Saturday 20 August 2016

The Function of Vulnerability

Vulnerability. A place where most of us do not want to be at. Where we can feel uncertain and threatened. For people in the caring professions, this is a key domain to identify in their clients, where attention is devoted to acknowledging and soothing the parts of the psyche that are vulnerable. And yet, ask those same able professionals if they would be comfortable being vulnerable themselves, and nearly all would say no. This is one of the instances where the professional training being directed to resolving the vulnerabilities of clients, often does not translate into the professional being comfortable with facing their own vulnerabilities internally. Perhaps no human being is ever at home with being vulnerable. Strength is often perceived as the ability to paper over and buttress the defense against vulnerability, which can provide decades of symptomatic relief and coping abilities, but does not get to the root cause of the vulnerability.




I would argue that being vulnerable is an essential part of the human experience that brings great gifts, in the following ways: 

1. Vulnerability is a stepping stone to empathy and compassion, due to the shared experience of pain with others. A higher purpose to pain, may be to connect humans to their vulnerability, so that compassion can arise. That is more helpful than attributing only negative origins to pain, such as bad karma, or God's punishment.

2. Being in touch with one's vulnerability also lends a flexibility to one's personality, so that one does not crack under extreme pressure. Bending like a bamboo to the wind, yet not snapping easily. That is real strength. The false "strength" that comes from avoiding vulnerability through various coping mechanisms, creates a certain brittleness in the individual that makes it more likely that they will snap under unfamiliar situations or extreme pressure.




3. A leader in touch with her own vulnerability, is able to relate to the vulnerability of the people she leads, and more likely to be able to support them through difficult challenges as a team, thus achieving more together. In short, that makes a better leader. 

4. Being in touch with vulnerability, lends an innocence and openness to one's personality, due to being non-judgmental and being flexible in attitude. This makes one more receptive to change, to new ideas and situations, fostering lateral thinking and creativity by not getting stuck in rigid habits of thoughts or beliefs. This also helps to deconstruct unhelpful rigid patterns, so that new impulses have a chance to come through. 

5. Vulnerability cultivates the openness required to receive the Divine. The ability to bear pain and uncertainty with an open heart, cultivates the receptacle necessary to bear the Divine Fire. It is profound to reflect that angelic beings are able to radiate love of a Divine magnitude, because they are also able to feel pain of an equally Divine magnitude. If the path of human beings is to move towards our angelic half (human beings are often described as halfway between angels and animals), it necessitates the ability to bear increasing levels of pain with an open heart, so that we can bear increasing amounts of Divine Love and radiate that on Earth. This path is of course, not compulsory for all human beings. It is to be chosen out of the free will of the individual. Otherwise it will not be a spiritual path, but a police state of the most twisted conception of Heaven, and that is certainly not what the Divine hopes for mankind.




I am of course not suggesting that in all threatening situations, especially those that present immediate physical danger, that you stop and get all soppy about the vulnerability within. To all things there is a time (and place). If there is an immediate problem to be resolved, solve it first. There are also a number of professional or social situations where it may be harmful to express vulnerability. But by and large, the problem with modern man is their habituated inertness to experiencing and expressing their vulnerability in daily life. As to the time and place to do so, we have to leave it to the discretion of the free individual. Be strategic.

So next time, when faced with situations that trigger vulnerability, before reflexively brushing it aside, a more enlightened response may be to say "I don't know for sure, but I am willing to see what happens", and smile. 



Monday 18 July 2016

Applying Sexual Energy to Wellness - a prototype framework

This is my attempt to articulate a prototype framework describing the application of sexual energy to wellness in health. 

Allow me an important digression to discuss the modern usage and meaning of the term "wellness". Wellness can be equated with the state of well-being, also identical with the World Health Organization's definition of health as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." Hence along the spectrum of human health, wellness and pathology would occupy opposite ends. There is a growing awareness that modern medicine and therapeutics have to move beyond curing diseases, towards healing and creating a state of wellness. The "wellness industry" is fast growing, covering diverse areas in medicine such as preventive health, aesthetics, anti-aging, nutritional and functional medicine, to name but a few. It also covers a broad stroke of complementary therapies such as massage, essential oils, yoga, meditation, energetic medicine, again to name but a few. Out of all the therapies out there labelled as "wellness", it is debatable which ones are but superficial and which ones go deeper into the root causes of good health. Wellness is very much frontier country, with both exciting developments and nonsensical hype going together, promising much economic opportunity and possibly meaningful alternatives that conventional medicine can imbibe into itself. There is of course the risk of fraudulent and misleading claims on the part of those promoting new therapies, which could directly result in the individual experiencing harm, economic loss, or delay in seeking the right treatment. There is a growing momentum to equate wellness with what used to be called preventive health, in that people seek wellness to delay or prevent the onset of aging and disease, in short an attempt to cheat death for as long as possible.




