Tantra and Tantric Massages in Reflex Magazine

Tantric massages became the subject of interest for a journalist from Reflex magazine, who also tried a tantra massage with us incognito :-). In his March 2011 article, he shares his impressions, experiences, and photos from our studio.

In the second part of the article, he describes his conversation with John Hawken on the topic of tantra and tantric massages in the Czech Republic from the perspective of an English tantra teacher who has been active in the country for over ten years. The author also tries to uncover why tantric massages have become so popular among Czechs!

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Czechs Discover Tantra

SEX AND SPIRITUALITY IN ONE PACKAGE

Half-naked masseuses in tantric studios and pragmatic teachers trying to improve your life at weekend seminars. That’s what we found when we tried to figure out why Czechs have fallen in love with tantra.
“Be prepared for one thing during tantra someone will be touching you all the time.”

 
“At the end, there may or may not be a climax,” says a pleasant young woman with a non-Prague accent after a rather long lecture about what her services involve. Since we’re in Žižkov and the young woman has that accent and we’re talking about sex, you’d think this must be one of those many private parlors scattered around this Prague district, staffed by prostitutes of varying degrees of physical appeal.

In a typical Žižkov parlor, Buddha statues stare at you from every shelf, Indian mythological scenes cover the walls, and there’s so much incense burning that they could have hidden a corpse there for two months and you wouldn’t have noticed. And the whole place bears a rather noble name, the “Center of Integrity,” so you feel that it can’t possibly be about something as banal as sex.

 
TAO IN ŽIŽKOV

But if it is about sex, it’s certainly not treated as something banal. Before the actual procedure, you are given not only the fantastically Zen phrase quoted at the beginning of this article but also a few other guidelines for example, that you should breathe deeply and try to enjoy the whole thing as much as possible. Which is quite possible, considering that the masseuse massages you while partially undressed. The most exciting part of the massage is, in fact, the feeling that sexual arousal might happen.

To filter out any trace of vulgarity and preserve the emphasis on “energetic experiences,” along with the necessary touch of exoticism (even though Žižkov is right outside the window), they consistently refer to the female and male genitals by their Sanskrit names, yoni and lingam.

“Tantra massage combines elements of ancient tantric and Taoist techniques with classical massage, creating the atmosphere of a sensual, intimate ritual that awakens your energy and fills you with excitement and tenderness,” claim the center’s website. I’m not sure whether I was filled with excitement and tenderness, but I’m quite sure that at one point I fell asleep for several minutes.

So I can’t tell you whether I managed to enhance my spirituality, become aware of my energetic body, connect with my inner self, or experience perfect harmony and all the other things that tantric massages promise. But then again, it would be a mistake to expect that from someone like me a person who once fell asleep in a flotation tank, stayed silent during psychoanalysis, and couldn’t be hypnotized even after three attempts.

On the other hand, I’m sure it wasn’t a bad massage, and the fact that they use towels and oils I find quite pleasant and unfortunately underused in typical Czech conditions. You’ll even enjoy small touches like being offered fruit and feeling somewhat pleasantly... Roman. Well, apart from all those Buddhas around you.

And the possibility of giving the whole experience a more sexual dimension, using a trick most Asian masseuses call “oil massage”? That’s up to you. In any case, all those Buddhas and Indian paintings on the walls make you feel that you’re not part of the sex industry and perhaps not even of conventional morality.

As it seems, that’s exactly what people like. The center will soon move to larger premises in a better part of Prague because demand for such experiences keeps growing. They even offer “tantra massages for companies,” which, when I look at the colleague sitting across from me at work, is something I’d rather not imagine and I warmly recommend that you don’t either.

Most importantly, there are more and more women and couples among the clients. The opposite pole of the tantric business is also thriving weekend and week-long seminars across the country. The Czechs have simply fallen in love with tantra.

 
WE LOVE TANTRA

When you think about it, in a sexually liberal, non-religious society that’s hungry for mystical and esoteric experiences, this outcome was inevitable. Tantra seems tailor-made for Czechs. Although, to be fair, what most people today call tantra is actually a Western extract of Hindu esotericism too complex to explain in full here filtered through the American sexual revolution of the late sixties and since then offered in countless flavors across the Western world to all those overworked people who’ve made enough money to spend some on what they see as their personal spiritual growth.

Apparently, nobody minds. People don’t turn to tantra to study it, but to learn something about themselves. This is also shown in Benjamin Tuček’s recently released documentary Tantra, which follows teachers and participants of tantric courses.

“The shooting took a year, and it took quite a while to get past people’s initial distrust, but in the end they opened up to us and were happy with the film,” says Tuček, who at the time of our interview had just finished the first sold-out screenings in art cinemas, followed by long discussions between viewers and the film’s participants.

If you don’t plan to see the film, you should know that there’s no actual sex, no naked people running around for an hour. There are only a few intimate scenes, mostly meaningful. The rest of the time, people listen to lectures or do various physical exercises apparently important for understanding tantric philosophy which may sometimes look quite comical.

Yet Tuček, who has never practiced tantra himself and doesn’t plan to, has only sympathy for the participants. “These people are trying to learn something about themselves, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In a year and a half of filming, I didn’t meet anyone with a strongly negative experience. Sure, some people tried it, didn’t like it, and went home. But even they said there was nothing bad about it, it just wasn’t for them.”

Tuček says he wanted mainly to show that tantra doesn’t have to be about sex and that those who practice it are not perverts. “To be honest, I never saw anyone having sex or doing anything like that.”

From Tuček’s film, however, tantric courses may look like a form of therapy. Only the people who take part in them don’t want to be called patients and prefer to “work with energies” instead of the subconscious. Still, some of them truly manage to become “spiritual beings while staying grounded in their bodies,” as one of the many course slogans promises. So how does that work?

