Tantra and Tantric Massages in Reflex

Tantric massages became the subject of interest for a Reflex magazine journalist, who also tried a tantric massage with us incognito :-). In the article from March 2011, he brings you his impressions, experiences, and photographs from our studio. In the second part of the article, he then describes his interview with John Hawken on the topic of tantra and tantric massages in the Czech Republic from the perspective of an English tantra guru who has been active in the Czech Republic for more than 10 years. The author also tries to find out why tantric massages are actually so popular among Czechs.

Text version

Czechs Discover Tantra

SEX AND SPIRITUALITY IN ONE PACKAGE

Semi-naked masseuses in tantric studios and pragmatic teachers who try to improve your life during weekend seminars. All of this we discovered while trying to find out why Czechs have fallen in love with tantra.
“When it comes to tantra, prepare for one thing – someone will be touching you all the time.”

“AN ORGASM MAY OR MAY NOT HAPPEN,”

says a sympathetic young woman with a non-Prague accent at the end of a fairly extensive lecture about what her services involve. Given that we are in Žižkov, that the woman has the mentioned accent, and that the discussion revolves around sex, one might think that this is how things must work in one of the many private apartments scattered around this Prague district and staffed with prostitutes of varying degrees of physical acceptability.

In an ordinary Žižkov private apartment, a Buddha figurine stares at you from every empty shelf, Indian mythological scenes cover the walls, and there are so many incense sticks that they could have easily hidden a corpse there for two months and you would not have known. And the whole place is rather nobly called the Integrity Center, so you get the feeling that this cannot be about anything as banal as sex.

TAO IN ŽIŽKOV

But if this is about sex, it is certainly not taken lightly. Before the procedure itself, in addition to the fantastically zen-like sentence at the beginning of this article, you are given further instructions – for example, that you should breathe deeply and try to enjoy the whole thing as much as possible. Which is quite doable, especially if we take into account the fact that the masseuse then massages you partially naked. The most exciting fact about the entire massage is thus actually nothing more than the feeling that sexual arousal could occur.

In order to eliminate any element of vulgarity and preserve the emphasis on all those “energetic experiences” together with the maximum preservation of exoticism (while it is impossible to deny the fact that outside the window is Žižkov), the female and male genitals are consistently referred to here by their Sanskrit names, yoni and lingam.

“Tantric massage combines elements of ancient tantric-taoist techniques and classical massage with the atmosphere of a sensual, intimate ritual that sets your energy in motion and fills you with excitement and tenderness,” claim the website of the mentioned center.

I am not sure whether I was filled with excitement and tenderness, but I am absolutely sure that at one point I fell asleep for several minutes. I therefore will not tell you whether I significantly improved my spirituality, became aware of my energetic body, connected with my inner self, experienced perfect harmony, or many other things that tantric massages promise. But it would be a mistake to expect anything like that from me – a person who fell asleep in a flotation tank as well as during holotropic breathing, remained stubbornly silent when testing psychoanalysis, and could not be hypnotized even on the third attempt.

On the other hand, I am sure that it was not a bad massage, and I consider the fact that you are massaged with towels and oils to be quite pleasant and, unfortunately, little used under normal Czech conditions. You will also appreciate details such as receiving fruit, and overall you feel somewhat pleasantly… ancient Roman. Except for the Buddhas around, of course. And that there is a possibility of giving the whole thing a certain sexual dimension using a trick known by most Asian masseuses as “oil massage”? That is up to you. In any case, all those Buddhas and Indian art on the walls give you at least the feeling that you are not part of the sex business here. And quite possibly not even of conventional morality.

And as it seems, this is exactly what people like. The center will soon be moving to larger premises in a better part of Prague, as the number of people interested in similar experiences is increasing. The offer even includes things such as “tantric massages for companies,” which, when I look at the colleague sitting opposite me at work, I definitely do not want to imagine and strongly recommend that you do not imagine it either. And above all – women and couples are increasingly among the clients.

The opposite pole of the tantric business is also thriving – seminars organized on weekends as well as throughout entire weeks across the country. Czechs have simply fallen in love with tantra.

