THE TRUTH ABOUT TANTRA
By: Todd Jones
Tantra arrived on the cultural radar of mainstream America in 1989, with the publication of Margot Anand's The Art of Sexual Ecstasy. But even before Anand's ascent to the best-seller lists made Tantra a household word, other writers and workshop leaders had been mining Eastern sexual and spiritual techniques and blending them with elements of Western sexology, psychotherapy, and New Age self-transformational techniques. One of the first of these was Charles Muir, a yoga teacher who had been a follower of Swami Satchidananda until he became disillusioned by revelations of Satchidananda's illicit sexual relations with some devotees. He then spent time as a student of Swami Satyananda, and as a teacher in the tradition of TV yoga guru Richard Hittleman.
After his first marriage, Muir began to reexamine his ways of relating with women, and, as he puts it, "was blessed with the teachings of a number of remarkable women" who initiated him into their knowledge of Tantric sexuality. Muir also started to study the ancient Tantric texts, and began including more and more such teachings in his yoga workshops. By 1980, Muir made a full-time switch from hatha yoga teacher to Tantric sexuality teacher. Two decades later, he and his wife Caroline are still probably the best known teachers of Western Tantra.
On the first night of the Muirs' weeklong workshop entitled "The Art of Conscious Loving," at the Rio Caliente spa about an hour outside Guadalajara, Mexico, nine couples gather in a circle. The group seems subdued and a bit tense, with a palpable undercurrent of nervous anticipation.
Tom, a handsome psychologist born to Central American parents but raised mostly in the States, and his partner, a black-haired social worker with a mischievous grin named Leslie, emit a honeymoon glow as they sit entwined around each other. In contrast, Susie's back is turned like a stiff wall toward Bill, who hunches as though he's trying to take up as little space as possible. Stan and Liz, an outgoing pair of 67-year-olds from a wealthy Southern California suburb, chatter about their upcoming nuptials—"the second for both of us," Stan says, "but we're telling people it's our first real marriage." Next to them Anja, a native of Denmark and a healer, and Merle, her American partner, seem the most relaxed pair as they sit quietly with placid, taciturn smiles.
The couples are almost as diverse occupationally as geographically—no blue collar workers, but, for such a small group, a fair slice of middle and upper middle class white America: a retired government bureaucrat now doing volunteer work; several entrepreneurs, an architect, a secretary, a teacher, an accountant, and a disproportionate number of healers of various types—a doctor who specializes in alternative/complementary medicine, the psychologist and the social worker, an art therapist, and four bodyworkers/energy healers. Quite a few turn out to be committed to Eastern spiritual practices. The doctor practices Zen; for several years he attended asesshin, an intensive meditation retreat, for one week out of every two months. Anja started and ran a yoga school for 17 years, closed it to open a school of esoteric energy healing, and finally lived alone in the woods for six years of intense personal spiritual practice. Merle, who runs a bodywork school, has practiced vipassana meditation for several years. Another bodyworker mentions a decade-long association with Yogi Bhajan's Kundalini Yoga community.
Later, when Charles asks each couple to share what drew them to this Tantra workshop, Anja reports that she was so inspired by a visit to the Tantric temples at Khajuraho, in central India, with their relief carvings of hundreds of ecstatically (and acrobatically) entwined lovers, that she swore to some day find a man with whom she could share Tantra. Now, she says, after 12 years of celibacy, she has. Two participants attended the workshop previously and have returned to share it with a newfound soul mate. On the whole, though, the couples seem quite reluctant to talk publicly about their sexual lives. Yet, traveling from as far away as Hawaii and Denmark and anteing up $3,400 per couple (plus airfare), they have all committed a substantial investment of time, money, and energy to their relationships—and to the exploration of Tantra.
The Muirs begin by contrasting the sexual education—or, more accurately, the lack of it—most Westerners receive to the more respectful, celebratory, and unconflicted attitudes they attribute to ancient Indian culture. With his characteristic humor and earthy language, Charles offers up as fairly representative his teenage tutelage with the leader of a Bronx street gang in the 1950s: "'Get it hard, get it in, and get it off. Fuck 'em hard and fuck 'em deep.'" Many of us, Charles points out, receive little more information than this about the vast possible joys of sexual loving. "We learn most of what we know about intimacy from those great fonts of wisdom and experience, dear old mom and dad," Charles says, drawing snorts of rueful laughter from the group. Outside our families, we glean information—often misinformation—from the locker-room talk and slumber party whispers of our peers, and we absorb intensely mixed messages from the adults, religious institutions, and pop culture around us. "How can you not be confused" asks Charles, "when you're told both 'Sex is dirty' and 'Save it for the one you love?'"
