He looked up to see her examining his food.  “Got to keep my strength up,” he said, squeezing a lime over the cukes.

Geno was one of the most handsome men she had ever laid eyes on, even here at the ashram, where she was becoming rather immune to the whole issue.  He stood at well over six feet with a body that spoke to years in the gym, and his hazel eyes and tanned skin glowed with vitality and health.

Early in the group, he had informed everyone that he had a partner back in Italy and was therefore off limits, although he was available to do exercises with.  Many women had shared a ping of disappointment.  This morning, Laurel and Geno had chosen to do the sensual massage assignment together.  When it was her turn to be the giver, she had watched in amazement as he didn’t even flinch when she neared the vicinity where most men take notice.  His touch on her was rough and insensitive, not at all in tune with her response or lack of it, sleepy and unaware.  He got somewhat excused for this by his otherworldly good looks, but not completely.

She hadn’t told him how unsatisfying it had been.  In true good girl fashion she had told him it had been “nice.”  Someone taught her once that “nice” stands for “Nothing In me Cares Enough about you (to tell you the truth),” and she supposed that was true.  It was not an unpleasant diversion, however, to sit at his table and gaze at that face.  And that body.

“What’s your girlfriend in Italy like?” she asked.

“She is a great and famous teacher of tantra,” he said. “Right now she is giving a seminar in Tuscany.”

“Oh,” she said, thinking back to his touch devoid of sensuality. “You must be learning a lot about tantra from her?”

“Oh yes,” he said.  “She’s an amazing woman.”

“Then why are you here, studying tantra several thousand miles away from her?”

“She says I need to learn more about being on my own, and she is right.  I want to lose my tendency of codependency.”

That buzz word, I hate it, Laurel thought.  “What exactly does that mean anyway?  It seems to me it’s a way to put down people who value being in a relationship over being alone.”

“Here, I hope to deepen my aloneness,” he said, “and then take it back to be with her.  In a more authentic way.”  He moved the tray with its mound of peelings and rinds to the other side of the table, and poised his spoon over the melon.

“A relationship is like climbing a great mountain,” he continued.  “It is a journey that is difficult and long and takes much preparation, much training.  It is the only thing in life that is of value.”  He dipped his spoon into the watery red fruit and took a bite.  “I don’t understand these men who come here just to sleep with any woman.  It shocks me; I don’t understand it.  It has no……,”  he scratched his head.  “Ah, my English is so bad.  What is the word?”  His eyes turned up into the back of his skull, searching his memory banks for an Italiano-Inglese dictionary.

“Rispettare….no?…No!”  Laurel shook her head.  She certainly had no idea.

“Decoro….stima….Ah, ah, I must know.”  He was frantically looking around the crowded lunch area, for what she couldn’t fathom.  “Ah!”  and he sped off over in the direction of the fountain.

Suddenly Laurel found herself sitting alone, not really understanding what had happened.  She shrugged it off to just another strange ashram occurrence.  First she was having lunch with a gorgeous Italian raw foodist, and abruptly she wasn’t.  She reached over and took a dripping bite of his watermelon, then replaced the spoon.

Geno finally reappeared holding a tattered book in his left hand.  He leafed through the pages, shaking his head and muttering.
“Ah hah!”  he trumpeted.  “Nobility!  That’s the word.  Nobility.  It has no nobility.  That’s it.  To sleep with so many women has no nobility.”  He got up and left the table to return the book.

© 2009 Catherine Auman

As she neared the corner to turn to her flat, an Indian man in his mid twenties stopped her. He wore a stiffly starched Western style shirt, immaculately white, and black trousers. His little mustache quivered. He came up to Laurel’s chin.

“Please, sir,” he said, addressing Laurel. Laurel wanted to scream at him that she was not a ‘sir’ but she bit her tongue. Was the only honorific in Hindi masculine?

“My wife and I,” he continued. His voice was insistent and firm, determined to get what he was after. “We are married new. Please, sir, honor us, bless our marriage.”

Behind him was a shy Indian woman, dressed in punjabi and beaded sandals, her glossy black hair gathered into a thick braid. Her eyes were downcast and she clung to her husband’s arm. Laurel wanted to laugh. Her bless a marriage? Ludicrous. What was with these people?