In the context of using sexual energy, we are not concerned with the "wellness industry" per se, but with three aspects of wellness that it can positively influence, as follows.

Three Aspects of Wellness:

1. Self-Esteem. Which is how good you feel about yourself. Your innate confidence. How comfortable you are in your own skin. Being at ease and in harmony with your sexuality, certainly brings a confidence and shine to your presence.

2. Self-Drive. This covers two overlapping areas, namely, personal drive, and having clear directed goals. Most people would find it easy to relate to how the sexual drive accounts for so many of their motivations and actions taken in their lives, and how stubbornly these persist in the subconscious throughout one's life even when not immediately apparent in everyday waking consciousness. Harnessing and directing the sexual drive then becomes a matter of practical importance in achieving things in the world. Have you not noticed how often those people who are driven, passionate, and get things done the way they want them, are also incredibly charismatic and attractive and sexy? (Even if we do not always want to admit it.)

3. Self-Energy. The energy you possess to dare to be yourself, and do the things you want or need to. If esteem represents one's self-comfort level, and drive represents the application of energy to one's ambitions, then self-energy is the battery that fuels life itself and makes the above possible. It is the organic side of wellness, the aspect that most directly and overtly creates the living experience of wellness when it is full. Self-energy can be loosely equated to the concepts of prana in Ayurveda or chi in Chinese Medicine, at least for our purposes here. Appropriate cultivation of sexual energy can preserve and promote the rejuvenation of self-energy that is simply crucial to all life activities. 

Next I will describe briefly the domains in an individual's life in which working on sexual energy can bring about observable change, of which I have identified as the five domains of living, as below.

Five Domains of Living for observable change:

1. Physical. Exercises that train males to have non-ejaculatory orgasms, dissociate orgasm from ejaculation, can help those with premature ejaculation overcome their problem, and there have been anecdotal reports of benefit for some with symptoms of benign prostate enlargement. It definitely helps with prolonging sexual intercourse and generally raising sexual satisfaction levels for those involved. Higher levels of orgasmic experience can be reached one after the other without a (or with a markedly reduced) refractory period, without the interruption of ejaculation sending the orgasm crashing down and keeping it at a low level of intensity. For females, the experience of multiple orgasms will definitely change how she relates to sex and her partner, and improve intimacy if there was distance before, as it can take lots of trust and surrender to get there. If deep sexual satisfaction is consistently reached, that can also have the effect of improving sex addictions which are often a result of an underlying persistent dissatisfaction with one's sexual experience. 

2. Psychological. This relates to the individual's beliefs and attitudes surrounding sex. 
Addressing knowledge gaps, having open discussions, and adopting a non-judgmental attitude, all help an individual gain a more balanced and nuanced view of sex and sexual energy, if the individual so chooses. At the very least the hope is that this helps the individual not to simply close off reflexively when facing sexual matters, often due to societal and religious conditioning that the individual may not even be aware of until pointed out. 

3. Emotional. This relates to the inner emotional world of the individual. A harmonious and integrated inner world of someone who has worked on sexual energy, is going to bring about peace and stability in their psyche. Someone comfortable with their sexuality and having deeply satisfying sexual experiences, is often open-hearted and at ease, having a presence and charisma that often spills out to others around, even without the intent to project outwards. Their energy shines, just by the way they are.

4. Social. This covers all parts of living that has to do with the individual's social relationship with other people, singularly or in groups, such as work, family, and friends. This is of course a reflective mirror of one's inner state. Being at ease with oneself reflects outwards in being at ease with others, making others comfortable and causing them to gravitate towards you without you trying. Being familiar with one's inner landscape and intensities through working on sexual energy, makes one able to better connect with the inner landscape of others, and people do pick that up. This could reduce social awkwardness by making you a better listener and being more responsive to social cues, thus making new connections or deepening existing ones that may not have been possible before.

