The Price of Practice

When I was 19, I nearly became a stripper in order to study Buddhism. I desperately wanted to learn everything there was to learn about dharma, but there wasn’t much accessible to me in the small city where I lived and studied. I went to a local dharma center on a few Sunday mornings. The members were friendly and kind enough to give me basic meditation instructions on counting the breath, but they also intimidated me. I could have been their daughter. They were middle-class white boomers, many with professional ties to the large public university where I was enrolled. They were nice to me, but I was suspicious. I worried they were snobs.

Growing up in this college town, I often came across older Western converts whose interest in Buddhism had an academic bent. They also had a bohemian elitism toward people who drove Chevys and went to church. God forbid you enjoyed fishing with your mamaw, aspired to own a pair of Ray-Bans, listened to country or rap, or spoke in a Southern accent.

Mostly, though, I didn’t understand why learning dharma cost so much money.

Around the center, posters advertised courses that sounded interesting but unaffordable. The weekend classes cost over two hundred dollars—about what I made in a week. I worked part-time grilling Philly cheesesteaks at a sandwich shop. Although I went to the center somewhat regularly for a few months, there seemed no way to advance my studies as a dharma student. No one mentioned scholarships to attend the weekend courses, or offered me teachings besides counting the breath. It didn’t seem like they wanted young people around at all. I decided the best plan of action would be to study abroad in a Buddhist country. I chose Mongolia because it appeared to be most closely related to Tibetan Buddhism.

My parents, two women who lacked the privilege of marriage and jointly filing their taxes, thought this idea was ridiculous. (It was.) They were both professionals and by no means poor, but they would not dip into their life savings to pay for me to study in Mongolia—a location that had no practicality whatsoever in terms of finding employment after college. It was bad enough that I was an English major. They questioned why the study abroad program was so expensive when Mongolia was a low-income country. They thought I was getting fleeced.

Finally, when it was clear I was determined to go, come hell or high water, they took me to a local sporting goods store and bought me an expensive three-layer coat. If I was going to live in a yurt for a semester, they didn’t want me to freeze to death.

I talked the director of the study abroad program down to a slightly more affordable price, but it was still outrageously expensive. I wasn’t sure what to do. One day, I broke down in tears while washing dishes at work. A fatherly Wiccan priest—the sub shop manager—gave me an extra forty bucks for groceries, then went next door to the hippie bookstore and bought me a malachite ring for energy protection. He told me it was obvious that I had a past-life connection to this tradition. He had a vision of me in a tall furry hat. He said he’d pray for me.

A few days later, my friend Lydia came in to grab an early dinner. She was just about to go to Regina’s Gentlemen’s Club, where she danced as a stripper. Lydia was conventionally pretty. She had an hourglass figure and had felt objectified by men since puberty. Now she was reaping revenge. Men had to pay her for looking at her body, which they were doing anyway.

Some historical context might be helpful here: This was 2001, a few months after September 11. Kathleen Hanna, a former stripper herself, was the frontwoman of Le Tigre, a punk dance band that played constantly at any sort of queer or progressive gathering. My group of friends protested the coming Iraq war and went to rallies against police brutality, but we felt like changing the gender dynamics of our everyday lives was a hopeless cause. For example, the idea of asking people to use “they/them” pronouns would have been unthinkable outside the most radical spaces. Looking back, much of what we felt was really a type of cynicism.

The feminist discourse of the time followed a sort of logic that both Lydia and I subscribed to. Sexual harassment was ubiquitous. Men tried to feel us up at the workplace, catcalled us when we walked down the streets, and hit on us in their faculty offices as soon as the doors were closed. We both figured that if men wanted to look up our skirts so badly, we ought to be compensated.

Lydia told me how much she made dancing the weekend before; I told her how much money I needed to study abroad. “You make that in four months, easy,” she said.

It might seem outlandish for a young woman to dance as a stripper in order to study Buddhism. But it never occurred to me, not for a single moment, that I couldn’t be a stripper and also a dharma student, or, at the very least, a spiritual person. I could think of plenty of women who considered themselves deeply spiritual but monetized their sex appeal. (No one doubts that Dolly Parton remains a sincere Christian even though she received breast implants.)

More importantly, if Vajrayana Buddhism claimed that everyone has buddhanature, this meant strippers had buddhanature, and horny drunk men did too. I had no idea what any of this meant exactly, but based on my reading, I’d gathered that it was part of the tradition to not avoid difficult situations. Besides, I’d heard about a Tibetan meditation master who blessed people with his penis. Dancing naked for money seemed pretty vanilla in comparison.

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My roommate and I went to the club on a weeknight to scope it out. Hardly anyone was there. We were underage, so we ordered soda water with lime. We sat at a table near the back. Music from twenty years ago blared from the DJ booth, as a way to take back the middle-age men to their heyday. A skinny girl with long blonde hair came out, twirled around the pole a few times, then took off her bikini top and thong.

The dancer went over to a male customer who had come up to sit near the stage. He looked a lot like my middle school science teacher. The girl bent over and twerked her ass. The position, and the raw-animal quality of it, reminded me of being a child and seeing a broodmare taken out of her stall to be bred, her tail tied up, her hindquarters quivering.

I’d never seen the female body—mine, or another woman’s—in this position. Suddenly, I could almost imagine what my boyfriend was seeing as he watched me bend over to pick up my underwear off the floor. I would turn around and see some kind of hypnotized, half-crazed look on his face. He would catch me noticing him and blush. He was there and not there, I was there and not there. This is what the exchange was mimicking, but not the feeling. There wasn’t much feeling in it at all.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. But a twirl around the pole and that money shot wasn’t it.

