Ā
ROXANA P BIBI
We Give Who We Are
Returning to teach tantra for couples, after thirteen years.
Ā
Suta and I prepare the room.
We're in Glastonbury, a place some describe as the heart chakra of Earth. Fitting for the weekend retreat we are about to teach: Initiation into Tantra for Couples.
Part of me is wondering what exactly we are about to offer these couples, beyond methods they could pick up in a book or through YouTube. The question runs deeper than my first day nerves.
The hired space takes new shape as we make dedicated places for each couple and prepare an altar. With flowers, cloths, candles, sacred art from ancient traditions, the altar becomes our focal point for beauty, for evoking the sacred, to open consciousness to the mystery of the divine. We light incense, charging the air with the powers of sandalwood and rose.
As I place each item, taking care over details, balance, beauty, symmetry, I can feel my years with Ma Ananda Sarita in my gestures, in my assessments. My body knows the particular way she liked things.
Every world has its own shapes, its own way of making an environment that participates in its creative intent.
My hands, it turns out, still know this one. Despite the thirteen long years since I last taught in a space like this.
The room is now ready. The shift is distinct, palpable, reminding me yet again how the physical and non-physical nest together, revealing different faces of each other.
When Suta and I raise our arms requesting blessings for the space, for the participants, for their intentions, a powerful flow of contact opens. We smile at each other, both sensing the unknown gifts pouring in.
Being with Suta is, for me, part of the gift of this weekend. We had kept sporadic contact over the years, and more recently regular. I knew his decades of teaching with Sarita and within the school created a strong foundation for our work. His heart and depth of experience held me, coaxing me back into this teaching environment.
I had first entered Sarita's world as a bright-eyed newbie. I was in my early thirties, clutching the hand of my then boyfriend. Knowing close to nothing about the subject, simply on a trusted colleague's recommendation, I signed up for her six-day couples retreat. This opened a profound tantric path for us, and gave me something I didn't really know I was looking for.
I'd felt so imprisoned by the cultural norms of my childhood that I was driven to find a place where I could simply be myself, to even discover that self. This six days ahead was the powerful start of this process for me.
Sarita dazzled me.
Her world re-routed me into a natural self I hadn't had access to before.
She took so many shapes and fluidly passed through them, not assuming any one identity but wearing many as and when needed. One moment she'd be speaking with nuanced precision about meditation, consciousness, the inner life. In another she'd answer a participant's personal question with a depth that struck a lifelong chord. In yet another she would stand naked, filled with unselfconscious ease, teaching some refinement of touch.
Until then, I'd only seen the naked body depicted sexually, or otherwise objectified. Within the culture of my upbringing, it was constantly hidden and subject to a tonne of shame. Sarita, however, radiated naturalness when unclothed. My jaw dropped.
I also began to recognise viscerally the multi-layered conditioning, human history and human ideas entwined within the raw life of my body. It showed up as feeling uncomfortable or plain embarrassed and in physical tensions.
Just in her being, Sarita was an education that allowed these parts of me to begin unravelling.
Thank you, Steiner, I said inwardly. I really get you now: that we educate far more through who we are than through what we know. At that time in my life I was a Rudolf Steiner school teacher, and yes, I regularly had conversations, arguments even, with Steiner in the privacy of my own mind.
Sarita's lightness of spirit, playfulness and girlish cackles of laughter didn't diminish how unrelenting she was as a teacher. Be total, she'd exhort. Give everything. Enter the practices fully. No one I'd ever met had ever split open so many categories and encouraged such freedom and exploration. It was exhilarating. My bones were thirsty for this exuberance, this demand, often a command, to totally commit to Life.
I ended up spending nine devoted years in her Tantra school. First as a student within my couple. Then at her side as an assistant, being taught the old old-school way, sitting at the feet of the master. And finally, as a co-teacher, creating and shaping new trainings with her and her core teachers.
My own life in the intervening years had carried me elsewhere. Into a remarkable healing lineage with a teacher called Jason Shulman, who had created a healing modality and path of awakening through a nondual and universally open perspective on Kabbalah.
If Tantra had opened a holistic and spiritually aligned vision of relating to my partner, Jason's work began a long immersion into the finer grain, the warp and weft of relating: to self, to themes of life, to the inherent suffering and loss we all face, to the mystery and contactable presence of the Divine.
It took me from the themes between individuals to the molecular bonds of how we create relationship all day long.
