David Bray
I run my fingertips up my legs to the top of my stockings and over the bands of an hourglass Bordelle basque. I flick my hair and turn into the circle, looking at the five other women - goddesses - sensuously grinding their hips...
Not Stringfellows. Not London's outré new club, the Box. Rather, a Tantric temple in Wiltshire, where we have come to find our inner-divinity and see if it's possible to maintain full-body orgasm that lasts longer than a Glee box set.
Rewind three months, to a Tantric workshop held by Hanna Katz-Jelfs in the west London boutique Coco de Mer. The audience at the salon, 20 men and women in their thirties and forties, sit raptly watching a projector. On the screen, a man is holding his hands against his lover's vulva and her whole body is shaking with wave after wave of vigorous climax, on and on, not stopping... It was mesmerising. A call to arms for any serious sexual player. The white rabbit on a girl's shoulder beckoning each of us into a mind-blowingly orgasmic new level of the Matrix.
Think Tantra and you think Sting wrapped in eight-hour communion with Trudie Styler, or, more happily, Heather Graham, a vociferous fan. But take your mind beyond Hollywood, beyond crystals and incense and the rest, and Tantra is a portal to a universe of sensation more potent than the f***ing non-initiates know. Or a yoni-verse, as Hanna would call it, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
In a world that celebrates sexual energy and the divine life force, Hanna and her husband Martin are pleasingly credible. She is also a trained psycho-sexual therapist and he a psychotherapist, between them they move neatly between traditional counselling and 14 years of Tantra teaching.
Still, it was only the visual proof of the shimmering, everlasting orgasm I'd seen at Coco de Mer that persuaded K and I to join the Wiltshire weekend. Clutching our cases, we knock on the door. It is opened by a beautiful French girl in a kaftan. She leads us to our bedroom, which is swaddled in gold drapes, the bed higher than my waist, the floor covered in cushions, an altar covered in candles and mirrors on the walls and ceiling. So far, so expected.
Hanna welcomes me and nods at K who is contemplating our textile-heavy boudoir with a raised eyebrow. "Men tend to feel uneasy on arrival," she smiles. "Half of them come terrified it is going to be an orgy. The other half are terrified it's not."
We meet the other couples and Hanna takes the women to one side to talk about our needs and desires. The essence of Tantra is a weaving together of polarities, and it celebrates the difference between men and women before celebrating their ecstatic union.
Full details of our initiation into the temple are confidential. But six or seven hours later - after dancing, after blindfolds, and teasing and movement and touch - I have led K (now Shiva, the male god to my female Shakti goddess) back to our room, every sense of my body sparking until I am on fire. We sit in "yab yum", him cross-legged, me cross-legged in his lap. Tantrics tell of the power of yab yum: the male "magic wand of light" bone-hard, deep and brilliant inside her inner temple. The position is rich with spiritual symbolism, a mystical union of wisdom and compassion. More important, my skin is so sensitive I can feel the candle light, my Shiva's eyes sear into my soul, ricochet down my spine, meeting the sensation in the belly of my being.
The weekend passes with lessons in the temple, an octagonal space filled with Bodhavistas and pictures and candles; Hanna and Martin answering our questions and channelling the emotions: anger, jealousy, sadness are also churned up. They then give us homework to take back to our private space.
For one, K looked at me for 20 minutes, then spent 40 minutes making love to me in a new way. New in several ways, as the men are encouraged to keep their energy and their stamina by not spilling their seed. This leads to far slower movements, and an infinitely greater focus on touching all parts of each other's bodies. The erotic charge of having a room designed for coitus, which is removed from all distraction, and having time put aside for nothing other than sexual play is uncanny. The heightened sensation of having looked and/or been looked at for 20 minutes is also remarkable. It gives lovemaking an immediacy and connection that, again, is miles from the distractions of the every day.
A Parisienne, R, came on the weekend because she was hardly orgasmic. She was most moved by the Karezza, a meditation done for 40 minutes just as she awoke: his cock either inside her or rested against her vulva. R found, as she lay there, that suddenly ripples of sensation started breaking across her chest, spreading out through her body, through her legs and out to her fingertips; the feeling rushed and rushed - her first climax in months, one that left her speechless to describe it.
Group courses are not everyone's idea of erotic. Hanna and Martin also do private practice in central London, or at clients' homes. The most remarkable fact of the weekend? There are 14 levels of development. We worked at level one.
Original article published in GQ Magazine, in June, 2011