Caroline picks up the thread, pointing out that many of us also approach adult sexuality scarred by childhood and adolescent experience of incest or other sexual abuse. When we finally find partners for our first sexual explorations, often as not we end up with further emotional wounds from fumbling in the dark with lovers as misinformed, ignorant, and scarred as ourselves. "Is it any wonder," Caroline asks rhetorically, "that many of us don't really know how to 'make love?' We may have learned how to get off, but not how to use sex to make more love in our relationships."
As models of a healthier attitude, Caroline holds up ancient cultures, especially that of India. She points out that Indians revered sexuality as a holy gift from the creator, regarding sex as both a sacrament and an art form, celebrating it in their art, and teaching its secrets to their children. Sex was used not just to join two lovers, but as a meditation through which the lovers could unite with the divine energy of the universe. "This week," she says, "we'll learn how to make sex be sacred again."
The Yoga of Relationship
Before adjourning for the evening, Charles outlines the three interwoven topics he and Caroline will be teaching throughout the week: increasing energy and pleasure; increasing intimacy; and quieting the mind. "We'll learn many techniques for increasing the energy and pleasure you can feel in your body," he says. Many of the techniques will be what he calls White Tantra—practices that can be done individually, like asana, pranayama, repetition of mantras—while others will be Red Tantra—practices that involve joining your energy with a partner's.
Techniques for fostering intimacy, Charles says, are designed to allow lovers to increase their ability to give and to receive each other's energy. He adds that workshop participants will discover that they don't need to learn to do more; they simply need to surrender and allow themselves to be who they naturally are. In the end, says Charles, "Relationship is the ultimate yoga. If you're in a relationship, it is a yoga, a spiritual pathway. Relationship will bring up every lesson you need to learn."
All these techniques culminate, he emphasizes, in the quieting of the mind. Instead of habitually using the thinking mind, students will learn to cultivate the mind's capacity for being completely quiet and receptive. "Ultimately, Tantra is a meditation," Charles notes. "In fact, orgasm is the only universally shared meditative experience, the one that cuts across all cultures. At the moment of orgasm, you're not in your thinking brain, you're in your receptive, being brain; when you're completely absorbed in the present, you enter into timelessness."
As the week progresses, some of the information and exercises are explicitly sensual and sexual. Participants are given primers on touch, kissing, and oral sex, on using the breath to intensify and prolong orgasm, on strengthening the pubic-coccygeal muscles to increase sexual pleasure. One session especially directed at the men focuses on a number of methods for delaying (and heightening and lengthening) orgasm. Using hand puppets—an oversized, furry yoni and lingam(respectively, the Sanskrit names for female and male genitalia)—Charles and Caroline demonstrate how to use your hands to delight your partner, how to mutually pleasure each other using a man's "soft-on" instead of a "hard-on," and how to bring infinite variety to intercourse by changing the speed, depth, and angle of penetration. Inviting their students to gather around them, the Muirs conduct a graphic (though fully clothed) seminar on sexual positions, complete with detailed demonstrations of how to use pillows to support an aching back, and how to gracefully segue from front to side to back entry positions, and from woman on top to man on top and back again, without ever losing contact and intimacy.
Charles and Caroline also spend just as much time on techniques that are far more esoteric and far less explicitly sexual. Almost every day, they lead the class through a half-hour or more of gentle hatha yoga. The routines wouldn't pose much physical challenge to any regular practitioner, but that's not the Muirs' focus. Instead, as in all the yogic techniques they teach, they emphasize awareness of the subtle energy body and the chakras. All the chakras, Charles says, contain dormant energy, consciousness, and intelligence, and the Tantra techniques he teaches aim to arouse and harness those latent energies. He stresses that the goal in doing these asanas shouldn't be to achieve any particular stretch or outward form, but instead "to recognize and reconcile yourself with your body just as it is."
"These asanas are not exercises," Caroline chimes in, "they are poses: sacred geometries for awakening and becoming aware of energy." As they lead a simple but well-rounded sequence (standing and balancing poses, side stretches, forward and backward bends), Charles and Caroline direct the participants to support the circuits of energy in the body with the breath: In a forward bend, for instance, students breathe energy up from the feet through the legs and torso and exhale it out through the crown of the head before beginning the cycle again with the feet.