5. Existential. Orgasms are deeply intense experiences, that can bring about an immense amount of stillness, bliss and timelessness, particularly with an experience of multiple ascending orgasms (necessarily non-ejaculatory for the male). Such orgasms are often experienced in the whole body, and not just in the genitals, often accompanied by flows of energy circulating throughout the body, feeling rejuvenating and satisfying. These can be related to ancient myths of the Fall found in various traditions, where the splitting of the hermaphroditic primitive man into two sexes, created a ceaseless search for the lost half, and a separation from the state of Divine union previously experienced in Paradise. After a while of experiencing such orgasms and the deep satisfaction they bring about, it's not difficult to realize that deep in ourselves we are both man and woman, and the way back to the Divine and the lost half, is to go ever deeper into ourselves. Sex is just the start of that beautiful journey to the Divine within. 



What then, is the goal we hope to achieve, when sexual energy has been used to optimize the three aspects of wellness and brought change to the five domains of living? That goal would be a state I call the "Integrated Self". 

So what is the Integrated Self? That is probably best described by its counterpart seen in most people, the Dis-integrated Self. The reality is that most people live disconnected lives, feeling very much powerless and unaware of their true potential, as they live and work in usually urbanized environments where various parts of their lives are artificially compartmentalized, feeling like robots, and drained of energy and joy after having to meet the demands of work and family, day after day. It is fairly apparent that even though our forebears in rural environments lived harsher physical lives compared to us, they lived closer to the land and often felt more connected than we did. 

The Integrated Self is thus a healing of the fragmented urbanized individual, to attain a sense of wholeness and alignment, through the re-discovery of the tool of sexual energy in directly bringing about the sense of connection to ourselves internally and to the world outside. 




At this point the reader may ask, why does it have to be sexual energy? It could be argued that there are certainly other methods one could use to bring about wellness and integration as described, without necessarily working on sexual energy. And I certainly would have to agree, that working on sexual energy is no panacea for all the individual's suffering, and may not be suitable for everyone. Certainly people are free to choose the method they feel suits them best.   

The reasons I choose to focus on sexual energy as the most direct method of healing such self-disintegration, have been alluded to in my four preceding posts on sexual energy, which I encourage you to read if you have not. Here I will just broadly outline the angle I took. Sexual energy is life energy itself, as mentioned in so many traditional texts of medicine across many cultures, and yet so much distortion and taboo has arisen around it, that meaningful discussion of its implications to health and wellness becomes near impossible oftentimes, creating layers of repression and cycles of abuse, that perpetrate themselves across generations of humans. That itself warrants an immediate de-mystifying of sexual energy, an open discussion of its many aspects as elaborated in traditional texts, and a serious consideration of its applications to our modern age. 

And of course the positive results of my own exploration of sexual energy for my own wellness, have led me to start articulating a possible framework that other people could benefit from. I also believe working on sexual energy could benefit a range of pathological conditions both physical and psychological in nature, but I refrain from writing about that as I do not have (yet) sufficient personal or witnessed experiences of such pathologies. I can only write truthfully of what I have experienced or witnessed for myself. 





Monday 4 July 2016

I am ṛ (poem)

A secret name unutterable
Intrinsic, revealed, and transmitted
Initiation at an archetypal level
A living force in my heart and beyond
The story of my soul's journey and mission
A universe of lifetimes packed in an 



(Note:  denotes the semi-vowel as described and spoken in Sanskrit)

Wednesday 22 June 2016

Sexual Energy in Loving Touch and Family Intimacy

This post is inspired by my experiences with my first-born son, who is now 2 and a half years old. My wife, now pregnant with our 2nd and having a weak back, has always been uncomfortable sleeping together with our son at night, as he will toss and turn and kick and burrow all over her body, making it hard for her to sleep, and impossible to change her sleeping posture when needed, so she often wakes up with a sore back and subsequent chiropractor appointments. So I had been tasked to put him to sleep at night, and to pacify him when he wakes up in the middle of the night. I often end up sleeping with him most of the time as that is the most practical way to ensure he stays quiet and I get to sleep more. 

