Lingerie for the Heart

Part of why milongueras are always bitching that they have nothing to wear is that our clothes have to make us feel like making love. If they don't, we cannot possibly dance! It is out of the question! If something pinches, scratches, falls off, is the wrong color, or really has anything remotely funny about it, it draws our attention away from the important task at hand. We can't give ourselves to you body and soul if we're thinking about our hems. We can't even do it if our clothes are just sort of neutral and whateverish. We must be dressed in something that gives us that tiny impulse to jump into your heart and nestle—or forget it. And what we wear isn't just our clothes. We can't dance with you unless every single part of the bodies we wear makes us feel embraced and embraceable.

A while ago I was walking down the street and my heart chakra magically opened up. Before that I had been noticing energy skipping that spot, and it felt numb, empty, absent. This made me feel frustrated, helpless, and out of control. I had been working at forcing it open, and strangely enough, this had had no effect. No matter how much time I-alone spent with it, pushing it to make itself open, it stayed silent and breathless. ….But then many other people touched it just right (and I don't even mean that the way you think), and then one day, suddenly, all by itself, it opened up like a flower and I felt the breath of life moving through a beautiful new living thing that hadn't been there before, that was there to stay.

This transformed my dance. Now that I had a heart chakra, my whole dance came from it, with a little minor traffic control from my head. The energy of the ground, the perceptions of the mind, the lead, and my own movements all used the heart as their operational base. And I could tell that this was definitely what the guys who invented tango had in mind. Not only did it improve my physical mechanics, listening skills, and efficiency, it also made me enjoy the dance a lot more. I'm always saying It's A Real Embrace...and now that I had a heart, the thing designed to embrace and be embraced, I could actually feel this real embrace, instead of just feeling its symptoms.

My heart was now exquisitely sensitive. Which is probably why God encased it in a body: a big, protective, ambulant suitcase. Thanks, God, for having that foresight. I spent the next couple of months wheeling my heart around in its big suitcase, sending electrical impulses through it and enjoying every microsecond of the process. And then one day something else happened.

I was practicing and I physically felt something inside my chest cavity, about the size of my fist. It felt silky. ¡Ooo! I love silky things! I walked around and around my dining room feeling the silk inside me, running my mind's fingers over the silk, caressing the silk. My walk changed. The more I tuned in to the lovely feeling of the silk rubbing up against the rest of my insides, the gentler, deeper, and more voluptuous my steps became. “That's my pericardial sac,” I mused. “Who knew.” It felt like custom-tailored la Perla, I thought...which made me realize it had to be custom-tailored around something. “It's such a perfect fit, wow,” I thought. Perfect ease of movement, nowhere tight, nowhere loose either. In my mind's eye it was shell-pink and transparently tissue-thin but very sturdy. I giggled and blushed as I kept walking, feeling my insides nestling around this silky object. “Since I can tell it's tailored around something, one day if I am very lucky I will probably be able to feel that 'something' itself.”

And then quite suddenly I did! I felt something warm and runny and wet inside the silk. And then past the runny something, I felt something like foie gras. That is all I can tell you about it. It felt rich and meaty and full of chi—just like foie gras. “I AM,” it said. “You must be my heart! The physical organ whose energetic presence I've been finally noticing lately!” I said.

“I AM,” it said. An organ of few but powerful words. I walked my heart around and around the room and as I felt its warm, runny, wet, rich, meaty chifulness, my walk took on each of those characteristics. “You're doing a great job, I like this walk,” I said. “You may continue to run everything, from now on.”

“I AM,” it said.

I loved how it essentialized everything and knew exactly the right answer for every situation! I loved its concentrated, deep-seated fire! And I really loved how efficient it made the process of moving through space! The more power I ceded to it, the less I had to waste through the rest of me. When I thought, “it's my heart that's walking through this dining room, and everything else is just bringing it along, just so I can have the pleasure of feeling it move around,” muscular effort, clunky holding patterns, and restrictions melted away. The longer I stayed in that head-space, the more softly and warmly they melted away. “So this is what it means to dance,” I thought, beaming toothily from ear to ear.

I could tell that I had only been introduced to a very large iceberg that would take me the rest of my life to explore. I could tell that I had only just begun to say hello to skills that would require an eternity of daily practice. That didn't matter. The fact that they had become apparent was everything. Now that I knew this existed, I could learn how to practice it. Like any other form of meditation...it doesn't make any sense until that day when you suddenly have one tiny fleeting glimpse of “it,” and then you're like, “oh, it's that, ok, now I understand,” and then you know what you're doing, even though it's just a tiny glimpse. You practice every day, and over time, you slowly accumulate more glimpses, and you cultivate the ability to reliably glimpse. How this happens...I have no idea.

I wondered what it would be like to share this silky pericardial lingerie and this foie gras heart with somebody. I blushed. I reflected on the philosophical ramifications of this anatomy lesson while making eggs that evening. “Our energy is soft when we feel safe and its outside hardens into a protective shell, like an egg, when we need to feel protected,” I thought. “It gets harder and harder and eventually gets sharp and pointy if necessary.” (We've all felt someone poking us with their sharp pointy energy. Ouch!) But maintaining this hard shell takes effort. The safer we feel, the less effort we expend. Our natural state is soft, and softer, and softer, and when all our defences are down, the shell is gone. And our runny heart-yolks run all over the place and slather themselves all over everything and everyone and we share our innermost juices and essences.

And then we fall asleep. Peacefully.

That's what it would be like to share my heart with someone else, I decided, from a purely scientific standpoint. And I bet they will love it. After all: the best way to produce an orgasm in someone else is to have one yourself.