On the "tradition" of Tantra Massage (OR Eva says it best)
When we first started our retreat “TANTRA WITH A PINCH OF SALT”, or >> TWAPOS for short, and put it up on Facebook (because back then, the way to announce you’d started something was to create a Facebook event), a neighbour slipped into my DMs saying:
“You know this isn’t real tantra, don’t you?”
This neighbour was an Osho sannyasin. She still did his >>Dynamic Meditation in the mornings in our block of flats in Prenzlauer Berg. If you haven’t tried it, it really is an experience, especially if you have banging speakers and absolutely no neighbours.
I would have thought it obvious that our TWAPOS offering is not trying to be The Real Tantra: the clue is in the name - Tantra With A Pinch Of Salt. But evidently pinches of salt are not enough. We considered modernising the idiom and changing it to ‘a punch’ but have not gone that far, yet.
We find it enough of a worthwhile topic to dedicate one evening every retreat to a presentation specifically on these questions: what is The Real Tantra? (Can’t resist a link in >>here.) Is there one? What is the tradition of tantra massage? Where does it actually come from? And therefore, how best to respectfully engage with “it” whilst upholding a queer, contemporary, somatic approach which respectfully engages with us and with you?
Without getting lost in the details and the history, which is tackled expertly and far more eloquently in the articles I link at the end of this text and interactively covered in our discussions at the retreat, here are some key points to note. Tantra implies a number of things which we like: slow, conscious, holistic, ritualistic, sexual, spiritual. It implies them all and more, without saying any of them or only one. Why is this even needed? Eva Hanson puts its best: “The "tantra" in tantra massage is an attempt to underpin a practice for which there were no role models and no words in our culture – a culture where spirituality had been thought of for so long without lusts and covetousness, where idleness and hedonism were frowned upon – and which therefore knew no sexual arts.” Uh! Glorious!
Tantra is also not just one thing. It is itself >>diverse, recorded in a multiplicity of texts in ancient languages like Sanskrit, some translated, many not, many translated at the turn of the 20th Century by conservative or bigoted or racist or all-of-the-above-academics who heavily edited according to what they and their patrons found useful or acceptable or appropriate at the time. There is no one book, as we Judeo-Christians might be used to, and therein lies both a complexity, and a freedom, this lack of definition leading to an openness of interpretation and a space in which to interpret one’s own relationship to this flavour of spirituality.
But let us try to get more specific, just for fun. To go deeper down the rabbit hole, some other neighbour might have said:
“You know, this isn’t real neo-tantra.”
Because Neo-Tantra funnily enough, is also The Real Tantra my Facebook neighbour was referring to - Osho, Agama, Margot Anand, Daniel Odier (some more rabbit holes for your google/youtube needs) are all teaching Neo-Tantra: modern, often Western adaptations of traditional Tantra (whatever that is), typically emphasizing sexuality, personal empowerment, and spiritual awakening. But is Neo-Tantra The Real Tantra? Now I get to quote Julio: “The early erotic-occult variants of Tantra can be described as a sexualization of rituals, Neo-Tantra would then be the opposite: the ritualization of sex.”
Additionally, all this hullabaloo about what’s Real and what’s Not (ironic in a discourse about a tradition or path where reality is a play of energy and consciousness, but I’ll leave that thread for now) misses a point, because whilst we use ‘the T word’, we are not actually aiming to find ‘The Truth’ behind ‘the T word’. We are interested in what happens to a body, or to two, or three, when tantra massage is in the room. We are interested in finding out what your tantra massage looks like, what you do with bodies and oil and permission to touch or to be touched everywhere and nothing being left out. We do use ‘the T word’ in the title and we are very open to discussion about ‘the T word’ and again, Eva says it best: “Tantra massage irritates and polarizes for a reason. In my eyes, it is precisely these reasons that make the discourse about it so interesting.” We’d love to engage with you about it too. How?
There are some great articles already written about this online. Please read >>this from Eva Hanson, and >>the article she links by Julio Lambing.
OTHER RESOURCES TO READ:
David White: Kiss of the Yogini
Margot Anand: The Art of Sexual Ecstasy
Barbara Carrellas: Urban Tantra
Christopher Wallis: Tantra Illuminated