Even though I complain about having to sleep next to him and having my own rest disturbed, I believe I will start to miss doing that when he gets old enough to kick me off his bed. I am just filled with so much love and desire to hold him tight and smell him, all the time. Then as he drifts off to sleep, he will pull up my shirt, rub his small hands over my naked tummy, poke his finger into my belly button (at that point I will shout at him to stop as it is really painful), and he will pull up my shirt further and scratch my nipples and then pinch them (and then I will really shout at him to stop). In any case he is probably doing all that out of habit as he was breast-fed previously, and touched my wife in the same way. 


What struck me was that the desire I have to hold him tight and smell him, is not essentially very different from my desire to do the same to my wife. His rubbing my tummy and nipples were pleasurable, and physically not different from my wife doing the same. Yet in the case of my wife doing that to me, it might be labelled under "being sexualized" and part of sexual foreplay, while in the case of my son it might be labelled as "physical comforting and care". But is that distinction real? The times my wife and I touch each other may only be "physical comforting and care" in intent, without leading to sexual foreplay and penetrative sex. And of course in the case of my child touching me, it would be ridiculous to suggest that there was any sexualized intent on the part of my child, although the comforting stimulation he gave to my tummy and nipples made me wonder about the difference between his touch and a sexualized one, and how I perceived his touching. 

Can you sense my intellectual confusion at this point? The conflation of sexual energy with "being sexualized" as propagated by the modern world creates this confusion. I believe it makes more sense to regard the intimate sexual relations between a copulating couple (whatever the sexual orientation) and the intimate touching within a family, as a continuum along the spectrum of sexual energy. They share many similar energetic qualities, only differing as to the specific intent and its position along that continuum. 


The need to give and receive touch, is a fundamental human need, increasingly acknowledged as being pivotal to health and dignity. In the human touch, sexual energy flows, whether you are aware of it or not. Healthy touching enlivens the individuals giving and receiving, even conferring life and health, and as such sexual energy is entwined with it. That is also why you recoil from some people's touch, where perhaps you sense the malicious intent, or the disguised "sexualized" agenda of that person. At the same time, if you have issues with acknowledging your own sexuality, or if your sexuality was brutalized through instances of abuse before, that hurt you carry would colour your own reaction to touch and sexual energy, so that you have difficulty accepting positive expressions of touch and sexual energy, or you habitually fear them and reflexively close yourself off to them. You could also be hasty in judging instances of touch as being "sexualized", either coming from others or initiated by yourself.

A healthy expression of sexual energy through touch, is important in nourishing intimate relationships, between partners and with children. It is in the safety of the family environment and in loving relationships, that we open ourselves to giving and receiving loving touch. It is thus sad to reflect on the amount of sexual abuse and sexual repression happening all over the world, as this creates a wound that can be passed down through generations of human beings. If you have been a victim of sexual abuse and repression, it might give you a broader perspective that the perpetrators of your hurt, have almost invariably been hurt themselves before in a similar way, and that this hurt often goes back generations. At the same time, nourishing your loved ones through loving touch and sexual energy, is the best collective solution to resolving the hurt that we have inherited and carry now. That is the hope we see in our children and the future of mankind, when we express ourselves through loving touch and sexual energy.



I will end this post with my own take on Sigmund Freud, grandfather of psychoanalysis, who attributed much of normal human behaviour to the underlying sexual drive. What made me really fed up when I read his work in my teens, was how he even attributed the baby's suckling the mother for milk to an underlying sexual drive. I remember being totally exasperated at Freud for seeing sex in everything and anything. Now I am more nuanced, in that I see sexual energy at play in all dynamics of life and nature, but not in the cheap "sexualized" definition of that term.


Sexual Energy in Spiritual Work

Following on from my last posts about sexual energy, I would like to expand on the role it plays in spiritual practice. Broadly speaking, I would define spiritual practice as a structured discipline of inner development, to awaken to one's true essence and potential within, and to connect to forces larger than the confines of one's little ego. Why cultivate sexual energy in spiritual practice? There are good reasons to do so. Sexual energy is life, so delving into it helps one to experience first-hand the articulation between consciousness and bodily existence.  States of lofty consciousness can be better anchored on a steady and healthy base of life, through the cultivation of sexual energy, and that need cannot be underestimated as long as we live in a physical body that is subject to the forces of life. Poor or misaligned health is itself a barrier to entering lofty states of consciousness while residing in a physical body. A common experience in meditation is that if one's body is not at ease, one cannot enter deep states of consciousness, with many examples in spiritual texts of how such a minimum amount of bodily ease is required. Cultivating sexual energy directly boosts health and bodily ease, thus aiding one's meditation practice. 





