Sensation

by Isabel Losada

  I don’t usually have negative feelings about being a woman (apart from immediately prior to workshops that is). But I don’t have positive ones either. There is a famous prayer with which an orthodox Jewish male is encouraged to begin his day and it includes the line, ‘Praised are You, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has not made me a woman.’ One curious prayer to be sure. But then I have never woken up feeling grateful that I am a woman either. Gender is something I’ve taken for granted rather than enjoyed. Perhaps women enjoy being women more when there are men around who enjoy them? Did our mothers and our grandmothers enjoy being women more or less than us, do you think?

  My family has four generations of strong women on the maternal side. My great-grandmother, who I never met, had 13 children. My grandmother, Aimee, who raised me for the first six years of my life, lost her husband on my mother’s 13th birthday and brought her four children up alone from that day onwards. My mother brought me up with no husband as she and my father separated before my birth. I was single as I raised my daughter.

  In contemplating this heritage I have usually focused on the absence of men rather than the strength of the women. I’d love to have all four generations together at once – they would all be miraculously aged around 40 – to find out what they all think about being female. Can you imagine this conversation with your own mother, grandmother and great-grandmother? We’d have to go back quite a few more generations, I believe, before we found a woman who identified with the Mother Goddess. Maybe our ancestral mothers would all feel that having been female was more a curse than a blessing. If I’m honest, and I could choose between lifetimes (as some of the far out ‘New Age’ people believe that we can), I’d rather come back as a man. I’ve always felt a bit of a failure as a woman – as if I don’t quite have what it takes. Which leads me right back to the purpose of the weekend. I’ve done so much spiritual work in which gender makes no difference that arriving on the tantric path is a shock.

  Today’s workshop has a most unpropitious beginning. To get to the unlocatable location you have first to go to Birmingham and then cast spells on taxi drivers who could not otherwise be lured so far from the safety of traffic jams. But this is no cavern with log fires. My fledging inner witch is mortified to arrive at a truly hideous residential centre featuring school-style dorms with plastic covers on the extra narrow bunk beds. Those running the workshop are apoplectic with apology, never having used this quick-buildtake-the-money-and-run-before-it-falls-down venue before. They are ‘smudging’ the dorms by burning sage to disguise the smell of BO from whatever unfortunate lost beings were sleeping here last night. I glance at the other women attendees antagonistically wishing I could turn them all to stone with a glance. Can I go home now?

  • • •

  When we arrive in the main room after dinner I learn that they call their work a ‘mystery school’ so I can’t tell you in detail about any of the particular processes that we are about to do. This doesn’t prevent me from telling you what I experience; it just makes my job considerably harder and puts me into a worse mood. I mean obviously I want to tell you the spells. Dammit. The reason that they don’t allow anyone to talk, specifically, about some of the methods is that half the women who come would never have the courage to show up if they knew what was going to be asked of them. Once here, miles from home and trapped in a silk web of encouragement from other women, breakthroughs are made. They want women to do this work and they don’t want people like me misrepresenting it. This means that the only way I can tell you about all this is to consider the effect that it has on me. This is what I least want to do ... So I have to do the work with 100% integrity and then I hope that I can be of some help to you. Bleugh.

  We are asked tonight to think about how we feel about being a woman at whatever age we are. I sit moodily and don’t join in the conversation. Then they have a variation on this question about how we are feeling.

  ‘How does your vagina feel?’ This is just not the sort of question that gets asked every day. I say nothing but I think about it. I mean, physically or emotionally? Physically, right now, I can’t feel it at all. I do not receive sensation from the vagina in the normal course of a day, or if I could then I’m unaware of it/her? How does it/she feel emotionally? A little confused at this point, I suppose. Certainly not confident. So it seems that today I have reflected that I’d be equally happy as a man and my vagina is dazed and confused.

  We are now invited to consider our relationship with our breasts in a kind of meditation. They tell us that breasts nurture our children or our lovers, but we don’t often think of nurturing our breasts or them nurturing us. I’m not speaking in terms of turning oneself on sexually, but just about nurture and gentle pleasure. It turns out that many women never stroke their own breasts. I agree – it’s not a pastime that I’ve ever given a great deal of time to. ‘How do we feel about our breasts?’ There are the usual judgements, ‘too big’, ‘too small’, ‘wrong shape’. And even if some women love them, don’t we usually think of them as nurturing for babies or others? I’ve never considered mine as nurturing for me. Weird, witchy workshops.

  In every ‘process’ we are invited to consider the wonder of the female body. I don’t dislike mine but it’s true I’ve taken it for granted. Even when it miraculously produced a child, I was young and I barely noticed the miracle. How can we enjoy being women or men more? These are not questions we usually consider in the normal working day. How many of us really celebrate the sex we are? I think of my friend who has waited 50 years to have a gender change and now, finally, is a woman. She wakes up every morning with amazed delight and joy to find herself in a female form.

