Touch and Go

Not looking or feeling your best, no matter what you try? Don’t despair. It could just be your aura needs a good rubdown. Enter Totok Aura, a therapy that combines acupressure with breathing techniques for a massage that goes beyond skin deep, Imogen Badgery-Parker writes.

It’s not hard to find a Totok Aura treatment in Jakarta these days, but it all began in a Javanese-style house in Kemang, in South Jakarta: Dian Kenanga Totok Aura.

The Dian Kenanga waiting room is a small wooden affair that gets crowded on weekends, as devotees pack in for an aura readjustment. Similarly crowded are the walls, where press cuttings jostle for space, testament to the therapy’s soaring popularity since it was launched by Totok Aura pioneer Salma Dian Priharjati in 2004. Dian’s business opened with two treatment beds, four employees and eight customers; now, there are more than 50 employees and 20 beds, treating up to a hundred patients a day.

It’s not you, it’s your chi

Totok Aura’s special twist is its emphasis on prana – chi, aura, bioenergy, life force, call it what you will. When diet, lifestyle and negative emotions unbalance this bioenergy, the theory goes, our health and appearance suffer. Lose the bad energy and get your chi flowing, and you’ll feel – and see – the benefits.

Totok Aura therapists are trained not only in acupressure, but also in special breathing techniques to keep their own bioenergy in tip-top condition. The idea is that during the massage, they use their breathing to draw out the client’s negative energy and replace it with their own positive energy.

Devotees rave about the results, and the list of reported health benefits is impressive: from relieving stress, insomnia, sinusitis and aches and pains, to correcting hormone and metabolic imbalances, treating impotency and infertility and helping weight loss. There are even reports of improved eyesight and relief from Parkinson’s disease.

But the real trump card? It is meant to make you look younger, which is probably why the most popular treatment is for the face (breast, feet and whole body massages are on offer too). After all, Totok Aura is ultimately pitched as a beauty therapy.

But, Dian says, health comes first.

“Sometimes you see someone who should be beautiful but isn’t – that’s her aura talking to us, telling us her body system isn’t working well,” she says.

“Or you can have someone who isn’t necessarily good looking, but if her energy is balanced, she appears beautiful.”

Prana queen

Dian Priharjati, elegant and meticulously groomed, is a modern female success story and wide-eyed advocate of her own medicine.

As a sickly child, she spurned doctors’ recommendations for more aerobic exercise and developed a strong interest in holistic therapies, immersing herself in the theory and practice of reiki, yoga and prana.

While working as a totok therapist in 2002, it occurred to her to take the massage technique one step further by integrating elements of prana. She patented her new therapy and set up shop, although people initially resisted it because it smacked of magic and the supernatural.

But those who believed say they have been rewarded for their faith – as was Dian, as the success of her business testifies.

Rub me, rub my aura

In many ways, a Totok Aura facial massage is much like any other.

I am lying on my back on a narrow bed, all but my shoulders and face covered by a thin sheet. A green curtain separates me from the other treatment bed in the small darkened room. I can hear a fountain, flute music, the soft murmur of female voices.

The therapist cleans my skin before beginning the massage. Her fingers move across every inch of my face and throat, now using gentle circular motions, now vigorous upward strokes, also massaging my arms, upper back, upper chest and scalp.

So far, so gentle.

Then the acupressure begins: she seeks out the point between my eyes and presses. Hard. Her fingers feel out and press down on points around my eye sockets, sinuses, cheekbones, jaw and skull.

Presumably, she is also using her much-practiced breathing techniques, drawing out my negative energy and replacing it with her own positive energy. I listen hard but I can barely hear her breathing. As for my bioenergy, it gives me no sign of whether it is coming or going, pulling itself together or lying all over the place.

After half an hour of vigorous massage, the therapist paints a mask on me and leaves me alone for 15 minutes, before coming back to clean me up.

In the balance

So was my bioenergy rebalanced? I certainly feel relaxed and my skin is smooth and soft, but the state of my chi? I couldn’t say. I look and feel much the same as always, if a little dewy and dazed.

But Totok Aura does not promise instant results. Dian recommends an initial course of 12 sessions, about once a week with no more than 10 days between each one – longer than that and your biorhythms will get out of whack again. Once the initial course is over, she recommends continuing the treatment at least once a fortnight or month.

Totok Aura does require a leap of faith, especially for those with no strong belief in its theories. Those who truly do believe beauty is more than skin deep could find their answers here. But to chi or not to chi – there are worse ways to pass an hour. And who knows – it might just work.

The Weekender visited Dian Kenanga Totok Aura twice, first as a paying customer, then as a guest during the interview.

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