Of course sexual energy in its raw uncultivated form, is far from being enlightened or wanting the Divine. All it wants in its coarser form, is sex! And it will produce all kinds of mental and bodily distractions to keep you from being still in meditation, so it can get out there and do what it wants. Even if cultivating sexual energy is not one of your defined spiritual goals, there is value in knowing enough about it to get it to work for you, since our bodily existence is ruled by life and hence sex. Some basic cultivation of the sexual energy can go a long way towards relieving the mental and bodily restlessness generated by sexual fantasies during meditation. In fact cultivating it does not merely result in an absence of restlessness, but leads to states of intense stillness and ease, which will greatly facilitate the entry into deep states of consciousness. 

There are also certain well-defined spiritual practices that hone sexual energy to the point that it aligns to high states of consciousness, making you unstoppable in your path towards enlightenment. Aligning sexual energy to any of your goals, worldly or spiritual, can make you unstoppable. That is why the world invests so much time in dumbing down and desecrating the sexual energy, so we all remain pliant meek rabbits that do as we are told. Sexual energy is the force and motivation in observable organic nature. Look at the incessant growth and reproduction of plants, animals, microbes, from birth to death, driving everything without their conscious knowledge. Man is probably the only species on Earth with the potential to reflect on her own consciousness and cognize its underlying dynamics. Now imagine this unstoppable force of nature, present in every organism from the smallest to largest, that is present in you too, aligned to the Divine or in pursuit of it. Wow! In short, sexual energy represents the primal personal drive inherent in life, and getting it to align with your goals, spiritual or worldly, makes them happen. And it is not as difficult to get there as you might imagine. The question is, how badly do you want the Divine while living in the world?




In my involvement with Clairvision meditation, we are taught to recognize flows of sexual energy in ourselves and in others, during spiritual practices or in daily life. Experiences of sexual energy are actually more common than we think, because it often is the flow of life energy itself, and not limited to the narrow band of "sexualized" activities as defined by our modern standards. 

In my previous post, I recounted my experience of multiple etheric orgasms during a regression session. When the violent orgasms of golden semen gave way to more subtle energetic orgasms, I found myself in the space of a large cave whose walls were made of solid gold of refined golden semen. I had the realization that this cave of golden semen had always been a part of me that I had cultivated over lifetimes, but had only re-acquainted myself with in this life. That re-connection to this intimate part of myself left me in awe and in tears. I was crying softly at that point and found it very difficult to express to my connector what I was going through. 

(Quick note here, the following hyperlinks are to the "A Language to Map Consciousness", a glossary of technical terms used by the Clairvision school. To find the term being hyperlinked, simply scroll down or up in alphabetical order till you find it.)

Another fascinating experience I had was during a five-day Clairvision meditation intensive on the Thunderwand in 2014. The Thunderwand defines the central channel of energy that extends from the top of the head to the root of the body (perineum), that has been specifically cultivated with Clairvision techniques. For most Clairvision students, the Thunderwand meditation in one form or another, is the foundational daily meditation that is commonly practiced first thing in the morning upon waking. During this five day intensive we had the opportunity to take our practice of the Thunderwand deeper. Halfway through the intensive, I started to experience multiple etheric orgasms during Thunderwand meditation for the first time. It was so awesome and mind-blowing. My abdominal energetic center became a "penis" ejaculating golden semen up my central channel (corresponding roughly to my spinal column), into the "vagina" that was at the intersection between the Third Eye tunnel and the central channel, corresponding to the structure we call the "atom" that is in the head. 




So now I was "cumming" straight into my head, talk about a mind-fuck! My abdominal "penis" was pumping golden semen gleefully up my central channel, and I felt like a man there. Then my head "vagina" was gleefully sucking every last drop of semen up, just like a female would feel and enjoy, and she goaded my man below to continue squirting, which he duly obliged. Until in my consciousness all I could see and feel was golden semen smeared all over the space, literally drowning in pleasure, and absolute rock-solid stillness, all at once. Let it be emphasized that throughout this time I was sitting cross-legged in half-lotus, meditating on my Thunderwand, with no external physical stimulation and no shifting of sitting position whatsoever. In fact I was to experience this in many subsequent meditation sittings, until the force of the experience itself faded over time, and I became acclimatized to these flows of sexual energy. 

