{"id":3978,"date":"2017-05-12T11:07:21","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T17:07:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=3978"},"modified":"2017-05-12T11:07:21","modified_gmt":"2017-05-12T17:07:21","slug":"my-tantra-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=3978","title":{"rendered":"My Tantra Weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago my girlfriend and I were trying to figure out what to do for our combo 1 year anniversary\/her birthday and I came up with the idea of maybe doing some new agey workshop at Esalen in Big Sur. Maybe we could do some meditation, enjoy their hot springs, and investigate Esalen’s rich history which I had read about in Christopher Knowles’ excellent series of articles here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So we looked at what was going on in their schedule, and the only thing that remotely interested me was a tantra workshop being taught by one of its Western pioneers, Margot Anand<\/a>. Margot was a disciple of Osho Rajneesh, who combined his tantric teachings with some of the raw experimental therapy techniques of Wilhelm Reich<\/a>, and from what I could tell, some elements of Western Magick.<\/p>\n

So we booked the weekend, not really knowing what we were getting into. Big Sur got flooded out, so the workshop was moved to a spot north of San Francisco called the Institute of Noetic Sciences. It’s another new agey retreat, founded by ex-astronaut Edgar Mitchell.<\/p>\n

Okay, so the reason I’m writing this post is not to share some lurid details about me becoming the second incarnation of Sting: the multi-orgasmic soft rock messiah. This was probably one of the most difficult weekends I’ve ever had on a psychic and emotional level. From the first session to the last, I was challenged to basically leave my self-conscious notions of Self and openly mingle with this crowd of 50-80 year old swingers, hippies, seekers, and damaged people.<\/p>\n

We did all sorts of stuff: dancing to shitty disco playlists, pranayama hyperventilating, staring into each others eyes, creating circles of protection etc… The whole time I was feeling affected by everyone in the room; especially the big extroverted lady with a super fake British accent. At one point she was aggressively locked into my eyes and doing some kind of tribal dance. Later I had lunch with her and tried to figure out where she was “from”, which resulted in some answer about growing up all around South Africa, England and coming to America for Burning Man. I believed the Burning Man part.<\/p>\n

I learned about this process called “streaming” where you are sending orgasmic energy up and down your chakras. I watched two elderly men do it. They sort of herky jerkily moved their bodies as if a snake of orgasmic energy were whipping up and down their spine. I just looked on youtube if there’s any examples of this to see, but I can’t find one. I personally didn’t like watching these guys convulse around making post orgasm noises. I think it challenged my ideal vision of stoic masculinity, with this image of a bendy rubber band man who has a constant semi.<\/p>\n

I tried the streaming process, with my girlfriend Sarah attempting to manipulate my aura in real time. I really tried to make it happen and at about the 15 minute mark I did find something in me that felt like a snake of electric energy whipping around my body. It was sort of hard to hold on to, but it was something.<\/p>\n

Anyway lots of shit happened that weekend, but the most powerful and challenging experience was a primal scream session we had early on. I forget how it led up to that moment, but at some point I found myself in a room of elderly screaming, howling, grunting, and crying people. For me this was too much. Since my teen years I’ve had a hard time with other people’s emotions. I have strong revulsion toward emotional weakness, irrational behavior, fighting, mental disorders etc… and it wasn’t until after an ayahuasca experience, I realized it was because I was absorbing the psychic vibes of the people around me and taking them on as a guest in my ego house. I am basically like Deanna Troi but without the skill of creating personal psychic boundaries around me.<\/p>\n

Without the boundary of “you are you, I am me” I often times found myself unable to draw a distinction between myself and others, which would result in a extreme dissonance within myself, which would THEN result in a desire to get away from or act coldly toward that person who had unknowingly assaulted me.<\/p>\n

So in this room of screaming hippies and swingers, I was forced to confront one of my great obstacles: finding my psychic space and as a result, being able to treat others with compassion. But in order to establish a psychic boundary that had never existed before I had to essentially fight off everyone in the room. The weight of their psychic baggage was so heavy, I found myself curled up on the ground, disturbed, hiding my head in my pillow and trying to figure out a way to escape. I realized that I couldn’t stay in that state, because this session could possibly go forever and I would be defeated and get nothing out of it. So I picked myself up and started bashing this pillow into the ground, imagining I was UFC smashing everyone in the room’s face in. I started grunting and shouting every time someone else’s voice cut through the crowd like it wanted my attention. I had to scream louder and punch harder into the ground, picturing my fists turning their skulls into raspberry jelly. In my head I was shouting “DIE YOU FUCKS. FUCK YOU!” over and over until over the course of several minutes I had mentally killed everyone and established a bubble of protection around myself.<\/p>\n

I left this session with a really heavy revelation about myself and the way I relate to friends and partners. It’s now something I’m trying to apply to my relationship with my girlfriend Sarah: not the psychic UFC head bashing bit, but the bit about not feeling guilty about not absorbing her emotional journey so I can be there for her as ME. Does that make sense? I’m writing all this in one shot, so I’m not sure how thorough my thoughts are. Anyway, that was my tantra weekend, and no, Sarah and I did not hook up with any old hippies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago my girlfriend and I were trying to figure out what to do for our combo 1 year anniversary\/her birthday and I came up with the idea of maybe doing some new agey workshop at Esalen in Big Sur. Maybe we could do some meditation, enjoy their hot springs, and investigate Esalen’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3978"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3980,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978\/revisions\/3980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}