I thought I knew what tantra meant. A partner made a joke about it and I laughed along — and then I actually went and did the reading, and almost none of what I thought turned out to be true.

This episode is my attempt to untangle three words we use like they're interchangeable and aren't:

• Classical Tantra, the actual non-dual tradition going back over a thousand years, built around the idea that you're not earning your way toward wholeness — you're remembering a wholeness that was already there.
• Neo-tantra, which has a real origin story most people have never heard, starting with a man named Pierre Bernard running a "spiritual retreat" out of a mansion in 1920s New York.
• And sacred sexuality, the modern umbrella term that's grown up underneath both.

I bring in the two people teaching classical tantra who actually changed how I think about this — a Sanskrit scholar and a practicing cardiologist, landing in the same place from completely opposite directions — plus a teacher who trained under both the monk and the sex-magic camp at once, on purpose.

And underneath all of it is the thing I actually can't stop thinking about: a conversation with a doctor about a NuvaRing, and how many women she says can't stand touching their own bodies. Because if any of this is real — if all of it, the whole body included, is sacred instead of shameful — then stigma, shame, sin, and the idea that your body belongs to someone else's permission before your own all have to come apart first.

The revelations are still coming, and here's what I've got so far...