The Muirs also give instruction in pranayama (breathing techniques), ranging from simple, full breaths to more advanced practices, such as using bandhas (energetic "locks") to contain and heighten energy in the body, or directing energy up to the space between the third eye and crown chakras by using the rapid forced exhalations of "breath of fire" (Kapalabhati). The group intones various bija mantras, sacred "seed syllables" whose vibration is said to awaken each chakra; visualizes yantras, geometric diagrams that serve the same purpose; and practices mudras, potent hand gestures that create specific flows of energy. Along with all these solo yogic techniques, Charles and Caroline direct participants in breathing with a partner. First the class members practice simply coordinating and harmonizing their inhalations and exhalations. They go on to practice reciprocal breathing—in which each breathes in his or her partner's energy as the partner exhales, and vice versa. Eventually, they use breath to link their bodies together in a circular flow of energy.
Sacred Spot Massage
Although the Muirs present an enormous range of information and lead many exercises, their workshop pivots on the practice they call "sacred spot massage." In this intimate ritual, conducted by each couple in the privacy of their own room, the man will spend an entire evening in the role of sexual shaman, offering his partner the loving presence and touch that can help heal old wounds and allow her to open more completely into her full sexual power. (Later in the week, the couples reverse roles, with the women giving and the men receiving healing and empowerment.)
According to the Muirs, Tantra believes women's sexual arousal and orgasm can open them to channel ever increasing amounts of shakti, the basic energy of the universe, which both she and her partner can then tap into. (Men, on the other hand, are said to have a more limited, less renewable store of sexual energy, which is depleted every time they ejaculate. For men, the key is not so much opening up to sexual energy, but instead learning to contain and experience an ever greater degree of energy and ecstasy without dissipating it through ejaculation.) "The knowledge of women's limitless sexual potential has been lost to our culture," says Caroline. She and Charles insist not only that all women are endlessly, naturally multiorgasmic, but that all are capable of both explosive clitoral orgasms and deeper, longer, more wavelike vaginal orgasms that can be accompanied by female ejaculation.
A key to fully awakening a woman's sexuality, the Muirs say, is loving massage of the "sacred spot," a region of highly sensitive tissue located about two inches up the front wall of the vagina. (In Western sexology, this is the "G-spot," named for Ernst Grafenberg, the gynecologist who first described it in Western medical literature.) But along with previously unknown pleasures, sacred spot massage can also unleash memories of sexual confusion, repression, pain, and abuse. We don't just store such memories in our minds, but in our bodies—and especially in the tissues around our second chakra (the genital region), which Tantra regards as the wellspring of our energy. The pain surrounding these memories must be addressed and released, the Muirs believe, before we can experience all the joy of unfettered sexual energy.
The Muirs stress that sacred spot massage should never be undertaken with the goal of orgasmic fireworks. Instead, they say, sacred spot massage should be viewed as a process that invites a couple into ever greater vulnerability, trust, intimacy, and caring. "Orgasms are part of a natural flow of events," says Charles. "Don't go after orgasms, but let them be signposts on the road to sexual wholeness." The Muirs devote hours of instruction to ensure that their students learn how to use sacred spot massage to integrate the emotional experience of loving connection with the passion of sexual arousal.
But once Charles takes the men off for their separate class, he concentrates on preparing them to serve as sexual healers. First, he coaches each man to honor his partner by making the whole evening a feast for her senses: Tidy and decorate the room. Build a fire. Gather flowers. Dress up. Prepare a special treat of food or drink. Draw her a bath. Give her a massage. Then, he urges, tell her the things you appreciate and love most about her. "Don't hesitate to invite God—whatever meaning that may have for you—into the bedroom," Charles tells them with a little grin as he sets up his punch line: "It makes for the best threesome!"
Most of all, Charles prepares each man to give his partner concentrated, loving attention—to remain present with whatever emotional experience comes up for her. "Real presence is far more important than physical technique," he assures the men. "Get out of your head and into your heart. If difficult emotional stuff comes up for her, it's not just her stuff; it belongs to both of you." Charles encourages the men to approach the whole evening as a sacred meditation, an exercise in empathy: "Make the evening a peace offering to your woman and to the collective womanhood of humanity, a healing for every woman who's ever been raped or molested or demeaned in any way."
