Overnight tantra massage in Amsterdam, from dusk until the light returns

Nothing in the older tantric material prescribes eight hours of massage, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. What the overnight borrows is broader and much older than any bodywork: the idea of the night as a single span to be kept whole, familiar from vigils, from festival nights and from long evening rites in many cultures, where the dark hours were held as one continuous time rather than a tally of separate ones. Tantric practice has its own long associations with night-time observance and with the hours before dawn, and the European schools that adapted it to oil massage kept a fondness for sessions that were never boxed in by an appointment book. The fixed eight-hour booking is a far more recent and practical invention, a way of pricing time generously enough that nobody in the room has any reason to think about the clock.

Across the night the technique is the same as in any session, contact that is not broken, weight given through the forearms, pace taken from the breath, but it is spread out very differently. The evening session is the longest and fullest, often two hours or more, and it closes by tapering rather than stopping. What follows is less an interval than a continuation at a lower level: a hand resting on your back as you drift off, a blanket drawn up, the lamp turned down another notch. If you wake in the dark, a slow passage can begin again from wherever the body happens to be, with no opening sequence, because the settling was done hours earlier and does not need repeating. Towards morning the work is at its lightest, long feathered strokes and still holds that return the body to waking by degrees. Oil is used sparingly after the first session so that sleep stays comfortable, and fresh towels are kept within reach all night. Your therapist judges when to work and when to let you rest, and she does not wake you to begin anything unless you asked her to.

Most overnights begin in the late evening, although the hour is entirely yours to set. Your therapist arrives in ordinary clothes with everything the night will need, oil, towels and fresh linen, and spends the first little while shaping the room: curtains drawn, lights brought low, the temperature nudged upward, since a body lying still for hours cools faster than one that is moving. Payment is settled at this point, so the rest of the night carries no business at all. The first session is long and unhurried, paced exactly as any evening tantra booking would be. Afterwards there is quiet, conversation if you want it and silence if you would rather, and then sleep. The middle of the night is left open, shaped by whether you wake and by what you ask for when you do. Morning comes without an alarm set by anyone but you, with a slower, lighter passage of touch if you would like one before the day starts, and she leaves once you are properly awake, quietly and in no hurry to be gone.

It suits someone who has booked three hours before and felt the ending come too early, and anyone for whom the finest part of a tantra session is the still hour afterwards that usually has to be spent alone. It suits a last night in the city before a morning flight, a first night after a long-haul landing when the body clock is still somewhere over the ocean, and any evening meant to be marked rather than merely filled. It suits people who fall asleep easily, though many who normally sleep lightly find rest comes readily after a long slow session. It does not suit a night that already has something else in it, a dinner reservation or a late call, since the whole point is that nothing competes with the time. For two therapists across a night, the arrangement is quoted on enquiry rather than taken from this rate.

Sleep that arrives without effort and a morning that starts slowly, which for many travellers is the rarest thing a hotel room ever gives them. The calm of the evening session is not cut short by a departure, so it has the whole night to settle, and most people say they are still carrying it well into the following afternoon.