked so sweetly innocent that I felt ashamed when I caught myself imagining what she'd look like naked. Both imagination and conscience could have taken a break. As we sat facing each other, quietly introducing ourselves, Sabina - her name was Sabina - shifted her weight slightly and, in one movement, pulled her cotton dress over her head.

"You don't mind me being naked to receive, do you?" Sabina's voice was light and high, her accent sounded vaguely German. "I prefer to be able to feel all of the touches on my skin."

No, I didn't mind. Her body was pale and slim and so delicate that I felt like I could have pulled her apart with my fingers, like smoked chicken breast at a picnic. The slight hillocks of her breasts were topped with small nipples of the lightest pink. Touching her hairless body felt like a combination of lechery and hagiolatry: like a young priest dreaming of the Virgin. I craved to bend down and kiss the neat cleft of her sex, but found I could keep the urge floating in the limbo of my consciousness. I channeled my arousal to drop into a trancelike focus on her responses to my touch: the rhythm of her breath, the movement of her lips, the vibration of subliminal vocalizations, and the micro-shimmers in her muscles beneath my fingers. Afterwards, when we bowed to each other to close the massage, she smiled at me through light tears, and then - still naked - pulled herself onto my lap to embrace me: feather-light, slim arms around me. There was some spring-like scent in her hair that I didn't recognize and I thought I could also smell her arousal.

After a short break we swapped places. Not wanting to seem self-conscious I stripped naked and lay naked on my back on top of my sarong. As soon as she touched me - starting at my left foot, with that firm pressure designed to ground me in my body - I felt my cock swelling and stirring. It was the combination of exposure, the sensation, and the promise, the possibility of pleasure. Pornography danced across the back of my closed eyelids - might she choose to let her forearm brush against my penis as she stroked me? What if her wet mouth suddenly engulfed it? - but I kept letting these images drift away again, refusing to hold onto any of them, to let myself be caught up on a wave of fantasy. I deliberately slowed my breath, bringing my attention back to the actual sensations of my body: the feel of her touch, and the other prickles and itches and darting electric sparkles. As her touch encircled my body I felt myself become a tightly coiled yarn of sentience: her fingers flowing over my skin were spark-plugs sending crescendos of aliveness rearing above an ever more vibrant background hum of energy.

When it was over, we embraced. I squeezed Sabina's hand and we parted without another word. I felt too full for speech. When I stood up, I almost fell back down again. It was lunchtime. I left the tent and lay on the grass in the shade of a fig tree, feeling blissed out. I think I may have slept for a while. At any rate, I only opened my eyes again when I heard the bell ringing out of the afternoon session. I'd missed out on food, but didn't feel like I needed any. I could see Hawkeyes and Anabelle walking back towards the pavilion, arm in arm, talking quietly together.

I found that I'd slept through some minor course drama. An aery, middle-aged sparrow of a woman - who had introduced herself to the circle the previous evening with a hushed, breathy stream-of-consciousness riffing off her relationship with her angel guardians - had decided that the course was not for her. "I must follow my intuition: I'm a spirit person, my aura is very sensitive and I can feel that I am not meant to stay in this place. I don't want to criticize, but some of these people have no connection to their higher chakras; I can feel the disbalance and it's most disturbing - I've had a headache all morning, I really must go." As a result, Anabelle would now have to take part in the paired exercises in order to balance numbers.

There were more exercises and a talk in the afternoon, though I donn't remember much about them. Dinner in the evening was the standard vegan slop - prized by the organisers of spiritual workshops for its wholesome dullness - and I found that I again had hardly any appetite. I went for a stroll around the grounds, and was slightly late for the final session of the day. I found that everyone had already paired up in preparation for a partnered breathing exercise. That left me to pair with Anabelle.

There was to be no demonstration, Hawkeyes would just give instructions as we went along. We performed the namaste, palms together, bowing until our heads almost met, and then coming back into eye contact. Her eyes were flecked many shades through brown and gold. We could have sat facing each without physical contact, Anabelle came forward and placed herself on my lap in the traditional tantric yap-yum. Her proximity was intoxicating. She was intoxicating.

"Bring your breathing into synchrony with your partner" said Hawkeyes, "ladies - the shaktis - lead, men - the shivas - follow the breath of your partner." Slowly Hawkeyes added layers to the exercise - a specific breathing pattern, rhythmic contractions of certain muscles, a slight rocking of the pelvis, visualisation of the circulation of energy first within our own bodies and then circulating between us.

I guess this marked the true start of my relationship with Anabelle.

We'd still not yet spoken to each other and there was trouble to come, but I still think of that meeting as the start of our relationship. But we connected with an extraordinary intensity. It was a transcendent experience for me. She told me later that it was for her as well. I won't say much about it; I don't think I can find the words to do it justice. It was sex, there wasn't physical penetration, but it was more like sex that most of the fucking I had done in my life. I felt more totally inside her than I had ever felt with a woman. It was lovemaking without romance; just deep connection and desire and something like awe. There were moments that felt frenzied and moments that felt as still as the bottom of a deep lake. Perhaps it lasted an hour, but it felt beyond time. When the bell tolled, we didn't seem able to pull our bodies apart. We didn't really try. We remained there, gazing into each other's eyes. I was vaguely aware of the background buzz of people thanking each other and slowly heading away, and knew that Hawkeyes would be observing us. But the thought felt unimportant next to the primacy of retaining this harmony for a little longer.

In the end there was silence, and we still did not move. Much later she managed to slowly pull herself off me. We look around the empty tent, dazed, both of us.

"We're alone." she said. They were the first words she'd spoken to me.

And then I leant forwards and kissed her. And soon we were wrapped together again, rolling over each other across the floor. In the end she pulled back again, holding out a hand to keep me at a distance from her. "Stop." She said, and her voice was broken, almost a sob. "I need to go. Tomorrow, we'll talk tomorrow." And she jumped up and left the tent hurriedly, without looking back around.

Slowly, I walked out into the night. I didn't go to my room; I didn't much feel like small-talk with The Unicorn. Instead, I wandered through the gardens. Every sensation, everything I saw, every sound seemed to have uncountable layers of meaning and significance. It felt like I'd been watching life through a window and had now stepped out from behind it to find myself finally fully in touch with reality. And I knew, with something approaching certainty, that this woman was going to be more important than any who'd gone before.