There was a woman who became very visible in me in Cambodia whom I jokingly began calling my shalaven. I don't know how to translate this Russian word into English without ruining her. “Slut” is too harsh and carries too much contempt. “Flirt” is too innocent. My shalaven is playful, sensual, mischievous and VERY interested in men. She simply likes attention. She likes flirting. She likes that little current that appears when two people notice each other. She can be jealous, competitive, ridiculous and completely unreasonable. Most of the time she doesn't even want the man. She simply wants him to notice her. The funny thing is that she was not new. I had known her for a very long time. I had simply been ashamed of her.

She never fit comfortably beside the other women I respected in myself: the mother, the professional, the teacher, the spiritual practitioner, the mature woman who should presumably know better. I had learned to watch my shalaven carefully because she seemed potentially embarrassing and, somewhere underneath that embarrassment, maybe even dangerous. A respectable woman does not need so much attention. A mature woman should not become jealous over a man she doesn't even want. A spiritual woman certainly shouldn't be looking around the room thinking about whom she would like to flirt with. So like many parts of ourselves that we consider inappropriate, she was allowed to exist as long as she remained somewhat hidden.

Something changed almost immediately in Cambodia. Instead of hiding her, I began announcing her. I would openly tell the women, “My shalaven wants to flirt.” If I noticed jealousy because some Cambodian man was paying attention to someone else, I could say that too, which was particularly hilarious because half the time these men were not remotely my type. I like blond men, could be flexible here of course. I have always known that. Yet apparently my shalaven had much broader hiring criteria. I could catch myself looking at some Khmer man and simply announce out loud in front of everyone: “Well, apparently she wants this one too.” Everyone knew what was happening. I knew what was happening. The women were not being secretly turned into competitors, and the men were not being cast into some enormous romantic story without their knowledge. Something that could have lived underground as shame, jealousy or covert competition became an open game. I declared her, I gave her a stage and she was being fully scene!  And everybody loved her! She did SO well! I was so proud of her... 

That surprised me. The part of myself I had assumed needed to be managed turned out to be funny, warm, infectious and remarkably harmless once she was allowed into the room honestly. The women teased her... Men played with her with pleasure. I teased her too. I could flirt openly without pretending that I wasn't flirting, and because there was no hidden agenda, there was also much less tension around it. I didn't have to perform innocence while secretly monitoring who was looking at whom. I didn't have to turn attraction into a relationship or male attention into evidence of my worth. I could say: “Oh, look, she wants to play again,” let her play, laugh and move on. For the first time, my shalaven stopped feeling like a threat because I stopped hiding her.

That distinction became important to me. Telling the truth about a desire is not the same as obeying it. Acknowledging jealousy does not require acting possessively. Enjoying male attention does not require seducing the man. Flirting does not have to become a promise, a betrayal or a future. In fact, I experienced almost the opposite. Once the impulse was allowed into consciousness and language, it lost much of the power I had been afraid it possessed. Shame had made her dangerous because shame required secrecy. Truth turned her into play.

One of the first people I flirted with was Alexander, my teacher's husband. He played along beautifully. There was no hidden agenda, no great attraction and no story to build around it. I knew perfectly well that he wasn't even my physical type, but I wanted to flirt, so I flirted. Then Cambodia began having fun with my supposed type. The man assigned to take me through the jungle on his motorcycle was definitely not the man my mind would have selected. My first reaction to him was almost rejection: This one? This is my man? I judged him before we even started. By the end of that experience, after he had carried me safely through the jungle, returned for me in the rain and raced me back down the mountain while I sang, I looked into his eyes and felt extraordinary tenderness. Nothing about my visual preference had changed. What changed was the authority I had given that preference. My type could remain my type without becoming the gatekeeper for every experience I was willing to receive.

