The weekend before this last weekend, I was stumbling around the bright lights, blaring music, clothing-limited but not optional, LA convention center for the second-most pornified convention I’d ever been to, when the phone rang. It was my main man, who himself was at an expo, only his was new-agey and all zen-like and stuff. Even though I couldn’t make out all the words he was saying to me over my cell phone in the loud, sex-crazed expo hall, he seemed to be radiating bliss across the wire.

“I met this great couple,” he started, which immediately made me think he was calling to tell me about a threesome he was asking my permission to engage in while I was across the country.

I watched a woman practice giving some pretty awful head to a double-sided dildo as he continued with the conversation. “They’re this Tantra couple,” he said. “I really felt like I clicked with them. And they’re doing a workshop in New York next weekend, and I want you to go with me.”

My man and I had talked, FOR YEARS, about exploring the the practice of Tantra in our sex lives, but up until that moment we had not actually done anything to make it happen. But when he told me who was teaching the workshop in New York the next weekend, I knew we were about to stop talking, and start well, breathing..or whatever you do in Tantric sex.

Okay. The man was Charles Muir, and he was THE MAN. In 1978, he founded the Source School of Tantra Yoga. This was long before Sting had stung his thing in Tantra and long before most Western folk got with the program. And years ago, when I worked with Bob Berkowitz, he raved about a Muir workshop he had attended in Hawaii. I had met a lot of wonderful, sex positive people over the course my time with Bob, and while I had never met Charles, his name had always stood out.

So, we went. We did it. Well, not actually “it” as in intercourse, in fact, we didn’t do that all weekend (it wasn’t in the homework) but we did practice some Tantric techniques. And man, they rocked. And I rocked – literally, because that’s part of being in your body, and also part of getting out of your body, which are both parts of Tantra.

There’s so much I can say, and so many ways to say it, but I’m in North Carolina and it’s getting close to bed time and I can’t explain it all so quickly. It is, for starters, more intense than just having sex. You don’t need to orgasm to feel alive and complete. In fact, I don’t know if you want to. I’ve never had that much energy running through my body. And if I wasn’t a believer before (I wasn’t), I am now. I’ve been feeling amazing since Saturday. More at peace, more sexual, more beautiful, more grounded than ever before.

Then of course there’s the sex part. Sacred spot, G-spot, Prostate, whatever you want to call it, in Tantra (they call both the G and P spot the Sacred spot – although for me, the clit is way more of a sacred spot than my G-spot) you spend a lot of time circling it, rubbing it, tapping it and sending it healing energy. Much to my exhibitionistic/voyeuristic chagrin, you don’t spend any actual time doing it in class, but you do a heap of Sacred spot exploration at home. And it’s so out of the ordinary to know that you have a whole night coming to you (although you don’t necessarily come) where all you have to do is sit back and receive.

That was the hardest part for me. Receiving. It’s so easy to give. So easy to please a partner, and do it until it’s done. But to be receptive, to lay back and let your partner give for you, with no expectations, no immediate rewards, that’s tough. Really tough.

I felt a lot that night. I cried. I realized some stuff about my own life that I never quite understood. Stuff that I’m not prepared to share with a whole host of people I don’t know intimately. And I also realized that I am a sexual healer. Not just in writing about sex, or talking about it, but in doing it.

And so that’s where I am. Well, not physically where I am. Until tomorrow, that’s Raleigh, North Carolina. But it’s where I’m going on my journey. And maybe it’s not the next stop, or even the stop after that, but she’s there. Somewhere. My inner Tantrika. Waiting to come out and help heal the world. One breathe at a time.