Dance of the Soul and Body or The Shaman’s Kiss

Kiss

Natalia Izmaylova

Dance of the Soul and Body

or The Shaman’s Kiss

The artwork of the Peruvian artist, Pablo Amaringo, has been used in the design of the cover.

Accept all weave that is bound in the fabric of your fate, for what better can quench your sorrows?

Marcus Aurelius, 2nd Century AD

Part 1

The Dance of the Soul and Body

Today I found out about the suicide of an acquaintance. Not a close one, thank God? This was a man in his prime who was head of a semi-governmental enterprise and according to his friends got too deep in financial debt and was at the same time entangled in a romantic relationship with his friends wife.

This sad news caused the recall suicide of my husband’s father who left his family and for reasons unknown to his son, settled his score with life. It was a drastic step taken under the influence of alcohol. The question raised is why do people drink? Is it truly to escape and if so, from what? Day-to-day problems imposed by someone or anxieties over insecurities in life? Maybe it’s a fear of possible troubles, insomnia or out of a plain desire to find pleasure in a calmed and relaxed state.

Most every one has the realization that our health won't get better through alcohol consumption. Many fool themselves when talking about the potential benefits of moderate alcohol consumption for reducing stress by offering examples of some related long life livers from the mountains of Caucasus and even examples of the French and their beneficial wine drinking but as the saying goes, facts are a stubborn thing.

A friend of mine, a smart girl from a normal family who had no stress whatsoever, used to bring over wine and drink while the two of us would sit with our small children and watch them play while we chatted. As a result of her excessive wine drinking the family broke down, she was fired from her position at the university where she taught English. It was discovered she would ask students for their gold jewellery in return for good marks. She then would pawn the gold.

And at the end of it all she gave up her seven-year-old son to her ex-husband who by a twist of fate had by then become my second husband. She never met her son again, not even once though he looked for her. It did become known that during her never-ending drunkenness, she had given birth to yet another son and he was given up to an orphanage.

Not long ago, as a result of yet another binge my first husband died. Our two sons and I arranged his funeral. His civil wife, a former accountant has been in recovery from alcohol addiction for many years now. My former husband, the son of very famous Soviet sculptors held a responsible position in the public services until his last days. He lived in an apartment with a view onto the Isaac Cathedral and feared losing his job because of his abuse of alcohol. I so vividly remember the words he said soon after we married. Natasha, how frightening it is to die?

What I am about to share with you in this book didn’t happen out of the blue and it isn’t just a re-telling of some other story. It is about a deep personal experience and an incredible transformation of my personality because of the rapidly changing events in my life.  Now I can say with confidence that every person has this ability. For me this is a long journey and I relish the experiences. Ahead of me there is a large wide-open door with endless opportunities.

I will share my experiences with you in hopes that those who really want to, will understand how to find their positive path and see for themselves how amazingly the world around them is changing. To understand what this is all about, I will set the stage by giving you a snapshot of my life’s path.

It all began when my espoused lover dumped me. Like in most cases it turned out to be an office romance. I absolutely cared nothing for the existence of a wife and fortunately already grown children. I was single yet again for 8 months by then and I was in a passionate search for my other half that I was sure must be wandering around out there somewhere.

We didn’t fall for each other straight away. I was a pretty woman and even though I began gaining weight with age I always knew my value. And when this handsome man appeared in front of me, I caught a glimpse of arrogance in his eyes and confidence with respect to women as well as an interest in me. I instantly bristled inside and thought to myself, Oh no pretty boy, you aren’t getting any from me. Later on he admitted that when he first saw me, he thought, A hot gal. Maybe we… or maybe not….

For a long time we pretended that we didn’t notice each other. I found out that he was a former military pilot (for me this was only slightly better than a cab driver); moreover the pride of my heredity was grafted into me since childhood. My grandmother came from an old noble family and my mother, a pure-blood aristocrat, married an ordinary man. A Vas'ka as they were then called in Russia. Sadly she suffered her whole life because of that attraction.

Yes, as you have probably already reasoned, I turned out being a half-blood. I was raised by my grandmother and her sisters who miraculously survived the repressions and they instilled it into me that when they had been young they would walk on different sides of the walkway with their servants. This feeling that we were no match followed me around for a long time. When we first screwed, I was slightly flabbergasted. The sex was rampant and powerful and we were 'in over our heads'. After some time I felt that I was falling in love for the second time in my already long (by our standards) life.

I grew up as an ugly duckling. My mother was always screaming and lashing out at my father, her husband. Just look at what your father looks like, she would charge at me ever since my childhood. The meaning being that my father always came home from work quite drunk. My father was a manager of a grocery store and we lived in his house. My mother was a deputy chief accountant in a well-known ministry. Then my dad was arrested. It wasn't for long but he was not allowed to work in his chosen occupation anymore. Rumour had it that it was his older brother who had turned him in to the police.