Before sending the men and women off for their "homeplay," Charles offers them some predictions. "For many of you," he promises, "this will be the most important night of your life. About 25 percent of couples have ecstatic experiences in sacred spot massage; about 25 percent encounter mostly shadow residues of old experiences that need to be released; and the remaining half have a mixed experience."
In the morning, when the couples reconvene and begin to share their experiences, Anja validates part of Charles's forecast: "I would say it was the most romantic time in my life, the most happy moment in my life, and now I am so peaceful. I think I am joining with my higher consciousness in a way I've never been before, and I know it's going to influence my work." (In class, Anja talks mostly of the spiritual effects of the evening, but in later conversation she also mentions "wave after wave of orgasmic energy" that ran through her body for almost two hours.)
Though none of the other women report transports of ecstasy, all the couples tell stories of increased intimacy, of insights and breakthroughs. For the most demonstratively passionate couple in the group, Tom and Leslie, the exciting shift wasn't in sexual intensity but in emotional vulnerability. "The biggest gift," says Tom, "was Leslie crying in my arms, which had never happened before." Many of the men reveled in their role as giver and healer, delighting in pleasing and nurturing their partners; some also enjoyed an unexpected freedom from performance anxiety.
Not that everyone had smooth sailing. For Susie, the sacred spot massage was painful—both physically and emotionally. "When Bill started to massage my sacred spot, it was uncomfortable, and it brought up all my issues. So I cried and screamed and ranted and raved, and then I cried some more. Bill cried too." Despite her pain, Susie felt "it was still a healing experience. I'm starting to realize that healing doesn't happen in one fell swoop. Last night I got a piece of healing." Turning to Bill, she says, "What I really appreciated was that you were there for me." Looking back at the group, she says firmly, "He was really there the whole time. And I realized that he has been there for me for a long time; I just didn't see it."
Beaming back at her, Bill drawls, "I got yelled at all night, and I loved it. I feel a little guilty. I was supposed to be the giver, and I received so much. After a couple of hours, it dawned on me that I didn't have to try to quiet my mind. It just happened. Of course, the greatest blessing was that last night was the first time in my life I ever felt like a healer."
By: Todd Jones
Tantra arrived on the cultural radar of mainstream America in 1989, with the publication of Margot Anand's The Art of Sexual Ecstasy. But even before Anand's ascent to the best-seller lists made Tantra a household word, other writers and workshop leaders had been mining Eastern sexual and spiritual techniques and blending them with elements of Western sexology, psychotherapy, and New Age self-transformational techniques. One of the first of these was Charles Muir, a yoga teacher who had been a follower of Swami Satchidananda until he became disillusioned by revelations of Satchidananda's illicit sexual relations with some devotees. He then spent time as a student of Swami Satyananda, and as a teacher in the tradition of TV yoga guru Richard Hittleman.
After his first marriage, Muir began to reexamine his ways of relating with women, and, as he puts it, "was blessed with the teachings of a number of remarkable women" who initiated him into their knowledge of Tantric sexuality. Muir also started to study the ancient Tantric texts, and began including more and more such teachings in his yoga workshops. By 1980, Muir made a full-time switch from hatha yoga teacher to Tantric sexuality teacher. Two decades later, he and his wife Caroline are still probably the best known teachers of Western Tantra.
On the first night of the Muirs' weeklong workshop entitled "The Art of Conscious Loving," at the Rio Caliente spa about an hour outside Guadalajara, Mexico, nine couples gather in a circle. The group seems subdued and a bit tense, with a palpable undercurrent of nervous anticipation.
Tom, a handsome psychologist born to Central American parents but raised mostly in the States, and his partner, a black-haired social worker with a mischievous grin named Leslie, emit a honeymoon glow as they sit entwined around each other. In contrast, Susie's back is turned like a stiff wall toward Bill, who hunches as though he's trying to take up as little space as possible. Stan and Liz, an outgoing pair of 67-year-olds from a wealthy Southern California suburb, chatter about their upcoming nuptials—"the second for both of us," Stan says, "but we're telling people it's our first real marriage." Next to them Anja, a native of Denmark and a healer, and Merle, her American partner, seem the most relaxed pair as they sit quietly with placid, taciturn smiles.