  • • •

  We have been asked to bring objects that are sacred for us to place on the ‘altar’. Someone has brought a statue of a Tibetan Buddhist, ‘Shakti’, and next to her is a ‘Jewish Shakti’. Although it’s not correct to call her that. She is Asherah, a copy of a statue from the Israel Museum. One of the participants has a special interest in the female depictions of the Divine in Judaism.

  ‘She was once the consort of Yahweh,’ she explains to me.

  ‘Once there were female figures like her in every temple.’

  ‘She is the goddess that Solomon would have had in his temple, but of course she was suppressed as Judaism became patriarchal.’

  ‘And you don’t often hear the Shekinah spoken of apart from in Jewish mysticism. That is the feminine in the presence of God. Hebrew has a word for this.’

  This woman was beautiful. Somehow managing in herself to celebrate her femininity, her sexuality and her Jewish heritage – all in her own living form.

  I must have been absent the week they covered sexuality in my confirmation classes in the Church of England.

  ‘In Christianity I don’t recall the feminine nature of God ever being spoken of. I’m very happy to see that you have brought your little Asherah statue to hang out with the girls in the 21st century.’

  Someone else has brought the much-loved but widely misunderstood statue of Shiva having sex with his Shakti on his lap. This statue, although greatly admired for its apparent eroticism, is actually – in tantric cosmology – about the universe being perceived as being created, penetrated and sustained by the two forces which are in union: the masculine or abiding aspect of universal energy and the feminine or energetic aspect. People buy this statue of a rather beautiful copulating couple not realizing that it is actually about the nature of the character we have traditionally called ‘God’. Anyway, they are here, the two of them, doing their thing.

  And Ganesh is here, waving his long trunk about happily – quite why I didn’t like to ask. ‘He’s a remover of obstacles,’ someone tells me. Of course he is. You knew that didn’t you? But does anyone actually pray to him? ‘Please remove the competition, Ganesh?’ As well as these more traditional offerings people have brought photos of their partners or yonic objects (that is, objects that resemble a yoni like a cowrie
shell or the centre of an orchid flower).

  The vulva, in the tantric tradition, is referred to as the ‘yoni’ – a Sanskrit term that takes a little getting used to. Some prefer ‘pussy’. Please not the terms chosen by American teenagers: ‘Junk’ or ‘goof’. At least let’s have something affectionate. My daughter’s friends choose ‘Vajayjay’, which sparkles and sounds like the female of ‘vajra’.

  On this course they do call the penis the ‘vajra’. Vajra is a term that has so many different (but related) meanings that an entire page of Wikipedia is dedicated to it. But suffice to say that it often represents the male principle, or here – the penis. I assume the wit that has placed a banana on the altar is making a humorous reference to this revered and sacred item.

  I have brought photos of my late grandmother, late mother and really quite punctual daughter in the hope that I can somehow do this work for all of us. My mother was elegant and graceful and my daughter has always seemed to be happier in her female incarnation than I am. Someone puts a large pink crystal phallus immediately in front of my mother’s photo. They can’t do this. It seems outrageous that she should have to look at it. Should I move it? Move my mother? Cover her eyes? I look at her photo and the huge erect penis. Were it not for a one-time proximity of these two forms I would still be in the ether waiting to be born but, but, all the same ... I grasp the penis boldly and move it a good two feet away from her.

  Why is it that we can never really imagine our parents having or enjoying sex? My daughter puts her fingers in her ears and sings, ‘la la la la la’ loudly if ever reminded where she came from or how she got in there so you can imagine her feelings on my writing this book.

  ‘I’m traumatized, Mother. And I’m accepting voluntary contributions from readers toward my potential need for therapy.’

  The thing is, your mother isn’t supposed to do this sort of thing. You don’t want to think about yours doing it either, do you?

  I go on staring at my mother, realizing that maybe she’d have smiled at the oversized pastel pink crystal carving. Like all of our mothers, she must have had sex at least once.

  At the top of the altar, in the centre, is an oil painting of a woman from the shoulders down. She has huge beautiful breasts and a rounded and large stomach or ‘womb’. The ‘womb’ is described here as the seat of fertility, not just of babies but also of ideas, projects, nurture, everything. So this part of the body can still be enjoyed whether or not some of the older women have had their physical womb removed.

  So I hope you now have a vision of the somewhat unconventional ‘altar’ that sits behind us as we work. There are pictures on my ‘Sensation’ Pinterest page if you’d like a look.1

  After we’ve all looked at the altar, we sit on cushions and talk to each other. The introductions are always interesting.

  Some are academics and some are women who have stayed home and brought up children. A policewoman, a barrister, a charity worker, a model – we are aged between 23 and 63. Some have been on the tantric path for 30 years and some started last night. In my estimation we are astounding just for being here.

  We sit in our circle and discuss, for a while, all the subjects that really matter if we are to be fully ourselves. Birth, death and sex all happen behind closed doors. If you want to see a corpse to give yourself a reality wake-up call, unless the deceased is a family member it’s almost impossible. The only way would be to feign an interest in becoming a professional embalmer and then, perhaps, with a lot of forms and permissions given, it would be possible to visit to remind yourself how you are going to look very soon. Birth is the same – unless you are fortunate enough to have a friend who invites you to be present at the birth of their baby or you have your child at home and invite others, it’s unlikely that you will ever witness the birth of a child. And of course there is sex, we have all seen this, on television and online – versions so unlike what happens in most people’s bedrooms that very little comparison can be made. How far most of us are from knowledge and daily awareness of our natural selves and our connection with all that lives and breathes.