WE LOVE TANTRA

When you think about it, in a sexually quite liberal Czech society, unbound by religious dogmas yet craving all kinds of mystical and esoteric experiences, it could hardly have turned out otherwise. Tantra is simply tailor-made for Czechs. Even though we should probably say that what is today in most cases considered tantra is a classic Western distillation of Hindu esotericism, too complicated to explain its essence here. A distillation that was filtered through the American sexual revolution of the late 1960s and has since been offered in many flavors across the Western hemisphere to all those overworked people who have earned enough money to be able to spend some of it on what they consider their own spiritual development. But it seems that nobody minds.

People do not engage in tantra in order to study something, but to learn something about themselves. This is also evidenced by the recently released documentary Tantra by Benjamin Tuček, which records both participants and teachers of tantric courses.

“Filming took us a year, and for quite a long time we had to get through a barrier of distrust, but eventually people opened up to us, and in the end they were satisfied with the film just as we were,” says Tuček, who at the time of our interview already had his first sold-out screenings in art cinemas behind him, followed by long discussions between viewers and the film’s protagonists.

If you are not planning to see the film, you should know that there is no intercourse in it and naked people do not run around the screen for an hour. There are only a few more intimate scenes, mostly in a meaningful context. The rest of the time, people listen to lectures or perform various physical exercises, said to be important for understanding the philosophy of tantra, which may sometimes appear quite comical to the viewer. Nevertheless, Tuček, who has never practiced tantra himself and does not plan to, feels only sympathy for the people in his film. “They are trying to learn something about themselves, and in my opinion there is nothing wrong with that. During the year and a half that we were filming the documentary Tantra, I did not meet anyone who had a distinctly negative experience. Sure, many people tried it, it did not interest them, they packed up and went home. We talked to them as well, but all of them told us that they actually could not say anything bad about it – it just simply was not for them.”

Tuček claims that he primarily wanted to show that tantra does not have to be primarily about sex and that people who engage in it are not perverts. “I say it openly – I never saw anyone having sex there or anything like that.” Nevertheless, from Tuček’s film, tantric courses appear somewhat like a form of therapy. Only the people who attend them do not want to be called patients and are very happy to work with chakras instead of the subconscious. Still, some of them really manage to become “a spiritual being while being in the body, with their feet on the ground,” as the subtitle of one of many tantric seminars promises. How do they do it?

MEETING THE GURU

To be honest, after undergoing a tantric massage, I no longer really felt like undergoing a tantric course as well, so like every proper Czech, I decided to take a shortcut. I went straight to meet the teacher privately.

John Hawken was one of the first foreign tantra teachers in the Czech Republic. You will come across his traces in the local tantra world at every step. Skydancing Tantra, which is something like his personal brand, appears in the biographies of most people I encountered in connection with this teaching in the Czech Republic.

We meet in a hotel restaurant by Lake Mácha, in whose surroundings John is currently leading a week-long tantra course. The participants are said to be somewhere nearby on their lunch break, and John, a tanned, sturdier man with longer thinning hair on the threshold of his sixties, is contentedly enjoying a pancake with ice cream and a café latté next to his blonde, younger partner and translator. Up to this point, a typical guru. But that is where it ends.

He appears calm, and if there is anything unsettling about his behavior, it is only that although I am the one asking the questions, he does not look at me and spends most of the time answering while gazing rather affectionately at his partner, even though we are both speaking English and she intervenes in the conversation only minimally. It is as if he were giving her a lecture and I were the audience.

John studied English at Cambridge and drama in Bristol, and after some time began working as a psychoanalyst in Germany. And it was during that time that he encountered tantra. “Psychotherapy ends with sex. It goes no further, it does not explore beyond that. So I, because I am who I am, wanted to explore what comes next. But therapy tends to tell people what is right and what is wrong. Whereas tantra tells people: follow your heart. The only authority in tantra is yourself. That attracted me. I realized that until then I had tried to be a good son for my mother, then a good client for my therapist, but in practicing tantra I suddenly did not have to pretend anything or fulfill other people’s expectations. I have been doing this for twenty-one years, and I feel that I still have not reached the end of what I can learn.”