The couples are almost as diverse occupationally as geographically—no blue collar workers, but, for such a small group, a fair slice of middle and upper middle class white America: a retired government bureaucrat now doing volunteer work; several entrepreneurs, an architect, a secretary, a teacher, an accountant, and a disproportionate number of healers of various types—a doctor who specializes in alternative/complementary medicine, the psychologist and the social worker, an art therapist, and four bodyworkers/energy healers. Quite a few turn out to be committed to Eastern spiritual practices. The doctor practices Zen; for several years he attended asesshin, an intensive meditation retreat, for one week out of every two months. Anja started and ran a yoga school for 17 years, closed it to open a school of esoteric energy healing, and finally lived alone in the woods for six years of intense personal spiritual practice. Merle, who runs a bodywork school, has practiced vipassana meditation for several years. Another bodyworker mentions a decade-long association with Yogi Bhajan's Kundalini Yoga community.
Later, when Charles asks each couple to share what drew them to this Tantra workshop, Anja reports that she was so inspired by a visit to the Tantric temples at Khajuraho, in central India, with their relief carvings of hundreds of ecstatically (and acrobatically) entwined lovers, that she swore to some day find a man with whom she could share Tantra. Now, she says, after 12 years of celibacy, she has. Two participants attended the workshop previously and have returned to share it with a newfound soul mate. On the whole, though, the couples seem quite reluctant to talk publicly about their sexual lives. Yet, traveling from as far away as Hawaii and Denmark and anteing up $3,400 per couple (plus airfare), they have all committed a substantial investment of time, money, and energy to their relationships—and to the exploration of Tantra.
The Muirs begin by contrasting the sexual education—or, more accurately, the lack of it—most Westerners receive to the more respectful, celebratory, and unconflicted attitudes they attribute to ancient Indian culture. With his characteristic humor and earthy language, Charles offers up as fairly representative his teenage tutelage with the leader of a Bronx street gang in the 1950s: "'Get it hard, get it in, and get it off. Fuck 'em hard and fuck 'em deep.'" Many of us, Charles points out, receive little more information than this about the vast possible joys of sexual loving. "We learn most of what we know about intimacy from those great fonts of wisdom and experience, dear old mom and dad," Charles says, drawing snorts of rueful laughter from the group. Outside our families, we glean information—often misinformation—from the locker-room talk and slumber party whispers of our peers, and we absorb intensely mixed messages from the adults, religious institutions, and pop culture around us. "How can you not be confused" asks Charles, "when you're told both 'Sex is dirty' and 'Save it for the one you love?'"
Caroline picks up the thread, pointing out that many of us also approach adult sexuality scarred by childhood and adolescent experience of incest or other sexual abuse. When we finally find partners for our first sexual explorations, often as not we end up with further emotional wounds from fumbling in the dark with lovers as misinformed, ignorant, and scarred as ourselves. "Is it any wonder," Caroline asks rhetorically, "that many of us don't really know how to 'make love?' We may have learned how to get off, but not how to use sex to make more love in our relationships."
As models of a healthier attitude, Caroline holds up ancient cultures, especially that of India. She points out that Indians revered sexuality as a holy gift from the creator, regarding sex as both a sacrament and an art form, celebrating it in their art, and teaching its secrets to their children. Sex was used not just to join two lovers, but as a meditation through which the lovers could unite with the divine energy of the universe. "This week," she says, "we'll learn how to make sex be sacred again."
The Yoga of Relationship
Before adjourning for the evening, Charles outlines the three interwoven topics he and Caroline will be teaching throughout the week: increasing energy and pleasure; increasing intimacy; and quieting the mind. "We'll learn many techniques for increasing the energy and pleasure you can feel in your body," he says. Many of the techniques will be what he calls White Tantra—practices that can be done individually, like asana, pranayama, repetition of mantras—while others will be Red Tantra—practices that involve joining your energy with a partner's.
Techniques for fostering intimacy, Charles says, are designed to allow lovers to increase their ability to give and to receive each other's energy. He adds that workshop participants will discover that they don't need to learn to do more; they simply need to surrender and allow themselves to be who they naturally are. In the end, says Charles, "Relationship is the ultimate yoga. If you're in a relationship, it is a yoga, a spiritual pathway. Relationship will bring up every lesson you need to learn."