Even at the Apsara school, the joke continued. While the children were demonstrating their daily training, one boy caught my attention immediately. I kept watching him and thinking, What a lovely boy. He doesn't even look Khmer. When we were invited to choose a child who would teach us some of the exercises, I knew exactly where I was going. That's my boy. I practically ran over and sat between him and a wonderful little girl, and the two of them became my teachers. Only later did I discover that the boy was French. His mother was standing nearby filming him and speaking French. At that point I had to laugh. Apparently my unconscious can identify a type before my conscious mind has received the biographical information. I didn't need to make it a sign about anything. It was simply funny.

What mattered much more was that I was beginning to experience a part of myself without putting her on trial. I had spent years believing that freedom meant gaining greater control over myself. Cambodia was showing me another possibility: sometimes freedom comes from telling the truth so completely that there is nothing left to control in secret. My shalaven could be seen. She could be ridiculous. She could want attention. She could flirt with a man she had no intention of sleeping with. She could even feel a flash of jealousy over someone she didn't actually want. Once I stopped insisting that a good woman should never experience those things, I became much less interested in acting them out. I could simply notice her and let her exist.

And then came the name Ara Tara.

To explain why this name affected me so deeply, I need to explain something about the person who gave it to me. Diana is my teacher and the founder of the Sacred Dance practice in which I have been training for years. Within the language of our Mystery, she also has what we call a multidimensional assembly. I know how this may sound to someone outside this work, and I am not asking the reader to adopt the cosmology behind it as fact. I can only describe what I have witnessed. A year earlier, I had been present during one of these processes with Diana, and there are moments when the person I know seems to enter a very different state of perception. She sees, speaks and responds differently. We sometimes describe it as speaking “the language of God,” not because I can prove where the information comes from, but because of the strange precision with which things sometimes arrive through her.

I have learned to pay attention when this happens. Some of the things Diana has said in these states, especially things concerning me personally, later unfolded with an accuracy that was difficult for me to dismiss. I don't need to decide here whether this is clairvoyance, altered consciousness, extraordinary intuition, access to information we don't yet understand, or something else entirely. I know only that I had enough previous experience with her to take seriously what came through when she gave me this name. Ara Tara was not a name I invented for myself because I liked how it sounded. It was given to me, because this is my true name "out there"... and then I had to discover what, if anything, it recognized in me.

There was another reason the name startled me. Within this same multidimensional framework, Diana carries the name Seter, or Keter Tara, and Natasha is Arya Tara. And now I was being named Ara Tara. There were three of us, three Taras, which immediately suggested that the names were not appearing independently. In the language we use for this work, we understood ourselves as belonging to the same larger assembly, almost, jokingly, as if we had come from the same “litter.” There is a larger structure associated with this that I am still learning and do not want to describe inaccurately from memory. What mattered to me in that moment was simpler: I had not received an isolated mystical name. I had been placed into a pattern.

That pattern also changed the way I began looking at the word Tara itself. Tara is not a small image. In Buddhist traditions she appears in many forms, but broadly she is associated with compassion, protection and liberating action, a feminine presence that responds to suffering rather than turning away from it. In the religious language that is emotionally closer to the culture in which I grew up, the nearest image for me was the Mother of God. I do not mean that Tara and the Virgin Mary are historically or theologically the same figure. They are not. I mean the scale of the experience they evoke in me: the Great Mother, protector and savior, the one whose presence is so vast that whoever comes into her field can find refuge there.

That last part mattered enormously. When I felt Tara in myself, I did not experience her primarily as gentle or serene. The first word that came was huge. Not huge as in important, superior or grandiose. Huge in circumference. An enormous internal field. A woman capable of holding far more than what is comfortable, beautiful or easy. She can hold grief without becoming grief. She can encounter fear without organizing everything around fear. She can hold another person's crisis without needing to take it away from them. She can hold contradiction without immediately choosing one side and exiling the other. There is room for suffering in her, but also for pleasure. There is room for death and enormous appetite for life. There is room for another person's truth even when it does not resemble her own. She does not create refuge by making everything safe, clean and orderly. The refuge is her capacity to remain present while life is still complicated.

