SLEEPING WITH THE KING

“If your husband's a doctor, then you're special. If you're with Mick Jagger, you're special. If you're sleeping with your Tibetan lama, you're special. It's seen as a status symbol,” explained Catherine^* over the phone one afternoon. “It gives you status, and it plays into women's sexual identity. Women identify themselves based on who they sleep with!” Having been the consort of a prominent Tibetan lama, Catherine was speaking from firsthand experience. And with this conversation, I entered headlong into a series of disarmingly candid and illuminating dialogues with women who have slept with their spiritual teachers.

“You want to align yourself with a man who has the kind of power that you want. And in this case it's dharma power!” said Annie, a student and former lover of one of the most influential Japanese Zen masters to bring the Buddha's teachings, or dharma, to the West. Another woman, Linda, told me: “It was powerful to think that I was intimately involved with the principal disciple of one of the world's great Indian yogis. He was very charismatic and he had exceptional powers that not every human being was manifesting, which confirmed my belief that there was something more in the unseen world that was possible. What attracted me to him was that so many other people were attracted to him, because when others recognize a greatness in the person you're involved with, that affirms you even more. You think, 'Well, this says a lot about me,' whether it does or it doesn't.”

Indeed, that was exactly how I had felt. My Korean teacher had been the most highly realized man I had ever encountered. He was different; he stood out. And in his presence, events unfolded with uncanny synchronicity, transmitting the sense of another dimension, an alternate and mysterious reality that intersected with the ordinary in ways that evoked the numinous world he inhabited and the spiritual powers he could manifest. Wherever we went, his penetrating and powerful presence was noticed and often drew attention. In his company, by association and physical proximity, I felt simultaneously special, protected, and spiritual.

“Women love men who are at the top and have for at least four million years, and they continue to everywhere in the world,” explained anthropologist and author Dr. Helen Fisher, her evolutionary view on sexual attraction providing a refreshing and vast perspective on the most intimate realm of human experience. “In a study of thirty-seven societies, it's been established that women are attracted to men who have status, power, education, and resources. I think it's a brain mechanism, a brain appetite or tendency that has developed because a man who has status, class, education, and influence is more likely to be able to provide for children. So women have inherited a biological taste for what in anthropology we call 'big men.' And if a woman is looking for spiritual guidance, the spiritual teacher is the one with all the resources.”

In the case of my own teacher, I had never met a man who was so well equipped to fulfill both my spiritual longing and my longing for security. For some mysterious and inscrutable reason, which only he seemed to fully comprehend, this great shaman and Zen master had felt obligated to take care of me, to shepherd me to the distant lands of my own spiritual potential and safeguard me throughout the journey, conveying to me a divine possibility and a deep security beyond anything I had ever experienced. “I am protecting you with my aura,” he told me a few months after we met. “And because you are physically protected, you can relax and trust, and this will accelerate your spiritual progress.”

Annie, now a Buddhist teacher herself, spoke about how women's spiritual search has been intermixed with our age-old craving for security, position, and influence. Echoing Dr. Fisher's view, she said, “A woman who wanted to be safe and secure, let's say in caveman times, would match up with a man who could provide her with that security. Even though this is the modern era, these are very atavistic, very, very ancient forces at work here. And though I hate to admit it,” she continued, reflecting on her relationship with her Japanese Zen master, “I'm sure I was getting off on being powerful. I was the one sleeping with the teacher. That was the ego part—it was a feather in my cap. On some level, I'm sure I thought I was hot stuff.”

For women on the spiritual path, a relationship with our teacher adds an additional and ultimately compelling element to the long-standing benefits of becoming sexually involved with a powerful and influential man: spiritual enlightenment. “He deeply acknowledged the spiritual capacity that I knew existed,” said Leslie, who was in a relationship with a prominent American spiritual teacher. “So I thought, 'Wow, I can have this all together in one package: mentor, lover, father.' I knew he favored women who were attractive, and that boosted whatever image I had about myself. All the attention made me feel special, like Radha—a spiritual goddess. I mean, this teacher had power; he had money. He was charismatic, and if you were the woman at his side, that had to mean something about you as well.”

In one of the first and most notable studies of sexual transgression between women and their teachers, doctors, or therapists—Sex in the Forbidden Zone—author and psychiatrist Peter Rutter writes, “When a woman meets a man—as mentor, healer, protector—who has the connection to the world at large that she yearns for, all that she might become is for a moment in his hands.” He describes how all the women he spoke with for the book “felt they acceded to sex as a way of maintaining a relationship that had come to have extraordinary importance in their lives and seemed to them to open up new and boundless possibilities for the future.” When I spoke with him one afternoon, he elaborated: “What this means is to have your future potential recognized, as well as your specialness as a human being. You know, it's really, really powerful stuff. And so the male mentor holds this, and he's using personal, social, and transpersonal power.”

The experience of that transpersonal, transcendent power in the presence of a spiritual mentor was evocatively described by Diane, who had sexual relationships with a number of her teachers: “When you are in the presence of someone with a very, very deep connection to Source, God, whatever you want to call it, and you have something inside yourself that you're trying to get to, and you see it there in front of you, you're like a kid with candy. You want to taste it at a depth that you don't believe you have yourself. And God, you want more and more of it!”

Bestselling author, columnist, and former executive director of McCall's magazine Dalma Heyn told me: “While women have historically chosen 'alpha males' for pleasure because they were most likely to deliver it in all its myriad forms—sex, power, money, children, and esteem in the community—in the spiritual context, you're talking about a man who has been elevated in her consciousness to the highest realm. My analogy is of a king, but a king who has a god in him, the spiritual king. He's not only a great guy, he's not only wonderful and smart, but he'll take care of her spiritual life. Good Lord. I mean, that's the sexiest possible alpha male there is!”