All these techniques culminate, he emphasizes, in the quieting of the mind. Instead of habitually using the thinking mind, students will learn to cultivate the mind's capacity for being completely quiet and receptive. "Ultimately, Tantra is a meditation," Charles notes. "In fact, orgasm is the only universally shared meditative experience, the one that cuts across all cultures. At the moment of orgasm, you're not in your thinking brain, you're in your receptive, being brain; when you're completely absorbed in the present, you enter into timelessness."
As the week progresses, some of the information and exercises are explicitly sensual and sexual. Participants are given primers on touch, kissing, and oral sex, on using the breath to intensify and prolong orgasm, on strengthening the pubic-coccygeal muscles to increase sexual pleasure. One session especially directed at the men focuses on a number of methods for delaying (and heightening and lengthening) orgasm. Using hand puppets—an oversized, furry yoni and lingam(respectively, the Sanskrit names for female and male genitalia)—Charles and Caroline demonstrate how to use your hands to delight your partner, how to mutually pleasure each other using a man's "soft-on" instead of a "hard-on," and how to bring infinite variety to intercourse by changing the speed, depth, and angle of penetration. Inviting their students to gather around them, the Muirs conduct a graphic (though fully clothed) seminar on sexual positions, complete with detailed demonstrations of how to use pillows to support an aching back, and how to gracefully segue from front to side to back entry positions, and from woman on top to man on top and back again, without ever losing contact and intimacy.
Charles and Caroline also spend just as much time on techniques that are far more esoteric and far less explicitly sexual. Almost every day, they lead the class through a half-hour or more of gentle hatha yoga. The routines wouldn't pose much physical challenge to any regular practitioner, but that's not the Muirs' focus. Instead, as in all the yogic techniques they teach, they emphasize awareness of the subtle energy body and the chakras. All the chakras, Charles says, contain dormant energy, consciousness, and intelligence, and the Tantra techniques he teaches aim to arouse and harness those latent energies. He stresses that the goal in doing these asanas shouldn't be to achieve any particular stretch or outward form, but instead "to recognize and reconcile yourself with your body just as it is."
"These asanas are not exercises," Caroline chimes in, "they are poses: sacred geometries for awakening and becoming aware of energy." As they lead a simple but well-rounded sequence (standing and balancing poses, side stretches, forward and backward bends), Charles and Caroline direct the participants to support the circuits of energy in the body with the breath: In a forward bend, for instance, students breathe energy up from the feet through the legs and torso and exhale it out through the crown of the head before beginning the cycle again with the feet.
The Muirs also give instruction in pranayama (breathing techniques), ranging from simple, full breaths to more advanced practices, such as using bandhas (energetic "locks") to contain and heighten energy in the body, or directing energy up to the space between the third eye and crown chakras by using the rapid forced exhalations of "breath of fire" (Kapalabhati). The group intones various bija mantras, sacred "seed syllables" whose vibration is said to awaken each chakra; visualizes yantras, geometric diagrams that serve the same purpose; and practices mudras, potent hand gestures that create specific flows of energy. Along with all these solo yogic techniques, Charles and Caroline direct participants in breathing with a partner. First the class members practice simply coordinating and harmonizing their inhalations and exhalations. They go on to practice reciprocal breathing—in which each breathes in his or her partner's energy as the partner exhales, and vice versa. Eventually, they use breath to link their bodies together in a circular flow of energy.
Sacred Spot Massage
Although the Muirs present an enormous range of information and lead many exercises, their workshop pivots on the practice they call "sacred spot massage." In this intimate ritual, conducted by each couple in the privacy of their own room, the man will spend an entire evening in the role of sexual shaman, offering his partner the loving presence and touch that can help heal old wounds and allow her to open more completely into her full sexual power. (Later in the week, the couples reverse roles, with the women giving and the men receiving healing and empowerment.)
According to the Muirs, Tantra believes women's sexual arousal and orgasm can open them to channel ever increasing amounts of shakti, the basic energy of the universe, which both she and her partner can then tap into. (Men, on the other hand, are said to have a more limited, less renewable store of sexual energy, which is depleted every time they ejaculate. For men, the key is not so much opening up to sexual energy, but instead learning to contain and experience an ever greater degree of energy and ecstasy without dissipating it through ejaculation.) "The knowledge of women's limitless sexual potential has been lost to our culture," says Caroline. She and Charles insist not only that all women are endlessly, naturally multiorgasmic, but that all are capable of both explosive clitoral orgasms and deeper, longer, more wavelike vaginal orgasms that can be accompanied by female ejaculation.
