Ingrid's story

I have always been an exhibitionist at heart. From my earliest memory I became excited by my own nakedness. When I was a child of three, before bath-time Mom allowed me to run around the house without clothes on. There was something exhilarating about throwing off the coverings that were daily zipped, buttoned and bowed over my little body. Squealing with excitement, I would fall to the ground, spread-eagle, to experience a rough scrub of crimson carpet next to my skin, just the way our dog Chippy did when he wanted a belly rub.

My nakedness excited me and made my body tingle with anticipation. Even at that young age I knew risking exposure was something I enjoyed. As I grew older my prepubescent straight lines began to curve. Mom would scold me, “Cover up! Put some clothes on,” she’d bark.

“Only bad girls run around naked,” she’d say.

Looking back, that very well could’ve been the start of my sexual indoctrination, the first veil of many that would cover the large, loud color of my experiential heart. In one fell swoop Mom’s harsh words squelched my childhood pleasure and transformed innocence into self-consciousness. My parents, like society, strengthened the message of conformity through positive and negative reinforcements. In early adolescence, I not only learned good girls cover up but they also remain silent. If a bloody tongue was what it took to remain agreeable with the “superiority of male intelligence”, then by all means I was to bite down and speak only when spoken to.

The church reinforced my mounting self-consciousness and confusion by saying that my body was not my own. That one day it would belong to my husband for his good pleasure. God-forbid I’d become fat, being fat was worse than sin. In high school it was social suicide. Masturbating was a sin, sex outside of marriage was definitely a sin, and so was thinking about either of them. Come to think of it, the church frowned upon anything that remotely felt good, tasted good, or smelt good. Bottom line, I was handed spiritual blinders so I would see no evil in the world, earplugs so I would hear no evil, and a silk gag so I would silently swallow the anorexic approach to living life from the confines of my evangelical straitjacket.

It took years before I discovered that eating a constant diet of other people’s expectations caused severe digestive problems and that straitjackets are difficult to accessorize. Somewhere down the road I had changed from a being a happy child into being a sad and serious grown up with awful fashion sense. I felt alone in the midst of a crowd, dissatisfied, and spiritually bankrupt. Everything about life had become complicated and nothing made sense anymore. Living under layer after layer of social conditioning had squeezed every ounce of joy from my life causing me to forget what it was like to live creative, resourceful and free.

Then, I found Tantra. Its experiential training created a fundamental shift away from living behind my phony conditioned disguise to courageously performing a striptease inspired by the music of my soul. My childhood thrill to run around the house naked blossomed into an authentic desire to live life in relationship and vulnerability with an exposed heart. One by one, I shed stories from the past that no longer served. I learned to reclaim respect for the mystery that is my body and the wisdom it imparts. Physical and mental clarity increased as I rediscovered the power of my own voice.

Tantra taught me to trust my body as my basic truth, awakening radiant vibrant dynamic health. I learned to trust my senses to ground me in reality, alleviating fear and anxiety. But most importantly, it taught me to trust in the gift of breathe as a guide toward understanding deeper truth. Tantra, is the blueprint that turned me on. It turned me in and continues to turns me beyond what I’ve experienced in life so far.

I hope you’ll join me on the journey.

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