The truth often sounds paradoxical.

- Lao Tzu 

The story so far...

What follows is an amended and edited version of Chapter 3 from Beyond Tantra: Healing Through Taoist Sacred Sex. Beyond Tantra is the story of how my partner Mieke and I used Taoist Sacred Sex techniques (also known as Dual Cultivation) to cure her of a serious illness and, in the process, reinvented our relationship. In Chapter 1 I talk about a Tantra course I had attended years before which had left me rather dubious about the whole area of 'Tantric Sex'. In Chapter 2 I tell the story of Mieke's healing and our journey together as we learned about Taoist Dual Cultivation.

Chapter 3

After so much research and reading over the seven years this was all taking place, it was inevitable that I 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 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.

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. 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 (Isis in Egypt, Aphrodite in Greece) practices – 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.

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