Touch & Trust
Touch and trust are fundamental parts of the practice in Tantra, Massage and Yoga. They must go hand in hand in order for the practice to be supportive, wholesome, inspiring and growth-promoting.
I have experienced firsthand and heard of many other occasions where teachers and therapists have abused their power in classes and sessions and taken advantage of their students and clients. They overstepped boundaries on sexual, physical and psychological levels, touching before permission was given and trust properly developed to excite responses from their students or clients to satisfy their own desires.
Unhealthy and often severely destructive relationships can then eventuate as this invasive behaviour involves psychological and sexual hooks and uneven power keels. It commonly works to the teacher or therapist’s advantage as they hold power over the vulnerable and open student or client. The student or client can then quite easily become a naively enchanted and willing sexual partner or servant of sorts.
Actual love rarely enters into these scenarios. Once the spell has been broken, the victim of the power play awakens and they realise they’ve been left in a shattered state in need of desperate repair. Some don’t muster the courage to keep going, find help or get back on the path of their truth and soul and lose themselves. Others do and find the healing and resolutions they need to rise up stronger in their own divine power and wisdom.
In amidst many pedagogic hierarchies, there are insatiable hungers for dominance, power and sex that prevail because of primal and psychotic aspects of the self that thrive as individuals undertake positions of superiority over the ignorant. In abusing their right to power, these leaders tell their recipients how to enter the practice and lead them astray. In those moments, these individuals are completely vulnerable and initially unaware of any potential dangers because of the implicit trust they feel they can hold in that leader. Especially if they are charmed by that leader. The recipient’s naivety and ardent consent in the search of the perfect practice or way to perfect their body and self is like an intoxicating drug for the one in power because of their submission to the leader’s vision and instruction. The invitation to play God opens which is accompanied by peril.
Be careful on your path and in your practice with who you allow to guide you and who you submit to. Do your research. Question teachers before you submit to them. If there’s good discipline and benevolence involved in the teachings these are great foundations for a healthy, growth-promoting practice and life-affirming love to blossom between teacher and student. We don’t have to live out further suffering when opening to learning, nor fall into damaging traps or destructive temptations.