 
MEETING THE GURU

To be honest, after the tantric massage I didn’t really feel like attending a tantric course, so I decided to take a shortcut — straight to the teacher himself.

John Hawken was one of the first foreign tantra teachers in the Czech Republic. His name appears everywhere in the Czech tantric scene. Skydancing Tantra his personal brand shows up in the biographies of nearly everyone connected with this teaching here.

We meet in a hotel restaurant by Lake Mácha, where John is leading a week-long tantra course. The participants are apparently on their lunch break, and John a tanned, solidly built man in his sixties with thinning long hair is enjoying pancakes with ice cream and a café latte next to his younger blonde partner and translator. Up to this point, a typical guru. But that’s where it ends.

He seems calm, and if anything about him is unsettling, it’s that although I’m the one asking the questions, he doesn’t look at me. Most of the time, he answers while gazing lovingly at his partner, even though we’re speaking English and she hardly says a word. It’s as if he’s lecturing her and I’m just watching.

Much of what John tells me she must have heard many times before, yet she still listens intently. Apparently, the result of years of tantric practice. On the other hand, I can’t really blame him if I were in his position, I might not want to look at me either.

John studied English at Cambridge and drama in Bristol. Later he worked in Germany as a psychoanalyst and that’s when he encountered tantra. “Psychotherapy stops at sex. It doesn’t go beyond, it doesn’t explore further. So, because I am who I am, I wanted to explore what lies beyond. But therapy tends to tell people what’s right and wrong. Tantra tells people: Follow your heart. In tantra, the only authority is you. That attracted me. I realized that until then, I had tried to be a good son to my mother, then a good client to my therapist. But when I started practicing tantra, I didn’t have to play a role anymore. I’ve been doing it for twenty-one years, and I still feel I haven’t reached the end of what I can learn.”

He has been active in the Czech Republic since the 1990s, when he first started coming here to lead seminars. For the first few years, he says, he taught almost for free, and only later began earning a living from it. “Before that, I gave various lectures even for BMW employees,” he says, and I tend to believe him, if only because he doesn’t look like someone who cares much about luxury.

He simply started doing what he loves and he enjoys it. And in the Czech Republic, he found the ideal environment. His slightly specific approach to tantra, rooted in psychoanalysis, caught on quickly here, since people had no prior experience with either tantra or psychoanalysis.

From his work in Germany, Hawken learned how to speak well, explain clearly, and capture people’s interest. He already knew the basic tricks of tantric group work such as keeping the number of men and women balanced, because while women have no problem doing exercises with women, all-male circles never quite worked out.

Still, he ran into some regional peculiarities when he came to the Czech Republic.

“When I arrived, there was an enormous hunger for tantra. In England, it took forever to fill a group; in Germany, there were three tantra teachers on every corner. But in the Czech Republic, no one was teaching it. Czechs are incredibly open and curious, but I ran into a new problem. If a class started at ten and ended at two, everyone came at half past ten. It took time to explain that since they’re paying for the course, it’s in their own interest to show up on time. I had to transform the Czech sense of rebellion into a sense of appreciation. For example, it didn’t occur to anyone that they should clean up the room afterward, even though that affects the energy of the space.”

In other words: John Hawken taught Czech tantrikas to clean up after themselves. Not a small thing. But seriously, what does he actually try to teach them?

John looks at his partner and gives me this definition: “According to tantra, we create our own reality in every moment, by what we focus our attention and consciousness on. Most of the time, we create our reality unconsciously based on personal habits or inherited patterns from family or society. We try to teach people to create reality consciously, so they can become who they truly want to be.”

It’s a bit of a “guru moment,” so I point out that many other teachers from so-called esoteric fields say similar things. That makes John order another latte and explain that tantra isn’t about believing in something. “It’s a map of human existence available to you. You can explore it, use it, or ignore it. If it starts to make sense in love, sex, spirituality great. I don’t know if it’s true. But when I act as if it were true, things work better. It’s that simple.”

That sounds like a fairly rational approach, tailor-made for the Czech market, which, as mentioned, continues to expand its tantric offerings.

Moreover, the Czech Republic turns out to be an ideal place for it. People come to courses from nearby Germany and Slovakia, where similar attempts failed. In other words, while tantra has gone out of fashion in the West and will have a hard time penetrating the East because of religious taboos, here it’s slowly becoming mainstream.

There are about ten major tantra teachers active in the country, and new seminars keep appearing. Even Hawken is adding more and more events, and as he says, “I work pretty hard.”

He doesn’t mind the growing competition. But when I mention tantric massages, his mood changes. “A lot of people offer tantric massages, which are something completely different from our courses. They open a salon without really understanding tantra. I dislike those who sell some pseudo-tantric sexual service for three times what people pay me for a therapeutic consultation. I can’t stand it when tantra is used to exploit people who are simply sexually frustrated. But if someone can, for a fair price, learn something new about their sexuality or improve it, why not? I don’t offer tantric massages myself and I’m not interested in doing so. I did develop a system of tantric massage to train masseurs who truly want to teach tantra through touch not just use the word. But what interests me are the seminars. I feel that they help people live better lives.”

 
JUST TAKE YOUR PICK

So after spending several weeks trying (I still think unsuccessfully) to understand the phenomenon of tantra through massage parlors, online research, talking to teachers, participants, and watching a film I dare say only this:

It doesn’t seem dangerous. And even though it might not necessarily improve your life (in fact, it might even ruin your relationship if you go with your partner), it could still be quite pleasant if you’re the tantric type.

 
Would you like me to make a slightly refined version (stylistically smoother, magazine-ready, but still faithful to the original)? It could sound more natural for English readers while keeping the Czech humor and tone.