  Talking honestly about sex is hard. On Saturday morning I admit that I’d found the exercises on the previous night strangely threatening and even that I find being in a room with all these amazing women intimidating. Some women cry as they share their stories, admitting they want to run away or that they are not orgasmic or they just don’t have a good time in bed with men in any way. But we have travelled here from all over the UK and some from other countries so, no matter how scared we are, no one is likely to run away. Recognizing ourselves in others, we want to keep the group complete and not allow any women to take her fears home with her. One woman has had a hysterectomy and feels that she has lost all her sexuality along with her womb. Two women are therapists but neither seem comfortable in their own skin. One woman admits that she had been married for 30 years and never had an orgasm. Several women say they have great sex and simply wanted to make their sex lives better still.

  Inspiringly, one woman has been drawn here by seeing someone complete the tantra training and witnessed the transformation:

  ‘She turned, metaphorically, into a beautiful red setter bounding out of the back of a car into the woods. That’s the way she is now. The way that she is living her life.’

  Three other women had come for that reason … because they had seen the transformation in another woman.

  And then there was me – as always trying to do the process fully and observe the process all at the same time. I’m supposed to be a bit stronger, older and wiser by now but I feel most like the younger women that just want to run away. But I’m also taking delight in being away for the weekend – far away from T, as if I had to claim my right to be a woman away with other women. Not that this right was ever taken from me, but women just don’t do it. It feels as if, somewhere in our collective history, perhaps when we were all tribal, women would go away to the woods together to learn about sexuality, dance, sing and just celebrate being women. If women were ever to dance together, naked, as I did years ago on another seminar a bit like this one, they would soon see and learn that we are all different and that the idea, so prevalent today, that some body shapes are better than others, is utterly absurd. To be this natural and unselfconscious would be ‘normal’. Crazy, isn’t it?

  The second morning there’s a group of women in the showers all complimenting each other on how beautiful their breasts are. They’re laughing and it’s funny because some of the aforementioned breasts are huge and some are almost completely flat. Some have a huge areola and some barely any. We wonder how we’ve been brainwashed into believing that some shapes are better than others. We don’t judge trees do we? ‘Ah, look – that oak tree is better than that chestnut.’ Or flowers: ‘that daffodil is more attractive than that tulip.’ How did we all become so judgemental? This simple act of comparison in which we assign labels ‘better than’ and ‘worse than’ has created several industries including, of course, the cosmetic surgery and the diet industry. When are we women going to just enjoy our bodies as nature intended and take care of them instead of so often destroying them with bad food, cigarettes and drugs?

  Anyway, I’m just saying that I’m enjoying being with women now.

  Hilly is very much the earth mother archetype. She helps women ‘to be born into full realization of the beauty of their own bodies and the bliss available to them’. Quite a job. I once asked her about all the men in her life and the fathers of her children.

  ‘When you were with father number six, did you sometimes find yourself wishing you were still with father number two?’

  Hilly said, ‘After a while I realized that they were all just different faces of the same God.’ This is the best level. They are all ‘Shiva’, the masculine energy, just in different forms.

  • • •

  Whenever women meet together for this kind of work, you can guess that there will be some element of nakedness that you will be invited to
experience. The process may sound corny or even dreadful to you. But if it does, then you’re already joining in. Ask yourself why you would feel full of dread? Why would you not want to be seen naked by your sister women? Could you celebrate dancing naked just as a child would? Are you ashamed of your body? If so, on what grounds? If you are an older woman, have you failed in some way if you have a stomach that is not flat? If you are a younger woman, have you failed in some way if your breasts are not as large as another woman’s? If you are a woman of 70 who has given birth to three children, have you failed if your body is not the same as it looked when you were 30? What exactly is there to be ashamed about? Don’t just think ‘I just wouldn’t enjoy it.’ If that is so, think about why you wouldn’t enjoy it. And could you overcome that.

  Any process, in any seminar, that involves nakedness between women is utterly beautiful. Part of the tantric and sexual journey is about self-acceptance and we all need to learn what exactly we are not accepting and to acknowledge the insanity. It’s always a surprise to learn that, no matter how beautiful a woman is, and how perfect her body is, she often remains focused on her own perceived inadequacies. Not just the most obvious ‘my bum’s too big’ but beliefs that would really make you want to cry. A woman who has had children thinks her stretch marks are ugly? Or a woman with a beautifully perfect yoni thinks ‘it’s too big’ or ‘it sticks out too much’. Women – how did we become this insane? I imagine I can hear you wince if I use the word ‘yoni’, but even Eve Ensler who created The Vagina Monologues says that ‘vagina’ sounds medical. They call the vulva a yoni on this training, so yoni it is for now.