Then she realized that to them she was a sannyasin, a person on a spiritual quest, which in India denoted a holy person. She laughed to think of herself as holy, yeah, celibate and all. But then again, she argued with herself, she was dedicating her life to spiritual search. In the West, this may have made her an uncool person, but here it was honored as a respected life path. Maybe her spirituality was not that of a celibate monk dedicated to hours of pranayama or late nights studying the dharma. She was equally as determined as he was to see it to the end. Maybe she ought to regard her own life choices with a little more respect.

How did one bless a marriage? “All blessings for your marriage,” Laurel said. “May you live long and happily together.” She waved her arms around like she imagined a priest would. Would that do?

The man smiled at his wife who nodded. The newly married couple walked on into their life together, and Laurel walked on into her life alone.

© 2006 Catherine Auman

“All right,” Mevlana said. “Women, raise your arms and feel your longing. All the longing you have ever felt. Reach, reach for the sky.”

Laurel lifted her arms to the ceiling and felt the stretch along her ribcage and the sides of her breasts. Her head fell back and her left hand covered her right as her fingers strained upward. Longing. She felt her longing. So many things she had desired in her life: beautiful clothes, that pair of silk pants with the silver braid, that boy at summer camp, what was his name? Ice cream, and world peace, and for summer never to end.

“Really reach for it,” Mevlana coaxed. “Long with all your might.”

Laurel remembered her ambition for career success and the trappings that were supposed to come with it: a designer-decorated home, a luxury car, and tropical vacations in Fiji, or Bali, or Kuala Lumpur. She had fantasized being as rich as Oprah, and craved the opulent life that magazines extolled. Her itching for this consumerism had gradually declined as she began to realize it was all greed stoked by the marketing machine.

“Feel your longing,” Mevlana said. “Really feel your longing.”

Laurel strained harder. The air in her chest pushed down against her diaphragm and her arms elongated up, further. Her fingers spread wide toward the ceiling, grasping, reaching.

So much effort and money and work spent aspiring to be beautiful, hoping to be loved and cherished by a man. Where was he? The dream of the Perfect Beloved. Desire to be united with him. The pining to be held, to be made love to, to be made love to expertly and to surrender to the biggest orgasm ever. The coveting of other women’s boyfriends.

“Feel all the longings of your life,” Mevlana said. “Don’t hold back.”

There was the yearning to stop the search and be flooded with Love and finally feel satiated. Laurel reached even further. To understand what was really going on. Why life had to hurt so badly. Why it never worked out the way you hoped. To know the secrets of death, and life, for that matter. A passion to get to the place they call Enlightenment, and to understand what the heck it is we are all doing here. How she hungered to know the Truth.

Laurel tensed, exhaling the air out of her lungs, hard. She lengthened her arms above her head, further, farther. Up as high as they would go.

There was a rustling on the dais and for the first time, Laurel became aware of the soft raga Bashir had chosen as the music. Mevlana stood and called out an instruction. “This is to the men. Rise up behind your partner and let her feel your support. Unmistakably, let her know the full degree of how much you encourage her in her longing. Hold her and incite her to go even further in her pursuit so that she knows that this time, she does not endeavor alone.”

Laurel felt Michael’s body rise up behind her, felt his warmth against the curve of her back. His hands slid up, grasped her forearms from behind and urged them up a little further. Laurel gasped. The effort was intense. This is what it felt like for longing to be okay and not secretive and humiliating. It had never occurred to her to ask that her appetites be supported, by girlfriends maybe, but not by men.

“Really let yourself be supported in your longing, in your passion,” Mevlana said.

With Michael holding her, Laurel let herself relax and permit his solidity to carry her. To be supported like this allowed for a modicum of trust, trust that her prayers might be answered. It was tremendously healing, Laurel realized, looking up at Mevlana with gratitude.

The yearning and stretching continued. That’s got to be enough now, she thought. Surely this exercise must be almost over. But no, it was not. The effort was beginning to wear. Michael’s got to be tired of me by now, she thought. He must be thinking what a dolt I am to be so full of lust. He must wish this would end, feel a hankering to move on. She peered around. His eyes were glistening with kindness. The shock made her disappear back into her striving.

“You’ll notice that longing is always attached to pain,” Mevlana called out, “but what to do? That’s the nature of it.”

Laurel suddenly realized that even if she never got what she hoped for, as she actually never had in the past, everything would still be all right. The longing itself was the point. It all really wasn’t about the objects of desire. That was the error, seeing the object as the point, rather than the longing itself.

