Beyond Tantra: Healing Through Taoist Sacred Sex (4 page)

That evening proved to be different, however. I was licking and teasing away as Mieke was lying on her back, listening to the gentle Nepalese music playing and visualising Sexual Energy flowing through her body. I was trying to concentrate and stay focused on the task at hand. All of a sudden, Mieke’s entire body convulsed and I saw a bright flash of white light inside my head.

‘What was
that
?’ I asked, reeling slightly.

‘I was just trying to get my Qi to connect in a loop as the book says I should,’

she said. ‘I think I just did it!’

Very soon afterwards, Mieke’s periods started getting shorter and less heavy.

Nine months later, she was back to normal and now, seven years later, she is completely healed and has more sexual energy and life-force then many women thirty years younger than her. She also looks ten years younger than her age.

Our relationship has completely transformed for the better and I, too, am in much better physical and mental shape. To top it all off, the sex with Mieke is incredible!

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Ancient Traditions:

New Understandings

The truth often sounds paradoxical.

—Lao Tzu

After so much research and reading, it was inevitable that we would start talking to our friends and family about what we had discovered. I soon found that I had to explain terms such as Sacred Sex, Taoism, Dual Cultivation, Tantra and Qi as these are not terms with which most people in the West are familiar. So before going into what I distilled from the large amount of (at times, conflicting) information I found during my research, I’d like go through some basic background definitions.

Sacred Sex

Sacred Sex is a fairly new term to describe practices that use sexual energy for healing and spiritual development. This energy can be created internally in one person as well as being generated between two (or more) people. Many cultures around the world have developed Sacred Sex practices, although few of them are well documented or, at least, any documents that may once have existed are no longer available. The Judaeo-Christian, Western civilization appears either to have completely lost or actively rooted out and suppressed any such tradition it may once have had.

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Beyond Tantra – Healing Through Taoist Sacred Sex The first question many people ask me when I talk to them about Sacred Sex is ‘how does the connection between Sex and Spirit actually work?’ This is totally understandable since so many people have been taught that Sex and Spirit are in opposition to each other. After all, it was not all that long ago that the Catholic Church taught that sex was sinful unless it was engaged in for procreation. My answer to this question is based on Mieke’s and my practical experiences and is quite simple. I do accept, however, that before you have experienced it, it can sound a bit far-fetched. So bear with me, please, and suspend any disbelief for a second!

In my experience, spiritual development requires two things: intention and energy. You have to want to improve yourself otherwise it’s just not going to happen. You also need to have the energy to do the work required, as it doesn’t just happen by itself. The Sacred Sex masters of old discovered, probably through a process of trial and error together with keen observation, that sexual energy is the only type of energy that you can generate in your body without the addition of an external material substance. To generate all other types of energy you have to bring something from outside into your body such as food or air. Sexual energy has this remarkable quality of seeming to ‘generate something from nothing’.

Most people have experienced this feeling during and after orgasm. These masters observed that what actually happens is that, when you generate sexual energy, you connect directly to the huge reserves of energy around us in the Universe.

I know; it does sound sort of strange that you could somehow plug-in to the energy that is ‘out there’. But, in our experience, it does actually work. These masters then went on to discover that you can, indeed, use this sexual energy to support your intention to do spiritual work.

In other words, Sacred Sex does not mean that you can just engage in lots of sexual activity and automatically become healthier and more spiritually developed. In fact, just the opposite can be true. If you merely increase your sexual energy with the intention of ‘having more fun’, you may soon find that your health and state-of-being start to deteriorate as you will not be cultivating awareness of your use of sexual energy or filling up your energetic ‘bank account’.

Sacred Sex means what it says – using Sexual Energy in a sacred fashion. What this does require, for some people, is a redefinition of the term ‘sacred’.

So does Sacred Sex mean that you have to ‘believe’ or ‘have faith’ in something? In my experience the answer is ‘No’. What you do need, however, is a willingness to suspend your disbelief long enough to try some exercises and see for yourself whether they actually work. Remember that, if you had demonstrated a mobile phone to someone in the 15th century, you probably would have been burned at the stake as a witch or warlock, but mobile phones do actually work even if most of us do not have an in-depth knowledge of the physics involved.

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Ancient Traditions: New Undertanding – Sacred Sex 23

The techniques of Sacred Sex have been used successfully for many millennia, so the chances are pretty good that there is some validity to them. But, at the end of the day, probably the best proof is that obtained by testing the techniques in the laboratory of your own relationship.

There are many Sacred Sex traditions – such as Chuluaqui Quodoushka (Shamanic American Indian) and Goddess worship practices (Isis in Egypt, Aphrodite in Greece) – but none of them have the same amount of literature and practitioners as Tantra and Taoist Dual Cultivation. In fact, if you browse the Tantra or Sexuality section in a bookshop that carries such books, you will soon discover that almost all of the available Sacred Sex literature falls into one of two traditions: Tantric and Taoist. This is partly due to the fact that these two traditions have the best historical documentation but also because these are the two traditions that have survived (just) into the present era.

Tantra

The Tantric tradition, often referred to as
Tantra
, originated in India but refers to practices used throughout South-East Asia. I found that it is quite difficult to pin down what Tantra actually is, since the term is used in many different ways. In this book I use the term ‘Tantra’ to refer to Indian sexual practices used for spiritual self-development.

In other words, Tantra is not just about better sex and bigger orgasms.

Rather, it refers to a complete worldview in which the conscious use of sexual energy has an important role as a tool for spiritual development. What’s interesting is that, when you start to explore the world of Tantra in the West, you soon discover that the vast majority of teachers and authors have some sort of connection to the teachings of an Indian self-styled guru called Osho,
a.k.a.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931–1990). Osho was the founder and leader of a controversial new religious movement, who lived in India and the United States and published many books as well as founding a large commune in India.

One of the difficulties, then, with the term
Tantra
is that it is so often syn-onymous, in the West, with Osho’s ideas about Tantra. This is not to say that Osho’s ideas are all wrong; it’s just that some of his teachings have little or no connection to classical
Tantra
. So the problem is that it is not that easy to get a clear picture of what the actual ancient teachings on Tantra contain just by reading an Osho-inspired book or going on a course given by Osho-followers. What confuses the picture even more is there are many different interpretations of Tantra even amongst traditionalists in India and Tibet. In this book, therefore, I will make a distinction between
Tantric
and
Neo-Tantric
. The first term refers to

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Beyond Tantra – Healing Through Taoist Sacred Sex traditional Tantric wisdom as it was and is practised in India and Tibet, the second term to the flourishing community, often Osho-inspired, of Western teachers, workshop leaders and authors.

Taoism

Taoism (Daoism) is an ancient Chinese philosophy that has informed and guided Chinese culture for over five thousand years.
Tao
(pronounced ‘dow’ and also spelled ‘Dao’) means ‘the way’ or ‘nature’s way’. Taoism places emphasis upon spontaneity and teaches that everything in nature follows ways appropriate to itself. One of the fundamental tasks in life, according to this philosophy, is to discover our own way in harmony with nature or to ‘become one with the Tao’.

A note about Chinese spelling: Before 1979, the most usual way to
transliterate Chinese terms into English was based on the Wade-Giles
system. ‘Tao’, ‘Chi Kung’ and ‘Tai Chi’ are all examples of Wade-Giles
spellings. In 1979, the Pinyin system was adopted as the official system
of Romanization in The People’s Republic of China. ‘Dao’, ‘Qi Gong’