One other learning point from that experience, was that I could be both man and woman. I am both man and woman. All of us are. We contain the blueprint inside to experience both sexes, even if physically we can only be one or the other. Subsequently I had other experiences in meditation where I felt how a woman would experience actual sexual pleasure, and how it might feel to be pregnant. Those were equally awesome experiences. The distinctions between man and woman, even sexual orientation, all began to break down, in the awesome sacred light of sexual energy, naked just as it is. Co-opting sexual energy into my spiritual practice started to become a reality. 







Tuesday 21 June 2016

The difference between sexual energy and "being sexualized" - Part 2

In part 1, I attempted to show how "being sexualized" is how all things sex are mostly portrayed in the media of our modern world, and how that only forms a narrow and superficial band of the spectrum of sexual energy. 

Let me briefly describe the world I grew up in, that is Singapore, a nation of conservative mores despite our East-meets-West location, in a middle-class family of conservative mores, and embracing a (mainly Theravada) Buddhist faith with conservative mores...... enough said. I fell for it hook line sinker, this formidable loop of guilt-forbidden fruit-desire that entraps mere mortals. I was fascinated about sex as all young men (and women) would be, and conceptually drew a distinction between the dirty knowledge of sex and the biological necessity of it, which actually helped soften the guilt exploring it, since it was a biological necessity, right? So I oscillated between guilt and fascination about sex, for a long time. During that period I purchased the book the "Multi-Orgasmic Man" by Mantak Chia out of sheer curiosity, and was exposed to the idea of ejaculatory control for the first time, but I never really got the practices in that book to work for me. 



Now I will describe an early personal experience of sexual energy that blew my mind away, and started the gradual deconstruction of all the limiting and confusing things about sex I had been conditioned to believe.

In 2011, I attended a seven-day meditation intensive organized by the Clairvision school. It was essentially a week of practices involving the Inner Space Technique (IST), the school's method of regression, which is a very useful tool in finding the source of psychological traumas and psychosomatic issues. Usually this entails a paired practice, where the client (the person being regressed) is lying down, and the connector (the one facilitating and leading the session) will be seated next to the client, and placing their fingers lightly on a part of the client's body (commonly the chest or abdomen) which we call a "spot", then inviting the client to explore any sensations or emotions arising from that "spot". A typical session lasts for 45 - 90 minutes. 



During one such session on the last day of that intensive, I was exploring a "spot" in my abdominal area, and entered a space where I started to experience multiple orgasms, without any physical sex or sexual stimulation. It felt like I was ejaculating golden semen from the "spot" in my abdomen to the rest of my body over and over again, and it felt awesomely pleasurable, just like real sex, except that in real sex I only experience such orgasms in my genitals with the characteristic physical contractions of ejaculation. I was experiencing energetic or etheric orgasms without their physical counterpart, the etheric being the layer of life-force that is analogous to "chi" in Chinese Medicine and "prana" in Ayurveda. There was no preconceived agenda or "protocol" or intent to get me to experience those multiple orgasms. Neither my connector nor myself had any idea that would happen. As with all such IST sessions, the best (and only) solution was going with the flow, and expect the unexpected.



These initial orgasms were quite violent, where the bursts of golden semen in my consciousness felt similar to my usual physical orgasm. Then the more I allowed myself to embrace these violent pleasures and open to them, the violence abated, and the ejaculations of golden semen became more subtle and soft. Yet the space felt deeper and more still, and I was aware of deeper and deeper layers of sex opening, with an increasing brilliance of golden light and preciousness of energy the deeper it went. There was seemingly no end to the depth of pleasure and stillness through such sex, and no fatigue and no refractory phase. And I increasingly felt the waves of orgasm flooding my whole body, instead of being limited to the genitals in typical physical orgasm. The deeper the orgasms went, the more even my physical body and such whole-body-orgasm-waves receded, until what emerged was a space of precious golden stillness replacing my body. It was a state of such pleasure and well-being and stillness, all the more amazing because it emerged from sexual energy and is sexual energy, yet had none of the grasping and fatigue associated with sexual activity. 



