Episode #195: Dancing in Duality
“I just always felt most comfortable in retreat settings, and in monastic settings to some degree… and in strip clubs,” Natalie Ducastelle says. “Those are the two places that I feel completely comfortable and myself. It never really struck me as like, ‘Oh, this is so weird.’ These are both expressions of parts of myself that fit very comfortably in who I am, and don't have to be at odds with one another. And they kind of balance each other out.”
Speaking with remarkable vulnerability, Natalie describes the unusual trajectory of her life that combines what some if not many would find contradictory: work as a stripper and sex worker, and a deep devotion to the Buddha’s teachings and insight meditation practices, which ultimately led her to Myanmar. And though she ended up leaving that line of work, her perspective on her life and her decisions is very thought-provoking.
Natalie traces her story back to a very messy parental divorce that destabilized her home, causing her to find refuge however she could. “I had a really hard time as a teenager, and developed a lot of defenses,” she recalls. “I had a very hard time in relationships with other people, and started straddling the world of my spiritual life and interests, and also a lot of escapist behaviors from a really young age. So, for example, I discovered yoga when I was in high school, I came in through the doorway of the scriptures, and then into asana practice. At the same time, I started experimenting with drugs, and with smoking weed, and taking psychedelics and all those kinds of things.”
Later on, even as she became more serious with her practice and began sitting long vipassana retreats, she also began spiraling with drug and alcohol addiction. “[After] I came out of a retreat, within 48 hours I would have my face in a pile of cocaine,” she recalls. “I'd have these really profound spiritual and insight experiences. And yet, they were not sufficient for me to step out of the kind of lifestyle that I had, or out of the patterns that I had. That was a really painful, challenging and confusing place.”
Ultimately, she realized that intensive meditation could not help her overcome her serious alcohol and drug addictions on its own. “My capacity to engage in the teachings in a deepening and sustainable way [was] incredibly limited until I treated the alcoholism and the addiction, and then things really shifted for me.”
Natalie eventually got sober, and has not used substances for over a decade now. Yet while she was giving up intoxicants, she continued her job as a sex worker and stripper. “I danced in strip clubs for 14 years, and 12 of those years were years that I was sober,” she says. “And most of those years, I was very much engaged in practice. I think that for most people, it sort of boggles the mind that those things can live in the same space, because of the concepts that people have in considering sīla and sexuality and all these other things. It's like how do those two things exists in the same place?”
Natalie sought out advice from therapists and Dharma teachers about how she could stay in that profession, while still being true to her inner values of living with integrity and not taking any action which would cause harm to others. She also wondered whether she could apply the Buddha’s teachings on mindfulness in all postures and in all situations to the environment of a strip club.
“Can I stay really present with this and know the suffering?” she would ask herself before going to the club. “For me, it wasn't like I would go to work and the practice would drop to the side. It was the opposite, like cranking up the volume on that commitment. It’s relatively simple to show up in life and not lie, cheat, be greedy, or throw my sexuality around. But it's not as easy in a club. So the commitment, and this reorientation to that commitment, had to be really consistent and strong.”
Even while stripping, Natalie tried to maintain a clear observation of her body, while also examining her mental volitions, such as when she was moved to act in ways that were dishonest or manipulative, or when the presence of such mental states like guilt or shame came up. This subtle examination of the mind made her attentive to how she spoke as well, and so Natalie also tried to follow Right Speech as well.
During that time, she decided to resettle in Las Vegas because it is home to the only Mahasi monastery in North America. Of course, in that city, it was not hard for her to get something in her line of work, either, and she ended up finding employment on the Strip at the Spearmint Rhino. And so in Vegas, the two strands of her life could now be pursued simultaneously.
“One of my biggest interests is how to integrate practice into life, and the complexity of life, including the places that aren't usually considered inviting into the practice. Like, what does it even mean to practice sīla in a place like a strip club? How does that even work?” she remembers thinking. “Sex workers become the holders of so much shadow for individuals and for the collective…. There's a lot of undone shadow work that gets projected onto the bodies and the beings of sex workers.”
In addition, she was aware that many customers came in hopes of seeking out fantasies or escaping reality, which meant satisfying the senses, indulging in delusion, and sometimes enacting darker impulses that are usually suppressed. Natalie’s steadfast sobriety and growing mindfulness gave her insight in being able to engage skillfully with her customers’ wide range of motivations.
Outside of work, Natalie spent her free time on retreats, studying the Pāḷi scriptures or at the local Mahasi monastery, which she visited often. Donning a conservative yogi dress, she found herself the only non-Burmese person there, and was warmly welcomed and encouraged in her practice. “In that particular monastery, which I loved so much and haven't had much of that over the years, there was something very settling and balancing for me about that,” she recalls. “Once you get off the Strip, it's quiet, and my lifestyle is really very steady and quiet, other than work.”
Natalie also began visiting Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California, and learned that many of her teachers had either studied under Thai Forest lineages, or had been taught by Burmese teachers. She took a trip to Thailand in 2007, but was especially intrigued to visit the “Motherland,” as she referred to Myanmar, and her aspiration was fulfilled in 2019. There, she spent time living in nunneries in the Sagaing Hills, which she found to be “a Disneyland of monasteries.” She was deeply inspired by the community of nuns she came to meet; two nuns in particular really looked after her, and their friendship and generosity still strongly impact her to this day.
The monastic environment, especially one nunnery where children were sweetly chanting, left a deep impression in her. Indeed, it took years to process the significant cultural and religious differences between what she found in Myanmar, and her own upbringing and places of practice in the United States.
“The way this practice lives in me as a Western, self-identified white woman having grown up in a city, there's just no comparing it to the way that it lives in the bodies of folks in monastic culture, who have essentially been conditioned and steeped in Dharma from the time that their little brains are even forming,” she says. “All of these questions I started to have about humans and relationship and love and attachment and the complications of growing up and attachment and family, and how much of my own work involves navigating that mess. And wow, these children, it's just Dharma! That's it. From the very beginning, especially in a place like Sagaing, that’s it.”
After being so impacted by her experiences in these Sagaing Hills nunneries, the recent news coming out of Myanmar since the coup has been devastating for Natalie. All the more painful are the stories of violence inflicted on the very nuns she spent time with. “I have to play out the whole thing in my mind to really feel it, just imagining just how horrific this scene must have been,” she says, reflecting on a recent incident in which soldiers stormed into one nunnery in the dark of night. “What's so painful is this is what humans do… This is what's happening… there's some things I'll never understand. It's like no amount of wisdom will ever will ever feel like enough to be able to pretend to understand that sort of thing.”
Still, Natalie comes back to the deeper lessons that remain with her from that trip in the Golden Land, which she is still deeply grateful for today. “What really sits with me is this expression of that life and of that culture of Dharma, of monastic life, just the most loving, tender, gentle, nurturing… that's what's really emerging for right now.”