Sex and Yoga

Well, I have your attention now, don't I?

Sex sells — let's admit it. We've been told this many times. With all the recent movements (#MeToo and others), it's a confusing time for someone who enjoys sex as much as I do, and perhaps for you too. Growing up in this patriarchal society meant I had to break through some major social and mental conditioning. There are so many layers to this human onion, and I'm still peeling through them.

Recently, I held a "Yoga, Ayurveda, and Tantra" workshop with a dear friend and teacher of mine. It went well, and it felt easeful to work alongside her — I was honored to stand as an equal with someone I revere as one of my core teachers. The next day, she called to bring something to my attention. Gently, lovingly, she told me that my breasts had been spilling out of my top during class, and that people might take this the wrong way depending on their samskaras — their societal conditioning. I understood immediately. But the comment also cracked something open in me, a sense that there were layers still waiting to be unearthed.

So let me back up and describe the conditions that shaped me.

I grew up in an America that was — and still is — oversexualized. I sang along to Mötley Crüe and Too $hort, to lyrics I won't repeat here. When my junior high class graduated, the students handed out faux superlatives for who was most likely to become what. I was voted Centerfold Cindy.

My mother wasn't very present growing up — she spent most of her time at her boyfriend's — so the school parties ended up at my house. In high school, I had some of the best sex and intimacy of my life with my high school sweetheart; we were wild and adventurous together. Around that time, I moved in with my father and stepmother, who were ultra-conservative. My father's response to me was usually some version of, "You're going to leave the house looking like that?" My older sister introduced me to her friends as "my sister with the big boobs." I'd started competitive dance in seventh grade, and ballet was part of the training — by then my body had already begun changing, breasts and a little belly included. My ballet teacher commented on the belly, and something in me broke: body obsession, dysmorphia, a conviction that I was fat. I dieted and worked out obsessively, feeding a fear my father had already planted in me. My jazz teacher, meanwhile, told me I had the figure to be a Vegas showgirl.

Eventually my high school boyfriend and I broke up — he was an alcoholic, an addict of everything, and after he cheated on me more than once, I was done. Not long after, while watching Michael Jordan play on TV, I said out loud how good-looking I thought he was. My father's reply was, "If you ever bring home a Black boy—" and he didn't finish the sentence. Naturally, my next boyfriend was Black. We were together a couple of years and moved to San Diego, where I'd enrolled in college but mostly went to the beach instead. I taught aerobics, danced, did childcare — that was the extent of my résumé. I was lost and had no real sense of who I was. I drank, smoked pot daily, smoked cigarettes like it was a job. Eventually I ended the relationship, partly because I didn't want to keep disappointing my father, and partly worn down by the stares we got in public.

One day a friend and I were flipping through newspaper ads and found one for a bikini contest. We went to check it out and realized, once we arrived, that it was a nude strip club. My reaction sat somewhere between mortified and intrigued. I hated my body — I was ninety pounds with big breasts and still convinced I was fat. I was nineteen, in a bad place, and needed money fast. I tied for first place, and the club owner offered me a job, telling me I didn't have to take my clothes off — I could just dance in a bikini. I took it. Within two weeks I was fully stripping. I was liberated, or something like it. I was making a thousand dollars a night, flying to Vegas for work, dancing at clubs in Hollywood where Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee, and Slash would come in. Centerfold Cindy was arriving right on schedule. With the money came toxic attention — stalkers, and eventually my father finding out, which meant disappointing him all over again.

I started dating one of the guys who hung around the dancers — part of a loose crew of punk rockers who ran with us and, in their way, protected us. When a client stiffed me for a lap dance once, they beat him badly enough to put him in the hospital. Things got darker from there. Other dancers stole from me, tried to fight me. I'd dabbled in hard drugs but thought I had a handle on it. Then I got pregnant with my boyfriend's baby and wanted to keep it; my father talked me out of it. That was the start of a real nosedive — not knowing who I was, sliding into a severe depression. I'd saved enough money, and had just enough clarity left, to know I couldn't stay in that industry much longer, and I started cosmetology school. I moved back to the Bay Area to start over. I told myself I'd liberated myself, but underneath I was carrying a deep shame — I had used my body for money, and I knew it. Guys gawked at me everywhere I went, and it started to make me angry and scared. What was I supposed to do, dress like a nun?

I started practicing yoga around nineteen or twenty, during the same stretch I was dancing. I remember, eyes closed, a feeling of coming home — nothing to judge, nothing to critique, just me and my scared, tender self underneath it all. I was smoking to numb my grief, slowly trying to kill myself without admitting that's what it was. Around then I read my first spiritual book, Conversations with God. One line stopped me cold: every time you take a drag of a cigarette, you're telling yourself you don't want to live. That landed. From then on, every time I reached for a cigarette, something in me refused. I replaced it with a natural nasal inhaler — instinctively, I think I just needed to take a real breath.

Back in the Bay, out of cosmetology school, I landed an apprenticeship at a well-known salon — two and a half years before I was allowed to work on clients — nicknamed, affectionately, Cowboys and Angels. Or Cowboys and Junkies, depending who you asked. It was a hedonistic, dysfunctional family, and we had a lot of fun. I cut off all my hair and became a real feminist, to the point of being fed up with men altogether. A coworker invited me into a foursome with her girlfriend and Joan Jett. I thought it would be harmless. Instead, it opened a door — I started to feel used, like a toy — and then the girlfriend and I ended up having an affair, which my coworker discovered. I fell hard for a woman. I moved to the Castro, and I remember my dad helping me move in, looking around at all the flags in the neighborhood and asking, "What are all these queer flags for? Well — hopefully you find a husband soon. Preferably one of the opposite sex." Disappointing him again.

After that I dated another musician — terrified, I think, of disappointing my first and truest love: my father. I couldn't exactly bring home a junkie boyfriend, but at least he was "a man," technically — androgynous in that Iggy Pop-meets-Keith-Richards way.

I think I'm writing all this because lately I've felt lost again. Yoga helped me love and inhabit my body. When my core teacher would crack stripper jokes in class, it released some of the shame I still carried about erotic dancing, and it taught me to set real boundaries around who gets access to my energy and my body. But I also see now that I'm still using my body for attention. Scroll through Instagram or Facebook and notice which yoga "influencers" get the most likes — usually the ones barely dressed, writhing like erotic dancers. When your livelihood depends on likes, have you sold out? Objectified yourself? I've fallen into that trap somewhat. When I teach, I teach from the heart, without shame around sexuality — we're sexual beings, that's how we got here at all. But I notice I keep attracting men who want me for sex and nothing more, unwilling to stick around long enough to know all of me: my light and my shadow. There's a darker current to my sexuality that I enjoy but that gets treated as taboo, and chasing it usually leaves me depleted and empty afterward.

So here's what I keep asking: how do we celebrate our sexuality inside a real, sweet union with a lover — where the veil between us disappears, where we see each other through the sexy times and the mundane, ordinary, human times too?

As I finish writing this, I'm signing up for an erotic pole dance class — not to go back to the industry, though the money is tempting, but because what I do now isn't about income. It feeds something else in me. Where do you compromise yourself for money? How do we live from the place that fully lights us up? So often we're just going through the motions, replaying old samskaras without even realizing we're reinforcing them. Yoga lights the fire that burns through that — and one of the best ways to feel it is to step away, to go on retreat. It gives you room outside your own life to actually see what's toxic, what's worth releasing, and what you want to build instead.

I believe that when we live from our soul's purpose, we find liberation. I invite you to do the same.

With all my heart, Erika