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

An unbiased report by the popular journalist and publicist J.X. Doležal (REFLEX) on what a tantric massage looks like in our center. In the article you will learn how Mr. Doležal found his way to us, what he expected from the massage, how it proceeded, and what its spiritual and therapeutic contexts are.

Text version

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

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

When I received a voucher for a two-hour tantric massage as a gift from my colleagues, my knees buckled slightly. “Does anyone know this? What is it supposed to be?” I asked around the newsroom. “Just normal bunga bunga,” a nameless colleague jabbed. For the uninitiated: the term bunga bunga was popularized by former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. It refers to an interesting version of commercial sex in which a woman performs an anal prostate massage on a man. And as frightened as I was, I believed my colleague and genuinely started to worry whether, the moment I stepped into the tantric center, someone would shove something, at best a finger, up my ass.

NO WHIPS OR CANES

Nervously, I rang the doorbell of the tantric salon – it operates within the broader “Center of Integrity” – on a gloomy Smíchov street. A girl dressed in ethnoshop clothing opened the door, told me to take off my shoes, and led me into the massage room. “Please sit down, the masseuse will be here shortly.”

After the dilapidated street outside, the interior looked surprisingly new and clean. The dimly lit room was thirty degrees warm and very tidy. In the middle of the floor lay a massage mattress with a freshly ironed ochre sheet, a small table, and two chairs. A Buddha watched over everything, with a row of burning candles in front of him. Along one entire wall was a semi-transparent partition with two showers behind it. There were no whips, binding crosses, or stocks anywhere, except for a strange wooden sawhorse made of lacquered wood with sharp edges standing next to the entrance, on which I could imagine a particularly brutal form of bunga bunga. My unease grew. Then a masseuse, about twenty-five years old, arrived. She had a deep neckline and nice breasts, but overall she looked completely normal – neither like a whore nor like a hysterical esoteric. She introduced herself as Anna.

She poured me tea, we sat at the table, and she asked why I hadn’t taken off my jacket. “I couldn’t figure out where to put it.” “We have a silent servant here!” she gestured toward the sadomasochistic sawhorse, and I sighed with relief. The device was not for tying people up, but served as a coat rack! So what are you going to tell me, kitty? I remembered my Indian lover Uma and her explanations about Hinduism, Shiva, and Shakti. And I focused on what Anna was telling me. She spoke about how there are many tantras – breath tantra, visualization, meditation – that there are Buddhist and Hindu tantras, but that in Europe it was sexual tantra (vama marga) that truly took root and sparked interest, belonging according to common classification to the system of left-hand tantras, or Kali (Mahakala) tantras. But in Europe only a fragment of it took hold – the purely sexual one – which was additionally introduced here by psychologists and psychoanalysts. And here in the center, they of course do not strictly adhere to Indian tradition, but mix in gestalt therapy and dasein analysis as well.

And I began to melt internally, because everything the girl was saying matched what I had ever heard about tantra. She did not talk about how ancient Indian tantrics sometimes slit a goat’s throat before their rituals and consumed something of the legendary soma – fly agaric mushrooms – or charas, Indian hashish. “Oh, India! I wanted to go there on Erasmus!” Erasmus is a student exchange program for university students, and I definitively – though completely irrationally, based on that piece of information – stopped worrying about my ass.

ON THE MORAL DIMENSION

“I’ll leave you alone here, take a shower and put on the sarong,” Anna handed me that South Asian cloth worn around the hips that I never know how to tie, and left. I obediently showered, wrapped myself in the sarong, and rang the little bell. She appeared a few seconds later and was like the clever maiden from a fairy tale. She wore only a kind of sheet and had bare shoulders, but the sheet was wrapped from her neck down to below her knees, and nothing naked was visible except the shoulders, which of course evoked nudity and therefore made her far more arousing than if she had been naked.

“We’ll start standing. You can close your eyes.” I closed my eyes, softly played Westernized Indian mantras, which are a bit sticky but not disturbing, and I felt Anna begin to massage my head. I stood and perceived the touches – they were not unpleasant at all, but neither were they a huge turn-on. Then the shoulders, the back, she untied the knot of my sarong and told me to lie on my stomach. I did so, closed my eyes, felt her massage me – gently but very firmly – on various completely non-sexual and rarely touched places, such as the inner elbows, and I thought about what I would write about it and how I would approach it. Is it prostitution or not? Would I eventually, as the cynical deputy editor-in-chief Viliam Buchert had predicted, be offered sex for an extra fee? And wasn’t I actually in a soft brothel, a jerk-off joint, in the humiliating position of someone buying sex? As a narcissist, I need to be admired and to obtain sex as an expression of admiration from a woman who goes with me for joy and pleasure, not for money.

