Tonight I’d actually intended to write a blog about nudism in London but then – even compared to a city like Berlin (with a much smaller population) – the opportunities in the Thames Valley to shed your clothes in public are few and far between. Supposedly the only regular nudist activity in The Smoke is a Sunday swim at the University London Union pool in Bloomsbury (hired out to nudists rather than organised by the ULU).

I was browsing through the Naturist Holiday Info website – as one does when researching topics like nudism in London – when I came across a link to a tantra portal. The FAQs were pretty much what you’d expect: “sessions for women can include yoni massage (i.e. massage of the genital area) for both healing and expanding pleasure… (for men) during massage, ejaculation is welcome though not the absolute focus or goal!” What struck me more was the biography of the woman offering this tantric service in north London, which contained a long list of her teachers and the courses she’d taken with them. This particular tantra exponent has clearly spent a lot of dough getting herself trained up in the spiritual arts. Through the services she offers I guess she hopes to make some of that back: her starting price is £150 for a ninety minute session, although she seems to think longer appointments are more appropriate.

All of which brought me back to thinking that most tantric counsellors, sexual alchemists, naked life coaches etc., are in the middle section of a pyramid scheme. Those who use their services must ultimately bring yet more people into the sexual healing movement if they are to make back what they’ve shelled out on ‘teaching’ over the years! But at some point those at the bottom of this bubble will discover there is no one else who wants to come in. Maybe when that happens those involved in such ‘new age’ pursuits will realise that the best root to ecstasy is actually through opposition to capitalism (and those that read Osho are wasting their time), since the aim of all true revolutionaries is not just a return at a higher level to the forms of social organisation found in pre-alienated human societies, but the reclaiming of the shamanic modes of consciousness that emerged from primitive communism.