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Love at Dancing Leaves
A Tantra Memoir

by M. K. MacCrae
What the Book is About

Madhuri, a Californian who had lived thirty years in India, was alone in Switzerland happily and in a leisurely manner recuperating from a near-death event…when she put an ad on a dating site. This is the story of what happened next.

It’s the journal of one woman’s exploration of the ancient science of Tantra. Tantra means many things: ‘technique’; bringing consciousness to love and sex; letting go into the river of life…It is a way of living, as well as of bringing consciousness to love. This book is not a how-to manual, but simply relates the author’s experience as she experiments along with her partner. It also describes a relationship in which culture differences loom large: she is a wild carefree gypsy, he a stolid Midwestern Republican. The book is rich with lively detail: recipes, poetry, clothes, childhood scenes, motorbikes, travel; as well as the intimate meditations which recur and develop throughout. Much of it takes place in a beautiful house in an oak grove. There are assays to India, Canada, Maui, Europe.

The book is funny, sad, searching, joyous. In it Madhuri employs techniques she learned in a meditation commune, for taking ultimate responsibility for oneself in a relationship: how to reclaim projections, how not to blame the other, how not to be a victim; how to grow through the inevitable difficulties. How, too, to celebrate the unknown…as well as the senses. What emptiness is for.

It is a book for women, and for men who would love them. It’s for the menopausal, the middle-aged, as well as the young who would seek a way for love beyond what is portrayed in popular culture. It’s for people who’d like creative ways to be intimate when there are physical limitations – and when there are not. It’s for poets, therapists, and therapees. It’s for amateur cooks, cat-lovers, and Indiophiles. It’s for dancers and channelers and artists and healers and wanderers, meditators and Human Design aficionados. It might even be for the guy who runs the hardware store. It’s sort of Kama Sutra meets Shopaholic meets Walt Whitman meets Prairie Home Companion. Really, it’s for anyone who would like to open up to possibilities beyond the usual.
 
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Read Excerpts (pdf):

Chapter One: The Beginning
A Light Repast of Tantra
Binky's Aunt

“Intriguing, full of zest and heart.”
Diana Richardson, author of Tantric Orgasm for Women and
The Heart of Tantric Sex

“Like sipping nectar from acorn cups.”
Dalayna Williams

Buy the book!

Who Wrote It

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Madhuri MacCrae was raised with six siblings in raggle-taggle poverty in Southern California. Serendipity gave her two years in Europe as a teenager. She went to India in 1973, when she was twenty-one. She lived there until 2002, with working sojourns in the States, Europe, Japan, and the Antipodes.

She received her education in India (most of what passed for schooling in the States having been truncated and forgettable) at the Osho meditation commune, and has in turn become a teacher of meditation, psychic opening, dreamwork, women’s metaphysical studies, and Tantra. She’s also worked as housecleaner, exorcist, constructionperson, intuitive-jewellery-wallah, and more.

She is a painter, delighted clothes enthusiast, writes far more than is good for a person, and loves finding herself rambling in strange places. She enjoys train rides, reading, hiking, dancing, big orange tomcats, stationery (she makes her own), and techniques for inner exploration. She’s been motorbiking in the Himalayas, feasting at midnight way above the Arctic Circle, cycling in the dark in Gujarat, ghost-busting in Hamburg, Strip-O-Gramming in California, and river-floating in the Ozarks. She now lives in Hebden Bridge, W. Yorkshire, England

Madhuri has published many poems and articles in various periodicals. Her first book, Impassioned Cows By Moonlight, was published in 1974. Her second, With Open Hands: a Psychic Palmreading Workshop, was published online in 2000.