How I got over my lifelong fear of intimacy… by taking sex lessons in a room full of strangers

I’ve always had hang-ups around sex. I’m a Catholic school girl, and not the fun, naughty kind, the ‘everything is a sin kind’.

At 40 I was pretty much living out my mum’s premonition that I’d suit being a nun.

For most of my life I’d been single. In my teens and 20s I thought the problem was that I was unattractive and nobody wanted me… I was too ginger, too fat, too whatever.

In my 30s, much to my surprise, I found that some guys did like me but I struggled to stay with them for more than a few months. Something about being in a couple made me feel trapped, like I stopped being me.

I realised that I was happy being single – but that didn’t mean I wanted to be celibate. I wanted to have sexy underwear that actually got worn in sexy situations. I wanted beautiful sex. Transcendent, earth-moving sex. And I wanted to be good at it… because the truth was, I worried I wasn’t.

Everyone else had years of practice and knew what they were doing. I didn’t. When it came to sex, I was still an awkward teenager.

And so when I was asked to write about a tantra retreat for a magazine, I did something that made me feel sick to my stomach: I said yes.

Like most people, my only knowledge of tantra was that Sting once talked about it in an interview, boasting of marathon love-making sessions with his wife.

In fact, a quick Google told me that tantra is an ancient spiritual practice that embraces sex as part of a connection with the divine.

The word ‘tantra’ means ‘the weaving together of all that is’ which basically means you learn from everything in life – including sex, something that other spiritual paths tend to kick out the back door.

I used to have a stress dream that saw me in a department store tugging on my top to cover my knickers. In this dream I’d accidentally left home without any trousers.

The tantra retreat felt like a new variation of this dream – the variation being that it wasn’t a dream.

It was excruciating. On the first night we gathered in a large, carpeted room and danced to hippy music. Sober. A man with a tie-dye t-shirt with an elephant on it had his eyes closed and raised to the sky. A slim woman with dark hair twirled around him like a spinning top. I swayed from side to side, a fake grin on my face.

The next morning we were back in the same room, which was now filled with mattresses. A woman wearing a Madonna headset microphone invited us to find a mattress.

We had been told to bring a sarong and a blindfold, and to put the sarong on the mattress and the blindfold on us.

I felt sick. Physically sick. Loud music started and we were told to shake our bodies. Shake, shake, shake. Like a rag doll.

Then the music changed to something more drum-like and we were invited to get down on the floor and express our ‘animal nature’. What? I didn’t have an animal nature. I went to convent school.

When I sneaked a look under my blindfold I could see that some people seemed to be humping their pillows. I couldn’t hump my pillow. I just couldn’t. It’s not how I was raised.

I told myself that everyone in this room was liberated in ways that I wasn’t. I was terrified of being found out for the scared girl I was.

I was struck by the humiliating realisation that, even as I approached middle age, I was terrified of everything. Terrified of men. Terrified of being rejected, terrified of not being rejected. Terrified of not knowing what to do, or of doing it wrong, terrified of being seen to not know what to do.

A lot of the exercises we did involved practising saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’. It sounded so simple but, actually, it was fraught.

I kept saying yes to things in order to please the other person. To be ‘nice’. To not be selfish. To fit in. To not look like a prude.

The teacher kept telling us that we should never do anything we didn’t want to do and this was our chance to practise saying ‘no’.

But I kept saying yes… until one morning, a man asked if I wanted a hug. I didn’t. I said so. I waited for him to get angry or upset. He smiled. ‘Thank you for looking after yourself,’ he said. What? You mean it’s that easy? We don’t have to do things we don’t want to do?

As the days passed and I kept saying ‘no’, I found myself able to let go of the fear that all the men in the group were predatory weirdos, because they weren’t. Well, apart from the elephant T-shirt guy. He claimed to be able to have sex with people in India telepathically but on day three he had a plumbing emergency and had to leave early.

The course culminated with my ‘initiation’ – an exercise in touch and trust which saw me lying on a mattress, being stroked by three people. I suspected that other people in the room were naked but I stayed fully clothed.

Even so, I felt fearful and I whispered ‘I’m scared’ as fat tears streamed down my cheeks. My three companions kept smiling and stroking, genuinely enraptured by their job of stroking my fully-clothed calves.

We breathed slowly and deeply, as instructed, and gradually the feathery strokes felt as if they were getting faster, six hands sweeping over me, and I felt myself dropping into another world. The pang in my chest reminded me of the deep longing I used to feel looking at my A-ha poster as a young girl.

And then it was over, my glimpse of Heaven. In the months afterwards, I felt like a different woman but I found it hard to recreate the magic in the real world. So I signed up for a more advanced tantra retreat. This time things were more explicitly sexual –the emailed instructions included a suggestion to ‘bring your own intimate lubricant and/or a jar of coconut oil’.

And so began seven days in the Big Brother tantra house – seven days that were the sex education I had never got.

At first it was OK. More sober dancing. More sitting in circles, having excruciatingly honest conversations. Then… well, the real stuff started. We were offered the opportunity to practise something we’d always wanted to try. I knew what I needed to practise and that this was the place to face my fear of… No, I couldn’t. No. No. No.

I ran to the loo to cry. When I walked out I found a man I’d met on the first retreat – who I’d nicknamed Hawaiian Santa because of his colourful shirts and rosy cheeks – waiting to see if I was ok. I blurted it all out. The fear that I was bad at sex and the feeling that I was doing it wrong and letting men down.

‘I, I, I don’t know what to do with a penis!’ I said. There it was. My shameful secret. I waited for him to laugh. He didn’t. Instead, he offered to help.

