J.X. Doležal: How Anna Had Me in Her Hands

An unbiased report by the popular journalist and columnist J.X. Doležal (REFLEX) about what a tantric massage looks like in our center.
In this article, you will learn how Mr. Doležal came to visit us, what he expected from the massage, how the session unfolded, and what its spiritual and therapeutic contexts are.

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text version

J.X.D.: A salon offering tantric massages is more of a psychotherapeutic center than a brothel

When you hear “tantra” on Prague’s Smíchov, it sounds quite funny. Yet thanks to my colleagues, who happened to buy me a tantric massage for my birthday in that very district, I found out that this ancient Indian meditative art can be more than pleasant, even on Smíchov.

When I received a voucher for a two-hour tantric massage from my colleagues, my knees trembled a little. “Do any of you know what it is?” I asked in the newsroom. “Just a regular bunga bunga,” one unnamed colleague joked. For those unfamiliar, the term bunga bunga was popularized by former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. It refers to a certain version of commercial sex where a woman performs an anal prostate massage on a man. And, frightened as I was, I believed him and started to worry whether, the moment I entered the tantric center, someone would shove something if I was lucky, just a finger into my backside.

WITHOUT WHIPS AND FLOGGERS

Nervously, I rang the doorbell of the tantric salon it operates as part of a broader “Center of Integrity” in a gloomy Smíchov street. A girl dressed in ethnic shop clothes opened the door, told me to take off my shoes, and led me to the massage room. “Please have a seat, the masseuse will come shortly.”

The place, considering the dilapidated street outside, looked surprisingly new and clean. The dimly lit room was about thirty degrees Celsius and neatly arranged. In the middle lay a massage mat with a freshly ironed ochre sheet, a small table, and two chairs. A Buddha figure watched over the scene, with a row of burning candles in front of it. One wall was made of semi-transparent glass, behind which were two showers. There were no whips, crosses for tying people up, or stocks, but next to the entrance stood a strange wooden contraption like a double trestle made of lacquered wood with sharp edges on which I could easily imagine some particularly brutal form of bunga bunga. My unease grew. Then a masseuse appeared, about twenty-five years old. She had a deep neckline and nice breasts, but overall she looked completely normal neither like a whore nor like a hysterical esoteric woman. She introduced herself as Anna.

She poured me tea, we sat down at the little table, and she asked why I hadn’t taken off my jacket. “I didn’t know where to put it.” “We have a valet stand!” she said, gesturing toward the sadomasochistic-looking contraption, and I sighed in relief. The thing wasn’t for tying people up, but a coat rack! So, what will you tell me, kitty? I recalled my Indian lover Uma and her explanations about Hinduism, Shiva, and Shakti, and I focused on what Anna was saying. She talked about how there are many kinds of tantra tantra of breath, visualization, meditation that there are Buddhist and Hindu tantras, but that in Europe the form that took root and gained interest was sexual tantra (vama marga), which traditionally belongs to the left-hand path or to the tantras of Kali (Mahakala). But in Europe, only a fragment of it survived the purely sexual one introduced here by psychologists and psychoanalysts. And here, in their center, they do not strictly follow Indian tradition but combine it with Gestalt and Dasein analysis.

And I began to relax inside because everything she said matched what I had ever heard about tantra. She didn’t mention that ancient Indian tantrics, before their sexual rituals, sometimes sacrificed a goat and consumed the mythical soma fly agaric or charas, Indian hashish. “Oh, India! I wanted to go there on Erasmus!” Erasmus is a study exchange program for university students, and I finally, though completely irrationally, stopped worrying about my rear end.

ON THE MORAL DIMENSION

“I’ll leave you alone now, take a shower and put on this sarong,” Anna said, handing me one of those South Asian cloths men wrap around their waists, which I can never tie properly, and she left. Obediently I showered, wrapped myself in the sarong, and rang the little bell. She appeared within seconds, looking like the clever girl from a fairy tale half-dressed, half-naked. She wore what looked like a sheet, bare-shouldered, but wrapped from neck to knees, showing no nakedness except her shoulders. Yet that tiny hint of skin, naturally evoking the association of nudity, made her far more enticing than if she had been fully naked.

“We’ll start standing up. You can close your eyes.” I did. Soft, pop-like Indian mantras played in the background not too intrusive and I felt Anna start massaging my head. I stood still and felt her touch. It wasn’t unpleasant at all, though not exactly erotic either. Then she moved to my shoulders, my back, untied the sarong, and told me to lie down on my stomach. I obeyed, closed my eyes, and felt her massaging me gently yet firmly on various nonsexual, rarely touched places like the insides of my elbows. I was already thinking about what to write and how to frame it. Is this prostitution or not? Would I, as my cynical deputy editor Viliam Buchert predicted, be offered sex for an extra charge? Was I actually in a soft brothel, a “wank house,” in the humiliating position of someone buying sex?

