When my girlfriend suggested we go away to a tantric retreat for the weekend in the English countryside, I couldn’t believe my luck — and neither could my male friends. Suddenly I was no longer the guy with the weird-wokey-woman, but the luckiest man alive. And all because of that one little word: tantric.
Say it and people instantly think: Sting and sex marathons. Strange esoteric erotic practices that produce cosmic orgasms. Now add “tantric” to “retreat” and it conjures up visions of couples doing it, throuples doing it, everyone doing it together in one great fireball of fornication! And all in the name of spiritual growth, of course. If only! I quickly discovered that instead of heading off to a weekend of erotic ecstasy, we were actually off to a couples’ retreat to deal with our relationship problems. I said to my girlfriend, “But I didn’t know we had relationship problems.”
“That’s the problem,” she said.
On the train I studied the program for the weekend ahead. Meditation. Dance. Yoga. Learning to listen, to talk, to feel, to touch. As far as I could see there was a lot of stroking, but no poking.
Did I really need to do this? I’ve always thought I was one of those enlightened New Men who were at ease with emotions, feelings, sharing and intimacy. But my girlfriend soon put me straight. I was, she told me gently, an uptight, emotionally repressed, avoidant man, fearful of feelings and incapable of intimacy.
“OK,” I said, “but what about my bad points?”
She smiled and said that I used humor to avoid feelings. It’s a defense mechanism, she said. And she was right.
So how was I to handle the retreat experience? I could treat the whole thing with bemused Tom Wolfe snarkiness — or keep an open mind and get with the program. I chose the latter.
A lot of the people there had done these sorts of courses before, but I was a retreat virgin. It’s not easy going with the flow when you’re a mature, anxious, self-conscious, up-tight, anally-retentive guy like me. My first challenge came with the early morning dance session. Around thirty couples — of all ages — just let it all hang out to hi-energy techno. Alas, I didn’t know how to do let-it-all-hang-out dancing so, I stood on the sidelines doing old-white guy swaying with my eyes shut. Sad, eh?
You know that line about dance as if no one is looking? Here no one was looking. They were lost in music, lost in the moment. I should have been getting in touch with the vibrations of the universe. But all I could think was: do I look silly doing this?
Eventually, I got the hang of things and by the third day I’d gone totally native on the dance floor. I haven’t gone so wild and weird in public since a frenzied outburst of “idiot dancing” — as it was called back in the Seventies — watching Led Zeppelin in concert. And to be honest it felt good.
I also had to learn the art of hugging. I’ve never been a hugger. And having a young and attractive woman with her breasts clearly visible take me in her arms for an innocent “good morning hug” was a challenge. I told myself: it’s not that kind of a hug! For Heaven’s sake, it’s a loving, spiritual hug! Get a grip! To which my inner cynic sniggered: oh really? How come something is stirring down below?
I broke away immediately.
I begged my girlfriend not to make us go out in front of the group and share our problems. “It’s so embarrassing, all that self-exposure,” I said. “What do you mean?” she asked. “You do that stuff all the time in print!” She had a point.
I could manage hugging, dancing, meditation, discussing my feelings in public, but going naked in the hot tub was the greatest challenge of them all. I don’t do public nudity. Actually, I’m not keen on private nudity either.
Of course wearing my bathing shorts was an option, but I knew that would be considered devastatingly uncool. It would signal to others in the tub that an uptight normie had just joined them for a soak. I was about to take the plunge and go naked when I noticed that most disturbing of contemporary sights: men with no pubic hair. The shaven heterosexual — “manscaped” in the argot of the male grooming industry — is so ubiquitous, and so weird. Look, I will defend to the death a man’s right to shave his scrotum and other bits, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the look of it. I entered the tub in my natural state and saw one occupant laugh and look away: I’d been pubic-ly shamed.
Yes, it’s easy to be cynical about events like these. But the retreat took me not just out of my comfort zone but my Me zone. I was in a room full of people who didn’t care about what I did for a living. What’s more, my whole people-pleasing Cosmo shtick — trying to be funny, clever and interesting all the time — was pointless. I could drop my act and that was so liberating, I didn’t even miss the tantric sex.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2024 World edition.
