A couple of weeks ago, I found myself enthusing with a regular client over a new analogy we had come up with for self care – one that utilised mathematical parabola to demonstrate the necessity of rest and reflection for expansion and well-being.
This got me thinking again on a topic that has been floating around in the old cerebrum for some time. I recalled what my teacher often says about how our “biases” – our personal and particular bugbears, passions, and rants – influence and shape our work.
For me, some biases have been there since I first started out in my field, and have grown increasingly stronger with time – such as a need to work towards inclusivity for all genders, bodies, and orientations. Some I have discovered and nurtured along the way – like a talent for supporting clients in sitting with what I call the “difficult questions”, and making peace with extremes of emotion.
And some… Some have just sort of appeared out of the corner of my eye, and come along for the ride whether I planned it or not.
One of these, which I have become more aware of in the last year, is the fact that I, apparently, teach tantra for geeks.
All manner of wonderful and unique individuals of all genders, ages, and walks of life pass through my sessions and workshops – and that is just the way I like it. That being said, I’ve discovered I can pretty much guarantee that any given weekend will hold a programmer or two, an academic, gamers, writers, teachers… People who don’t want to just know how a thing works, but also why.
People, in short, not unlike myself.
When I first met my teacher, she described me as a sex geek – and my fascination with not just the how but also the why of sex has certainly served me along the way. But the geekery does not stop there. My brain has never quite gotten over its post-Oxford patterns of enquiry, I’m an unashamed skill-slut (I have to have earned at least one new qualification to feel satisfied at the end of the year), and I harbour an increasingly unfortunate addiction to second hand bookshops. I talk openly about my linguistic-fetishism in workshops, and I am always looking for newer, prettier, edgier words to describe what I do.
(And if I wasn’t bad enough, there’s my team, who, during their down-time when running weekend intensives, can be heard debating the merits of the semi-colon, and wondering whether the BBC is capable of creating good sci-fi.)
So here is yet another way I am coming to think about what I do:
I teach Sacred Sexuality for Geeks. I show people who are too clever for their own good how, and, more importantly, why, to have more pleasure, and more pleasurable lives. I refuse to settle for telling when I can show instead, since without experiential data I never expect anyone to believe me (because, after all, I wouldn’t) – which is how I recently ended up setting fire to my Beloved in my underwear in front of 300 startled German activists.
I’m often to be found deconstructing the “why” of a workshop structure, and I drive anyone who works with me to distraction with my need for the sequence of workshops to “make sense” and “flow” – sometimes at the expense of less important things like lunch. And yes, I’m happy to use mathematical formulas in a client session if it will get the job done – along with the occasional film quotes, song lyrics, and smatterings of etymology.
Sex for people who struggle to get out of their heads, intimacy for the creative, experiential spirituality for the thinking person. Because it’s my bias. It’s what I need. And if it doesn’t work for my little grey cells, I’m not about to try and get it past yours.