Don't fall in false love: in order to find true bliss, we have to be true to ourselves, says author Asra Q. Nomani. She should know--she learned this lesson the hard way. (On My Mind).

* Several years ago, I was a 30something single woman right out of Sex and the City. I was working for The Wall Street Journal, living in an apartment in Brooklyn, and dating a series of ill-suited boyfriends. So when I left New York in 1999 to begin researching a book about tantra, an ancient Eastern philosophy that seeks sexual gratification, divine love, and spiritual liberation, I hoped that my subject matter could truly bring me what it promised. After all, I was born in India but raised in West Virginia, and I had already tried the ways "Western women are supposed to find happiness in love and failed.

So I attended "sacred sex" workshops. I rode a motorcycle alone through the foothills of the Himalayas in India to shore up my Shakti, or female energy. I flew to Nepal and chanted in front of a statue of the penis of the god Shiva in a Hindu temple. Then one day, I fell head over heels for a dark, handsome stranger. I was in Pakistan, at a place called French Beach outside Karachi. I had waded into the Arabian Sea to say hello to a friend of his, whom I knew, and when I turned toward him and gazed into his eyes, I felt an instant connection. Soon, we began the kind of whirlwind romance I had indulged in back in New York. Only in Pakistan, sex is forbidden outside of marriage, which made our affair even more exciting.

But then, just when I thought I'd found "divine love," a horrible thing happened. On January 92, 2002, journalist Danny Pearl came to Karachi with his wife Mariane to stay with me at a house I'd rented. Danny and I had been friends since 1993, when we worked in Washington, D.C. On the second night of their visit, Danny left to meet with a source and never came home. Terrorists had kidnapped him in an awful plot that eventually claimed his life. As Mariane and I searched for Danny, my ...