We walked back into the group room and when the moment arrived, Santa took off his trousers and boxers. A female teacher offered to show me some techniques. I watched her touch him with such care and joy, as she talked me through different moves: the pulling the endless handkerchief out of a hat move, ‘juicing a lemon’, the ‘helicopter’ – I couldn’t believe that one didn’t hurt.

Then it was my turn. I got started with the helicopter while the voice in my head started screaming (‘You’re doing it wrong! Your hands are clammy! He’s hating this!’) but when I looked up I saw Santa was beaming. He gave me two thumbs up like a children’s TV presenter.

I was delighted with myself. Finally, I was on my way to being a sexually liberated woman of the world!

At that moment I thought about how much in life I’d missed out on because I was too scared to admit: ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, could you help me?’

Once I got back from the retreat, it occurred to me that I was not the only one who didn’t know. There were all sorts of people there that week – from 30-somethings to 60-somethings, some single, some married. We all had different stories but we all had our insecurities.

I thought about how ridiculous it was that sex was used to sell everything and we’re all meant to be at it all the time, and yet nobody can talk about it and we’re never taught how to do it.

I thought about the sex education at my school, where all we were told was: don’t get pregnant or get an STD. I thought of the message I’d grown up with that ‘nice girls don’t’ and that any woman who enjoyed sex was a slut. No wonder I was confused.

I listened to a podcast with renowned sex therapist Esther Perel, who explained that when it comes to sex most of us ‘carry guilt, we carry silence and we don’t really know how to talk about it’.

Renowned sex therapist Esther Perel says that when it comes to sex most of us ‘carry guilt, we carry silence and we don’t really know how to talk about it’ 

She added: ‘For a long time, we said sex was sinful. Then, when we tried to do away with religion, and we brought in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, we replaced it with ‘sex is natural’, which was a wonderful thing to say in light of how much it had been condemned and vilified.

‘But on the other end, it’s not natural. It’s an art. It’s cultivated, it’s learned.’

I felt proud that I had the courage to start learning. In the months after that retreat my life started to change. I’d kept in touch with another retreater, George, (who I had briefly ‘married’ as part of an exercise in dealing with commitment) and when he told me he was planning to be in London for work I invited him to stay.

I hoped that he could be a lover, but as I cleaned the house preparing for his arrival, I got in a panic, thinking of all the ways I wasn’t good enough for him. He had the lean body of a rock climber, I had the body of a comfortable sofa. He was a vegan who did charity work. I was a meat eater who barely recycled.

When he arrived we went for dinner and spent the night together in my bed. He packed his own pillow (he had allergies and a bad neck) and his own sheet (duvets were too heavy for him) and went out like a light. Oh.

In the morning he made me breakfast and we talked. Really talked. I told him all my insecurities and he told me his.

We kissed. It felt different to before. We were both really there, no hiding or pretending. Who knew that confessing to being bad lovers could be so hot?

And so began five days – five days! – of the best sex of my life. The beautiful, transcendent sex I’d been dreaming of. The stuff of poetry and art and gods, yin/yang signs and stardust.

It was different to anything I’d experienced before, in that a lot of it wasn’t really ‘sex’ – or at least it wasn’t penetration. It was kissing and touching and eye-gazing and it was so, so, so slow.

In the workshops, we had been taught to focus on the feelings of our own bodies, instead of worrying about the other person. So I did. I said no when I wanted to say no. I didn’t feel any need to perform and yet my body was doing things, compelled to touch him, kiss him, move in certain ways.

Our tantra teacher had explained that when we are nervous we stop breathing. ‘To feel more you have to breathe more,’ she said. And so I did. I took big, slow breaths and didn’t mind that my tummy blew out like a balloon. I thought about what my body was enjoying rather than how it was looking.

‘That’s how sex should be,’ said George afterwards.

And it was. It was so far from the sex I’d seen on screen.

‘We’re making love,’ he said.

And we were. I’d never done that before. I’d had sex but I’d never made love.

He stayed for a week. He read me poetry and we slow-danced.

He cooked me a vegan dinner and I bought him avocados. We had more beautiful sex.

We both marvelled at what was happening between us.

But a few weeks later he told me he had to step away to focus on his spiritual path. I felt dumped… and did the very unspiritual thing of getting drunk and bad-mouthing him before crying for four days.

But once I’d got over the rejection, I felt grateful that I had opened myself up to him in the way I did.

It’s now four years later and I am pleased to report that I have lovers. Yup. Lovers, plural.

The Catholic schoolgirl in me can’t quite believe I’m allowed to do this. To have love and freedom. Sex and space. My cake and eat it. But it seems like I can.

The sex is beautiful and I still feel very much like a beginner. There is so much to learn and experience, and I am so grateful that I had the courage to go to those tantra workshops.

It changed my life. It was painful to confront the gnarly shame I had around sex but getting to know myself as a sexual woman has opened up a whole new world, a world where sex is not a reward for being young and hot, but a natural part of being human.

For years I thought of sex as another thing to be good at and, conversely, another thing I could fail at.

Now, I understand that sex is not a performance, it’s an experience to be shared or enjoyed alone. And it’s for all of us who want it.

I have gone back to more tantra retreats, where I have met people in their 70s who are exploring their sexuality – sometimes for the first time. It’s never too late.

Sex is such a glorious thing – it’s free and healthy and much more enjoyable than watching hours of Swedish crime dramas. I wish the nuns had told me this.

• Adapted from Love Me! by Marianne Power, published by Pan Macmillan on August 22 at £16.99. © Marianne Power 2024. To order a copy for £15.29 (offer valid until September 1, 2024; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.