The dancer took the man’s cash from his hand and smiled.

I expected more flirtation. More dancing. I thought it would be like the scene in The Graduate, where a woman spins pasties on her nipples at a nightclub.

I thought it would be like modeling nude for an art class, but with pole dancing and drunk men who tuck in twenty-dollar bills in your G-string. The strip club wasn’t at all what I expected. It was not entertaining. Just sad, raw, gross. A little dull. The dancing, at this particular club, wasn’t even that good.

I honestly expected something more along the lines of Flashdance.

But I could do it. Sad, raw, and gross wasn’t all that bad. I wanted to study dharma to understand what connected me to a sense of the world that was greater than myself. I wanted to cultivate the feeling I sometimes had accidentally, usually under a tree, relaxing outside on a spring day, of everything in the world being completely OK, even the stuff that was terrible and went beyond my understanding. Even the stuff about my own life that felt hard and alienating and sad. That state of nonduality wasn’t something I knew directly, but the idea of it—of happiness and pain running not only along parallel streams but coursing through the same river—was why I wanted to study dharma. The river led to something that my instincts told me was ineffable.

If Vajrayana Buddhism claimed that everyone has buddhanature, this meant strippers had buddhanature, and horny drunk men did too.

If coming to a deeper understanding of dharma required me being uncomfortable, then that was fine. I would do it. And then maybe one day I would practice and somehow help other people.

Another girl walked onto the stage. My initial shock had worn off by then. It occurred to me that while the dancer wasn’t wearing any clothing, she did not seem naked. It was not as though she’d just had sex with her boyfriend and was searching for her underwear on the floor. It was not as though she’d just gotten out of the shower, reaching for a towel, smelling of anti-acne face wash. I found this comforting, a sign I could muster up the courage. In my very limited 19-year-old erotic life, sex had seemed to me about removing a sort of mask. But no mask was removed here. The mask stayed on. It was not real sex.

A third dancer came on. She used a stage name, of course, but I recognized her from high school. We smoked pot together a few times and she had dated a mutual friend.

My resolve weakened. I’d grown up in the same town where I was going to college. Someone would inevitably recognize me. It was likely that I’d eventually run into my middle school science teacher, not just someone who looked like him. I looked over to Lydia. “I don’t know if I can do it,” I said. We left the club, and didn’t talk that much on the way home.

I wrestled with whether I should go to amateur night the following week.

Already, it didn’t seem like it was in my best interest to be attracted to cisgender heterosexual men. Our relationships were filled with irritating heteronormative power struggles. They didn’t seem to realize that I was just as smart as they were, what foreplay was, or that I wanted to feel desired without feeling possessed. They wanted to have other girlfriends—but their feelings were injured if I wanted to date other people.

And yet: The men who attracted me were strangely endearing. A lack of information never kept them from having an opinion on anything. They had incredible confidence based on extremely limited life experiences. They wanted to tell me the things they knew, even though I often knew those things already. And they seemed to have a very hard time comprehending their feelings. Men were human beings, like myself, only sometimes we didn’t understand each other. In spite of these power struggles, I still thought they were cute.

I wasn’t sure how I could continue to enjoy my attraction to men if I regularly exposed myself to the type of masculinity I found in the strip club—a masculinity that seemed sad, dehumanized, and lonely. A self-protective instinct took hold of me. I barely knew what real sex was. Earning money in a transactional performance of sexuality felt like it would distort my own experience of pleasure. I could see, clearly, that sex work is real work. Personally, I couldn’t work at the strip club without endangering my attraction toward men—I liked wanting them. I wanted to keep wanting them.

There was no clear way of articulating this at the time, but I had the fuzzy, undefined hunch that sexuality and spirituality were not distinct containers with no overlap. Years later, I would find this instinct confirmed by what others have taught me: that being open, comfortable, and secure in pleasurable experiences—whether that was making love or simply having a nice meal with friends—is important in opening oneself up to blissful, nondual states of meditation. How we relate to our sexuality and sensory experience—pleasure, the body, the self, the other—has a corollary with meditative awareness. Although these meditative states may be beyond sensual pleasure, and even the gross body itself, a comfort with positive experiences is a closer approximation to the experience of awakening than our painful experiences. Who we are, ultimately, is not our suffering or pain or grief. Who we are, ultimately, is much closer to our joy.

I would never go to Mongolia. I wore the inordinately warm winter coat my mothers bought me for the rest of college. My canceled trip wasn’t the end of the world, nor was going abroad necessary to find teachings. What I needed was patience and a move to a larger city, where I would find a sangha.

It wasn’t until many years later that I was able to better connect that cross-stitching relationship between sensual pleasure and spirituality. One day, before we sat down to meditate, my older dharma sister, who was the age that I am now, suddenly looked back at me and said, “The thing they don’t tell you about meditation is that after you’ve practiced for a while, it becomes incredibly blissful.”

Our sense of aliveness, in all its fleet ing pleasure and overwhelming pain, can direct us to more lasting experiences of happiness. I hope that by sharing my thoughts here, I can inspire someone in the way that my dharma sister inspired me. To practice. Unadorned bliss and emptiness are not as far from us as we think. May all beings know this as their true, lasting nature.

♦

This article is adapted from the author’s Substack, “Your Wild And Radiant Mind.”