“All right,” Mevlana broke in. “Take a moment to make sure you have exhausted all longing and get ready to switch places. Men will become the long-ers and the women will be the support persons.”

They switched. As Laurel put her hands on Michael’s body, she smelled his scent, and admired the definition of his arms. As the exercise proceeded, she noticed how much easier it was to support a man in his striving compared with how it had been a completely unfamiliar experience to be supported by a man in hers. She felt how sexy she considered a man to be in his longing, how noble, and honorable. It was hard to feel the same way about herself. She had experienced her own longings as pathetic, but a man’s as worthy of support. She felt now, and had always been, happy to be there for him, whoever he was.

As the late afternoon sun cast shadows across the group room floor, the exercise came to an end. All members of the group came to relax in a circle in front of the dais at Mevlana and Bashir’s feet.

“Now you know more about longing than ninety-nine percent of the world,” Mevlana said. “Use this knowing wisely. Realize that if your love has any motivation in it, it is not love. Life is fulfilled by longings, not by ambitions.

“The longing that men and women have for each other,” Mevlana continued, “you have to understand its true nature. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s really longing for God, for the Ultimate. The longing has to be completely frustrated, or we wouldn’t get on to what’s real.”

Laurel looked over at Michael and smiled. Behind him sat Ian, cuddled with the Brazilian girl, then Stefano, then Jack who sat by himself. Completely frustrated. She could truly say that she loved these men without any longing, although that may not have always been the case.

© 2008 Catherine Auman

So on one hand, you have the yogic paths that condemn sex, and the tantric which elevate it to the level of a sacrament. Both roads have their dangers. The probable pitfall of the yogic path is an enormous inflation of ego. The yogi identifies with all that has been accomplished. The tantric path was forbidden because the danger is that one will become enthralled and addicted to the sensual circus. The pitfall with tantra is the fall into dissolution from which one may never emerge. Many paths today attempt to be a combination of the two. You will notice some tantric schools that are billed as “the yoga of sex.” These approaches are arduous and involve much training of the body and breath.

When sex is allowed and encouraged, one will eventually come to the point where they discover that the fulfillment one is seeking from sex is not to be found in sex. The search for Union with the Beloved can only be realized through union with the universal, not with another person, and not through the body. The body and the beloved can offer glimpses, but not the ultimate. That is for what we search. Sex leads to what we are seeking only in the transcendence of it. When one is complete, sex disappears on its own.

In tantra, we go deeply into sex in order to complete it. When there is no repression left, no desire because it has been seen through, no more interest, we see that there is nothing there. We go Beyond. We become Complete. Those of us on the tantric path prefer to go through sex to get there, that’s all. The purpose of tantra is to go beyond sex, but it seems difficult to interest anyone in this aspect of it. Most people would prefer not to develop to the point of transcending sex in this lifetime.

© 2008 Catherine Auman

Tantra on the other hand is the path that teaches that all is divine. In yoga, some things are holy and some things are not. In tantra, everything is perfect just the way it is, including darkness, death, difficult emotions, and sensual pleasures. No matter what is happening, it is celebrated as part of precious Life. The path to ultimate realization is in the full acceptance of the perfection of the present moment. There is nowhere to go; nothing to do, no one to be; all is as it is, and realizing this, one can surrender into a deep let-go.

In its central worldview that all is divine, tantra accepted our sensual nature as an essential facet of being human. Tantikas would experiment with what was forbidden by other traditions such as eating meat, drinking wine, and having sex, as a way of experiencing that all is a manifestation of the Divine, that the distinctions taught by society are false. These activities were performed in special ceremonies as specific occult techniques, much like the homeopathic remedy of ingesting a tiny bit of the poison that caused the illness in order to cure it.

Of course, today when all is permitted in Western society, the performance of such ‘forbidden’ actions carries no meaning. Eating meat and drinking alcohol are activities that no longer teach us anything and have, in fact, become stale. Instead, many people’s lives have led to a sickening over-satiation of sensual pleasure, causing obesity, degenerative disease, and rampant boredom. Having sex is no longer forbidden, and for many people has become one of the paths of learning. It was said that in the Kali Yuga, which is the name of the time we are living in, tantra would reappear to enlighten the public.

© 2008 Catherine Auman