This approach is, of course, much more expensive than paid sex and can end tragically, often 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 so pathetic that no woman would give it to me (as if) for free!

While I was thinking, I noticed that Anna was breathing rhythmically, slowly, and deeply – another tantric technique – and I caught her breath and began breathing with her. And as she took care of me, still on completely non-sexual parts of my body, placing hot compresses on my thighs and warming my back with heated stones, and as I didn’t have to worry about anything, didn’t even have to think about breathing because I was breathing according to her, it started to matter less and less what I would write about it, and I slowly began to float. To put it in Buddhist terms – duality was disappearing. When my somewhat stiff arthritic hip began to ache and I slightly lifted myself as if to be active, Anna pressed me back onto the mat with her flat palm with such force that I only thought: “Touch her and she’ll smash your face in, son!” She clearly had the situation under control, not the customer as in a brothel.

The goal of all tantras is one: achieving unity. Escape from the suffering of the world of duality into brightly colored calm. Full awareness of oneself (the body) and a brief moment without prejudices, neuroses, and tensions, without the deceptions of the delusional mind that prevent us from a natural view of the world and the perception (vijñāna) of its order. The self-awareness of a civilized human being combined with a high degree of insight and compassion.

SATORI IN SMÍCHOV

I was already aroused like a horny bitch when Anna told me to turn onto my back. I turned over and, in the dim light of candles, watched her stroke my body with a feather fan, and it was obvious that she genuinely enjoyed her work. She was fully focused through breathing exercises, but at the same time – it could be read from her expression and every movement – she felt immensely good about how it was shaking me. Not sexually good, but personally good, good for her femininity. She had that man – me – completely under control, and although she was very much a woman, at the same time (note the gender aspect of language) she was fully the master of the situation.

Prostitution is disgusting because something happens there that is deeply unpleasant for one of the participants. Practically no prostitute likes her job and despises her clients. I understand that – if someone were fucking me for money, I wouldn’t like him either and I wouldn’t enjoy it. A tantric masseuse, however, is in a completely different position – she touches a man much like a doctor catheterizing an old man, no one sticks anything anywhere into her, no one sees her naked, and she has the chance to enjoy how her small touches completely shake a man who is a head taller than she is. There is nothing degrading in what she does, neither for her nor for the client. The client paid for two hours of luxurious care, not for her to “hold it.” And paying for care is quite normal at the dentist or in therapy. And moreover – there is no vagina dentata here, the toothed, threatening vagina that every foreign, untamed woman supposedly has. Especially in a brothel. This simply had nothing to do with prostitution.

I closed my eyes and again perceived only Anna’s touches, and suddenly, unexpectedly, she touched me in the groin as well, which she had until then avoided like the devil avoids the cross. At that moment, I allowed myself a complete fall into the non-being of ego, and the happy end occurred. I opened my eyes and looked at her. She had a confident and satisfied expression on her face, as if she had just returned from a (victorious) war. And, after all, that is not so far from the truth.

She took care of me for a while longer and then left, I showered, and as she saw me out, she talked about how people collapse there, cry, send flowers the next day… I completely understand that. For me, the experience ranked in the top five percent of my sexual experiences in terms of quality, and I’m quite “experienced.” When I imagine a poor manager who has a frigid wife at home who married him for money and holds him by the throat with her vagina? At home she’ll “hold it” only in exchange for a gift and he has to do it three times for her. Then he gets a massage like I did, and I can imagine it changing his life. The intensity of ego non-being – ego-lysis – can, according to my Smíchov experience, be induced with a slightly shorter but equally intense dissolution of ego as with light hallucinogens. Mushrooms or strong skunk from a vaporizer.

IT CAN BE DONE AT HOME TOO

It is obvious that a person can have a similar experience to a tantric massage during ordinary couple sex as well, if the partners put in some effort, know each other well, and practice tantra together. The problem is that you need a sexually unblocked and active, sensitive and arousable partner who is also willing, at least for a while, to think about something other than her own orgasm. The last scientifically proven occurrence of such a woman in the territory of the Czech Republic was recorded sometime in the 1960s, so unless a man finds an Asian woman, he most likely has bad luck at home.

I showered and thought that the whole thing had made the best possible impression on me. And that I had – as it occurred to me while washing the tantric symbols tattooed on the upper arms of both my arms – also spent my seven months at the sacred sites of India. And that I would like to see Anna again soon in a slightly different role – as a colleague. I want to become her male counterpart and massage women. Do you think I should go for it?