This made the word protector begin to mean something different to me as well. Protection is often imagined as standing between someone and danger, fighting, controlling, preventing something painful from entering. But the Tara I was beginning to experience was larger than that. Sometimes protection meant action, and sometimes it meant becoming a space in which another being did not have to disappear. If you came into her field frightened, grieving, angry, ashamed, sexual, confused, wounded or joyful, you did not first have to become easier to hold. There was room. That was the quality that felt almost maternal to me. You could arrive as you were and still find refuge.

And Tara did not feel passive. There was tremendous movement in her. She responds. She goes toward what calls her. She does not spend eternity negotiating with herself about whether she is ready, whether she has permission, whether someone else thinks she is qualified, or whether she can guarantee the outcome. There was speed in the image, something I had been hearing throughout Cambodia in the words that kept coming to me: stand up and go. Not know everything and then go. Not become fearless and then go. Stand up. Go. Meet what is there.

And then there was Ara.

The first quality I experienced in Ara was nobility, but again, not nobility as status, pedigree, superiority or being above other people. It felt like an internal dignity that does not need constant confirmation from the outside. A noble woman does not become noble because everybody treats her correctly. Her posture does not have to collapse every time someone fails to recognize her value. She carries something at the center that remains hers.

But Ara also began unfolding for me through movement and connection: speed, the relationship between center and periphery, the ability to travel between things that normally remain separated and bring them into the same field. I want to be precise here. I am not claiming that every meaning I experienced around Ara is a literal linguistic translation of the word. This is the meaning that began revealing itself to me through the name and through what I was living at the time. And through what Diana was sharing with me. 

And this part was almost embarrassingly recognizable. I have spent much of my life connecting things that supposedly do not belong together. Law and mysticism. Privacy and Sacred Dance. Corporate boardrooms and sauna mysteries. Intellectual rigor and experiences I cannot explain. Evidence and intuition. Death and pleasure. Discipline and play. The clean freak and the woman rolling in Cambodian mud. The woman who wants control and the woman who can get on the back of a motorcycle with a stranger and eventually stop telling him how to drive. The Master and the woman who simply wants to enjoy herself.

There is a wonderfully ridiculous Russian expression, впихнуть невпихуемое, which roughly means to fit together what supposedly cannot be fitted together. This may be one of the most accurate descriptions of what I have done throughout my life. I keep moving between the center and the edges, gathering things that appear contradictory and looking for the larger structure in which they can coexist - yes! the fucking wheel! Give me intellect and sexuality, crisis and pleasure, God and Devil, material and spiritual, darkness and light, science and mystery, grief and laughter, and some part of me immediately begins looking for the field large enough to contain all of them without flattening one into the other.

And suddenly the name made a different kind of sense. Ara moves between the opposites. Tara is large enough to hold what Ara brings home.

Which was precisely why the next realization was so funny. Because if Ara Tara was this enormous, noble, protective woman capable of holding contradiction, where exactly was I supposed to put my shalaven? Ara Tara was the reason shalaven could stay.

I remember the moment when this landed with almost ridiculous clarity. Diana had given me the name and some description, Natasha had helped me understand more of what it evoked, and I was suddenly struck by the apparent contradiction between this enormous, noble, almost archetypal feminine presence and the shameless little creature I had been happily introducing to everyone for days. Diana was walking behind me with Sasha, and I turned around in shock.

“Diana! Apparently I'm not a shalaven at all!”  “No,” she said with the smile. “Not at all.” I thought about it for a second. “Well... shalaven is me too.”  “Yes,” she said. “That's you too.” And suddenly I saw her differently. “Oh my God. She is so beautiful, and I was judging her! She is so much fun!”

That sentence was the core because it contained the entire problem. I had assumed that growth required hierarchy. If Ara Tara was noble, then shalaven must be less noble. If one was sacred, the other must be profane. If one was the woman I was becoming, the other must belong to a less evolved version of myself that I would eventually outgrow. Even spirituality can reproduce the same old rejection while giving it much prettier language. We find a “higher self” and immediately begin deciding which inconvenient parts of ourselves are too low to come with us.

