You may be right on all that, I would just say the following:

When I say “true tantrikas”, that’s of course a shortcut here for “people who have (or at least try to have) presence and love in the massage”. Tantra massage incorporates elements of technique, but it is not a technique. Presence and love are essential; and if these are present, then the problem of difficult to handle emotions should not arise. Personally I never had that problem when giving massage. That said, there are clearly qualitative elements at work. The spiritual condition of the giver is fundamental to the quality of the experience. I think any serious institute will only work with people whose spiritual condition is known to them and who have done the necessary work on themselves; it’s no diffferent to psychotherapy in that sense.

My suggestion is to experiment in tantra communities with new scripts and to document them, rather than taking on authority what Kramer did in the 1980s (which he may well not consider himself as authoritative, I agree with you – I don’t know why his prescriptions have become so widespread). As I have very limited experience with giving lingam massage, I cannot compare but only speak from my own experience and feelings. For me it is clearly important to work on the perineum, groin and scrotum in order to build a quantity of sexual energy; connecting the lingam to the rest of the pelvis is also important. Otherwise you have to go over much too quickly to the big draw, with too little energy in the pelvis. By breathing deeply and rocking the pelvis, the receiver can no doubt help himself with this but manual stimulation would be better, and indispensable for the neophyte with a tendency to premature ejaculation. I suspect this applies also though to all the other body types.

I didn’t chance upon a real tantrika, it was a personal connection. For sure though the masseuse will modulate what she gives in function of what the receiver is capable of receiving and if one doesn’t start out with a compatible understanding of the massage then it will remain on a more basic level. This is OK, I am not against it, but what I am interested in is of course to explore the higher realms. That said, I suppose that masseuses must often encounter premature ejaculation with “less demanding” clients too and are not usually equipped to recognize and work around it.

That’s why it’s called a ‘lingam’ massage

So as you wrote yourself, the tantric approach would be a “tantra+lingam massage” or as I’ve seen advertised: ‘tantra massage incorporating a lingam massage’.

I believe Joseph Kramer moved on to offer a more comprehensive ‘bodywork’, but the part of his work cited in the field of tantra massage is often simply the penis massage techniques that he pioneered.

The German tantra massage association is actually an association of ‘commercial’ providers of a service, who are attempting to distance themselves from the less serious red light providers who are just exploiting the word ‘tantra’ (who you report to be prevalent in Brussels). So ‘their’ ritual has to a) remain commercially viable and b) be performed by people who are not necessarily ‘true tantrikas’.

Bearing that in mind, do you have any suggestions how they could include the ‘missing’ elements?

That would then leave the ‘true tantrikas’ and the real therapists to develop their own respective forms of tantra massage and offer them to the world in an appropriate way.

Of course, when you chance upon a real tantrika within the ‘commercial’ realm as you did in the experience described in your other post – lucky you! It’s also a complement to you, showing how far you are on the path, since a real tantrika would have opened the doors less wide to someone less capable of looking through them.

It’s of course elliptic which is in the nature of a blog. From my experience of these things, the sequence which goes back to Kramer does not vary much in its essentials from one school to another. It was not my purpose to set out what it is in detail, but let’s say it is very much focused on the shaft itself.

As for your “wider issue”, you are talking about commercial tantra massage which is addressed to all comers, whereas I am talking about spiritual/therapeutic massage (these words being two aspects of the same thing). That a true tantrika would be unable to deal with the emotions generated by the massage is simply impossible; this is what the massage is really about (I have dealt with this issue in a previous post, see http://aruhea.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/will-the-real-me-please-stand-up/ ).

My comments were rather about some aspects that I believe are missing from the ritual with which I am familiar (as practised for example within the German tantra massage association). This being indeed rather ritualistic in nature, it is not, in my experience, adapted to include the kind of elements I am suggesting may be missing.

That we should endeavor to integrate body psychotherapy with tantra massage is probably a hypothesis at this stage, but I think it is one that makes sense on the basis of the principles supposed to underlie both.

As well as these interesting details, the wider issue is: Is anyone really integrating tantra massage and body psychotherapy? A few masseuses I talked to recounted experiences where emotions came up in their clients that they couldn’t deal with and therefore the masseuses are more likely to ‘hold back’ in future to avoid such uncomfortable situations. Which is correct, since the clients didn’t come for therapy.

The issue of adapting the massage to the person in front of me (whether using character types or any other typology) is a non-issue. Every good masseuse does that according to her ability. Period.

Moses

Still I would not put your three examples in this category.

(1) means I need to find some way to bypass the insecurity generated in my ego by the fact of my being subject to stochastic processes;

(2) appears to be an attempted definition of the term “reality” as being undefinable outside subjective experience

(3) means I would like you to join my religion, possibly by appealing to your low sense of self-worth

as such, I fail to see any truth in these statements, of any kind at all…