My father fought in the Great Patriotic War but at the time no one paid any importance to his governmental awards and medals. I remember the search of our house when they took all the money we had – ten roubles. I remember how my mother would stand over my bed watching me attentively to see if I was asleep, so that she could make love to my dad.

When I was a child, I wasn’t allowed to play with other children because they could have had a bad influence on me. I knew nothing about sex until I was fifteen years old. When I experienced my first period at thirteen I almost fainted when my grandmother said that from that moment onward I could get pregnant. When a friend of mine from school explained how children are made, I ran home to my grandmother and said: Grandma, it’s so disgusting! I received no answer. But sex, in its most appalling manifestation haunted me ever since my childhood.

I remember how once in the fifth grade I asked for permission to go to the bathroom. A group of high-school boys cornered me in the hallway and one of them groped my groin. I was ashamed of the long old fleece knickers I was wearing that day. We lived just outside Moscow and many times on my way to school, men with their nude members would spring out of the bushes. I also ran into a similar situation when I was skiing in a forest.

There was one occasion at the market when I was about thirteen or fourteen; a man pressed his hateful ice-cold member against my hand. To accomplish this act, he had to slightly open his long cloak. I remember washing my hand for at least an hour or so after that demeaning incident. Perhaps it’s because of these childhood traumas that I had problems with man and woman relationships later on in life.

My first consensual sexual experience (there had been earlier attempts, such as my great-uncle trying to caress me when I was sixteen), had a disastrous end. It happened one night in Crimea when I was twenty. My boyfriend whom I had recently met, tried to rape me. I fell and сracked my chin on the rocks (it left a scar for the rest of my life). My terrified rapist carried me, all covered in blood, in his arms to the lodge, triggering horror in my younger cousin, with whom I had gone on holiday.

For quite some time after that he tried to persuade me to have sex but he never succeeded. It’s hard to say why. Perhaps it was the upbringing by my grandmother whereby she taught me the pride of being a maiden. At that age, I truly believed that one can only give herself to a man when they are in a serious relationship. It was only later that I understood it was merely fear of sex, or generally of a relationship between a man and a woman, which I had learned in my early childhood when I had witnessed numerous scandals my mother experienced with my father.  Next, I will tell you about the reasons for which all the events in our life happen, and about the ability, as if by magic, to turn your life around in the opposite direction.

In order to escape the never ending scandals at home, after obtaining my teaching degree in two foreign languages with almost all 'excellent' grades at the Commission of Graduate Distribution, I asked to be assigned to Kamchatka. Before, in our country, students in full time higher education were obliged to work for three years in places where they would be sent to at the end of their studies.

To this day in my memory this remains a golden period of my life. It was the first time I had a taste of freedom even though at first I had to go through a few more stressful incidents. On the flight to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, my new acquaintance, a graduate from my university and I were late for our flight in some Siberian airport. We found out that all the tickets for other flights that only pass by once a day had been sold out a month in advance.

Mobile phones did not exist at the time. All our possessions including for some reason our money, were gone with our plane. Hungry, we sobbed bitterly at the box office amidst the crowd of other passengers who were also desperate to get on a flight. By what miracle the local CEO felt sorry for two twenty-one-year-old girls is still a mystery but we were put aboard a flight. Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky greeted us with the absence of a single sober person. In the streets drunken sailors dragged drunk and screaming under-aged girls behind them.

We arrived on a Saturday only to discover that we couldn’t get our luggage until the following Monday. Outside the temperature was typical for Kamchatka – 8-10∘C and all we wore were summer dresses. There were no rooms in the hotels not that we had any money on us. Luckily, we had a basket of fresh tomatoes from our carry-on luggage. In return for them we managed to get a tiny bed for two in a room for fifteen or twenty people in a local hotel. We didn’t realise it at the time but we could have made a fortune from our tomatoes.

From Petropavlovsk I was sent to teach at a school in Ust-Kamchatsk on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, where a strong earthquake and a tsunami had destroyed half of the city the previous spring. That was when half of the survivors had abandoned the city and many teaching vacancies were the result.

For the first month I had to live in a local hotel with outdoor lavatories. I was absolutely starving because the local stores didn’t sell any food. The locals obtained their food by fishing and hunting. I couldn’t cook even if there was something to cook on. Fortunately the school soon lodged me in a separate apartment with two other girls who had come from Moscow in search of romance. We were quick to befriend a few young officers who would bring us their army food.

All around the Tundra, there were camps where my flatmate was sent to teach history. The convicts were forced to study and it turns out that all her students were serving time for murder. Every night we would read their crime histories and the countless love letters with which the convicts showered their young teacher. By