When you work in a conscious way with sexual energy, it will amplify everything we give attention to. That’s how we’re going to utilize the Taoist sexual practices in the chapters which follow, to amplify the qualities which Gottman and others have determined strengthen intimacy. It is immensely much easier to cultivate habits of appreciation, gratitude, honesty, vulnerability, responsibility, and commitment when there is a greater availability of bio energy or chi. Sexual energy expands and intensifies all of our emotions and attitudes. When you’re feeling in love with someone, having sex will make that stronger. On the other hand, it’s also why fights between lovers are the most intense. Mantak Chia says, ”sexual energy is like fire: it can cook your food, and it can also burn your house down. It all depends on how it is used.”
Jutta Reichert has been working with Mantak Chia since the early 1980s, and is one of the most active teachers of the sexual practices, known as the Healing Love. “Life force can only be built through unconditional, love and arousal energy,” she says, “leading towards orgasm. When these two forces come together within ourselves, that is the only way to create more life-giving energy.”
Michael Winn co-authored Mantak Chia’s original book on male sexuality in 1984. He’s been working with Taoist sexual practices ever since. “Jin Chi acts like super glue. It will bind to anything that you put it with, whether positive emotion, negative emotion, ideas, beliefs, anything. If you connect sexual energy to something, it sticks. That’s its nature. Sexual energy will amplify anything. Whatever emotional state you’re in, once you add sexual energy it’s like pouring kerosene on a fire. So you want to make sure that your amplifying love, gratitude, appreciation, and all the other positive qualities.
RECOGNIZING TRAUMA
Many people carry unresolved sexual wounding, sometimes from abuse in childhood, or from unpleasant and undesirable sexual experiences in young adulthood. When we utilize sexual energy in this way, it can also amplify trauma. Peter Levine, who created Somatic Experiencing and is one of the greatest living experts on trauma, estimates that about sixty percent of women carry some form of sexual trauma. It may not be as intense as a rape, but he reflects that any unwanted sexual advice from a testosterone-driven man, and indeed even any incident when she says ‘yes’, or even ‘maybe’, and overrides her authentic ‘no’ can become stored as trauma. Men also carry sexual trauma, but it is more often connected to performance anxiety and feelings of humiliation, than when boundaries have been violated. All this means that if we are going to start exploring sexual energy as a way to amplify the deeper love we all long for, we also need to be thoroughly trauma-informed.
Winn emphasizes the need to address what he calls “landmines” first, before beginning to utilize the powerful Taoist sexual practices. “People need to first get some grounding and open up their connection in a non-sexual context, to get to know their relationship to energy and seeing themselves as an energetic body, rather than a tight, contracted physical body. They need to shift into the energy body and start to harmonize and balance it without any sexual input whatsoever. People have a lot of landmines: sexual energy that’s connected to various traumas. If you start circulating sexual energy right away, you have to navigate through all those landmines, whereas if you start to open up and balance out and and learn how to navigate energetically who you are, then when you turn up the the temperature and the volatility with sexual energy, you can process those landmines, and be much more conscious of integrating the sexual energy. If you don’t do that, you are taking a risk of activating these buried emotional, psychic sexual issues, and amplifying them. That’s putting a lot more work for yourself, and may sabotage your process completely.”
This definitely does not mean that you should not move on into the sexual practices that follow in this book if you suspect that you might carry some degree of sexual trauma. It just means we need to proceed with some awareness. Here are some steps you can take to make sure that things go well.
HOW TO ADDRESS TRAUMA
HERE IS ANOTHER
Start with the practices we’ve already covered in this book. The Six Healing Sounds will help you, both together and by yourself, to release stagnant energy from the organs.
The Inner Smile will help you refresh these organs with positive, healthy, emotional energy.
Practice regulating and co-regulating together, which most trauma therapists will tell you is anyway the best way to resolve trauma. Bessel van de Koop, Gabor Mate and Peter Levine all concur that trauma is not resolved through cathartically reliving charged memories, but learning how to regulate your nervous system.
Get clear together on your values, commitments and agreements. This will create a more trusting and safe container in which to integrate the more powerful sexual practices.
If you have concerns that you or your partner may carry any sexual trauma, make sure you’re also working with a well trained trauma therapist. I find Peter Levine’s work to most effective in this way.
If you want to really dive into the sexual practices in the best possible way, make sure to learn the solo cultivation practices before you practice together.
Lastly, and most important, it’s best to work with a qualified, trained instructor. This book will thoroughly inform you of what the practices are, but if you want things to go in the best possible way, work with someone who is trained and experienced.