He has been active in the Czech Republic since the 1990s, when he began traveling here to give seminars. According to his own words, in the early years he taught more or less for free, and as he himself says, he only really began to make a living from teaching tantra in recent years. “Before that, I supplemented my income with various lectures, for example for BMW employees,” he says, and I tend to believe him simply because he does not look like someone who would strongly crave luxury. It seems rather that he has finally started doing what he wants to do, and he clearly enjoys it. And in the Czech Republic, he found the ideal space for it.

His somewhat specific approach to tantra, which is based on psychoanalysis, caught on here relatively quickly, since no one here had experience with either tantra or psychoanalysis, and Hawken’s work during therapies in Germany taught him how to speak well, explain things, and above all, arouse the interest of listeners. He already knew all the tricks of tantric groups, such as the need to strictly maintain a balanced number of men and women, because while women generally have no problem doing various exercises only with women, men’s circles have not caught on anywhere particularly well. Still, upon arriving in the Czech Republic, he immediately encountered certain regional peculiarities.

“When I arrived, there was an enormous hunger for tantra. In England, it took a long time to fill any group at all; in Germany, there were three tantra teachers on every corner; but in the Czech Republic, nobody was teaching it. Czechs are extremely open and curious, but I encountered another problem here that I had not known before. If the start was at ten and the end at two, everyone arrived at half past ten. It was quite a problem to explain to people that if they are already paying for courses, it is in their interest to arrive on time, because it is primarily their time. I had to change people’s consciousness from rebellion to appreciation. For example, it did not occur to anyone that the room where the teaching took place should be cleaned, even though it negatively affected its energy.”

In other words: John Hawken taught Czech tantrics to clean up after themselves. Which is not a small thing. But seriously – what is it that he is actually trying to teach them?

John fixes his eyes on his partner and gives me the following definition: “According to tantra, we create our own reality in every moment by where and on what we focus our attention and our consciousness. Most of the time, we create our reality unconsciously – based on personal habits or inherited patterns of behavior, for example from family or society. We try to teach people to approach the creation of reality consciously, and thus become what they want to be.” I am afraid we are getting too close to a guru moment, so I object that similar definitions are produced by teachers of many other fields, often somewhat disdainfully labeled as esoteric. Which prompts John to order another latté and explain to me that tantra is not about believing in something. “It is a map of human existence that is available to you. You can explore it, you can use it, but you can just as well leave it alone. And if it starts to make sense to you – whether in love, in sex, or in spirituality – all the better. Even I do not know if it is true. But if I behave as if it were true, it works better. It is that simple.”

That strikes me as a fairly reasonable approach, with a factual rationality seemingly tailor-made for the Czech market. A market that, as already mentioned, continues to expand the offer of everything that contains the word tantra. Moreover, it turns out that the Czech Republic is in some ways ideal. People come here for tantric courses from nearby parts of Germany and from Slovakia, where attempts at tantric seminars ended in failure. In other words, while in the West tantra has already gone out of fashion and in the East closest to us it will penetrate with difficulty and in secrecy due to religious and other prejudices, here it is slowly becoming a common mainstream affair. There are about ten more significant tantra teachers active here, and the number of seminars is growing. Hawken himself is adding more and more events, and as he says, “works quite hard.” The growing competition in the field does not bother him. But when I remind him of tantric massages, he immediately recalls what bothers him. “A lot of people do tantric massages, which is a completely different matter from our courses. They open a massage salon without knowing anything about tantra or without having studied it in depth. I am bothered by people who offer some kind of pseudo-tantric sexual service for three times as much as people pay me for a therapeutic consultation… I hate it when tantra is used to rip off people who are simply sexually frustrated or unfulfilled. But if for a fair price they can learn something new about their sexuality or improve it, why not? In any case, I do not offer tantric massages and I have no interest in doing so. I have developed a system of tantric massages that I teach to masseurs who want to truly teach tantra through massage rather than just use the word, but I am interested in tantric seminars – and I experience that they help people live better lives.”

JUST CHOOSE

So after several weeks of trying (and I still think unsuccessfully) to understand the essence of the phenomenon of tantra in massage salons – by studying internet links, debating with a teacher, participants of courses, and watching a film – I dare say just one thing: It does not seem dangerous to me. And even though it may not necessarily improve your life (on the contrary, nowhere is it written that if you go to a massage salon with your girlfriend or wife it will not disrupt your relationship), it could still be quite pleasant for you, if you are a tantric type.