I have often wondered over my past twenty odd years of sharing Tantra, why it is called Tantric massage.
This idea that most people have that they will experience something similar to body massage with the addition of sensual stimulation, keeps tantra firmly in a place that is kept hush-hush at the dinner party instead of something to talk about as one of the most pivotal moments of one’s life.
When receiving an ordinary massage, we enter the room maybe tense, aching limbs, a need to let go of life’s tension and although we leave that very same room calmer then when we arrived, we are unchanged.
When receiving Tantric massage, this is not possible.
We leave the room somehow different.
We cannot find the words that will offer justice to the profound experience we have just moved through and that in truth we have been subtly altered.
We are not the same person we were when we arrived.
I wonder if we call it Tantric massage, to keep it “seedy and small?”
Something we desire and simultaneously fear, for when we are touched and seen, our body honoured and heard… When we have been met with love, held in sacred embrace, we know we will have no choice but to surrender to such divine loving power.
Massage keeps us at a safe distance.
Tantra envelopes us and to it we willingly melt and surrender.
So what shall we call it, this healing touch that offers an ancient pathway to our true self?
How do we express the reverence it is worthy of?
How do we inspires others at the dinner party, and feel we can speak of freely of an experience of our own transcendence and liberation.
Maybe we are a long way off, when there is still much taboo around real conversations of sex.
Maybe for now until we feel we can hold our head high when we speak of such things, rather than lower our eyes to the floor and whisper, this Sacred Touch has to stay in the category of massage.
But I will invite you to pause.
Take a moment to notice the unease or the excitement, when considering tantra.
What is the unease?
What does tantra stir up for you?
Is there fear?
Shame?
Disapproval?
Or curiosity?
A yearning to know, be, feeL more …
Alive.
