Tantric Plunge

I never knew things could work this way, never imagined it. I guess I knew it in a way, I mean, I´d seen shit like this in obscure kung-fu movies, but I never thought I´d encounter it in Guatemala, much less in Todos Santos.

I first heard about The Healers because Gay Matt was giving free yoga clinics. I wasn´t interested in the yoga, but I was curious about the free Reiki treatments that he and Erin were giving.

I´d studied a little Reiki in college: the art of how to heal just by laying hands on someone, Jesus shit. Buddha shit. Who wouldn´t want to be Buddha? So I checked it out. It was hard stuff to get my mind around, much less accept. I take that back. I can totally get my mind around Reiki, the ideas are simple. I just have a really hard time accepting shit I can´t see or feel or at least read that some dude with a PhD thinks it´s worth my time. I trust those Phds, wherever they are.

So I made my way to the House of Healers. I´d heard from other travelers that it was just a bunch of hippies sitting around, smoking pot and doing yoga, but I didn´t know what to expect. A friend of mine who was also interested in Reiki got directions to the house, and Todos Santos being ass-small, 3 minutes later we were shaking hands with Erin and Gay Matt, making small conversation and appointments for the following day. Turned out Matt was part of the original species from Jupiter that inhabited Atlantis, as well as on of the the few witnesse s to the fall of Atlantis millennia later, all in past lives, of course. Not only was I getting free Reiki, I was getting free Reiki from an alien. Bonus.

Man I don´t know what this Reikki shit is, or if it´s real, whatever you consider that to be, but that shit feels good. Just feels...good. I´m an articulate son-of-a-bitch and I don´t know how else to explain it. The Reiki session I got from Gay Matt, lying in the shade of the outdoor veranda, was going really well until the left side of my brain started freaking out when Matt told me about the visions he´d seen while giving me Reiki. Then he introduced me to Dr. John.

The doctor was making use of his poor Spanish downstairs in the House of Healers with a room full of local Mayans and holding something that looked like a growth-stunted blow-dryer to a woman´s belly. He explained to me that these were sick people, who had come to him for help. Right then he was curing a women from a virus in her bloodstream with an Electromagnitc Pulser: the growth-stunted blow-dryer. “This can cure anything,” he explained, waving the blow-dryer around as if attacking any air-borne pathogens floating in the room. “I´ve cured people with malaria, AIDS, cancer. Tumors just go away.” Hell, a coupla weeks before, The Healers in Dr. John´s group had gone to Antigua to get tested for STDs (for reasons I´ll mention later), and Dr. John had wanted someone´s test to come up postitive for AIDS so he could heal them with the Electromagnetic Pulser thing. He went on to tell me that the miracle blow-dryer has been outlawed in the U.S. under pressure from powerful pharmaceutical companies that know they´ll be out of business if this thing gets released.

Dr. John explained that people here know him as “Dr. Gato”: Dr. Cat, for some reason I couldn´t figure out until he started making purring noises and laughing with the Mayan woman who had the blow-dryer back on her belly. When he finished with her he took me into the back room. We talked for a bit and I felt slightly less sketched-out by this shady character when he told me he had a Masters in psychology, was a licensed chiropractor and had studied Tropical Medicine for three years. Then he read my tarot and did kinetics tests with crystals and hugged me while speaking in tongues: “Samma lanna koofa janana,” Dr. Cat told me.

Over the next couple months I spent enough time with Dr. John and his House of Healers to get to know them a bit, and I never knew things could work this way, never imagined it: Gay Matt and Erin are two of Dr. John´s followers. Dr. John´s been in Guatemala for years, holding ceremonies, healing his followers and doing clinics to give medicine out to locals. Right now he´s just got a couple followers, but other times he´s had 15 or 20 people living with him, following him as he travels the country, taking classes with him and having lots of Tantric Sex.

Yes, they have lots of Tantric Sex, or “Sex Magic” as Dr. John sometimes calls it, which doesn´t necessarily include penetration or even oral-sex. From what I gather, the idea is that there´s something very powerful about the moment of orgasm and in that instant, the possibility briefly opens to make profound life changes.

Alright guys, I just want to take a minute to defend Dr. Gato. The guy is out there, that´s for sure, and he´s got a lot of fucking weird beliefs. I mean shit, the guy thinks he can communicate with aliens (other than Gay Matt). But hold off for just a second on completely dismissing the guy because I can´t because well…

Listen: about a month ago I went to Antigua to take a course and learn how to give Reiki. The guy who taught it was awesome: a Guatemalan named Luis, so wise and soft-spoken and the course was fantastic and its one of those things I only wish I could realy make a part of my life. The guy travels around the U.S. and Europe teaching and giving Reiki. At the end of the course, Luis told us how he´d first been exposed to Reiki. Four years ago, he was homeless and addicted to heroine. He met Dr. John and became one of his followers (and had lots of Tantric Sex with him, I´m sure, although he didn´t mention it). Dr. John taught him Reiki and changed his life around.

Two hours ago I was sitting in my kitchen talking with Alex, a level-headed all-around cool Scottish dude. Alex had one normal and one seriously shrunken testical: we´re talking pea-size. That and a severe case of Paraniod Schizophrenia with whip cream and a maraschino cherry to top it off. Yes Alex had problems when he started his Arizona-to-South-America-over-land trip 6 years ago. But he never made it past Guatemala after meeting Dr. John. In the end, he spent a year studyding with the doctor and doing lots of Tantric Sex. His testicals are now both normal-sized and his schizophrenia hasn´t come back since.

In the age of Spam emails telling me I can reverse hair loss, enlarge my penis, extend my life and have live internet-sex with Jeniffer all at the same time I´m skeptical of everything. And you better believe I´m skeptical of Dr. John. But theres something going on that my western upbrining can´t explain, and I can´t help being curious.

So what do you say…should I take the Tantric plunge?