But the more I felt the size of Ara Tara, the less sense that made. She was not enormous because she was more powerful than the other women inside me. She was enormous because she had room for them. Her nobility did not require the exile of the shameless woman. Her protection did not require control. Her spirituality did not require a rejection of sexuality. Her dignity was not threatened by playfulness. Her capacity to serve did not eliminate her appetite for pleasure.

This was also beginning to change what the word protector meant to me. I had spent a great deal of my life protecting myself from parts of myself. I protected the respectable woman from the sexual one, the competent woman from the uncertain one, the spiritual woman from the ridiculous one, the mature woman from the jealous one. I protected one identity by keeping another identity out of sight. What if protection could mean something almost opposite? What if the woman at the center was powerful enough to protect the space for all of them?

Cambodia had already been dismantling these divisions in other ways. At Angkor Wat I tried to choose between the Path of the Master and the Path of Pleasure, only to discover how unstable that distinction was. I experienced poverty alongside extraordinary generosity, dirt alongside beauty, ritual alongside irreverence, prayer alongside desire, fear alongside enormous pleasure. Again and again my mind wanted to arrange experience into opposites, and again and again life refused to cooperate. Master or pleasure. Spiritual or sexual. Noble or shameless. Strong or playful. Serving others or receiving from them. Eventually the question itself began to look suspicious.

Why or?

I think women are often taught to develop through subtraction. Maturity means becoming less childish. Dignity means becoming less shameless. Spirituality means becoming less sexual. Independence means needing less. Strength means becoming less vulnerable. Even psychological work can quietly become another purification project: identify the unacceptable part, understand why she exists, heal her, integrate her, and hopefully emerge as someone more coherent and presentable. We can spend decades improving ourselves while secretly operating from the assumption that somewhere inside us there is still a woman who must never be allowed into public.

What happened with my shalaven was almost embarrassingly simple. I let her into public. She didn't destroy anything. She made people laugh. She flirted. She got jealous. She enjoyed attention. She enjoyed herself. And then she moved on. Once I stopped demanding that she justify her existence, I could see what was actually there. She wasn't asking me to destroy my life. She wasn't asking me to abandon discernment or betray anyone. She wasn't demanding that every attraction become an action. She simply liked being alive. She liked men. She liked the exchange of energy between people. She liked laughter, attention, beauty, play and the pleasure of being a woman in a body. The danger had never been her existence. The danger was unconsciousness. Desire is information, not instruction. Attraction does not require action. Jealousy can be acknowledged without being obeyed. Flirting does not require a future. I can have boundaries without locking this woman in the basement.

In fact, I suspect she becomes safer when she is allowed into consciousness because then she no longer needs to operate from the shadows. That feels very different from the woman I once thought I needed to become. I don't want to become a better woman by making myself smaller and more correct. I don't want spirituality that requires me to amputate ordinary human parts in order to qualify as sacred. I don't want maturity that is secretly another word for losing playfulness. I don't want dignity so fragile that a little shamelessness can destroy it, and I don't want a version of power that depends upon never admitting jealousy, desire, fear, silliness or need.

I want something much larger than that. I want enough internal space to know which woman in me is speaking without immediately silencing her. I want the one who knows and the one who has absolutely no idea what she is doing. The mother and the lover. The professional and the mystic. The protector and the woman who sometimes wants to be protected. The woman who likes a beautiful clean house and the woman who can roll in red Cambodian dirt. The serious one and the ridiculous one. The woman who can fall crying at the feet of a ninety-seven-year-old Apsara and, a few hours later, sit in a boat wearing a ridiculous lotus crown while a man makes her a wedding bouquet and she enjoys every second of his attention. 

And yes, I want my shalaven! Maybe especially her! Because one of the most beautiful discoveries I brought home from Cambodia was not another version of myself I now have to become. It was the realization that I may finally be large enough to stop choosing... I literally can have it all! For years I had been protecting myself from parts of myself.

Ara Tara gave me another image of power: becoming large enough to protect the space for all of them.