Opening me towards a vast, intelligent, responsive universe, continually in creation through the theme of relating.
Throughout those years I had secretly wished that the couples' thread in my teaching work would return.
Being present in this space today in my fifties, carrying my Nondual Kabbalistic healing lineage and the impact of life's slings and arrows, was a tender, humbling and horizon-opening event for me.
I was ready.
My experiences with Sarita were all simply here, indelibly etched. Available.
Standing there beside Suta, I wasn't returning to an earlier chapter of my life.
I was about to write a totally new one, bringing into the same room two lineages that both permeated and lived through me.
When the couples arrived they came bearing sheepskin rugs and sarongs, with the ease of people who know intentional temple spaces. On each cushion I had laid a rose.
In the opening circle each person offered their heart's intention to their partner through a rose. A circle of couples, and at its centre, the gathered roses transmitting their intentions.
When we are open, everything has a voice, offers a teaching. The rose was not sentiment. It was part of the teaching in the room. Through flower and thorn, roses carry what we long for in relationship: the beauty of love and the rightful boundary of self.
In this atmosphere we began. I felt a fluid ease in returning to this cherished space, fresh nerves for this particular moment, and genuine curiosity about how my healing years would enrich this work. The question I had been holding while laying the altar was still with me.
That first evening we taught them a meditation that expresses the heart of this path. We introduced it, rehearsed a principle of breathwork, which was new to most of them and which appears in many other tantric meditations, including love-making methods.
In this meditation practice, couples create bio-circuits between them through touch. Hands meet hands, hands rest on particular places, bodies lie together in a specific embrace. A mandala of subtle body circuitry is formed that balances and nourishes each partner.
As our first evening ended, I saw in the faces of the couples the softening and brightness that also radiated from them into the space. You know the atmosphere of new love, excitement, adventure, being met.
The next morning each couple sat in dialogue about what sex, love and spirit mean to them, and what they dream these could mean. What moved me was not what anyone said specifically. It was how they listened. Leaning in. Touching. A sincerity in the room you could almost hold in your hands.
Sincerity, care, attention. That is already so much of what we truly want from love. Everything else is a bonus.
After lunch on the Saturday I held a circle for the women.
This was where the two paths within my teaching met most visibly. I led a simple exercise, offered through the resonance of my years of immersion in this healing practice.
The women descended into old contractions hidden in their hearts. The drop was immediate, tender and imbued with kindness. Parts of them that had suffered from lack of contact, love, holding and guidance revealed themselves. Parts that had been diminished, shamed and misunderstood.
Later, as we shared about this exercise, most expressed astonishment at how gentle healing can be, and how the communal aspect potentised their experience.
Gentleness is so often overlooked as a power. It was what the women were still naming at the closing circle, as they shared gratitude for their experiences.
By Sunday evening when we closed, my initial ease had become living proof that I'd fully re-entered this significant portion of my life and heart.
Sensing into myself in the closing circle, the only way to describe what I felt is to say, I felt like clear water. Transparent, flowing. Contained, yet available to nourish.
So: what were we offering these couples, beyond methods they could pick up in a book or through YouTube?
We do not truly know what we are giving when we teach.
We are giving who we are.
Yes, Steiner said it about children. I've seen that it is just as true in a room of adults.
Our lives are living fields of experience, resonating, transmitting, supporting. Invisible, yet clearly visible in their impact.
In a world saturated with information, this is the most precious offering we have.
Relationship.
If you are in a couple, and you are far from each other right now, I want to say one thing to you before you go.
Do not wait for depth to arrive on its own. It does not travel well through the everyday.
You tend your home without negotiating with yourself about it. You sweep the kitchen floor, brush your teeth, deal with all manner of life's daily demands. Contact can be tended the same way. A small, named practice, agreed between you. A conscious space, woven into the ground of each ordinary week, where openness is invited and nothing is demanded. Something you can lean into precisely in the moments you feel far apart, so the way back does not have to be invented each time from nothing.
Even a small measure of real contact, returned to regularly, brings something new and alive into a long togetherness. Depth, you'll find, was never missing. It was folded. It unfolds with attention.
For me this thread of tantra has returned to my work life and it is growing. Over the coming time I'll be offering more retreats and a series of online classes, for those who want to begin exactly where they are, at home in and amongst ordinary-extraordinary life. If this speaks to where you and your partner are, the details live Couple Retreats.
Ā
With you in this,
Roxana
