Søren AasUnder Her Thumb
I am 46 and a half years old, and until yesterday I had never truly been held.
I want to be careful with that sentence. I have been touched before. I have been loved, in the ways that were available. But held — tended to, handled with full attention, received without agenda — that is something else entirely, and I did not know I had been living without it until a woman I had never met before placed her hands on my body and the years began to move.
Soundtrack: I Need Never Get Old by Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats. Go on, press the tv🫲
I found her the way you find things when you are finally ready to find them. A tantra priestess. The phrase itself would have embarrassed me once — too mystical, too earnest, too far from the life I had constructed inside my head. And I have lived a very long time inside my head. It is furnished in there. Comfortable, in the way that a sealed room is comfortable. Safe. She works out of a quiet space. I arrived not knowing what I was walking into, carrying the low hum of anxiety that had been my companion so long I had stopped hearing it. She opened the door. Leopard print tights. An unhurried smile. Eyes that did not look away. I should have known then.
What happens in a tantric session is difficult to write about without either sensationalising it or flattening it, and it deserves neither. The body is the text. That is the whole of the practice — learning to read what has been written in the flesh by years of holding on, bracing, retreating into the mind's safer country. She worked slowly. There was no urgency. The touch was gentle in the way that only truly confident hands can be gentle. Purposeful without being forceful. I lay there and something I had been carrying for a very long time began, quietly, to put itself down. The warmth came first. Then something I can only describe as a slow eruption — not violent, nothing like violence — more like the way a tide comes in. Unhurried. Inevitable. Filling spaces I had not known were empty. I did not cry. I wanted to. I let the wanting be there.
At some point she asked me to look at her. I looked. She looked back. We stayed there — I have no other way to say this — we stayed there for ten minutes without blinking, without looking away, without the usual social choreography of glances exchanged and withdrawn. Ten minutes is an eternity in eye contact. Long enough for the performance of self to dissolve. Long enough to be simply seen. She told me, more than once, that I had youthful eyes. I am not sure she was talking about age.
She told me something else — briefly, almost in passing — about a man and his children she had looked after. Not her children. His. She offered this small piece of herself without explanation, without preamble. Just placed it there between us like something she wanted me to hold. I have thought about that a great deal since. A practitioner setting a professional boundary does not do that. A human being, moved by something unexpected, does. I am not drawing conclusions. I am only noting what was placed in the room and by whom.
She told me to wait a few days before reaching out. To let it sink in. I am letting it sink in. Six hours after I left, I was still tingling — not metaphorically, not poetically, actually tingling, a living electrical hum running through a body that had been quiet so long I had mistaken its silence for peace. I sat with my dog. I drank water. I wrote. What came out was this:
as I walk away carrying almost nothing just materialized feelings she helped me charmed me like a doe eyed cobra she held me, in the moment unafraid I lay quivering, under her gentle hand the lightest touch was exactly enough Virgin Mary enter me
I did not plan that poem. It arrived the way the warmth arrived — from somewhere below thought, bypassing the apparatus of my mind entirely. That is, I understand now, the whole point of the practice. To find the route around the head and into the body where the real knowledge lives. Forty-six years in my head. One afternoon on a table, tended to by a woman with quiet hands and eyes like a depth I had not measured. I walked in one person. I walked out carrying almost nothing — all the dead weight left behind in that room — and everything.
I do not know what comes next. I do not know what the waiting will bring, or what she is sitting with in her own silence. I know that something passed between two people in a quiet room, and that it was real, and that I am grateful for it in a way I do not yet have the language for. What I have is the poem. What I have is the tingling that is still, this morning, faintly there. What I have, for the first time in a very long time, is my body. That is enough. That is, in fact, everything.
🌊Follow the current on Bluesky