How to describe tantric massage? It’s beyond feeling; beyond language. It’s bliss, like nothing else, and that’s only just the beginning.
Five thousand years in the making, with earliest antecedents in the terracotta statues of the Indus Valley, tantra – which incorporates tantric massage – starts to coalesce into a recognisable tradition around the sixth century CE. Conceived as a practice that borrows and weaves together other extant practices (‘tantra’ is Sanskrit for ‘weave’), tantra has always been iconoclastic and gonzo (evolution).
As my body relaxes into weightlessness, I see coruscating pools of light sliding over my fingers, sheathing my hands and arms in purple, blue, and magenta — silent fireworks in slow motion. I feel myself taking you in, your energy becoming mine.
From the get-go, tantra proves itself to be an adept shapeshifter, a true chameleon when it comes to seamless improvisation. It magpies from pre-Vedic traditions at will; plays fast and loose with its own exploratory, often inconsistent system of bindu, nadis, and chakra; and then propels itself along the Silk Road, cross-fertilising, first with Buddhism in India, and then, once seeded there, with Taoism in China. Nor does its evolution and propagation ever stop. Moving westwards in more recent times, revisionist, neo-tantric practices have alternately absorbed countercultural ideas of free love; leant into the language of post-Freudian psychodynamics; and riffed off emergent, clinical understanding of the parasympathetic nervous system and new relational neurobiology.
My consciousness drifts as a primordial pulse. I have forgotten how to move, or speak, or open my eyes. I can’t even tell where my body ends and where her body begins. This is not ecstasy; it is something quieter, rarer, harder to reach, harder still to sustain: it is palpable; it is nothing.
For would-be practitioners of tantric massage, there’s a lot to take in, and there’s any number of books, online courses, and luxury retreats, all vying for attention, all eager to present as definitive. But what makes good conversion rates for self-styled gurus also belies tantra’s provisional and fundamentally intuitive nature. Specifics may be an easy sell, but tantra itself has always been refreshingly unconcerned when it comes to specifics. Even something as foundational as the number of chakra seems immaterial (Tula-tantra says three; Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra says twelve). Its light-touch rituals, including its now-ubiquitous ‘om’ chant, remain
intentionally non-specific and open-ended, designed to hot-wire a receptive state of presence and intentionality rather than deliberately inculcate a fixed and specific ideology, or system of belief.
For all its contemporary bolt-ons, tantra, on close inspection, continues to re-emerge as a defiantly pragmatic practice of effect. The rudimentary, practical mechanics of how tantric massage is given matter far, far less than the intentionality with which it is given; where, ultimately, you want it to take you; and who you choose to accompany you on that journey.
I hang in the air, cradling his electric softness, utterly surrendered. In our merging I melt to nothing, yet I have never felt stronger, more expansive, more authentic — as if the infinity of all of space has opened before me.
Tantra quickly cuts down any attempt at formal instruction to size, turning it from an authoritative protocol to an inspo style guide. It soon becomes evident that the giver of tantric massage (called the ‘Sacred Courtesan’ in the early Kaulajñānanirṇaya) isn’t any woman who deliberately acquires knowledge of tantra. She is, and always has been, the rarest of women – radically independent, fully poised in the present, uninhibited and without shame – who instinctively knows tantra, long before she ever hears the word.
This place, this sanctuary she’s made, is so perfect, so ineffably peaceful that I could overflow. Here, in this little room, everything unfurls, everything connects. I breathe her in. I meld with her. Every cell in my body sings for her.
What, then, is tantric massage precisely? It’s hard to say with any certainty, given that a tantric massage is always improvised, adapted on the fly, and receptive to change as the session evolves. It’s perhaps easier to say what it is not. Tantric massage is not sex, making it an easy choice for those in committed, monogamous relationships, those who uphold relatively conservative religious or social values, or shy singletons touch-starved in the desert. And tantric massage is slow, intentional, respectful and nothing you’ll be uncomfortable with, though you may wish to say, ahead of time, if tantra’s lingam massage is something you have questions or reservations about.
An often unspoken, tacit narrative binds a tantric massage session together, preventing it from losing cohesion entirely. Tantra proposes a complex lattice of unseen, spiritual energy channels, called nadis, that correspond to the physical body, and gather to form multiple chakras, which run up the spine, from the pelvic bone to the crown of one’s head. Limiting thought, including self-doubt, shame, trauma, and the challenges of life can block these chakras. With an intuited alchemy of ritual, breath, essential oils, and full-body intimate touch, tantric massage seeks to unblock these chakras, allowing Kundalini, that is to say, energy stored in the first
chakra at the base of the spine, to pass uninterrupted to the final chakra at the crown of one’s head. The result is a profound spiritual liberation, often called enlightenment or nirvana.
This is what it means to live.
Massage and arousal of the lingam, the site of bindu, a supremely powerful creative force and a vital key to spiritual awakening, acts as an essential catalyst in this process, agitating and supercharging the nadis before the kundalini begins its rightful but delayed journey. While intensely protracted orgasm can and often does unexpectedly occur, it’s important to remember that tantric massage always aims for spiritual connection, rather than physical release.
Central to tantra’s internal logic is the assumption that the human body operates as the universe in microcosm. By that same token, the receiver and giver of tantric massage come to respectively embody and symbolise the oppositional forces that underpin all of creation. The receiver becomes the pure, unmoving consciousness of Shiva, the Divine Masculine, while the giver becomes the life-giving Divine Feminine figure of Shakti who, alone, has the ability to activate Shiva. If the receiver of tantric massage is the limitless force of the ocean, the giver is the wave that gives that force its ultimate expression. If he is the theatre stage, she is the dancer that brings him to life.
For those unfamiliar with tantra, this spiritual apparatus will almost certainly come across as disproportionate and overblown, overly elaborate, unnecessarily fantastical. If you decide, nevertheless, that tantric massage is something you might try, just go with it – you’ll be surprised.
Know, when you meet, that you come together in a sacred space; that, freshly showered and naked, your bodies are no longer simply corporeal bodies of dust but eternal bodies of the spirit also; and that, when you lie down to be touched, she doesn’t just attend to a flawed and fragile human, but attends to a vessel of the divine, anoints the awesome lion-limbs and face of a god.