As a narcissist, I need to be admired and to receive sex as an expression of a woman’s joy and pleasure, not as a paid service. That approach is, of course, much more expensive than using paid sex and often ends tragically sometimes even in marriage but that’s just how narcissists are. I don’t want to go to a brothel, I don’t want to be that pathetic guy no woman would sleep with for free.

While I was thinking, I noticed Anna breathing rhythmically, slowly, and deeply another tantric technique and I began to match her breath. As she cared for me, still on entirely nonsexual areas, placing hot compresses on my thighs and warming my back with heated stones, I didn’t have to think about anything, not even breathing, because I breathed in sync with her. Gradually, I stopped caring what I would write about it and started floating away. To put it in Buddhist terms the duality was fading. When my slightly arthritic hip started aching and I moved a bit, as if I wanted to do something active, Anna pressed me back onto the mat with the flat of her hand, so firmly I thought, “Touch her wrong and she’ll smash your face, son.” She was clearly in control not the client, as in a brothel.

The goal of all tantras is the same: to reach unity. To escape the suffering of duality into a radiant, peaceful clarity. To become fully aware of oneself (of one’s body), even for a brief moment free from prejudice, neuroses, tension, and the illusions of a deluded mind that keep us from seeing the world as it truly is. A self-awareness joined with deep insight and compassion.

SATORI IN SMÍCHOV

I was already aroused like a dog in heat when Anna told me to turn onto my back. I did, and in the flicker of candlelight, I saw her running a feather fan over my body. She seemed to genuinely enjoy her work. She was fully focused through her breathing practice, but at the same time it was clear from her expression and every move she took deep satisfaction in how her touch affected me. Not sexual pleasure, but something deeper, something affirming her womanhood. She had the man me completely under control. Though very much a woman, she was at the same time the master of the situation.

Prostitution is disgusting because one of the people involved deeply dislikes what is happening. Almost no prostitute enjoys her work and most despise their clients. I get that if someone paid me to have sex with them, I wouldn’t like it either. But a tantric masseuse is entirely different she touches a man as a doctor might catheterize an old man. No one is inserting anything into her, no one sees her naked, and she has the chance to relish how her gentle touches completely shake a man twice her size. There is nothing degrading in it for her or for the client. The man pays to be cared for luxuriously for two hours, not for sex. Paying for care is quite normal with a dentist or a therapist. And here, unlike in a brothel, there is no vagina dentata, no threatening toothed vagina that every unknown woman seems to have. Especially in a brothel. This had nothing to do with prostitution.

I closed my eyes again and just felt Anna’s touch. Suddenly, she touched my groin the one area she had so far avoided and in that moment, I allowed myself to dissolve completely, to let my ego vanish, and there was a happy end. I opened my eyes and looked at her. Her face showed a confident, satisfied expression, like someone returning from a victorious battle. And, all things considered, that was not far from the truth.

She cared for me a little longer and then left. I showered, and when she saw me out, she said how people often break down there, cry, send flowers the next day… I can understand that. For me, the experience ranked among the top five percent of all my sexual experiences, and I’m pretty well used. I can imagine some poor manager with a frigid wife who married him for money and keeps him on a leash with her vagina. At home she gives it to him only for a gift and demands he satisfies her three times in return. Then he gets a massage like I did and I can imagine it changing his life. The intensity of ego dissolution egolysis can, from my Smíchov experience, be achieved in a shorter but equally powerful way as with mild hallucinogens. Mushrooms or strong vaporized skunk.

IT CAN WORK AT HOME TOO

Of course, a similar experience can happen during regular partnered sex, if both partners put some effort in, know each other well, and practice tantra together. The problem is that this requires a sexually unblocked, sensitive, and responsive woman who is willing, at least for a while, to think about something other than her own orgasm. The last scientifically confirmed occurrence of such a woman in the Czech Republic was sometime in the 1960s, so unless a man finds himself an Asian woman, he’s probably out of luck.

I showered and reflected that the whole thing had made the best possible impression on me. And I realized, as I was washing the tantric symbols tattooed on my upper arms, that I had also spent seven months at holy sites in India. And that I would actually like to see Anna again in a different role, as a colleague. I want to become her male counterpart and massage women. Do you think I should go for it?