When I told a celibate Woman about my first Sex

When I was travelling in Australia in 2005, there was another place which I remember the people of but not really the city name. Especially some conversations stayed in my mind.

My organizer was a man of maybe 65 or 70 years. He was a yoga teacher, taught at his own place and also at other people’s studios. He introduced me to his students who came for workshops and lectures and also his friends, whom I then also sometimes met at his home.

One day, three of us were sitting together: my organizer, a woman who I believe was a friend of his and I. They told me that they both were disciples of an Indian guru whom I happened to know. With natural curiosity, this woman asked whether I had ever had sex in my life or if I was celibate and had been since my birth.

I had already had some strange experiences on this trip when it came to the subject of sex but I am a very open person – I have always been open and was not going to let any such event change that. So I told her that I was not celibate and that I had indeed had sex several times in my life. I went on to tell her the story of my first time, how it came to the point that I slept with a woman in Germany when I was thirty years old.

She listened with much interest – as everyone does to such stories I guess – but her reaction was a bit different than you might expect. The woman looked at me as though she felt pity and the next moment she also expressed something similar: ‘Oh, imagine how great it would be, had you not had sex with this woman!’ There was so much regret in her eyes for this action which, as I now understood, seemed to her as though something very precious had been stolen from me in that night! Something that I had kept for thirty years! An irretrievable treasure that I had lost to the sins of flesh. It was incomprehensible for her how I could not feel sorry and sad about it.

That’s how she felt because she was the disciple of an Indian sanyasi, a guru who preached celibacy as one of the highest virtues and something you should strive to achieve. I intentionally neglected to tell her that her guru himself was definitely not what you would call a virgin and not a celibate in the sense of the word’s definition. In fact, I happened to know that he had several women among his disciples who thought they had received the highest blessing that can exist on this earth – an intimate session with their guru. One of these ladies was living close-by to our Ashram.

I had never been interested in celibacy and believed already then that it was a ridiculous, unnatural concept but I did not feel the need to express this view to the woman in front of me. She left, probably still pitying me – and I sat there, unaware that I would now have a conversation with my host, also a disciple of that guru, which would make me feel slightly uncomfortable around his wife for the rest of my stay there. But that is a story that I will tell you about next Sunday.