A key to fully awakening a woman's sexuality, the Muirs say, is loving massage of the "sacred spot," a region of highly sensitive tissue located about two inches up the front wall of the vagina. (In Western sexology, this is the "G-spot," named for Ernst Grafenberg, the gynecologist who first described it in Western medical literature.) But along with previously unknown pleasures, sacred spot massage can also unleash memories of sexual confusion, repression, pain, and abuse. We don't just store such memories in our minds, but in our bodies—and especially in the tissues around our second chakra (the genital region), which Tantra regards as the wellspring of our energy. The pain surrounding these memories must be addressed and released, the Muirs believe, before we can experience all the joy of unfettered sexual energy.
The Muirs stress that sacred spot massage should never be undertaken with the goal of orgasmic fireworks. Instead, they say, sacred spot massage should be viewed as a process that invites a couple into ever greater vulnerability, trust, intimacy, and caring. "Orgasms are part of a natural flow of events," says Charles. "Don't go after orgasms, but let them be signposts on the road to sexual wholeness." The Muirs devote hours of instruction to ensure that their students learn how to use sacred spot massage to integrate the emotional experience of loving connection with the passion of sexual arousal.
But once Charles takes the men off for their separate class, he concentrates on preparing them to serve as sexual healers. First, he coaches each man to honor his partner by making the whole evening a feast for her senses: Tidy and decorate the room. Build a fire. Gather flowers. Dress up. Prepare a special treat of food or drink. Draw her a bath. Give her a massage. Then, he urges, tell her the things you appreciate and love most about her. "Don't hesitate to invite God—whatever meaning that may have for you—into the bedroom," Charles tells them with a little grin as he sets up his punch line: "It makes for the best threesome!"
Most of all, Charles prepares each man to give his partner concentrated, loving attention—to remain present with whatever emotional experience comes up for her. "Real presence is far more important than physical technique," he assures the men. "Get out of your head and into your heart. If difficult emotional stuff comes up for her, it's not just her stuff; it belongs to both of you." Charles encourages the men to approach the whole evening as a sacred meditation, an exercise in empathy: "Make the evening a peace offering to your woman and to the collective womanhood of humanity, a healing for every woman who's ever been raped or molested or demeaned in any way."
Before sending the men and women off for their "homeplay," Charles offers them some predictions. "For many of you," he promises, "this will be the most important night of your life. About 25 percent of couples have ecstatic experiences in sacred spot massage; about 25 percent encounter mostly shadow residues of old experiences that need to be released; and the remaining half have a mixed experience."
In the morning, when the couples reconvene and begin to share their experiences, Anja validates part of Charles's forecast: "I would say it was the most romantic time in my life, the most happy moment in my life, and now I am so peaceful. I think I am joining with my higher consciousness in a way I've never been before, and I know it's going to influence my work." (In class, Anja talks mostly of the spiritual effects of the evening, but in later conversation she also mentions "wave after wave of orgasmic energy" that ran through her body for almost two hours.)
Though none of the other women report transports of ecstasy, all the couples tell stories of increased intimacy, of insights and breakthroughs. For the most demonstratively passionate couple in the group, Tom and Leslie, the exciting shift wasn't in sexual intensity but in emotional vulnerability. "The biggest gift," says Tom, "was Leslie crying in my arms, which had never happened before." Many of the men reveled in their role as giver and healer, delighting in pleasing and nurturing their partners; some also enjoyed an unexpected freedom from performance anxiety.
Not that everyone had smooth sailing. For Susie, the sacred spot massage was painful—both physically and emotionally. "When Bill started to massage my sacred spot, it was uncomfortable, and it brought up all my issues. So I cried and screamed and ranted and raved, and then I cried some more. Bill cried too." Despite her pain, Susie felt "it was still a healing experience. I'm starting to realize that healing doesn't happen in one fell swoop. Last night I got a piece of healing." Turning to Bill, she says, "What I really appreciated was that you were there for me." Looking back at the group, she says firmly, "He was really there the whole time. And I realized that he has been there for me for a long time; I just didn't see it."
Beaming back at her, Bill drawls, "I got yelled at all night, and I loved it. I feel a little guilty. I was supposed to be the giver, and I received so much. After a couple of hours, it dawned on me that I didn't have to try to quiet my mind. It just happened. Of course, the greatest blessing was that last night was the first time in my life I ever felt like a healer."