Another amazing thing was the lack of an objective sexual target throughout the experience. In common everyday experience, sexual desire is aroused when targeted at a specific object, like a person you fantasize about, the smell of perfume, the sound of that person's voice, or a pair of heels clicking as they pass by...... the list is never-ending, but you get the point. In this experience, the target if any, was the sexual energy within myself. The sexual energy involuted or turned onto itself, going into ever deeper layers within one's consciousness and etheric (or life-force). Any external objects that surfaced as part of the imagination of my discursive mind were quickly seen as distractions and not the real deal, even if they appeared sexual, and were quickly abandoned in lieu of the sexual energy itself. That these fantasies of the mind were distractions was pretty obvious, because the flow of experience and pleasure went flat when these thoughts caught my mind, like a last ditch attempt to stop me going deeper by sending me superficial sexual fantasies to occupy me. But the momentum of the sexual energy itself was powerful enough to stop my usual discursive and fantasizing mind shortly after they arose, so that I plummeted ever deeper into stillness and light. The age-old adage of "going with the flow" in meditation would be given a new spin - "go with the ecstasy!" The ecstasy turning onto itself was the pathway in. This was a key experience in my spiritual journey as a healer, in years to follow helping to deconstruct the societal limits placed upon sex, opening new doors to understanding the symbiosis between sex and life, and how sexual energy heals at the deepest levels.




The difference between sexual energy and "being sexualized" - Part 1

The difference between sexual energy and "being sexualized" is a significant one, and one that I am still very much a student about. This distinction is important, because the former defines the role sexual energy can have in the cultivation of health and spirituality, while the latter highlights how sexual energy can be twisted detrimentally through "being sexualized". 

It is easier to define "being sexualized", because that is our common perception of sex in the modern world. From the mildest sexual innuendos in speech to sophisticated (or plainly blatant) ones in advertisements, the pornographic industry in print or film, race car queens, handsome salesmen etc, sex sells because sex just works. The taboos and moral codes that have developed around sex have only added to the confusion and mystique surrounding it. The closed loop of guilt-forbidden fruit-desire inflames the human mind to seemingly no end. These societal structures keep us trapped in a superficial understanding (and experience) of sexual energy, and bind us to the self-enclosed loop of desire, framing it in an unsatisfactory choice between simply perpetuating the desire, or fully stamping it out (which is often simply repression and does not actually resolve the underlying dynamics). "Being sexualized" is a very narrow band of expression of sexual energy in our modern world, rooted in our fears and confusion surrounding the nature of sexual energy.



Sexual energy creates life. Sexual energy is life. The refinement of nutrition through digestion in Ayurveda (traditional Indian medicine), takes place in stages throughout various tissues, till it ends in the precious Ojas (reproductive fluid, semen), which can be further refined into Tejas, the most precious of all bodily energies, supposedly stored in the heart. Tejas and Ojas are the fundamental energies that keep us alive, their depletion certainly resulting in ill health and eventual death. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the jing is quintessential sexual energy (and is also the literal Chinese term for semen), stored in the kidney and the heart. Again its depletion means certain ill health and death. There are examples in many other traditional cultures that puts sexual energy at a fundamental and sacred level, for its ability to create and preserve life. The prolific sexual reproduction seen in nature, in particular the plant and microbial kingdoms, is a testament to the raw power of sexual energy. 

Reading ancient texts of medicine about sexual energy and the sacred awe it invokes, is a far cry from the base levels that sex has seemingly sunk to today. I believe that societal/political/religious control has resulted in the "dumbed-down" sex we see expressed in the media of our modern world, reduced to mere physical pleasure, or at best a necessary evil for the propagation of our species (with a three second reward of an orgasm that quickly fades to mere fatigue, at least for the male half of our species). 

Worse still, such twisted perceptions that keep human beings from the depths of their sexuality, often contributes to all kinds of sexual repression and sexual abuse. I argue that a human being really in touch with their sexuality, is much more likely to be a happy and healthy person, and less likely to be a perpetrator of sexual abuse.

Sex has been forced to wear the garment of guilty dirty pleasure for far too long, when really we should be stripping these superficial and twisted perceptions away, to reveal the beautiful naked nature of human sexual energy just as it is, which is a natural accessible right to all of us as human beings. 

In Part 2, I will be relating some of my personal experiences of sexual energy, that helped me differentiate it from "being sexualized".